08 May 2009
DdK, "Digital Natives" 2009
The first 12 minutes is the whole of the matter. The key theme -- what is health in the digital era -- has merit. From 12 mins on, however, it becomes a survey of inventory and symptoms...lists upon lists. Around mid-way there is a "video" within a "video" (subplot?) that plumbs new frontiers in banality.
29 April 2009
21 April 2009
New Chapter in Cold Fusion?
(CBS) Twenty years ago it appeared, for a moment, that all our energy problems could be solved. It was the announcement of cold fusion - nuclear energy like that which powers the sun - but at room temperature on a table top. It promised to be cheap, limitless and clean. Cold fusion would end our dependence on the Middle East and stop those greenhouse gases blamed for global warming. It would change everything.But then, just as quickly as it was announced, it was discredited. So thoroughly, that cold fusion became a catch phrase for junk science. Well, a funny thing happened on the way to oblivion - for many scientists today, cold fusion is hot again. Full story at CBS. And the video.
Philip K. Dick:An "Interview" by Erik Davis
After spending the bulk of his life cranking out pulp paperbacks for peanuts, the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick is now finally recognized as one of the most visionary authors the genre has ever produced. While masterminds like Arthur C. Clarke anticipated technological breakthroughs, Dick, whose speed-ravaged heart called it quits in 1982 when the man was only 53, foresaw the psychological turmoil of our posthuman lives, as we enter a world where machines talk back, virtual reality rules, and God is a product in the check-out line.Dick's fractured and darkly funny novels have left their mark on video games and rock bands, avant-garde theater and electronic opera. But his influence has been particularly profound in Hollywood. Ridley Scott turned Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? into Blade Runner, one of the most powerful SF films of all time. A 1966 short story formed the basis of the Schwarzenegger hit Total Recall, and Steven Spielberg turned Dick's tale "Minority Report" into his darkest flick yet. The reality slips and cartoon metaphysics of The Matrix are thoroughly indebted to Dick, and his spirit hangs heavy over Richard Linkletter’s astounding Waking Life.
In the course of my current researches into techgnostic religious phenomena, I was experimenting with electronic voice phenomena. I was recording the analog noise between tracks on a scratchy old copy of Karl Muck conducting Parzifal with the Bayreuth Festival Chorus onto a cassette tape. Then I would cut, splice, and process the tape in various ways, and then listen to the results. On the third attempt I heard a voice that I recognized, from a tape once available through the Philip K. Dick Society, as belonging to the late science fiction writer. More incredible was my discovery that, by recording my own questions on the same cassette tape, I was able to initiate a genuine dialogue with this mysterious voice. Subsequent research proved, however, that all of the quotations have already made an appearance somewhere in Dick’s fiction, letters, or essays. Nonetheless, the conversation seems worth presenting:
DAVIS: Mr. Dick, the world has only been getting stranger since you left us. We are surrounded with clones, identity theft, patented genes, faster-than-light particles, Aibo, and obsessive virtual gaming. Some scientist in England promises to build a chip called a "soul catcher" that will sit behind your eyeballs and record your life. Doesnt all this sound strangely familiar?
DICK: Over the years it seems to me that by subtle but real degrees the world has come to resemble a PKD novel. Several freaks have even accused me of bringing on the modern world by my novels.
DAVIS: How exactly would you characterize those novels?
DICK: My writing deals with hallucinated worlds, intoxicating and deluding drugs, and psychosis. But my writing acts as an antidote, a detoxifying, not intoxicating, antidote.
The remainder of the interview can be found at: 21C Magazine
11 November 2008
Marshall McLuhan - “Notes on Burroughs” (1964)
1. Today men’s nerves surround us; they have gone outside as electrical environment. The human nervous system itself can be reprogrammed biologically as readily as any radio network can alter its fare. Burroughs has dedicated Naked Lunch to the first proposition, and Nova Express (both Grove Press) to the second. Naked Lunch records private strategies of culture in the electric age. Nova Express indicates some of the “corporate” responses and adventures of the Subliminal Kid who is living in a universe which seems to be someone else’s insides. Both books are a kind of engineer’s report of the terrain hazards and mandatory processes, which exist in the new electric environment.
2. Burroughs uses what he calls “Brion Gysin’s cut-up method which I call the fold-in method.” To read the daily newspaper in its entirety is to encounter the method in all its purity. Similarly, an evening watching television programs is an experience in a corporate form — an endless succession of impressions and snatches of narrative. Burroughs is unique only in that he is attempting to reproduce in prose what we accommodate every day as a commonplace aspect of life in the electric age. If the corporate life is to be rendered on paper, the method of discontinuous nonstory must be employed.
3. That man provides the sexual organs of the technological world seems obvious enough to Burroughs, and such is the stage (or “biological theatre” as he calls it in Nova Express) for the series of social orgasms brought about by the evolutionary mutations of man and society. The logic, physical and emotional, of a world in which we have made our environment out of our own nervous systems, Burroughs follows everywhere to the peripheral orgasm of the cosmos.
4. Each technological extension involves an act of collective cannibalism. The previous environment with all its private and social values, is swallowed by the new environment and reprocessed for whatever values are digestible. Thus, Nature was succeeded by the mechanical environment and became what we call the “content” of the new industrial environment. That is, Nature became a vessel of aesthetic and spiritual values. Again and again the old environment is upgraded into an art form while the new conditions are regarded as corrupt and degrading. Artists, being experts in sensory awareness, tend to concentrate on the environmental as the challenging and dangerous situation. That is why they may seem to be “ahead of their time.” Actually, they alone have the resources and temerity to live in immediate contact with the environment of their age. More timid people prefer to accept the content, the previous environment’s values, as the continuing reality of their time. Our natural bias is to accept the new gimmick (automaton, say) as a thing that can be accommodated in the old ethical order.
5. During the process of digestion of the old environment, man finds it expedient to anesthetize himself as much as possible. He pays as little attention to the action of the environment as the patient heeds the surgeon’s scalpel. The gulping or swallowing of Nature by the machine was attended by a complete change of the ground rules of both the sensory ratios of the individual nervous system and the patterns of the social order as well. Today, when the environment has become the extension of the entire mesh of the nervous system, anesthesia numbs our bodies into hydraulic jacks.
6. Burroughs disdains the hallucinatory drugs as providing mere “content,” the fantasies, dreams that money can buy. Junk (heroin) is needed to turn the human body itself into an environment that includes the universe. The central theme of Naked Lunch is the strategy of bypassing the new electric environment by becoming an environment oneself. The moment one achieves this environmental state all things and people are submitted to you to be processed. Whether a man takes the road of junk or the road of art, the entire world must submit to his processing. The world becomes his “content.” He programs the sensory order.
7. For artists and philosophers, when a technology is new it yields Utopias. Such is Plato’s Republic in the fifth century B.C., when phonetic writing was being established. Similarly, More’s Utopia is written in the sixteenth century when the printed book had just become established. When electric technology was new and speculative, Alice in Wonderland came as a kind of non-Euclidean space-time Utopia, a grown-up version of which is the Illuminations of Rimbaud. Like Lewis Carroll, Rimbaud accepts each object as a world and the world as an object. He makes a complete break with the established procedure of putting things into time or space:
That’s she, the little girl behind the rose bushes, and she’s dead. The young mother, also dead, is coming down the steps. The cousin’s carriage crunches the sand. The small brother (he’s in India!) over there in the field of pinks, in front of the sunset. The old men they’ve buried upright in the wall covered with gilly-flowers.
But when the full consequences of each new technology have been manifested in new psychic and social forms, then the anti-Utopias appear. Naked Lunch can be viewed as the anti-Utopia of Illuminations:
During the withdrawal the addict is acutely aware of his surroundings. Sense impressions are sharpened to the point of hallucination. Familiar objects seem to stir with a writhing furtive life. The addict is subject to a barrage of sensations external and visceral.
Or to give a concrete example from the symbolist landscape of Naked Lunch:
A guard in a uniform of human skin, black buck jacket with carious yellow teeth buttons, an elastic pullover shirt in burnished Indian copper […] sandals from calloused foot soles of young Malayan farmer […]
The key to symbolist perception is in yielding the permission to objects to resonate with their own time and space. Time and space themselves are subjected to the uniform and continuous visual processing that provides us with the “connected and rational” world that is in fact only an isolated fragment of reality — the visual. There is no uniform and continuous character in the nonvisual modalities of space and time. The Symbolists freed themselves from visual conditions into the visionary world of the iconic and the auditory. Their art, to be visually oriented and literary man, seems haunted, magical and often incomprehensible. It is, in John Ruskin’s words:
… the expression, in a moment, by a series of symbols thrown together in bold and fearless connections; of truths which it would have taken a long time to express in any verbal way, and of which the connection is left for the beholder to work out for himself; the gaps, left or overleaped by the haste of the imagination, forming the grotesque character. (Modern Painters)
The art of the interval, rather than the art of the connection, is not only medieval but Oriental; above all, it is the art mode of instant electric culture.
8. There are considerable antecedents for the Burroughs attempt to read the language of the biological theatre and the motives of the Subliminal Kid. Fleurs du Mal is a vision of the city as the technological extension of man. Baudelaire had once intended to title the book Les Limbes. The vision of the city as a physiological and psychic extension of the body he experienced as a nightmare of illness and self-alienation. Wyndham Lewis, in his trilogy The Human Age, began with The Childermass. Its theme is the massacre of innocents and the rape of entire populations by the popular media of press and film. Later in The Human Age Lewis explores the psychic mutations of man living in “the magnetic city,” the instant, electric, and angelic (or diabolic) culture. Lewis views the action in a much more inclusive way than Burroughs whose world is a paradigm of a future in which there can be no spectators but only participants. All men are totally involved in the insides of all men. There is no privacy and no private parts. In a world in which we are all ingesting and digesting one another there can be no obscenity or pornography or decency. Such is the law of electric media which stretch the nerves to form a global membrane of enclosure.
9. The Burroughs diagnosis is that we can avoid the inevitable “closure” that accompanies each new technology by regarding our entire gadgetry as junk. Man has hopped himself up by a long series of technological fixes:
You are all dogs on tape. The entire planet is being developed into terminal identity and complete surrender.
We can forego the entire legacy of Cain (the inventor of gadgets) by applying the same formula that works for junk — “apomorphine,” extended to all technology:
Apomorphine is no word and no image — […] It is simply a question of putting through an inoculation program in the very limited time that remains — Word begets image and image IS virus —
Burroughs is arguing that the power of the image to beget image, and of technology to reproduce itself via human intervention, is utterly in excess of our power to control the psychic and social consequences:
Shut the whole thing right off — Silence — When you answer the machine you provide it with more recordings to be played back to your “enemies” keep the whole nova machine running — The Chinese character for “enemy” means to be similar to or to answer — Don’t answer the machine — Shut if off —
Merely to be in the presence of any machine, or replica of our body or faculties, is to be close with it. Our sensory ratios shift at once with each encounter with any fragmented extension of our being. This is a non-stop express of innovation that cannot be endured indefinitely:
We are just dust falls from demagnetized patterns — Show business —
It is the medium that is the message because the medium creates an environment that is as indelible as it is lethal. To end the proliferation of lethal new environmental expression, Burroughs urges a huge collective act of restraint as well as a nonclosure of sensory modes — “The biological theater of the body can bear a good deal of new program notes.”
10. Finnnegans Wake provides the closest literary precedent to Burroughs’ work. From the beginning to end it is occupied with the theme of “the extensions” of man — weaponry, clothing, languages, number, money, and media in toto. Joyce works out in detail the sensory shifts involved in each extension of man, and concludes with the resounding boast:
The keys to. Given!
Like Burroughs, Joyce was sure he had worked out the formula for total cultural understanding and control. The idea of art as total programming for the environment is tribal, mental, Egyptian. It is, also, an idea of art to which electric technology leads quite strongly. We live science fiction. The bomb is our environment. The bomb is of higher learning all compact, the extension division of the university. The university has become a global environment. The university now contains the commercial world, as well as the military and government establishments. To reprogram the cultures of the globe becomes as natural an undertaking as curriculum revision in a university. Since new media are new environments that reprocess psyche and society in successive ways, why not bypass instruction in fragmented subjects meant for fragmented sections of the society and reprogram the environment itself? Such is Burroughs’ vision.
11. It is amusing to read reviews of Burroughs that try to classify his books as nonbooks or as failed science fiction. It is a little like trying to criticize the sartorial and verbal manifestations of a man who is knocking on the door to explain that flames are leaping from the roof of our home. Burroughs is not asking merit marks as a writer; he is trying to point to the shut-on button of an active and lethal environmental process.
2. Burroughs uses what he calls “Brion Gysin’s cut-up method which I call the fold-in method.” To read the daily newspaper in its entirety is to encounter the method in all its purity. Similarly, an evening watching television programs is an experience in a corporate form — an endless succession of impressions and snatches of narrative. Burroughs is unique only in that he is attempting to reproduce in prose what we accommodate every day as a commonplace aspect of life in the electric age. If the corporate life is to be rendered on paper, the method of discontinuous nonstory must be employed.
3. That man provides the sexual organs of the technological world seems obvious enough to Burroughs, and such is the stage (or “biological theatre” as he calls it in Nova Express) for the series of social orgasms brought about by the evolutionary mutations of man and society. The logic, physical and emotional, of a world in which we have made our environment out of our own nervous systems, Burroughs follows everywhere to the peripheral orgasm of the cosmos.
4. Each technological extension involves an act of collective cannibalism. The previous environment with all its private and social values, is swallowed by the new environment and reprocessed for whatever values are digestible. Thus, Nature was succeeded by the mechanical environment and became what we call the “content” of the new industrial environment. That is, Nature became a vessel of aesthetic and spiritual values. Again and again the old environment is upgraded into an art form while the new conditions are regarded as corrupt and degrading. Artists, being experts in sensory awareness, tend to concentrate on the environmental as the challenging and dangerous situation. That is why they may seem to be “ahead of their time.” Actually, they alone have the resources and temerity to live in immediate contact with the environment of their age. More timid people prefer to accept the content, the previous environment’s values, as the continuing reality of their time. Our natural bias is to accept the new gimmick (automaton, say) as a thing that can be accommodated in the old ethical order.
5. During the process of digestion of the old environment, man finds it expedient to anesthetize himself as much as possible. He pays as little attention to the action of the environment as the patient heeds the surgeon’s scalpel. The gulping or swallowing of Nature by the machine was attended by a complete change of the ground rules of both the sensory ratios of the individual nervous system and the patterns of the social order as well. Today, when the environment has become the extension of the entire mesh of the nervous system, anesthesia numbs our bodies into hydraulic jacks.
6. Burroughs disdains the hallucinatory drugs as providing mere “content,” the fantasies, dreams that money can buy. Junk (heroin) is needed to turn the human body itself into an environment that includes the universe. The central theme of Naked Lunch is the strategy of bypassing the new electric environment by becoming an environment oneself. The moment one achieves this environmental state all things and people are submitted to you to be processed. Whether a man takes the road of junk or the road of art, the entire world must submit to his processing. The world becomes his “content.” He programs the sensory order.
7. For artists and philosophers, when a technology is new it yields Utopias. Such is Plato’s Republic in the fifth century B.C., when phonetic writing was being established. Similarly, More’s Utopia is written in the sixteenth century when the printed book had just become established. When electric technology was new and speculative, Alice in Wonderland came as a kind of non-Euclidean space-time Utopia, a grown-up version of which is the Illuminations of Rimbaud. Like Lewis Carroll, Rimbaud accepts each object as a world and the world as an object. He makes a complete break with the established procedure of putting things into time or space:
That’s she, the little girl behind the rose bushes, and she’s dead. The young mother, also dead, is coming down the steps. The cousin’s carriage crunches the sand. The small brother (he’s in India!) over there in the field of pinks, in front of the sunset. The old men they’ve buried upright in the wall covered with gilly-flowers.
But when the full consequences of each new technology have been manifested in new psychic and social forms, then the anti-Utopias appear. Naked Lunch can be viewed as the anti-Utopia of Illuminations:
During the withdrawal the addict is acutely aware of his surroundings. Sense impressions are sharpened to the point of hallucination. Familiar objects seem to stir with a writhing furtive life. The addict is subject to a barrage of sensations external and visceral.
Or to give a concrete example from the symbolist landscape of Naked Lunch:
A guard in a uniform of human skin, black buck jacket with carious yellow teeth buttons, an elastic pullover shirt in burnished Indian copper […] sandals from calloused foot soles of young Malayan farmer […]
The key to symbolist perception is in yielding the permission to objects to resonate with their own time and space. Time and space themselves are subjected to the uniform and continuous visual processing that provides us with the “connected and rational” world that is in fact only an isolated fragment of reality — the visual. There is no uniform and continuous character in the nonvisual modalities of space and time. The Symbolists freed themselves from visual conditions into the visionary world of the iconic and the auditory. Their art, to be visually oriented and literary man, seems haunted, magical and often incomprehensible. It is, in John Ruskin’s words:
… the expression, in a moment, by a series of symbols thrown together in bold and fearless connections; of truths which it would have taken a long time to express in any verbal way, and of which the connection is left for the beholder to work out for himself; the gaps, left or overleaped by the haste of the imagination, forming the grotesque character. (Modern Painters)
The art of the interval, rather than the art of the connection, is not only medieval but Oriental; above all, it is the art mode of instant electric culture.
8. There are considerable antecedents for the Burroughs attempt to read the language of the biological theatre and the motives of the Subliminal Kid. Fleurs du Mal is a vision of the city as the technological extension of man. Baudelaire had once intended to title the book Les Limbes. The vision of the city as a physiological and psychic extension of the body he experienced as a nightmare of illness and self-alienation. Wyndham Lewis, in his trilogy The Human Age, began with The Childermass. Its theme is the massacre of innocents and the rape of entire populations by the popular media of press and film. Later in The Human Age Lewis explores the psychic mutations of man living in “the magnetic city,” the instant, electric, and angelic (or diabolic) culture. Lewis views the action in a much more inclusive way than Burroughs whose world is a paradigm of a future in which there can be no spectators but only participants. All men are totally involved in the insides of all men. There is no privacy and no private parts. In a world in which we are all ingesting and digesting one another there can be no obscenity or pornography or decency. Such is the law of electric media which stretch the nerves to form a global membrane of enclosure.
9. The Burroughs diagnosis is that we can avoid the inevitable “closure” that accompanies each new technology by regarding our entire gadgetry as junk. Man has hopped himself up by a long series of technological fixes:
You are all dogs on tape. The entire planet is being developed into terminal identity and complete surrender.
We can forego the entire legacy of Cain (the inventor of gadgets) by applying the same formula that works for junk — “apomorphine,” extended to all technology:
Apomorphine is no word and no image — […] It is simply a question of putting through an inoculation program in the very limited time that remains — Word begets image and image IS virus —
Burroughs is arguing that the power of the image to beget image, and of technology to reproduce itself via human intervention, is utterly in excess of our power to control the psychic and social consequences:
Shut the whole thing right off — Silence — When you answer the machine you provide it with more recordings to be played back to your “enemies” keep the whole nova machine running — The Chinese character for “enemy” means to be similar to or to answer — Don’t answer the machine — Shut if off —
Merely to be in the presence of any machine, or replica of our body or faculties, is to be close with it. Our sensory ratios shift at once with each encounter with any fragmented extension of our being. This is a non-stop express of innovation that cannot be endured indefinitely:
We are just dust falls from demagnetized patterns — Show business —
It is the medium that is the message because the medium creates an environment that is as indelible as it is lethal. To end the proliferation of lethal new environmental expression, Burroughs urges a huge collective act of restraint as well as a nonclosure of sensory modes — “The biological theater of the body can bear a good deal of new program notes.”
10. Finnnegans Wake provides the closest literary precedent to Burroughs’ work. From the beginning to end it is occupied with the theme of “the extensions” of man — weaponry, clothing, languages, number, money, and media in toto. Joyce works out in detail the sensory shifts involved in each extension of man, and concludes with the resounding boast:
The keys to. Given!
Like Burroughs, Joyce was sure he had worked out the formula for total cultural understanding and control. The idea of art as total programming for the environment is tribal, mental, Egyptian. It is, also, an idea of art to which electric technology leads quite strongly. We live science fiction. The bomb is our environment. The bomb is of higher learning all compact, the extension division of the university. The university has become a global environment. The university now contains the commercial world, as well as the military and government establishments. To reprogram the cultures of the globe becomes as natural an undertaking as curriculum revision in a university. Since new media are new environments that reprocess psyche and society in successive ways, why not bypass instruction in fragmented subjects meant for fragmented sections of the society and reprogram the environment itself? Such is Burroughs’ vision.
11. It is amusing to read reviews of Burroughs that try to classify his books as nonbooks or as failed science fiction. It is a little like trying to criticize the sartorial and verbal manifestations of a man who is knocking on the door to explain that flames are leaping from the roof of our home. Burroughs is not asking merit marks as a writer; he is trying to point to the shut-on button of an active and lethal environmental process.
10 November 2008
Dobb's "Calculus" Applied to Kroker's Epyllion
City of Transformation: Paul Virilio in Obama's America
by Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
[from: http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=597#bio]
It is surely the fate of every engaged political theory to be overcome by the history that it thought it was only describing. So too, Paul Virilio. His writings have captured brilliantly these twilight times in which we live: The Aesthetics of Disappearance, The Information Bomb, War and Cinema,Speed and Politics -- less writing in the traditional sense than an uncanny shamanistic summoning forth of the demonology of speed which inscribes society. A prophet of the wired future, Paul Virilio's thought always invokes the doubled meaning of apocalypse -- cataclysm and remembrance.
Cataclysm because all his writings trace the history of the technological death-instinct moving at the speed of light. And remembrance because Virilio is that rarity in contemporary culture, a thinker whose ethical dissent marks the first glimmerings of a fateful implosion of that festival of seduction, fascination, terror, and boredom we have come to know as digital culture. A self-described "atheist of technology," his motto is "obey and resist."
But for all that there is a raw materialism in Virilio's reflection, nowhere better expressed than in his grisly vision of information as suffocation. In his theatre of thought data banks have migrated inside human flesh, bodies are reduced to granulated flows of dead information, tattooed by data, embedded by codes, with complex histories of electronic transactions as our most private autobiographies. Information mapping our lives -- process, principles, concept, fact -- we have all become measurable. In Virilio's writing what Hannah Arendt once described as "modern world alienation" rides the whirling tip of history as the spirit of pure negation that is everywhere today. Negative politics, negative subjectivity, negative culture. It is impossible to escape the technological accident that has become us.
BOB: Android Meme (AM) dominates Anthropomorphic Physical (AP): 1960 - 1990, or AM/AP
But for all that history will not long be denied. Just as Nietzsche once prophesied in The Gay Science that with the birth of human subjectivity, twisted and scarred and deliriously unpredictable, the gods actually stopped their game of wagers and took notice because something new was moving on the earth -- a going across, a tremulous wakening, a pathway over the abyss -- so too with Virilio, the gods of history take notice once again. And not just take notice, but actively respond to the fatal challenge that is the thought of Paul Virilio.
Are we beyond Speed and Politics? What characterizes contemporary politics is the unstable mixture of speed information and slow movements. Like the slow implosion of the manufacturing economy, the slow rise of evangelical visions of catastrophe, the slow ascent -- the slow ubiquity -- of the speed of technology, the slow descent of culture into the cold state of surveillance under the sign of bio-governance.
BOB: Anthropomorphic Physical (AP) dominates Android Meme (AM): 1990 - Nov.'06, or AP/AM
You can see it everywhere. In the world economy, the speed of mortgage backed securities, credit swap debt offerings, and complex derivatives always seeks to move at the speed of light. Iceland is the world's first country actually liquidated by hyperreality with debts amassed at light-speeds now constituting 10 times its national wealth. Like Michel Serres' the perfect parasite, the Wall Street financial elite has worked a perfect number on the host of the world economies -- implanting unknown levels of toxic debt everywhere in the circulatory system of finance capital, from China and Japan to the European community.
BOB: "Rumplestiltskin" - see the bottom right-hand corner in the Bob Dobbs quadrant of my TINY NOTE chart at http://www.earmap.com/tinynote/tinynote.html
Waking up to the danger of hot debt moving at light-speed when it is definitely too late, Japanese bankers suddenly declaim that "It is beyond panic." Wall Street types say it is "panic with a capital P." Harvard economists, standing on the sidelines like a chorus of lament, wisely add that we are now between "capitulation and panic" and "debt is good." That in a world of over-extended economies, sudden loss of financial credibility, and a seizing up of credit mechanisms everywhere, the only thing to do, financially speaking, is wait for the capitulation point -- that fatal moment when despair is so deep, pessimism so locked down tight in the investor's heart, that everything just stops for an instant. No investments, no hope, no circulation. And for the always hopeful financial analysts, this is precisely the point to begin anew, to reinvest, to seize financial redemption from despair. Definitely then, not a speed economy, but a politics and economy of complex recursive loops, trapped in cycles of feedback which no one seems to understand, but with very real, very slow consequences: like vanishing jobs, abandoned health care and trashed communities. In The City of Panic, Virilio writes about the "tyranny of real time," "this accident in time belonging to an event that is the fruit of a technological progress out of political control." For Virilio, we're now interpellated by a complex, three dimensional space-time involved in the acceleration of technological progress "that reduces the extent, the fullness of the world to nothing."
BOB: Dec.'06 - Aug.'08: After-image of AP/AM
Or something else? Not really a fatal oscillation between fast technology and slow society, but hyper-technologies of global financial manipulation that can move so quickly because, just as Jean Baudrillard long ago warned, the hyperreal, simulational world of derivatives, credit swaps, and mortgage backed securities long ago blasted off from material reality, reaching escape velocity, and then orbiting the world as star-like high finance satellites -- purely virtual satellites which have no real meaning for the rest of us as long as they stay in space as part of the alienated, recursive loops of advanced capitalism.
BOB: Android Meme (AM) dominates Anthropomorphic Physical (AP): 1960 - 1990, or AM/AP (see the "holeopathic satellite" categories in the complete TINY NOTE chart at http://www.earmap.com/tinynote/tinynote.html )
But when the meltdown suddenly happens, when that immense weight of over-indebtedness and toxic mortgages and credit derivates plunge back into the gravitational weight of real politics and real economy, we finally know what it is to live within trajectories of the catastrophic. Economists are quoted as saying the financial crisis effects "everyone on earth." Is this Virilio's "global accident?" Quite certainly it is panic finance: that moment when the credit mechanisms necessary for capitalist liquidity slam shut, a time made to measure for Virilio's brilliant theory of bunker archeology, with each bank its own toxic bunker of junk assets, each banker a born again socialist. For example, always vigilant automatic circuit breakers working in the darkness of night recently prevented a global plunge of the futures market. Allan Greenspan throws up his hands, exclaiming "I'm in shocked disbelief."
BOB: Anthropomorphic Physical (AP) dominates Android Meme (AM): 1990 - Nov.'06, or AP/AM
By one measure, the global economic meltdown is Virilio's accident, a searing demonstration of the truth of Virilio's proposition that every technology is born with a necessary accident in mind. This time it is not a trainwreck, a robotrader or even 9/11, but a massive financial accident. Here, the brilliant software innovations and computerized trading programs that run so much of the world's economy move so quickly but respond so slowly to the complex information feedbacks of recursive loops of bank failures and toxic debt and storms of warring political opinions that they do the only logical thing possible. They quickly, globally, and simultaneously abandon their own hyperreal world of virtuality, and go to ground in a panic search for authentic value. The machine to machine communication that makes the posthuman economy possible wants, in effect, the gold standard of real, measurable value. It demands the bottom line, the unleveraged mortgage, the real asset that its digital operations have worked so zealously to accident. And just when you think you have finally got the financial capitalists -- those unfettered deregulators -- they instantly reverse course saying "Now that the capital is gone 'something different' is needed -- an emergency provider of equity." That emergency provider, of course, is us.
BOB: Dec.'06 - Aug.'08: After-image of AP/AM
But maybe it's not an accident at all.
BOB: Exactly.
Perhaps Naomi Klein's theory of always predatory capitalism as a "shock doctrine" is correct. Or perhaps Robert Reich's statement that, "It's socialism for Wall Street and capitalism for the rest of us." Perhaps we're experiencing a carefully planned accident, a trajectory of the catastrophic, that was allowed to run freely to its fatal destiny.
BOB: Approximately.
A culture under the sign of the "tyranny of the code," where we find ourselves biologically driven to unlock a code, where computer code literally reinscribes our genetic code and reconfigures our brains. Virilio suspects this. He most of all is an artist of the art of war, a theorist who understands that dromology has no real meaning outside of logics of capture and endocolonization and predation. When modern world alienation, Hannah Arendt's "negative spirit," found its quintessential historical expression in the past eight dark years of Republicanism, it not only set out to accident the world, but it has succeeded, probably beyond its dreams, in doing so. Thinking the Middle East in terms of the Book of Revelation literally required world catastrophe for Armageddon, for a fatal clash of civilizations and ancient religions, which would usher in the seven years of the Anti-Christ, and thereupon the Revelation. Thinking American political economy first, and then world economy, in terms of a permanent paralysis of the progressive movement has meant just what Thomas Frank's recent book described as the "wrecking crew." The party is finally over, the hosts are packing up to flee the premises, and everything is wreckage.
BOB: Anthropomorphic Physical (AP) dominates Android Meme (AM): 1990 - Nov.'06, or AP/AM
Out of the coming crisis of massive state over-indebtedness and hyper-inflation can come only Democrats as night watchman of the Tower: the imposition of a new austerity state for non-fungible labor -- blue-collar workers, the weak and the dispossessed; the intensification of the disciplinary state to control the inevitable social unrest; and for the always unrepentant capitalist class, a massive reliquidifying of all the capitalist marketplaces of the world, with the state willingly held hostage, just as Virilio predicted, by demonologists wrapped in the masquerade of bankers and financiers and investment dealers. At this time, at this place, at this trajectory of the catastrophic, Kevin Phillips' admonition "bad money always follows bad money," gets it just about right.
BOB: Dec.'06 - Aug.26/08: After-image of AP/AM
Or is it the reverse? In 1996 Virilio may have originally predicted a "global accident" that would occur simultaneously to the world as a whole. Only twelve years later in the last autumn days of 2008 -- exactly 40 years after the tumultuous political events of 1968 -- is it possible that Virilio's "global accident" has itself been accidented?
BOB: Yes, exactly.
Slowly, inexorably, one resistor at a time, one mobilization, one march, one individual dissent, one collective "no" at a time, with what Antonio Gramsci called the dynamism of the popular will, the global accident flips into a global political transformation. Signs of this at first political, and then technological, recircuiting of the popular will are everywhere. Entire empires have suddenly vanished, global social movements are everywhere on the rise, imperialisms have been checkmated, and the first tangible hints of a truly transformational politics is in the air. It's the electricity of the technological noosphere. It's the primal impulse, the desperate hope, of many progressive human hearts. It's why beyond all the rules of normal politics that the popular American Will -- the world Will-- now unifies into a common current of information flows, of house-to-house organization, of state to state campaigning, of immense financial support by a microphysics of small donations -- over 3 million at last count--, without illusions, without false hopes, that is on the verge of creating in American politics a truly transformational movement.
BOB: Aug.26/08 - "Lockdown BobRule" surfaces (becomes FIGURE).
Marshall McLuhan once noted correctly that the United States is the world environment.
BOB: Android Meme (AM) dominates Anthropomorphic Physical (AP): 1960 - 1990, or AM/AP
Ironically then, just as the United States triggered Virilio's global accident,
BOB: Anthropomorphic Physical (AP) dominates Android Meme (AM): 1990 - Nov.'06, or AP/AM
it just might be on the verge of accidenting the accident, revealing that the City of Panic can also be an American City of Transformation.
BOB: Oct.22/08 - "Lockdown BobRule" begins with meeting in the MidWest of the U.S.A. near Route 59 which takes you up to Winnipeg, Manitoba: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Route_59
by Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
[from: http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=597#bio]
It is surely the fate of every engaged political theory to be overcome by the history that it thought it was only describing. So too, Paul Virilio. His writings have captured brilliantly these twilight times in which we live: The Aesthetics of Disappearance, The Information Bomb, War and Cinema,Speed and Politics -- less writing in the traditional sense than an uncanny shamanistic summoning forth of the demonology of speed which inscribes society. A prophet of the wired future, Paul Virilio's thought always invokes the doubled meaning of apocalypse -- cataclysm and remembrance.
Cataclysm because all his writings trace the history of the technological death-instinct moving at the speed of light. And remembrance because Virilio is that rarity in contemporary culture, a thinker whose ethical dissent marks the first glimmerings of a fateful implosion of that festival of seduction, fascination, terror, and boredom we have come to know as digital culture. A self-described "atheist of technology," his motto is "obey and resist."
But for all that there is a raw materialism in Virilio's reflection, nowhere better expressed than in his grisly vision of information as suffocation. In his theatre of thought data banks have migrated inside human flesh, bodies are reduced to granulated flows of dead information, tattooed by data, embedded by codes, with complex histories of electronic transactions as our most private autobiographies. Information mapping our lives -- process, principles, concept, fact -- we have all become measurable. In Virilio's writing what Hannah Arendt once described as "modern world alienation" rides the whirling tip of history as the spirit of pure negation that is everywhere today. Negative politics, negative subjectivity, negative culture. It is impossible to escape the technological accident that has become us.
BOB: Android Meme (AM) dominates Anthropomorphic Physical (AP): 1960 - 1990, or AM/AP
But for all that history will not long be denied. Just as Nietzsche once prophesied in The Gay Science that with the birth of human subjectivity, twisted and scarred and deliriously unpredictable, the gods actually stopped their game of wagers and took notice because something new was moving on the earth -- a going across, a tremulous wakening, a pathway over the abyss -- so too with Virilio, the gods of history take notice once again. And not just take notice, but actively respond to the fatal challenge that is the thought of Paul Virilio.
Are we beyond Speed and Politics? What characterizes contemporary politics is the unstable mixture of speed information and slow movements. Like the slow implosion of the manufacturing economy, the slow rise of evangelical visions of catastrophe, the slow ascent -- the slow ubiquity -- of the speed of technology, the slow descent of culture into the cold state of surveillance under the sign of bio-governance.
BOB: Anthropomorphic Physical (AP) dominates Android Meme (AM): 1990 - Nov.'06, or AP/AM
You can see it everywhere. In the world economy, the speed of mortgage backed securities, credit swap debt offerings, and complex derivatives always seeks to move at the speed of light. Iceland is the world's first country actually liquidated by hyperreality with debts amassed at light-speeds now constituting 10 times its national wealth. Like Michel Serres' the perfect parasite, the Wall Street financial elite has worked a perfect number on the host of the world economies -- implanting unknown levels of toxic debt everywhere in the circulatory system of finance capital, from China and Japan to the European community.
BOB: "Rumplestiltskin" - see the bottom right-hand corner in the Bob Dobbs quadrant of my TINY NOTE chart at http://www.earmap.com/tinynote/tinynote.html
Waking up to the danger of hot debt moving at light-speed when it is definitely too late, Japanese bankers suddenly declaim that "It is beyond panic." Wall Street types say it is "panic with a capital P." Harvard economists, standing on the sidelines like a chorus of lament, wisely add that we are now between "capitulation and panic" and "debt is good." That in a world of over-extended economies, sudden loss of financial credibility, and a seizing up of credit mechanisms everywhere, the only thing to do, financially speaking, is wait for the capitulation point -- that fatal moment when despair is so deep, pessimism so locked down tight in the investor's heart, that everything just stops for an instant. No investments, no hope, no circulation. And for the always hopeful financial analysts, this is precisely the point to begin anew, to reinvest, to seize financial redemption from despair. Definitely then, not a speed economy, but a politics and economy of complex recursive loops, trapped in cycles of feedback which no one seems to understand, but with very real, very slow consequences: like vanishing jobs, abandoned health care and trashed communities. In The City of Panic, Virilio writes about the "tyranny of real time," "this accident in time belonging to an event that is the fruit of a technological progress out of political control." For Virilio, we're now interpellated by a complex, three dimensional space-time involved in the acceleration of technological progress "that reduces the extent, the fullness of the world to nothing."
BOB: Dec.'06 - Aug.'08: After-image of AP/AM
Or something else? Not really a fatal oscillation between fast technology and slow society, but hyper-technologies of global financial manipulation that can move so quickly because, just as Jean Baudrillard long ago warned, the hyperreal, simulational world of derivatives, credit swaps, and mortgage backed securities long ago blasted off from material reality, reaching escape velocity, and then orbiting the world as star-like high finance satellites -- purely virtual satellites which have no real meaning for the rest of us as long as they stay in space as part of the alienated, recursive loops of advanced capitalism.
BOB: Android Meme (AM) dominates Anthropomorphic Physical (AP): 1960 - 1990, or AM/AP (see the "holeopathic satellite" categories in the complete TINY NOTE chart at http://www.earmap.com/tinynote/tinynote.html )
But when the meltdown suddenly happens, when that immense weight of over-indebtedness and toxic mortgages and credit derivates plunge back into the gravitational weight of real politics and real economy, we finally know what it is to live within trajectories of the catastrophic. Economists are quoted as saying the financial crisis effects "everyone on earth." Is this Virilio's "global accident?" Quite certainly it is panic finance: that moment when the credit mechanisms necessary for capitalist liquidity slam shut, a time made to measure for Virilio's brilliant theory of bunker archeology, with each bank its own toxic bunker of junk assets, each banker a born again socialist. For example, always vigilant automatic circuit breakers working in the darkness of night recently prevented a global plunge of the futures market. Allan Greenspan throws up his hands, exclaiming "I'm in shocked disbelief."
BOB: Anthropomorphic Physical (AP) dominates Android Meme (AM): 1990 - Nov.'06, or AP/AM
By one measure, the global economic meltdown is Virilio's accident, a searing demonstration of the truth of Virilio's proposition that every technology is born with a necessary accident in mind. This time it is not a trainwreck, a robotrader or even 9/11, but a massive financial accident. Here, the brilliant software innovations and computerized trading programs that run so much of the world's economy move so quickly but respond so slowly to the complex information feedbacks of recursive loops of bank failures and toxic debt and storms of warring political opinions that they do the only logical thing possible. They quickly, globally, and simultaneously abandon their own hyperreal world of virtuality, and go to ground in a panic search for authentic value. The machine to machine communication that makes the posthuman economy possible wants, in effect, the gold standard of real, measurable value. It demands the bottom line, the unleveraged mortgage, the real asset that its digital operations have worked so zealously to accident. And just when you think you have finally got the financial capitalists -- those unfettered deregulators -- they instantly reverse course saying "Now that the capital is gone 'something different' is needed -- an emergency provider of equity." That emergency provider, of course, is us.
BOB: Dec.'06 - Aug.'08: After-image of AP/AM
But maybe it's not an accident at all.
BOB: Exactly.
Perhaps Naomi Klein's theory of always predatory capitalism as a "shock doctrine" is correct. Or perhaps Robert Reich's statement that, "It's socialism for Wall Street and capitalism for the rest of us." Perhaps we're experiencing a carefully planned accident, a trajectory of the catastrophic, that was allowed to run freely to its fatal destiny.
BOB: Approximately.
A culture under the sign of the "tyranny of the code," where we find ourselves biologically driven to unlock a code, where computer code literally reinscribes our genetic code and reconfigures our brains. Virilio suspects this. He most of all is an artist of the art of war, a theorist who understands that dromology has no real meaning outside of logics of capture and endocolonization and predation. When modern world alienation, Hannah Arendt's "negative spirit," found its quintessential historical expression in the past eight dark years of Republicanism, it not only set out to accident the world, but it has succeeded, probably beyond its dreams, in doing so. Thinking the Middle East in terms of the Book of Revelation literally required world catastrophe for Armageddon, for a fatal clash of civilizations and ancient religions, which would usher in the seven years of the Anti-Christ, and thereupon the Revelation. Thinking American political economy first, and then world economy, in terms of a permanent paralysis of the progressive movement has meant just what Thomas Frank's recent book described as the "wrecking crew." The party is finally over, the hosts are packing up to flee the premises, and everything is wreckage.
BOB: Anthropomorphic Physical (AP) dominates Android Meme (AM): 1990 - Nov.'06, or AP/AM
Out of the coming crisis of massive state over-indebtedness and hyper-inflation can come only Democrats as night watchman of the Tower: the imposition of a new austerity state for non-fungible labor -- blue-collar workers, the weak and the dispossessed; the intensification of the disciplinary state to control the inevitable social unrest; and for the always unrepentant capitalist class, a massive reliquidifying of all the capitalist marketplaces of the world, with the state willingly held hostage, just as Virilio predicted, by demonologists wrapped in the masquerade of bankers and financiers and investment dealers. At this time, at this place, at this trajectory of the catastrophic, Kevin Phillips' admonition "bad money always follows bad money," gets it just about right.
BOB: Dec.'06 - Aug.26/08: After-image of AP/AM
Or is it the reverse? In 1996 Virilio may have originally predicted a "global accident" that would occur simultaneously to the world as a whole. Only twelve years later in the last autumn days of 2008 -- exactly 40 years after the tumultuous political events of 1968 -- is it possible that Virilio's "global accident" has itself been accidented?
BOB: Yes, exactly.
Slowly, inexorably, one resistor at a time, one mobilization, one march, one individual dissent, one collective "no" at a time, with what Antonio Gramsci called the dynamism of the popular will, the global accident flips into a global political transformation. Signs of this at first political, and then technological, recircuiting of the popular will are everywhere. Entire empires have suddenly vanished, global social movements are everywhere on the rise, imperialisms have been checkmated, and the first tangible hints of a truly transformational politics is in the air. It's the electricity of the technological noosphere. It's the primal impulse, the desperate hope, of many progressive human hearts. It's why beyond all the rules of normal politics that the popular American Will -- the world Will-- now unifies into a common current of information flows, of house-to-house organization, of state to state campaigning, of immense financial support by a microphysics of small donations -- over 3 million at last count--, without illusions, without false hopes, that is on the verge of creating in American politics a truly transformational movement.
BOB: Aug.26/08 - "Lockdown BobRule" surfaces (becomes FIGURE).
Marshall McLuhan once noted correctly that the United States is the world environment.
BOB: Android Meme (AM) dominates Anthropomorphic Physical (AP): 1960 - 1990, or AM/AP
Ironically then, just as the United States triggered Virilio's global accident,
BOB: Anthropomorphic Physical (AP) dominates Android Meme (AM): 1990 - Nov.'06, or AP/AM
it just might be on the verge of accidenting the accident, revealing that the City of Panic can also be an American City of Transformation.
BOB: Oct.22/08 - "Lockdown BobRule" begins with meeting in the MidWest of the U.S.A. near Route 59 which takes you up to Winnipeg, Manitoba: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Route_59
02 November 2008
The Best of PXL THIS: Fialka in New Zealand!
PXL THIS is a festival that features videos produced using the PXL 2000, a plastic toy video camera made by Fisher-Price between 1987-9 that records sound and images directly onto audiocassettes. The picture is comprised of 2,000 "pixels" as opposed to the 150,000 pixels seen on the average TV screen, which makes for a very grainy but appealing quality.
PXL THIS organizer Gerry Fialka says, "PXL is the essential utensil of creation. The really creative artist does a lot with nothing. PXL THIS is based on the statements: 'It is literally possible to do more with less' - Buckminster Fuller; and 'Film will only become art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper' - Jean Cocteau. It's a real pencil and paper mentality. Express yourself, and don't be afraid to break some rules.?
"PXL THIS is worthy of praise...spellbinding. The shifting bricks of light and dark that form the Fisher-Price PXL 2000's picture lend themselves well to personal essays, creating an invigorating mesh of ambiguity and intimacy in every frame." - Paul Malcolm, LA Weekly.
Tonight's program features 14 shorts compiled from PXL THIS Film Festivals spanning 2003 to 2006.
Gerry Fialka will also appear:
Sat, Nov 15 from 1:30-3 at Museum Bldg Theatrette: WHO's JAMMIN THE JAMMERS? culture jamming workshop
Sun, Nov 16 same time and place as Sat: THE ART of FAKERY in EXPERIMENTAL & DOCUMENTARY FILM workshop
Thurs, Nov 20 from 5pm-6:30 PXL THIS FILM FESTIVAL (toy camera videos and workshop).
23 July 2008
P92.5 .M3 C479 2008 SMC
[It's finally there]
"The New American Vortex: Explorations of McLuhan"
Mr. Chrystall’s study revisits the work of H. Marshall McLuhan by re-reading McLuhan’s oeuvre on his own terms and in light of newly unearthed primary source material. Through the lens of his career-spanning concern with communication, McLuhan is seen as transforming the great tradition of Ciceronian humanism and the Ciceronian ideal (the figure in whom eloquence and wisdom coalesce), and the programme of the Anglo-American Modernists: James Joyce, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and P. Wyndham Lewis. In the final analysis, McLuhan is re-envisioned as a singularity - a paramodern (neither modernist nor post-modernist) doctus orator.
"The New American Vortex: Explorations of McLuhan"
Mr. Chrystall’s study revisits the work of H. Marshall McLuhan by re-reading McLuhan’s oeuvre on his own terms and in light of newly unearthed primary source material. Through the lens of his career-spanning concern with communication, McLuhan is seen as transforming the great tradition of Ciceronian humanism and the Ciceronian ideal (the figure in whom eloquence and wisdom coalesce), and the programme of the Anglo-American Modernists: James Joyce, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and P. Wyndham Lewis. In the final analysis, McLuhan is re-envisioned as a singularity - a paramodern (neither modernist nor post-modernist) doctus orator.
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