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“>> I am who I am.
Exodus 3, 14
>> I am who I am. An axiom of hermetic philosophy.
Madame Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, p. 1
>>- Who are you? Asked simultaneously three hundred voices, while twenty swords flashed in the hands of the next phantoms.
– I am who I am, he said.
Alexandre Dumas, Joseph Balsamo, II”
(Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum)
“Our cause is a secret within a secret, the secret of something that remains veiled, a secret that only another secret can explain, a secret about a secret that satisfies itself with a secret.”
(Ga’far al-Sadiq, sixth imam)
“And behold, when the light of the Infinite [En-Sof] was drawn out like a straight line in the midst of the above-mentioned emptiness, it did not immediately extend down to the bottom and spread out. It expanded only very slowly. That is to say, in the beginning the line of light began to expand, and at the very beginning of its expansion, in the mystery of the line, it stretched out and became like a wheel all around it.”
(Isaac Luria, >>The expansion of light in the void<<, quoted after P.S. Gruberger, ed., Ten Luminous Emanations, Vol. 2, Jerusalem 1973, p. 7)
“Although he is of good will, his spirit and prophecies seem to be manifest devil’s work … They are capable of deceiving many curious people and causing great harm and trouble to the Church of God Our Lord.“
(Report on Guillaume Postel, sent to Ignatius of Loyola by the Jesuit Fathers Salmeron, Lhoost and Ugoletto on May 10th 1545)
A tremendous energy flows through the universe and with it all living and non-living things:
(Co s mic-)Background radiation, gravitation, thermodynamics;
A tremendous energy emanates from the sun, it radiates permanently.
As a light-giver, she embodies the absolutely beautiful, Apollonian, and as such she is the expression of an elevation of the spirit above all conditions of earthly existence and a cheerfulness that can almost be called mathematical.
First of all we take the light that is optically directly incident upon us.
But is it not also an incredible warmth? Which we feel on our skin.
On a summer day with closed eyes, a red flicker through the eyelashes, lying on a meadow – not only absorbing the heat, but also producing different substances (e.g. vitamin D).
And first the plants?
With them organic life begins, as the natural sciences have been trying to reconstruct so far. The origin of life as a consequence of abundance – a permanent surplus of energy.
On this basis, Bataille drafts the “general economy” – in contrast to Marx’ “political economy”, since Marx, like almost all economists, assumes a fundamental lack: the realm of the necessary determines the living. For Bataille, on the other hand, Marx’s insights need to be supplemented by the expansion of perception to a deeper “solar economy” of (Dionysian) surplus.
We open our eyes, blink carefully; the bright light makes our eyes squint like an explosion that blinds us when we try to see inside. Bright shining forbidden fruit (of knowledge & eternity), giver of life and death.i
Oedipus before the riddle of the Sphynx.
Looking at the sun for too long makes us blind and destroys most technical recordings.
„”Mythologically”, writes Bataille, “the sun looked at is identified with a man who cuts the throat of a bull (Mithras), with a vulture who chops a liver (Prometheus), the one who looks at it, but with the slaughtered bull and the liver eaten. << The obsessive theme of the blinding, deadly sun, which already begins with L’OEil pinéal, remains dominant until the time of Acéphale, whose figure is clearly anticipated in the continuation of the quotation from Soleil pourri: >>You can add<<, Bataille wrote in 1930, >>that the sun was mythologically represented also by a man who cuts his own throat, and finally by an anthropomorphic being deprived of his head. All this leads to the statement that the sum of the elevation is practically mixed up with a fall of outrageous violence<<““ (Rita Bischoff)
The rays sometimes cause forest fires, create deserts or prolong droughts. And when it’s ready, it shines without doing ours – incessantly without interest; a star burns out until it implodes. Like the radiation, so all life: meaningless – no creator, but a dead imago: ‘God’. Incessantly new life is created, doomed to perish. For all that is created is value that perishes… A permanent process of spending energies, of decay, of (trans-)mutations. All that remains are traces, digested, (heterogeneous) residues. Make room for ‘new things’.
„By striking contrast with the new materialist idea of “vibrant matter”, which suggests that all matter is to some extent alive, the conjecture implied by Freud’s positing of Thanatos is that nothing is alive: life is a region of death. Freud’s later invocation of dualistic struggle between Thanatos and Eros can be read as a retreat from the forbidding monism of “Beyond The Pleasure Principle”, which argues that all life is merely a route to death. What is called organic life is actually a kind of folding of the inorganic.
But the inorganic is not the passive, inert counterpart to an allegedly self-propelling life; on the contrary, it possesses its own agency. There is a death drive, which in its most radical formulation is not a drive towards death, but a drive of death. The inorganic is the impersonal pilot of everything, including that which seems to be personal and organic. Seen from the perspective of Thanatos, we ourselves become an exemplary case of the eerie: there is an agency at work in us (the unconscious, the death drive), but it is not where or what we expected it to be.“ (Mark Fisher)
A drive (Trieb, motor, travel, …) towards zero (0).
Thanatos, the death drive, not Eros as expected, – finite drive of life, consequence of the arbitrariness of life as energetic excess.
Desire (will, Wunsch, hope, Desiré, Eros, longing, Begehren, …) could be understood as a detour on the way to the grave.
The further evolution progressed, the more complicated, elaborate and long were the detours that life took. Expended energy is transformed into worked things, experiences, knowledge… and serves to secure and expand the possibilities, the expansion. At the same time, the terrain in which man can unfold is balanced. Libidinous is connected; bound and/or tried to bind.
Desire, so one could say, is One (1); opposes the incessant drive, pauses, or much more Desire surfs on the wave of the drive. It should be noted that the drive is driven to the point of death (point 0) by the pure necessity of the basis of the permanent energy surplus, the resulting expenditure and the associated decay, the wear and tear. „It is ‚the destiny of signs‘, writes Baudrillard, ‚to be torn from their destination, deviated, displaced, diverted, recuperaded, seduced. It is their destiny in the sense that this is what always happens to them; it is our destiny in the sense that this is what always happens to us.‘ (Baudrillard)“ (Sadie Plant)
The life, as well as the psyche, of every human being, resembles an unimaginable labyrinth that can only be left by the loss of life and every event gets its meaning only by an event that is yet to come. “Catastrophe is the past coming apart. Anastrophe is the future coming together.” (Sadie Plant) A psyche thus imagined is much more subtle than metaphors, rhetoric, or psychoanalysis can and will see. The impossible makes its way into our world, the world of the possible not as closed as it seems.
The sun burns out and goes out – already suspected in the solar eclipse –
a dead star is born: Black Star, Black Hole, Absence of (the Sun), … .
Gravitational forces beyond our perception determine the constellations of matter. Without sunlight almost blind, foreboding shadows, and freezing violently; all living things pass away; thus we stood at the end of the Enlightenment and at the same time at the beginning of multiple enlightenments: post-modernity. Variations of infinite possibilities, in a continuous flow & discontinuous flickering – as in the film whose 30(/25)frames per second more than deceive our eyes sufficiently; the flickering pictures of the children’s toys spinning in circles awaken to new life.
„In girum imus nocte
et consumimur igni“
(Guy Debord)
„‘all signs enter into such circuits – none escape.‘ With the situationistss, we can agree that everything arising in the spectacle assumes its characteristics: interventions will always be forced to assume the equivalence and vacuity of the commodity as long as an economic system dependent on production and consumption persists: ‚when images chosen and constructed by someone else have everywhere become the individual‘s principal connection to the world he formerly observed for himself, it has certainly not been forgotten that these images can tolerate anything and everything; because within the same image all things can be juxtaposed without contradiction‘, writes Debord. But the recognition that even the most radical of gestures is implicated in this process cannot be allowed to lead to petrification and silence. It must, on the contrary, serve as a springboard for subversive strategies of interruption and provocation.“ (Sadie Plant)
„Unsere Melodie ist das Schreien der Maschinen. Unsere Musik ist das Brüllen der Motoren. Unsere Klänge das letzte Aufbäumen. Wir tanzen den Untergang, um zu leben. || Our melody is the cry of the machines. Our music is the roar of the engines. Our sounds are the final rebellion. We dance the doom to live.“ (Einstürzende Neubauten)
Quantum – Absolute Overkill – Implosion.
Beyond our perception. Post-humanoids (Bio-Medi-Tech-Social modified, mutated and updated, upgraded people) move out to discover (en-counter) the unknown.
„This general movement of life also fundamentally determines human activity. In one respect, in the sense of expansion, it opens up to life an expanded possibility, a new space (as the branches of the tree or the wings of the bird do). It is not, however, in the strict sense, a space not yet occupied by life, which work and technology of increased human reproduction open up. Rather, human activity, by changing the world, increases the living matter around apparatuses connected to it, consisting of a huge amount of inert matter, which considerably increases the available energy sources. From the beginning, man had the ability to use a part of the available energy not for the biological but for the technical growth of his energy wealth.“ (Georges Bataille)
Not only has the point long since been passed where the found material is processed. Man actively shapes his environment (in order to survive) and thus enters into a repetitive feedback with the environment he has created. Material that has already been worked on becomes part of the environment that is now found.
Mimesis, imitation, repetition, copy, return, sketch & regression.
„Plagiarism in late capitalist society articulates a semi-conscious cultural condition: namely, that there ‚is nothing left to say‘. … The practioners of much post-modern theory have tended to proclaim this feeling rather smugly; but if there is nothing to say, they yet demonstrate that there will always be something to sell. On the other hand, there are practitioners active in many disciplines who, recognising the necessity for collective action demanded by media such as film and electronic tape, engage in plagiarism in an attempt to expose and explode once and for all the individualistic attitudes which tend to make all current human activity seem redundand and increasingly alienated.“ (Sadie Plant)
You don’t go down the same river twice.
Access or return to something original [Ur-sprünglichem] or authentic is absolutely impossible.
The Loop leads into the progressive making available of historical media objects & contents, so that the re-trieval of the already past is possible. “Post-” means mining & refinement of missed opportunities.
„And once formed in the work, the beautiful moment can be repeated; it is immortalized in the work of art. The recipient can reproduce such happiness again and again in the enjoyment of art.“ (Marcuse)
People try to bargain for death, for transience – the actual goal of eternity, for ‘negation’. At least sublimated and/or simulated: control of nature – from media technology to biopolitics to Botox. Parallel to this, the attempt is made to grasp the totality of social history and make it available. However, in affirmative culture, the Ernst Jünger quote “Winners write history & their own myths” is still valid, this is only in the meantime repeatedly contested – a polyphonic (discursive) hegemony battlefield, multiplicity of armies. A gigantic Fog of War is fogging up the people, enveloping them at the same time.
“Until then, the reproduction of life will still be a reproduction of culture: the creation of unfulfilled longings, the purification of unfulfilled urges. In affirmative culture, renunciation is connected with the external atrophy of the individual, with his discipline to submit to a bad order. Here, the fight against transience does not liberate sensuality, but devalues it: it is only possible at the bottom of its devaluation. This lack of happiness is not metaphysical; it is the work of an irrational social organization. Its abolition, with the elimination of affirmative culture, will not eliminate individuality, but rather realize it. And ‘once we are somehow happy, we cannot help but promote culture’. (Herbert Marcuse)
The permanent conflict of the individual subject, which is in contradiction to the conditions found, shifts the presence of death into the cultural; staged as “retro”, “rawness”, “(pseudo-)live (acts)”, indexicality. The ephemeral is emphasized as a nostalgic ritual that serves the blind adaptation to a new world.
“Retro” implements what it supposedly rejects, the introduction of the digital – as virtualizations – into everyday cultural life. At the same time they represent bulwarks against transience, the non-simultaneous simultaneity of several epochs as a differentiated market offer.
Moreover, in a certain way, they refer to a new art form.
If one could previously observe sequences, musical developments – initially from traditional local music increasingly in global pop – building on each other, it shifts to a simultaneous access:
post-pop.
Music/Art as we knew it is dying.
The techniques of reproduction and synthesis have progressed so far that we are faced with the impossibility of sound: potential infinity.
All the sounds of the world can be recorded or reconstructed and, beyond that, artificially created.
„The written word is inferential in human speech. It would not occur to our wise old rat to assemble the young rats and pass his knowlege along in an aural tradition because the whole concept of time binding could not occur without the written word.“ (Burroughs)
„He [The Human] can make information available to other men over any length of time through writing. Animals talk. They don‘t write.“ ( Burroughs)
A truly impossible sound resounds in past events.
Each medium has its own index, a residue, a trace, an impurity of decay(, a sign of death).
„Even a non-affirmative culture will be burdened with transience and with necessity: a dance on the volcano, a laugh in mourning, a game with death.“ (Herbert Marcuse)
Beyond is not more, but less, subtraction instead of addition
– Void (Nothingness/Nothing) – : Picture ban & negation.
On the one hand the positive abundance of permuted and varying constellations of a negative, potentially infinite space of supply and possibility. Capitalism levels the given difference to cultural history, while – true to its belief in progress – it permanently produces difference by creating new market segmentsii.
It must level it in order to be able to assert its own eternity [cf. Fukuyama “The End of History”], because each of them – no matter how pseudo-individual – could develop utopias, ideas of something that is not yet. Capitalism as order negates transience, which it knows only as ‘bad’ & ‘natural’. Otherwise the capitalist idea, as a period of time in human history, would itself be exposed to the transience it produces every day.
„The beauty of art – unlike the truth of theory – is compatible with the bad present: in it it can grant happiness. […]
Because every moment carries death within itself, the beautiful moment must be immortalized as such in order to make something like happiness possible at all. Affirmative culture perpetuates the beautiful moment in the happiness it offers; it perpetuates the transient.
One of the decisive social tasks of affirmative culture is based on this contradiction between the hapless transience of a bad existence and the necessity of happiness which makes such an existence bearable.“ (Herbert Marcuse)
Capitalist Realism describes the unquestionability of a capitalism that sees itself as the last, the goal of history, as something that cannot be overcome.
„The spectacle proves its arguments simply by going round in circles: by coming back to the start, by repitition, by constant reaffirmation in the only space left where anything can be publicly affirmed, and believed, precisely because that is the only thing to which everyone is witness.“ (Guy Debord)
Invisible forces permeate the nothingness (the emptiness of space) determine the movement of the stars, just as the invisible hand determines that of the market, – a small messianic force is with every human being; forming the conditions of human beings.
“All history is called history of class struggles, because it was always the same, prehistory. There’s an instruction in there on how to recognize history .[…] According to Troeltsch’s appraisal in the book on Historicism, Marxist dialectics has ‘preserved its constructive power and its nestling in the fundamental movement of the real’. […] Dynamics is only one aspect of dialectic: that which is emphasized by the belief in the practical spirit, the dominating deed, the tireless ability to do […], because the perpetual renewal best hides the old untrue. The other less popular aspect of dialectics is the static one. The self-movement of the concept, the conception of history as syllogism, as Hegel’s philosophy thinks it is, is not a theory of development. It is merely the agreed misunderstanding of the humanities. The compulsion under which she understands the restlessly destructive unfolding of the always new consists in the fact that at every moment the always new is at the same time the old at close range. The new does not add itself to the old, but remains the need of the old, its neediness, as it becomes actual as an immanent contradiction in the old itself through its thinking destiny, its indispensable confrontation with the general. (Theodor W. Adorno)
The moon gently reflects the sun’s radiation, bathing the all-enveloping night in unreal light. No stinging pain; triggered by the glitter of the sunlight – at the sight of the moon. Much more, in romantic times a warming blanket, it stands inaccessible and with unbelievable distance, loving and howling in the glow of the moon:
Psychoanalysis & Surrealism.
„I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,
starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking
for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking
in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating
across the tops of cities contemplating jazz […]“
In non-shamanic times, psychoanalysis was the first to draw attention again to the phenomenon of the unconscious, rather unconscious, in non-shamanic times ( at least as far as human beings are concerned), and subsequently began early expeditions into the still unknown territory that had to be captured, territorialized and colonized.
So art, more precisely DaDa & Surrealism, made it its task to develop, collect & sketch this area as a (self-proclaimed) avant-garde. But “A map is not the territory.” (Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity, 1933; 4th ed., The International Non-Aristotelian Library, 1958, II, 4, p. 58) Bataille rightly pointed out the sacred content in art. Thus the splendour of (psychoanalytical) Surrealism had an effect on the canon of the emerging exploitation context of Pop, where, whether intentionally or not, the best breeding ground lay. Pop, self-modernised exploitation, the constantly heretical transforming electronic-digitised mutation of folk music in the sign of syntheto-syncretistic encephalo-synchronisation as a result of advances in media technology, the shaking of the human image of self & world, monopolisation in politics & economy & de-/relocalising colonisation. At the same time a place of hopes, wishes, dreams, worries, fears, embarrassments;
“Popular music expresses hopes, fears, expectations, sometimes it even develops visions and utopias, which soon find their expression in social changes. In the end, it’s about elementary things, about love and death, loneliness, fear, anger, grief and redemption. It is about exaggeration and overexertion and about sharing these feelings with other people. There could be tens of thousands of them in the stadium. Often, however, the strongest effect unfolds in small rooms in countless cellars and clubs, all over the world” (Martin Büsser), in short:
Luxury’s spatial-temporality, supposedly deprived of the necessary and delimited, all the more lost in its realm.
Little religion of sensuality.
Religion is the opium of the people:
It relieves suffering and sedates.
Completed spectacle means the apparent independence of the image/sound/pop world; out of it a complex system of recognition/confusion signs and, almost, religious symbols is formed. Or like the ‘Alt. Right’ call it ‘Info-War’.
„The permanent war is, incidentally, the central problem of any legal system. One way to limit war is to build fortified citadels and then to differentiate and classify those who find protection within the citadel and those who have no right to it and therefore do not enjoy the protection of arms and justice.“ (Achille Mbembe)
If the culture industry meant the collapse of the basic & superstructure, a tendency of the coincidence of myth & enlightenment is currently discernible.
“This fiction is based on a real story”, “This real story is based on fiction”.
The question of the absolute & the relative unsolved.
Petrified (Trans … ) sirens sing.
„Nazism was the moment when the magical spirit seized the lever of material progress. Lenin said that communism was socialism plus electricity. In a sense, Hitlerism was Guénonism plus armored divisions.“ (Pauwels & bergier, Le matin des magiciens, Paris, Gallimard, 1960, 2, VII)
The Dark Side of the Moon – Nachtromantik (Post-Romanticism) – The moon falls on earth – lunar eclipse.
„The conspiracy theory of society … comes from abandoning God and then asking: >>Who is in his place?<<“ (Karl Poppper, Conjectures and Refutations, 4 , London, Routledge, 1969, p. 123)
„’Any sufficiently advanced technology,’ wrote the inventor of the geostationary satellite system, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, ‘is indistinguishable from magic.’ What he means is that in order to understand how the most advanced machines work, you need to know more than most people who operate them.“ (Dietmar Dath)
„Insisting that secrecy is the exception to a free society of abundant information, the spectacle makes a virtue out of its concealed knowledges. ‚Everyone accepts that there are inevitably little areas of secrecy reserved for specialists; as regards things in general, many believe they are in one the secret,‘ writes Debord. But this secrecy runs deeper still; it ‚dominates this world, and first and foremost as the secret of domination‘, since it is always the very existence of any system of domination which is perpetually denied.“ (Sadie Plant)
Administered world. Statistics, probabilities, predictions, cataloguing and organising plan the chaos of things, determine decisions; people live. Cybernetic links from various open & closed systems, accumulate and calculate from any information, actual values, determine, dispose and process resulting procedures and adjustment needs on the basis of previously determined target values, which are entered as data or written into the program code. The limits of possibilities seem to be clearly defined.
In this world pop serves as amalgam and substitute religion between all incompatibilities, contradictions & the resulting cracks:
secession, differentiation, organization, control and pre-configuration of the (collective) Unconscious/Psyche. Classification into rackets and bands of the tasteful.
“Self-preservation forces its way through the collective to the sworn clique”
“In the image of the manifest usurpation perpetrated today by the united leaders of capital and labor, it is the history of gang fights, gangs and rackets.” (Theodor W. Adorno)
„what if…?“ „was wenn…?“
„as if…“ „als ob…“
the two grammatical formalizations of the (childlike) play of the fantastic meaning & mimetic comprehension.
One game takes place, like the sacred, in a delimited time & space context. When the game is finished, the area of virtualisation is entered:
Hypothetizations of “what if…” or “as if…”
At the same time, games, like the arts, mystical, sacred deepening (contemplation) or eroticism, represent an end in themselves. Excess: the expenditure of excess energy and strength, a luxury that can also be found in other animals.
Liberated from the realm of the necessary, this is also the basis of luxury.
But it is the luxury, the surplus of energy and power, which is the basis of possible work force, is predominant. Solar economics or general economics describes the non-capitalistic dynamics of an excessively wasteful cosmic-ecological economy. The basis of all life, evolution, is the radiation of the sun, which radiates in excess to the earth – running a complete vegetation.
“If there is a movement of energy at work in us, in the area of our habitat, which we use but which cannot be reduced to that usefulness (which we rightly strive for), we may misjudge it or we may adapt our activity to the destiny which is fulfilled independently of us. The solution to this problem requires action in two opposite directions: on the one hand, we must go beyond the narrow limits in which we usually move, and on the other hand, we must be brought back into our limits by this very excess. It is a question of spending the surplus. On the one hand, we have to give something away, lose something or destroy something. But the gift would be nonsensical (and we would never decide to do so) if it did not have the meaning of acquisition. So giving will mean acquiring a power. In the gift, the giving subject is able to transcend, but in exchange for the object given, the subject appropriates the transcendence: he considers this ability, to which he has had the power, as wealth, as a power that he now possesses. It is enriched by the contempt of wealth, and what it now guards, like a possession, is the effect of its generosity. (Georges Batailles)
Only the introduction of Protestant capitalism captured these forces globally & tried to tame them. The world is (increasingly) understood as a realm of necessity, of scarcity, of scarce resources; in which people are condemned to be laborers, zombified slaves.iii Instead of being fulfilled in their own expenditure (activity), as the excess of life does of itself.
Life’s a drive of death.
And our life the biggest detour.iv
While the maggots are already waiting for their food.
„Authentic luxury demands complete contempt for riches, the gloomy indifference of those who refuse to work and whose lives represent, on the one hand, the glory of boundless ruin and, on the other, a tacit insult to the assiduous lies of the rich.
Beyond military exploitation, religious mystification and capitalist embezzlement, no one could ever again find the meaning of wealth and the explosions, wastage and exuberance it promises if it were not for the splendour of rags and the gloomy defiance of indifference. If you wish, the exuberance of life is finally reserved for revolt by the lie.“ (Georges Batailles)
Cold fire, artificial light, Black Mirror – Alienation.
The game, the luxurious way of working, a seemingly self-purpose expenditure of one’s own strength (physical or mental). But already in the naïve imagination of children when playing, not only the beautiful, the wonderful, the joyful, but also the disgusting, the horrible, the sad & horrible appear – if the games do not already contain this of their own accord, then at the latest when reality tilts and “fun becomes serious”, as is so often said. They represent attempts of experimental (approximation) and hypothetical interpretation. No other art movement presents this as clearly as the now almost classic-looking idea of sci-fi.
Spaces of possibility are exhausted on the basis of previously determined potentials (mathematics, physics, philosophy, electronics), resulting from & in impossibilities. Creatively solutions for assumed problems are sought. Sci-Fi do not describe the future, but are accelerationist mutated probability calculations from their own present.
As fictional science, the prophecies thus produced colonize the future. The previously empty, imageless, dark future is increasingly preformed. Sci-Fis resemble in this respect the scientific attempts to record and calculate the resultant, the derivations; all improbabilities are to be sounded out and balanced out, all potential problems are to be anticipated. There must be no (unforeseen) disturbances.
If the fortune-teller knew how to give seemingly meaningless condolences in the vaguest formulations of the most general futures, like a fortune cookie or horoscope, the demystifying enlightenment is directed towards the exact calculation of what is to come.
If we still speak of self-fullfilling prophecy, this is gratefully combined with modern media technology to form the so-called “Stand Alone Complex”.
The future is programmed in that virtualisations anticipate time in a colonialising way.v Utopian science fiction, initially imagined and idealised as discontinuous, collapses under its own weight, dystopian sci-fi races towards our present at an enormous speed and „the story goes like this:
Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalitization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip.
The body count climbs through a series of globewars. Emergent Planetary Commercium trashes the Holy Roman Empire, the Napoleonic Continental System, the Second and Third Reich, and the Soviet International, cranking-up world disorder through compressing phases. Deregulation and the state arms-race each other into cyberspace.
By the time soft-engineering slithers out of its box into yours, human security is lurching into crisis. Cloning, lateral genodata transfer, transversal replication, and cyberotics, flood in amongst a relapse onto bacterial sex.
Neo-China arrives from the future.
Hypersynthetic drugs click into digital voodoo.
Retro-disease.
Nanospasm.“
Holografic, Virtual and Merged Realities – Embodiment & Ghost in the Shell
The toys, now highly technological devices such as computer games, simulate potential realities; in their algorithmic entanglement, however, it is linked to the formalizability & computability and bound to human-made programming.
“The wars of occupation and counterinsurgency are not only about tracking down and liquidating the enemy, but also about dividing time and atomizing space.
Since part of the work now consists of transforming the real into fiction and the fiction into reality, military mobilization from the air, the destruction of infrastructure, the beatings and wounds are now accompanied by total mobilization through images. The images are thus now part of the dispositives of a violence that sees itself as pure.
Moreover, capture, plunder, exploitation and asymmetric wars go hand in hand with the re-balkanization of the world and an intensification of zoning practices, which means a hitherto unknown complicity between the economic and the biological. (Achille Mbembe)
Eternally many different virtual worlds are offered in order to be able to pretend… the permanent saving, loading and repeating allows at the same time the testing of different decisions, what if…? Interactive risk calculation machines.
Computer games, movies, virtual reality, enhanced reality, merged reality, immersion.
The film that shows a photographer photographing a screen that shows a photographer photographing a photo, …. The doubling, the doubling of a doubled world. The digital pervades all areas of life and organizes everyday life.
iIt should be noted that for Bataille, in french and many other languages contrary to german, sun and moon have reversed sexes: le soleil, la lune. And in english, of course, the sun, the moon are sexless.
ii„The image of terror not only exists in a culture that no longer defines itself through a narrative, it also exists in a market that can only be kept in motion by hysterizing demand.“ (Roger Behrens)
iii„We work with world-tested tools and find a shortcut to new ways of working the world – as if by chance, the examination of this characteristic of aesthetic, scientific and political modernism provides a new, strictly formal criterion for progress. […] ‘The higher the productivity of human labor, the shorter the time in which it transforms a given quantity of means of production into finished products. This is a general law of human labor that was as valid among all pre-capitalist forms of production as it will be in the socialist social order in the future. Expressed in the objective use of the social product as a whole, this law must be expressed in an ever greater use of social working time for the production of means of production as opposed to the production of means of consumption. (Rosa Luxemburg)“ (Dietmar Dath)
iv„34 Revolution – ‘Multiplication, variation and selection’, the biologist repeats, ‘and then derived from this the secondary virtues of evolution: specialization, cooperation… When I ask her to what extent her Darwinian model requires a different application to society than that propagated by right-wing sociobiologists with their ‘struggle for existence’, she smiles: ‘Well, it’s not really all that mysterious: everything real is mortal, even the unjust world we have created. And for every mortal that has descendants, better or worse, one can give evolutionary laws. How you evaluate them is not dictated by Darwin. Take the division of labor, the conditions of production in general: If we do not enforce democratic planning, the human species will not become a political reality, but at some point we may get two new species, like the Morlocks and the Eloi in H. G. Wells – masters and servants, where the dependence of the masters on the servants stabilizes the whole, perhaps for thousands of years. One can then, as a right-wing sociobiologist, also say neutrally: the speciation that is taking place there leads to a new evolutionary stable strategy, to a symbiosis between classes that eventually become species. This is a process that could be greatly accelerated by biotech and eugenics. She does not have to say that this symbiosis would be wrong.
Injustice’ is not a scientific term, but a normative one, just like socialism. Lords and servants are both something different from people, morally speaking: less. This argument is sufficient reason to want to abolish them. People have allowed the machines that could help them to do away with them to become natural beings whose fruits cannot be harvested because they no longer produce any; like sleeping plants in winter. Men must free their machines so that they can return the favor.“ (Dietmar Dath)
vBetter control can be exercised by shorter distances to the claimed future – it is often much easier to describe an event in 10 minutes, 2 hours or 3 days than to describe an event in months, years or decades. In this explanation of a world that has become static by accelerating reporting to the second, the distances between the measuring points are so small that the long-term changes are clouded in their perceptibility. At the same time, complex, chaotic and/or so-called ‘self-learning’ algorithms calculate risk probabilities. On the (private) economic level, credits and shares complement governmental political planning in anticipation of the coming.
1)It should be noted that for Bataille, in french and many other languages contrary to german, sun and moon have reversed sexes: le soleil, la lune. And in english, of course, the sun, the moon are sexless.
2) „The image of terror not only exists in a culture that no longer defines itself through a narrative, it also exists in a market that can only be kept in motion by hysterizing demand.“ (Roger Behrens)
3) „We work with world-tested tools and find a shortcut to new ways of working the world – as if by chance, the examination of this characteristic of aesthetic, scientific and political modernism provides a new, strictly formal criterion for progress. […] ‘The higher the productivity of human labor, the shorter the time in which it transforms a given quantity of means of production into finished products. This is a general law of human labor that was as valid among all pre-capitalist forms of production as it will be in the socialist social order in the future. Expressed in the objective use of the social product as a whole, this law must be expressed in an ever greater use of social working time for the production of means of production as opposed to the production of means of consumption. (Rosa Luxemburg)“ (Dietmar Dath)
4)
„34 Revolution – ‘Multiplication, variation and selection’, the biologist repeats, ‘and then derived from this the secondary virtues of evolution: specialization, cooperation… When I ask her to what extent her Darwinian model requires a different application to society than that propagated by right-wing sociobiologists with their ‘struggle for existence’, she smiles: ‘Well, it’s not really all that mysterious: everything real is mortal, even the unjust world we have created. And for every mortal that has descendants, better or worse, one can give evolutionary laws. How you evaluate them is not dictated by Darwin. Take the division of labor, the conditions of production in general: If we do not enforce democratic planning, the human species will not become a political reality, but at some point we may get two new species, like the Morlocks and the Eloi in H. G. Wells – masters and servants, where the dependence of the masters on the servants stabilizes the whole, perhaps for thousands of years. One can then, as a right-wing sociobiologist, also say neutrally: the speciation that is taking place there leads to a new evolutionary stable strategy, to a symbiosis between classes that eventually become species. This is a process that could be greatly accelerated by biotech and eugenics. She does not have to say that this symbiosis would be wrong.
Injustice’ is not a scientific term, but a normative one, just like socialism. Lords and servants are both something different from people, morally speaking: less. This argument is sufficient reason to want to abolish them. People have allowed the machines that could help them to do away with them to become natural beings whose fruits cannot be harvested because they no longer produce any; like sleeping plants in winter. Men must free their machines so that they can return the favor.“ (Dietmar Dath)
5) Better control can be exercised by shorter distances to the claimed future – it is often much easier to describe an event in 10 minutes, 2 hours or 3 days than to describe an event in months, years or decades. In this explanation of a world that has become static by accelerating reporting to the second, the distances between the measuring points are so small that the long-term changes are clouded in their perceptibility. At the same time, complex, chaotic and/or so-called ‘self-learning’ algorithms calculate risk probabilities. On the (private) economic level, credits and shares complement governmental political planning in anticipation of the coming.