brian carroll on Wed, 8 Mar 2000 08:57:31 +0100 (CET) |
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[Nettime-bold] NOTHING WORSE |
unorthodox it may be to attempt to bridge "the gap" between realism and relativism in this multithreaded place... but it is that same (insane) silence that prods the constellations of ideas in my brainspace to output some homegrown ideology... at a liminal stage, peering through the window standing between a wall of oppositions, the symbolic order and electric media media environment... can open-source intellectuals exist within the proprietary codes of ideas... tools to build and unbuild reasoning with... what set of de|con- struction will be used this silent night in and upon `the world of ideas'... bzzzz! wrong answer! buzzers and alarms go off as the ontological gets mixed up with the epistemological, says certified philosophers, Doctors, assured of the rules of the game... why is it, i am still left to wonder, that Lewis Mumford's radical critiques and challenge to technologies of power goes undiscussed? has that generation of thinkers gone extinct in these, up- to-the-moment debates of current Authors musings? in any (head) case, in a psychiatric-philosophical schizoid break with tradition, er, reason, to "say" as might a mad wo|man, that the UR-medium is not _language_ itself, as has become `common-sense', but instead something before the externalized manipulation of symbols and signs in audiovisual representations of humans and other creatures... here comes a thesis of Mumford's, like many (after him?), that humanity's prime technological development has been the ability to manipulate symbols, in the form of language, wherein their externalization is where reality is realized to exist... so, another Mumford ideology had to do with `ages' that define technological development... i believe it was the `neotechnic' age which was supposed to define the age of today... adding these two Mumfordian thoughts together, in my own naive idea of things-as-they-are, i've come to the conclusion that what is considered language by some, to me, is a second order device... part of my goal for myself has been to ground the theory in the reality of a daily practice, a rough pragmatism which often fails to be prescriptive, but is more reactionary like this text... from my point of vantage, language occurs in the brainspace, as a brainwave, simultaneous to the conscious thought "i exist, therefore"... really, i wished Descartes would have been existential: "I doubt, therefore I think"... even prior to any negation, the `constellation' of brainwaves, via an MRI machine, show a representation of patterns of electrochemical reactions in the brain, as the brain processes (thinks) information... it could be the self-consciousness of an introvert, or the audiovisual "language" of an extrovert `speaking', saying things-as-they-are in an electrical age... but where does `language' exist, a symbolic, real, or imaginary order, if not in these electrical signals in the brain..? are these signals, now realized in our up-to-date electrical equipment oddly similar to the signals, uh, messages in our mediums, um, electric media environments..? what if language is not the ur-medium, but instead it is electricity, that thing-in-itself staring each one of us in the face, glowing phosphors via electron gun to optic nerve, transformed into an e-signal sent to the brain for conscious thought... what if the abstract, the theoretical, all that desiring-machinic energy really is that impulse that *sparks* things-alive... that kiss of life, that dream and wish, that realization of belief... what if reason and relativity are grounded in the same text, so to say... sure, there are these things-as-they-are, ideas, and they compete, often visciously, in the marketplace of ideas... social capital often taking a loss to monetary gain... what if post-modernism and modernist realism are not really opposite in a dialectic triangulation, but nurture and complement one another, at obtuse and acute angles of reason and irrationality..? to me this sounds mad, another day dream, only at night, silent night, rain falling as it has for millions of years, a long moment in the solitary life of another thinker-of-things... i am left to wonder about the complexity and contradiction, in the processing of the "official" symbols... and continually imagine what an open-source intellect would be like, if, that is, "correct" thought were not so thoroughly prescribed... a strong belief in discourse-politics prevails, but what externalized act(ion) can be realized- made reality- in our internetworking the international..? not having read Latour, but Winner or Postman or McLuhan, i'd have to say these are not separate, linear narratives of technology... parrallelism, certainly, but what of _foundations_ common to them all, that thing "ideas" are built-upon,..? naive, even mischevious and needless abstraction, so i try to calculate the placement of these, my representations, saying things-as-they-are, as language, conscious, brain twirling, sparks flying as we now know has been done for millennia... the common thread, i propose, is a different ur-medium than language... to detourn McLuhan: `the medium is electricity and the message is electric.' language, representation, the manipulation of symbols, internally or externally, is at its base an electrical phenomenon... to clarify, externally, to use the muscles of the arm and hand to write or draw is an electrical event, of nerves and brain waves, messages instructing action... as is the use of the mouth, to send out a `sound' wave of electromagnetic resonance... as it is to hear, sound vibrations turning into electrical signals to be interpreted by the brain as consciousness, as reality... now, i wonder what the difference is between things-as-they-are and our consciousness... an easy example would be nettime's birth in the age of the Internet... what is the internetworking of computers if not a NewMedia amputation, ala McLuhan, of functions once performed by humans, now, externalized (ideas/thoughts/symbols)..? is not staring the internetwork in the face, seeing photonic light, charged electric, like seeing a brand of enlightenment of our own scientific, technological, and philosophical era..? to see bits in the mind's eye, represented by electrons coursing through processors logic gates, as if they are similar to the constellation of bits of thoughts, ideas, dreams, wishes, in our electro- chemical brain-in-a-vat, sans IQ as CPU, etc..? as a breach of traditional reasoning, or of post- modern postioning in the matrices of the field, the madman is left to wonder aloud, in a vast silence, the nature of things-as-they-are, their order, in a _foundational_ sense, architectural, from which to do battle in the marketplace of ideas... but is it really a free-market, or are the scales weighted to degrees and affiliations otherwise hidden, now transparent, in hierarchical information spaces..? what of open-source intellectuals... and an open- source knowledge of things-as-they-are... sounds so pretentious for an individual to dare say, that is, without the context of playing language games... like the Internet that nettime focusses its gaze upon, where is the root file of this program..? where is the common framework from which to reason the commonalities between totalitarian media and power faced by B92, the industriousness of India's telecommunications initiative, the efforts of the hacktivists to help change the course of this un- governed ship, to the challenges to monopolistic software by Linux, to probings of media artists & media archaeologists...? where's the common thread in a forum like nettime when an individual is at a computer, facing the internetwork, a consciousness- sharing machinic desire to `say' things-as-they-are, in language, but always stuck in a circularity, of ideas, of actions, of ur-reasoning..? the open-source answer, real and relative, is in my point of view `electric.' it "bridges the *spark* gap" like the finger of God to Adam, a genesis of the world in an electromagnetic big bang, a forming of atoms made of electrically charged particles, into molecules, into galaxies, stars, and planets like the electromagnetic Earth, Van Allen belts and lightning, *sparking* life in the cosmic soup, life organizing with an urge, a desire to go forward, move ahead... molecules in a body bound together by the orbits of electrons... these turning into brains and nerves and nervous systems, from oceanic depths to sand, from tree to tundra, finally walked a human, with electrical senses and an electrical brain, externalizing symbols [Mumford] into a civilization, first a stone age, then bronze, iron,.. finally an electric age, where we face our own desire in electrically- based `nature' and the `artifacts' that surround us... anthropomorphisms such as television eyes, radio ears, telephone mouth, and the conscious brain computer [McLuhan]... seeing this electric media environment as a type of language, electric, mirrored inside our brainwaves (presupposing that thoughts actually exist within the space of the brain and not within an externalized field of suspended thoughts and memory via a genius loci)... and representations, electrical signals in this brain and, say, a computer, is, to `bridge the gap' between the realism and relativism of the question posed... that is, electricity is the sublime and literal _foundation_ for this discourse to take "place" on both ends, in the brain and in the computer. more or less abstract, complex and contradictory, would be to compare this conscious thought of the brain with, say, 50 million year old piece of amber, that special "rock", like lodestone, that was the discovery of electricity as a phenomenon in natural things [besides those goddamn lightning storms that have been scaring our ancestors for millennia!]... that electrical *spark* within amber, found by Thales of Miletus (Greece) 2500 years ago, is the same *spark* that we are using to think and act, and, that which we externalize in artifacts, such as the Internet... it is this electrical r-evolution in the firmament of ideas, from Thales to Maxwell to Edison, Tesla, and Einstein... that we have arrived at this place, online... and what of it have we yet realized we have in common in this (for the moment) public place..? discourse, language, layers of texts, archives, archaeologies, moving ideas forward with great weight, the empirical burden of bureaucracy is like an MS Word, spellchecked and grammatical... what of open-source intellectuals... of combining ideas, of forging an alliance of similarities, of patching eachothers code, of hacking and cracking discourses open so they bear fruit in the mutual exchange, so political... all alone, with a theory, i hear another speaking in a language of my own... of a madness, of a silence, of realism and relativism, across threads, non-linear, the idea grows, connecting multiple dots between the constellation of ideas in my brainspace, to use these, my electric motor fingers to type out an electronic representation of my consciousness that my eyes see with a charged *spark*, now to fade to black, into the night, into the rain, another thing `said' but not said, another dream dreamt but not real, another intersubjective ideal unfulfilled... may the (electric) force be with you... bc the architecture of electricity http://www.architexturez.com/ae/ //////////////////////////////// _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold