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At Death's Door

"Perhaps the single most triumphant denominator in Western culture is its tendency to thematize the real in terms of limits and their destruction." Joseph Libertson

"Where am I? Where am I?" lyric from rock group, The Cranes
"You will see your own home, the attendants, relatives, and the corpse, and think, 'Now I am dead! What shall I do?' and being oppressed with intense sorrow, the thought will occur to you, 'what would I not give to possess a body!'....Wherefore finding no place for yourself to enter into, you will be dissasified and have the sensation of being squeezed into cracks and crevices amidst rocks and boulders." The Tibetan Book of the Dead

"Contrary to what is normally thought, technological modernity doesn't neutralize anything; it causes a certain form of the demonic to re-emerge." Jacques Derrida, "The Gift of Death"

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The most persistent limit of life and thought is death and the unthought. Thought has made incursions into those regions under the aegis of (1) the mythos of life-that-comes-after and (2) thought that tricks itself into the apparent exceeding of its own limitations. The imbrication of these two regions, extinction and imagination, has now reached certain levels of formalization through technological extrapolation; likewise the exceeding of these limits seems to be intimately tied to the ability to construct planar assemblages (machines) which then ramify beyond the presentness of immediate calculability ('constructed organisms' or intelligent -- and not necessarily intelligible -- fields of force). The system of technological invocation gives to the human organism a system of 'loopholes' in extant organizations. All aspects of human life become increasingly portable and speedy, cut off from the humus that gave them birth, both physically and psychically. But these technologcal processses have not yet reached an absolute speed (remembering that an absolute in these terms might only be just beyond the limit of human thought and life, not extending all the way to that other absolute, 'god'.)

Is it premature to call for an end to end-ness or death (wouldn't that be an absolute speed, the teleology of all technology, collapse? Does the complete mapping of an entity determine even future mappings, aka 'the Enlightenment,' and isn't that a certain kind of death? So far analytic mappings of the psyche have added entities and possibilities for the unthought, not reduced them; but after all, even a black hole announces its presence.) Without the escape valve of death for a population, how would a species arrange its pragmatic life? What would be a philosophy of deathlessness? (Do we already have such? Is the business of technology about the concrete manifesting of those eternal forms, as we look suspiciously back at the ancient Greeks?) Does an 'end' to death mean the return of the gods (even as fields of force) and the end of the human? Do all of our ghosts (geist?) disappear? Would it be the end of hauntings -- or our final surrender, no escape from the most banal of revenants (returns). And you thought re-runs from the Seventies were bad.

Even the present day increase in life span is forcing a need to rethink work, genealogy, community. Are 'work,' 'kinship,' and social binding becoming perforated beyond repair? To what extent is art tied to mortality? To what extent is the possibility of the impossible and the unthought itself connected with death? Is it the end of prophetic speech or its radical efflorescence? Doesn't the phenomenal quality of time itself feel different now, once we step into the clock stream of media and the 'hypersphere', a heightening and densification of events? Even death now becomes a fairly minor event in the bitstream. Yet, still, Death -- and ends -- ride everywhere now. At what point in a specie's life does the impossible become necessary? Is it possible that the final conquering of life means a final embrace of death?

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Perforations and fort?/DA! Press are divisions of Public Domain Inc. a 501 (c) 3, a non-profit arts and information organization. Public Domain, Perforations, and fort?/DA! Press may be contacted through any of the following modes:

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