The Inextricable

oRb JeJeune

There is no straight path. Circlings, loops, hoops, screens full yet empty. wandering through labyrinthine twists; circuitous rhythms, disjunct but compelling, heard through the wall, a soundsphere emanating in all directions, not just feeble visual lines of flight (bound to hit a corner, bounce back, targeted always to `line of sight', always straight). Nevermind the possiblity of teleological lines of curvature, brought on by infinitely massive bodies beyond the limits (sight-lines) of history, always an unacceptable posit in the modern `mind's eye', the processional of `facts' -- now divorced from gravity and turned into data -- leading into the diaspora of a hermeneutic swamp. There, a supersaturated state of hyper info-density begins to precipitate out statistical forms and norms-- not totally unrelated to the singular instances which it seduces, querys (and subsequently modifies) . . . but not totally related either.

The very idea of `environment' is a discourse of control, not wild-ness (who ever heard of any `frontier' person speaking of `the environment'? At the point of envirospeak, belief in `control' is very powerful even if it is a discourse of `out-of-controlness' and corporate culpability.) And from the utilitarian, pragmatic, descriptive and/or constative point of view there is hardly anything BUT an `environment' in that sense of an economy marked and restricted by the ` `' ' . To the general economy belongs the performative, however fatal or sacrificial it always seems to turn out to be (what I am calling the fatal, J. L. Austin would no doubt call `abuses' or `infelicites' of the performative utterance.) The performative precipitates at the boundary of the `environmental'. It is here that fatality is not easily extricated from vitality (and from a psychoanalytic viewpoint life and death are indeed INextricable economies).

And if performatives are inevitably boundary creatures (perhaps Maxwell's demons), it is also in their nature to create their own conditions of operation, to create and settle occupation zones -- hence new boundary conditions and a new area of fatal un-settling. (We are threatening to become prematurely settled here. Most modern psychology and anglo-philosophy attempt to turn all border disputes away from the fatal and into the vital by claiming that all `environmental,' or `ecological', as J.J. Gibson calls it, issues can be accounted for by, strangely enough, attending almost solely to the internal side of some putative cartesian border. Perhaps the only way in which a `vital' stance can be taken, under these viewpoints, is to close off the borders -- using the clever ploy (both metaphysical and materialist) that there ARE no borders, hence no general economic environment, hence no `other side' in any fatal way. The performative in both its most general and most specific reside at this locus solus. Here logos [as techné] and techné [as logos] operate. But this `point' (the realm of the un-canny: always points and not lines) is far removed brom the `border' of the sublime. The horizon as sight-line--progenitor of all `modernisms' at whatever time, heirs to Apollianian sungods as well as chiasmatic, chiliastic teleologies always just over the horizon. The messianic promise and fulfillment -- always, everywhere, necessarily deferred -- is always a sublime promissory note, always payable at noonday. The shadowy accounting procedures of the uncanny (using unheimlich's own reckoning, it can hardly be said to be `procedural', having little to do with Kantian civic/political bourgeoise responsibility and bookkeeping )

Approaches to the creation and understanding of the golem were two: was the conjuration of the golem the bringing into existence of an actual body, a manifestation of the material through, somehow, magical relays of the linguistic, as it appends to more numinous realms? Or was it in fact a way of creating an ecstatic body, a body formed of etheric fluids, so to speak, a sympathetic vibration aligned to the conjuror's own nervous system, generated by but distinct from. Like the global golem being conjured now, intent is difficult to fathom since it too is situational (and perhaps statistical now); the Prague ghetto writ large or the human nervous system writ large and doubled on itself. Both options are undecidable torsions (how can we extricate a pure nervous system from the cultural occlusions and environments that cause thousands, if not millions at this point, of mostly young males sitting hours into the night in their own private enclosure/ghetto/alchemical retort attempting frantically to generate their own double, their home page (pale and feeble as it might be?). Which is it then: actual THING or resonating etheric bodies built by basic and C++? Both. Neither. "This, I realized, was the very essence of terror -- that ghastly, paralyzing fear of nothing at all, of something devoid of form,, that yet eats into the very boundaries of one's thought. (G. Meyrink, The Golem, P. 95)

Like the Prague golem, (secreted from all the sorrows, joys, secrets, the time-fined dust of millennia, once flying free, now precipitated out from the mists of historical redemptive possibilities, herms standing guard over the wreckage of the past) cast as a grey coating over everything, generations flown out into the ageless air to become a flexible film (sometimes an entity, sometimes a text, sometimes. . .ash) always attempting to slow the decay rate of time-bound creatures (the golem, like the book, is ageless; ageless and yet incredibly ancient and, also like the book [Are they not, in some way, the same? Both -- like techné -- extending/extruding a hand which becomes a fist, pulling from some beyond, now long beyond mere survival praxis], a vengeful conservator, at war with its own immanent uncanny arrival: silent), like that golem, the global statistical communicative body will perhaps find its own patina of dust someday (constituted here as self-conscious remembrance) but stripped of any nostalgic embrace because the dust itself (nano- no doubt) will by then be `alive' (and monstrosities don't have generations)...and 'dead' also (whence current theoretical interest in 'viruses', more borderline creatures, straddling the cusp between one surface and another; all 'contents' now seem to be drawn to the level of this 'surface tension' where various immisible realities --oil/water, the stroke of touching surfaces being everything practically now-- realities touch, can be seen, but do not merge. Perhaps it is at that point, where space and time begin to reshape themselves under the aegis of (either as hegemony, or immisibility, or embrication -- either too soon or too late to deal with those N-possibilities at this moment -- in some truly dark Blanchotian 'second night' which, strangely enough, looks bright as it approaches on the horizon) the proximities which information/communication bring, that the new golem speaks.