NOISE
This clotted fog, mental, physical, material, so intimately connected to the terror of the cemetary and the opening of the earth and of all sorts of crypts (everywhere announcing the spreading miasma of etheric doubles, which the digital can only mimic, as a sort of power ploy used by mimesis, and which the historical dialectic can only sheath in various rhetorics and delaying tactics) always serves the escalation of boundary intrigue. Fog has become the epitome of that New Matter, formerly opaque, now seen as merely a noisy boundary between Energy and Information, more void than solid, yet throwing up a very convincing facade of imperturbability. This new foggy matter is the utmost in flexability and adaptability, best exemplified by the extropian use of the utility fog or “nano-fog”. (This would be a fog composed of foglets, each of which would be the size of a human cell and would be composed of a supercomputer chip and 12 manipulable arms on the surface of the octohedral surface; a cubic centimeter would contain approximately 16 million of the foglets. Their purpose would be to create a complete environment, able to change almost instantaneously and capable of creating almost anything.)
At the extreme limit of the boundary between noise and information (that is, within the boundary itself), the differentials between matter and energy, signal and data, become so blurred as to be non-existent; or rather, the normal mechanisms for dealing with border disputes are not available since all hermeneutic strategies are based on an a priori determination of starting points — but, inside boundaries, such determinations have yet to be established. Gravity, basis of all interpretation, has disappeared. Inside boundaries (within the fold, at the hinge, cardo, or heart of the matter) noise and signal merge, become chiasmatic even. On what basis does one set up beacons in the fog?
All belongs to the shadowlands, ultimate border between the living and the dead, where the only operable function seems to be a species of magic, conjurings in the flux, strange attractors. “Immersed in background noise with its fractal agitation, the observer attracts the directional flux. It comes toward him, it is bound to. Should there be some wind, it will blow in his direction, any other point, for him, will be in the background. Immersed in disorder, all order is directed toward him. Toward him, at him, and against him.” Michel Serres,
The epistemological correlate for knowledge here becomes rumor, conspiracy, generated at every moment in conditions of extreme multiplicity and boundary disorder, new decision trees created at each instance and concommitant criteria for un/verifiability. At this point, one can only, as the saying has it, ‘give up the ghost’: “…I am a castaway of perception. I am swallowed up in space, drowned in its murmuring, the multiple always overflows me. I am a subject only when I am on the verge of fainting, dying.” (Serres, ibid, p.65).
The trauma for boundary inhabitants: give up the ghost (cyborg) or become the ghost (sorcerer). They may turn out to be the same. The problem remains one of navigation, of determining longitude and lattitude, only partly dependent on the cocoon-like spinning of the gyroscope.