Self contained, self-constructing breathing apparatus

There are lots of wrecks to dive into ….but in diving all wrecks begin to be approached

Snowy Images for Slushy Times

“All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”— Karl Marx

The Snow Man

by Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Images are how we have begun to experience ourselves– individually and, increasingly, collectively. And yet, they are changable and ephemeral: will my own ontological experience begin to resemble an etch-a-sketch, junior palimpsest extraordinaire? What about their vexed position in the metonymic chain: they promise(d) actual representation of reality, but in fact this referent is not acessible through language or even experience: what we “experience” as a contrivance is not literally the “same” as an experience.

And yet, electracy, as prefigured by literature, permits us to rework the idea of “experience”.In both I am having a kind of “prosthetic” “experience”. The key difference in electracy is that I no longer know the status of this “I” or “me” or I/me or what “experience” means anymore.

The rubric through which “authentic” and “inauthetic” experiences are reckoned is morphing– “real” and “fake” is transvalued a bit– it’s not what happened in a “real world”, but how it made you “feel”– what your subjective experience is.

Not Solipsism Afterall

Blanchot  felt that Hegel’s dialectics were “limp” (Writing the Disaster 47): “What exceeds the system is the impossibility of its failure, and likewise the impossibility of its success..” (47).

Levinas argues that in The Phenomenology of Spirit when the subject journeys out on its great “Odyssey” of spiritual development, the big disappointment is that the subject will inevitably make a return– run into herself. And so, here, for me, as heady as my love affair with the media has been in pseudo-bastardized hegelian terms, all I’ve done is find the  recesses of my own belly button.

“Writing, since it persists in relation of irregularity with itself–and thus with the utterly other–does not know what will become of it politically…This indirection, the infinite detour which we try to understand as writing’s being, so to speak, out of phase or belated—as incertitude or change (and also as invention)– makes us unhappy.”

What “good” can my writing do?– but that’s not the reason why I’m writing. I’m writing because I have chosen to attempt to writing under the assumption that  the universe is not on some journey towards abosolute spirit–however evanescent– and that there is no single point to which we can fix our gaze and navigate by, metaphysically speaking.

the medium is the experience

‘The speed of light does not merely transform the world. It becomes the world. Globalisation is the speed of light.”– Virilio, ibid.

Celebratory or destructive? Globalization in the blink of an eye.

Fiber optics our carrier pigeons and the image our broadsheets and missives: but the analogy breaks down when probed much further than that.. “A rose is a rose is a rose. And a universe is a universe is a universe”. Rather than incantation we now have trances– however we conceive of them in time.

How we experience the social, each other, and ourselves is in the process of radical alteration. I am uncomfortable even putting the last sentence in the passive voice– or the active voice. I don’t know how to parse out agency in this medium– be it individual, technological (how uncanny cyborbs are), or linguistic.

In the beginning (of recorded Western thought at least) there was the Word

And the Word was with God and the Word was God. (At least, God the father as such is synonymous with a metaphysical category. Before, according to McLuhan, our interior monologues were experienced as spiritual visitations rather roiling or stagnating “inner life”.

Through him all things were made;  (Certainly. You try thinking without words and see how far you get.)

cyborg eve: Blanchot argues that the writing of the disaster exists beyond teleologies, beyond a beginning and an end, making the above "origin" intellectually null, but affectively uncanny-- we are ourselves the sum of so much prosthetics....

without him nothing was made that has been made. (God represented a conceptual category– and thus a metaphysics–The Word has been supplanted by The Image and metaphysics with ontology. What does it mean to be a creature of Image? To experience life in an instantaneous intuitive flash rather than through careful, reasoned text? What do terms like progress and time mean when Experience as image is both so sped up and so dilated.)

Walter Benjamin quipped that “Books and harlots have their quarrels in public”– if letters to the editor blew his mind, how would he conceive of the public quarrels that now transpire in the blogosphere– that a politician would, for example, have to assert that she and not her daughter bore a child because of the collective electronic wailings in a hitherto unheard of corner of existence. What kind of public is a blog— where one both strategically reveals (often what the polite would call too much) and conceals (who are you, “on the other end” reading this as i write this?).

And for that matter, how does civic virtue inform these disclosures, revelations? Perhaps we are all now harlots, whatever that means now.

Odin: Now I’ve bled my ABC’s

In the Eddas, a collection of ancient Norse myths many of which were recorded in Iceland, Odin learns the secret of writing:

everything is illuminated...

Wounded I hung on a wind-swept gallows
For nine long nights,
Pierced by a spear, pledged to Odhinn,
Offered, myself to myself
The wisest know not from whence spring
The roots of that ancient rood
…

alphabet ephemera for the palimpsest of the human eye

 

 

 

Know how to cut them, know how to read them,
Know how to stain them, know how to prove them,
Know how to evoke them, know how to score them,
Know how to send them; know how to send them…

From “Hávamál”– Stanzas 138-144.

Blogging the revolution that won’t be televised?

The Icelandic Government has Collapsed… and then what? – A Letter from Icelandic Anarchists

Riot Police doused in Skyr-- the very Icelandic dairy product Colbert denounced!

Quotes:

“The Icelandic Government has collapsed and some people talk about a revolution. In a way it is true. Ordinary people overthrew this neoliberal government by writing articles, holding speeches, noise demonstrations, bonfires, car horns, direct action, civil disobedience and minor sabotage. A nation that before had hardly put up any resistance to abuse of power for a long time, finally stood up and said: “No thanks! No more shit!”

And yet…

“These ideas [that one of the parties or a coalition of parties more liberal than the recent neo-cons in power can do good]  have one thing in common, they are all based on the idea that reforms inside the current system are steps in the right directions, steps towards a more just society. They do not demand radical changes – revolution. Therefore it is strange to see people standing on Austurvöllur (the square in front of the parliament) shouting slogans like “Long live the revolution!” – no revolution has taken place apart from the fact that the government has collapsed.”

Gil Scott Heron’s words come back to me as I think about the possibility of revolution in the experience economy– what would an electrate revolution look like, anyways?  That Gil Scott Heron’s words are no longer literally true makes me as sad as realizing that about a third of my music collection is electronic–not even a pretense of a human artist in the sense it’s usually meant.

more about “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised-…“, posted with vodpod

Even metaphysics sneeze…

I have a terrible cold,

And everyone knows how terrible colds

Alter the whole system of the universe,

Set us against life,

And make even metaphysics sneeze.

– from a poem by Fernando Pessoa

Fernando,

Commit to allegorical snark– 

what would you say to the effects of a yellow fever on your metaphysics–an  infection spreads, leaking out of its host, dissolving what it depends on, mindless exacting replication–adaptation without will–What kind of body can i craft to stay well? To stay productively ill,  should i save my skin?