"POSSIBLE
SMOKE-FOG
AHEAD"
Systematization and Divinatory Excess
or:
Trauma, Terror, and Technology
rcheat'm
"Where is there hope in the deferred action of trauma (the messianic hope)?
How can the blind come to see, the lame to walk, the dead to love, er, live?..."
"Every collapse of distance (cars, wires) requires sacrifice ...
what sacrifice does collapse of difference
require?...the abyssal, the alien, the uncanny."
"...the slow apocalypse (the burning of rust rather than fire) that tech
requires/sustains/creates and that masquerades as negentropy: systemization."
Fehta Murghana
"Just one sniff of that fog and
you're turned inside out...
it's worse than that flesh-eating germ
you've heard all about."
song from The Simpsonšs Halloween Special
"Something came out of the fog and tried to destroy us..."
from The Fog, a film by John Carpenter
(abstract: The closure of a certain ontological space -- let's call it the human -- seems everywhere imminent now; it even seems to be called for by the inhabitants of countries who have embraced the so-called "third-wave" of the industrial revolution as that revolution is about to crest into the third millenium of human history. That is to say also that it will inevitably extend it's reach to all the inhabitants of earth. The arrival of the computer chip and telephony [it has still not fully arrived and may always be on the way] heralds the arrival of an age whose outcome can nowhere be predicted.
Phenomenologically speaking, how is such a web of systematized communication and control to be faceted? [For it surely can't be critiqued from any 'outside', all such attempts being merely 'loophole finders' in an increasingly Luhmannian homeostatic, self-referencing system..] In a 'post-modern' landscape where gravity itself loses all vectorization and the ultimate Copernican revolution seems well under way [the self's interior 'planet' being progressively displaced through the modernist tropes of Darwin, Freud, Nietzsche, Henry Ford, etc. and now IBM, Motorola, Microsoft, Archer-Daniels-Midland, etc.] well, what then? The climate is getting very dense and close. Perhaps a certain sort of fascism will have it's day yet. Or perhaps we need to take a closer look at the fog that seems to be seeping under doors everywhere. How does one see when the very light causes 'floaters' in the optic or: How does one navigate when the old longitudes and latitudes are now lines of flight? The very act of communication itself is haunted. it's carrier wave the uncanny emanating from collapse.
We might tend to punctuate, if not always address, these concerns -- which are those of information and communication in a phenomenological context -- as:
the demise of the biological (and the female)
the revenge of the biological (and the feminine)
netcrological hermeneutics
[the return (communication) of the dead/the death of the
dead/the living dead, expressed through their roving
technological avatars]
machinic unconscious
anomalous phenomena associated with technical media
doublings/dopplegangers
[including deconstruction, conspiracy as political rhizomatic
double, artificial life/intelligence, as well as
the more 'prosaic' folkloric Others]
uncanny and aporetic elements of the everyday in association with
the technical
the machinic abject embedded in the every day
the un-Heimlich Maneuver [the demise of the 'domestic' stemming
from the very heart of the domestic as it encounters a
global technical/telematic culture]
the Ghost Dance of attempts to resist these lines of flight
[--The Masque of the Red Death: bunkering and burrowing and
concomitant immunological breakdown
--Bartleby the Scrivener or: a a radical Blanchotian passivity [a
non-manifesting ever-arriving destiny]
--terrorism or: the final turning of Benjamin's angel)]
daemonic demographics
the technological singularity or: multiplexing radical human diaspora)
