1.
In Freud’s idea of Unheimlich, or the ‘’Uncanny,” we have the return of the same but too same, too familiar, that it produces what we call an uncanny resemblance. It is an unsettling experience because despite the resemblance, there is an alterity, a difference, that makes it an other. “En 1959, Lacan inventa le mot 'extimité'. Cette expression donnait l'idée de quelque chose d'intérieur, appartenant au sujet, et en même temps non pas reconnu en tant que tel – rendant le sujet mal à l’aise et appréhensif” (Wikipedia). Wax figures in museums, in the dark. The scene in Bladerunner where Rick Deckard (H. Ford) is walking through android shells. In fact, all androids are uncanny, the prime example of the Uncanny. Isn’t Cyberpunk the post-Freudian and cyber-tech version or realization of the Uncanny? The posthuman Uncanny?
2.
What is more primordial is movement and its quality of speed. Urban space is designed to slow down mobility, a place of deceleration. Space, strictly speaking, is empty, while urbanism is a cluttering of space, a place of capture or parking where people and goods converge for consumption, production, and domination. Congestion is part of urbanity's definition, it is precisely its function. Here, ease and speed of mobility or displacement becomes a prime class marker, with VIPs escorted through or flying on choppers. If deceleration is the function of cities, car chases subvert this by restoring the spaceness of the urbanscape, a form of defiance of the powers that govern mobility.
We exist in multiple spaces and times, virtualization tech displaces natural and artificial spaces, so that what we inhabit is not one locale or city or country alone but a fluid hyperspatial multilocality only governed by speed of transmissions and displacement and the number of instant connections. Dialogue is no longer binary but multiple networked group chats. The serial speed of communication is not linear but multileveled and forked in all directions, with variably fluid interfaces and evanescent engagements. (Cf. Virilio + Baudrillard)
3.
I'm more interested in posthumanist poetics. Beckett, in a way, is my lingering nostalgia for a residual humanism, however absurdist or postmodern it can be. But with algorithms getting better than most humans in producing literary and other art forms, the classical concept of writer and artist are at the edge of obsolescence. Kervinen, a Norwegian ''writer'', blurs machine and human writing by machinic texts, and he's only one among the many. Machine sounding human, human sounding machine writing... If news, corporate reports, novels and poems can now be done by algorithms, and with AI, not only reality and history will be composed by cybertechnology, but also literature for human consumption, even the Nobel prize. Even Postliterate poetics is not radical enough. Ideas should be pushed to post axiom breaking points. What little that remains may be what truth would look like, an unrecognizable stranger. Digital humanities should be renamed digital inhumanities.
4.
Frontiers, borders, the threshold of being and not being. The Narrative as a concept and object, like the sign or Literature, does not grow on trees. In short, what we deal with as beings who think, are notions without essence and ipseity. If this sounds like an axiom, it is the axiom of inessentality. In short, ''narrative,'' like other terms or signs, doesn't refer to anything in particular, or to any thing that is singular in nature. The nature of thought and its other as post-ontological substances: are they more anthropic, phenomenological, semiotic, phantasmal, discursive, constructionist, or hyperreal instead?
5.
Each letter-word has its gravity field, and they pull at each other to form clusters and, once fused, release symbolic energies and allegories. At this floating stage, they are caught as it were in the potential dimension, and our minds keep supplying the extra dimensions in which they will come into full being, in which they will be complete. We become involved in the tug and pull of the emergence or non-emergence of a sign, and we begin to supply the missing parts or connect the parts, normalizing every piece because our minds cannot help but form the completed picture. We are suspended between signifying and asignifying, becoming more conscious of the creative role we play in the completion of the sign. But is it the sign as we have on the page, or is it a pure event in the semiotic imagination? Why you of all people, why not those who, with a different set of glyphs, would be less tempted to solve a quasi-puzzle? Why can’t we let it be this way?
In Freud’s idea of Unheimlich, or the ‘’Uncanny,” we have the return of the same but too same, too familiar, that it produces what we call an uncanny resemblance. It is an unsettling experience because despite the resemblance, there is an alterity, a difference, that makes it an other. “En 1959, Lacan inventa le mot 'extimité'. Cette expression donnait l'idée de quelque chose d'intérieur, appartenant au sujet, et en même temps non pas reconnu en tant que tel – rendant le sujet mal à l’aise et appréhensif” (Wikipedia). Wax figures in museums, in the dark. The scene in Bladerunner where Rick Deckard (H. Ford) is walking through android shells. In fact, all androids are uncanny, the prime example of the Uncanny. Isn’t Cyberpunk the post-Freudian and cyber-tech version or realization of the Uncanny? The posthuman Uncanny?
2.
What is more primordial is movement and its quality of speed. Urban space is designed to slow down mobility, a place of deceleration. Space, strictly speaking, is empty, while urbanism is a cluttering of space, a place of capture or parking where people and goods converge for consumption, production, and domination. Congestion is part of urbanity's definition, it is precisely its function. Here, ease and speed of mobility or displacement becomes a prime class marker, with VIPs escorted through or flying on choppers. If deceleration is the function of cities, car chases subvert this by restoring the spaceness of the urbanscape, a form of defiance of the powers that govern mobility.
We exist in multiple spaces and times, virtualization tech displaces natural and artificial spaces, so that what we inhabit is not one locale or city or country alone but a fluid hyperspatial multilocality only governed by speed of transmissions and displacement and the number of instant connections. Dialogue is no longer binary but multiple networked group chats. The serial speed of communication is not linear but multileveled and forked in all directions, with variably fluid interfaces and evanescent engagements. (Cf. Virilio + Baudrillard)
3.
I'm more interested in posthumanist poetics. Beckett, in a way, is my lingering nostalgia for a residual humanism, however absurdist or postmodern it can be. But with algorithms getting better than most humans in producing literary and other art forms, the classical concept of writer and artist are at the edge of obsolescence. Kervinen, a Norwegian ''writer'', blurs machine and human writing by machinic texts, and he's only one among the many. Machine sounding human, human sounding machine writing... If news, corporate reports, novels and poems can now be done by algorithms, and with AI, not only reality and history will be composed by cybertechnology, but also literature for human consumption, even the Nobel prize. Even Postliterate poetics is not radical enough. Ideas should be pushed to post axiom breaking points. What little that remains may be what truth would look like, an unrecognizable stranger. Digital humanities should be renamed digital inhumanities.
4.
Frontiers, borders, the threshold of being and not being. The Narrative as a concept and object, like the sign or Literature, does not grow on trees. In short, what we deal with as beings who think, are notions without essence and ipseity. If this sounds like an axiom, it is the axiom of inessentality. In short, ''narrative,'' like other terms or signs, doesn't refer to anything in particular, or to any thing that is singular in nature. The nature of thought and its other as post-ontological substances: are they more anthropic, phenomenological, semiotic, phantasmal, discursive, constructionist, or hyperreal instead?
5.
Each letter-word has its gravity field, and they pull at each other to form clusters and, once fused, release symbolic energies and allegories. At this floating stage, they are caught as it were in the potential dimension, and our minds keep supplying the extra dimensions in which they will come into full being, in which they will be complete. We become involved in the tug and pull of the emergence or non-emergence of a sign, and we begin to supply the missing parts or connect the parts, normalizing every piece because our minds cannot help but form the completed picture. We are suspended between signifying and asignifying, becoming more conscious of the creative role we play in the completion of the sign. But is it the sign as we have on the page, or is it a pure event in the semiotic imagination? Why you of all people, why not those who, with a different set of glyphs, would be less tempted to solve a quasi-puzzle? Why can’t we let it be this way?
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