Alan Sondheim on Sat, 3 Jan 2015 18:16:25 +0100 (CET) |
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<nettime> Invisibility |
Invisibility http://www.alansondheim.org/cairn016.jpg Invisibility is the problem of our time, but there are so many! Most of our collapsing phenomenologies center on attention economies, acceleration, dromodology; these are epistemological problems, what might be examined, what should be examined, and the process of examination itself. But invisibility is more perverse; it is an issue of ontology, of disappearance, from within and without, a problem which not only robs us of our situation, our habitus, but also invades the discourse of the body and the self. It can be a sudden transformation, occurring at the edge of the possible, the refugee, the unmanned migrant ship floundering and heading for unknown shores; it may also be a slow and almost imperceptible withdrawal from being, to the extent that being exists as instrumental. Age is one index of invisibility, and this I experience: whatever I do increasingly makes no difference whatsoever, as long as it is with the bounds of the law. Making a difference, making a distinction, is fundamentally a communal and social act; when it no longer matters, helplessness ensues - not the helplessness of a lack of knowledge or tools (but that too), but the helplessness of the collapse of speech acts or being. The aging body is a refugee body, and what might have passed for wisdom is no longer given an audience, but is transformed into some thing swept aside within another register altogether. All of this occurs within a rigidity of etiquette which is not acknowledged, but which creates an iron and exclusionary ontology. Too many people I know, for a variety of reasons (political, age, class, religion or lack of it) feel marooned, a marooning which answers to no shore, no boundary. The issue is one of consequences, which at one point in our social evolutions might have been the concern of cause and effect, but now operates within the regime of effacement (what I have to say is of no consequence, because I am not speaking - a Lyotardian differend which operates across innumerable strata within broken models of being and the world). Engagement is not a projection, not what 'makes us human'; it is, of course, a skein, and one now driven by fast- forward feedback, ranging from high-speed stock manipulation to high speed online text-and-image feeds that leave no time for reflection, but, more importantly, no need for reflection as well. The horizon of all of this is the fracturing of steering problems which dissolve in rhetoric and shifting positions; the problems, however, remain and increase in urgency. Behind them is an increasingly devastated planet with extinctions and population out of control, existing within the immediacy of the digital and its potential for internal transformation (a change of pixel for pixel, for example), for epistemological slide. ... For all of these reasons, these flows, invisibility tends towards pharmacology and depression, towards despair and violence, towards the inerrancy of fundamental religion and a rigidity of logics and taxonomies between believers and non- believers. It is easy to conclude from all of this that 'we are all invisible' or some such, but in fact, the presence of belief and violence point elsewhere, towards a sweeping-aside of the ephemeral and the harnessing of the digital for a strict rhetoric of communications. For those of us who can neither ascribe to this, nor participate (by virtue of the problematic 'essences' of age, gender, sexual orientation, religion, nationality, etc. etc. (all these categories left over from an age of classical modernism and post-colonialism)), nothing is left, and this nothingness leads nowhere to enlightenment, but to those invisibilities which are always hammered into position by others, but which always resist positionality as well; this is the state of marooning, defined by the receding of that instrumental past which at one point, close by, has seemed to be heritage, but in fact was a social construct - the social construct of time which, fast-forward, takes no time at all. It is not that this too shall pass, but that this too has always already passed, and where once the I-(pod) might have been, there shall no longer be absence, but an absence of absence, mute, ontological, nowhere and everywhere at all. There is no answer because there is no time, and no evolution of our, or any other species; there is only the time of slow cessation, on this and other worlds, and the endpoint of invisibility is this - that one is invisible because there is nothing to be seen. This is no longer brilliant weather, but fabrication bending under the weight of its own collapse, as popular culture demonstrates over and over again, and we all succumb to its charms, just as news, here in Providence, flails out with the slogan 'news you can trust,' and advertisements hawk replacements and necessities with the slogan 'just for you.' No one drives these, no one receives them; events as well are marooned always already some- where else, to someone else, to the displacement of populations, from nothing to nothing. (Of course there is the trope that 'this essay, too, is invisible,' but how would one know, and where is one? And immediately that one can see tendency towards that absolutism that also participates in the annihilation of the world, as if that were not an occurrence. What is foregone, is foregone by virtue of invisibility; what is present, is unaccountable, uncountable, and unaccounted-for. Such are the shoals of ontology, such is the unseen, within and without the parenthetical.) http://www.alansondheim.org/cairn011.jpg # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org