"Haecceity, fog, glare." - G. Deleuze / F. Guattari
Information has become debris, the detritus of automatic data retrieval and storage. No 'use' value, other than empty consumption of data, is possible. (or rather, the only use value is an entire culture driven by 're-search,' a rather pale recombinatory at that). A profound cultural lethargy begins to set in, driven, paradoxically enough by an equally profound panic. As gravity leaves all thought, the vertigo of the body in freefall is not far behind as all barriers are breached and every thing becomes equidistant as everything becomes a thing, (or, in the best gloss, becomes fetishized) even our bodies, ourselves. And in the fog of perception that ensues, para-noia, often disguised as metanoia, seems to be a most applicable state of adjustment, especially where boundaries are replaced by 'frames', and frames are found by modernism to be all too readily deformable, pierced, traumatized.
The 'tragic' dramas of ancient mentalities, finding both comfort and limitation there -- how to separate the two? -- [and modernism finding itıs comfort in the striated space of the sublime, better taken as the 'sub-limned'] gives way to immortalty discourse, which breaks the frame.
Immortality discourse, rampant in almost all cyber-discourse, opens onto a contemporary egyptology of crypts, secrets [soon to become, if not already, the prime epistemology of the new millennium: witness the 'hauntology' in Derrida's recent writings] as the most fitting accompaniment to para-noia, or the mind beside it's own knowledge, as the robot chess player finds its own plane of consistency. The new haruspex is the theorist, no longer the paraclete, but rather the specialist in a kind of parapraxis, searching for the fault lines where the secret lies, dispelling notions of paraphernalia ('holding one's own things'), even as more 'things' are required for the search. The defining figure of the age may yet be Daniel Paul Schreber.
All these paras indicate again the uncanny, as para-site if nothing else, as that secret' which is closest, as close as the dark star which Schreber was in communication with through his insect buddies, as close as the aliens which inundate us and are nowhere to be found, as close as the abject, which is everywhere to be found. And all the more so as all nets draw closer, both space and time become mutable, fusable--and yet leaden, Saturnian at the same time (something which the cyborg hoped to relegate to a by-passed tragic trope ).
So nothing is left but conjurings, passes made in the dark, circles drawn, sorceric becomings, even (or especially) the Tauskian traumatic evacuative becomings of vibratory machinic phantasms. Not a frame anymore, but a plethora of frames, all of them leaky, porous; not the brave shining of enlightened sublimity, always poised for the final hurdle to the Promised land but a new pact with the dead who everywhere will begin to live again (but, like the vampire, without reflection--no screens, no mirrors, no tains, only emittances). The Dark still lives and, like the purloined letter, it is out in the open and is posted daily. It does not have to come closer because it is already closest. How will one move in the farthest reaches of a mental universe in chasmatic collision with the electronic universe -- and, at some point, how is it possible to tell the difference (the trauma of the screen invading one's dreams at night, revealing/concealing)?
Within the smooth space of sortilege, the casting of lots, quantum level of expectations, movement through stochastics (which is not one of 'manifestation', of building, of a certain level of density) also becomes a form of sortie, " a sudden attack by forces of a beseiged place upon the beseigers", movement through the tain, through the screen. But for now, only lightly: a haze on the surface, breath deposited, then etched. New laws of photonic rebound: what you see is not necessarily what you get.