Another statement of the difference between the sublime and the uncanny in Georges Bataille's general economy, has been entered by Joseph Libertson: " Bataille's originality does not lie in his thematization of an instance outside totalization and outside manifestation. Such a thematization of an absolutely other which escapes, and whose economy is exhausted by the fact that it escapes into the independence of absolution, is a constant in Western thought" and what might be taken as a statement of at least one version of the 'uncanny': "The originality of Bataille [....] is his discovery of an alterity outside the totality but within the general economy, which approaches as it escapes. [....] the Other in proximity is essentially 'here below':.. The urgency of its approach is its indefinite futurity." (Libertson, Proximity: Levinas, Blanchot, Bataille and Communication, p. 24)
Libertson makes clear the lack of interest such 'philosophies of proximity', which he associates with communication, have in negativity, power, and the absolutely other, which is always modeled on the model of totalization. This rather grave non-manifestational approach, a virtuality which is far beyond any present day possibilty of thinking the architecture of virtualness (in fact is impossible), amounts to a death sentence, when it is carried to its fartherest point ... which, from the philosophies' of proximity point of view, amounts to the nearest also.
Pre-eminently, the uncanny is the scene of border skirmishes between the living and the dead, now mediated and channeled by the technological impulse. The immunological systems of collective bodies (social, cultural, political) as well as privateı, biological, bodies become compromised by liminal, 'viral' states, agents whose ontological status is uncertain (but that does not mean non-existent). How is the 'experience' of death ever available? For isnıt it the most peculiar kind of 'experience' available to any living organism? (For doesn't all experience require a certain 'two-wayness' about it, an interpretive relation, a back and forth, a going-to, AND a reporting-back-from? How could we ever trust any 'experience' that is simply a 'going-to' with no coming back from--and a going-to of a particularly singular nature, that is, no one can accompany us in death? )
It might be objected that all experience is privative but, however one might want to debate that, there is still communication, reportage, hermeneusis after the 'fact'. To what degree can that ever be the case with death? How do we assign meaning, then, to those reported 'communications with the dead', channelings, readings, viewings, electrical chargings that popular cultural is so suffused with [and truth to tell, all culture, for how is culture even possible, extended in time, without some form, broadly speaking, of communcation with the dead? One might even posit, as Hans Jonas seems to indicate in the following quote, that a technological world is basically necrological in its animating passions:
"The earlier goal [i.e., of the ancient and medieval worlds]....was to interpret the apparently lifeless in the image of life and to extend life into apparent death. Then, it was the corpse, this primal exhibition of 'dead' matter, which was the limit of all understanding and therefore the first thing not to be accepted at its face value. Today the living, feeling, striving organism has taken over this role and is being unmasked as a ludibrium materiae, a subtle hoax of matter. Only when a corpse is the body plainly intelligible: then it returns from its puzzling and unorthodox behavior of aliveness to the unambiguous, 'familiar' state of a body within the world of bodies, whose general laws provide the canon of all comprehensibility. To approximate the laws of the organic body to this canon, i.e., to efface in this sense the boundaries between life and death, is the direction of modern thought of life as a physical fact. Our thinking today is under the ontological dominance of death" (Hans Jonas, The Phenomena of Life, p. 18)
For Jonas, the flow is toward the machinic, dead matter, and the understanding of life in terms of the dead (modernist, cartesian methodologies). But in a purelyı informational world, perhaps the first step (away from a aristotelian manifestationalı philosophy) ala Bataille and Blanchot, will have already occurred on the stygian shores of language as the body no longer mimics the machine, but rather language--though augmented in ways entirely peculiar and unprecedented. An inverted Egyptology perhaps. At that point the weightlessness of the dead, of shadows, of fog, join with the increasing weightlessness of human history and experience.
Science relies on inanimate probes into unknown regions, which then send back reports. But how would any probe return from or be able to report back from, a point beyond its own demise? (And although we say that an instrument diedı, can we say that has the same status as 'uncle harry died'? When we say that 'parts of uncle harry live on', how much of that is due simply to the density of organizational/communicational strategies of which a living organism is capable of (that is, minus the concept of soul or spirit) such that a purely 'mechanical' aggregate could be expected to attain a similar status at some point? And that at some point, that 'mechanical' mapping (it's wise to put mechanical in scare quotes since it doesn't correspond to any previously known example of the machinic; it fact it straddles the line/blurs the boundary between the older, purely planar assemblage mechanical and the self-organizational organic, calling both into question through the aegis of the other, the machinic gaining some semblance of 'depth structures' -- as in neural nets--while the organic acquires or is exfoliated through research protocols, a certain planar expressiveness of readily enumerable parts in specifiable configurations: blackbox vs white paper.)
The "human" is becoming more textualized, encyclopedized, configurable, while the "machine" is becoming more opaque, operationably non-describable, 'chaotic' ... Note that it is not necessary for either of these scenarios to reach their full fruition, either theoretically or practically, for important events to occur [that is, either a full explanation of what constitutes life and consciousness and/or the ability to create artificial life and consciousness. It is only necessary that, for all practical purposes, organic life be in large part specifiable and that it overlap with an increasing non-specifiability (opacity) of machine architecture, in order for uncanny doublings to reach a level not predictable by their respective underlying methodologies.