THE OBJECT_WORLD BECOME BEARER OF CONSPIRACY_THE EXISTENTIAL FURNITURE OF DAILY LIFE FINDS ITSELF SLOWLY TRANSFORMED INTO COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGY_THE LOCAL ITEMS OF THE PRESENT AND THE HERE_AND_NOW CAN BE MADE TO EXPRESS AND TO DESIGNATE THE ABSENT UNREPRESENTABLE TOTALITY_INSTRUMENTS OF COMMUNICATION_THE SURREALIST ONEIRIC CITY_BRUSHING AGAINST AN INANIMATE OBJECT SUDDENLY FEELS LIKE BEING TOUCHED BY SOMEONE'S HAND_PLANTS BECOME MACHINES_EVERY OBJECT CHANGES AND BECOMES A HUMAN SIGN_THOUGH SHE KNEW EVEN LESS ABOUT RADIOS THAN ABOUT SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA THERE WERE TO BOTH OUTWARD PATTERNS A HIEROGLYPHIC SENSE OF CONCEALED MEANING_OF AN INTENT TO COMMUNICATE_TWO INCOMMENSURABLE LEVELS OF BEING IMPOSSIBLY INTERSECT_SOME LARGER VIRTUAL NIGHTMARE_THAT OF THE LATE 60S GONE TOXIC_THE DRUG AND SCHIZOPHRENIC COUNTER_CULTURAL BAD TRIP_PSYCHIC FRAGMENTATION RAISED TO A QUALITATIVELY NEW POWER_THE STRUCTURAL DISTRACTION OF THE DECENTERED SUBJECT NOW PROMOTED TO THE VERY EXISTENTIAL LOGIC OF LATE CAPITALISM_
[EXTRACTS FROM FREDRIC JAMESON'S THE GEOPOLITICAL AESTHETIC AND ONE FROM THOMAS PYNCHON'S VINELAND ]
Once upon a time a couple of people were alive who were friends of mine. The weathers, christ, the weathers on those Saturdays.
And no provision has been made for the casual life in casual freshly-laundered bedclothes.
(Allowing liquids to puddle, importantly)
This one goes to the damp clothes, balled-up and forgotten in the washing machine. I don’t want to hear any news on the radio about the weather on the weekend.
“The Stack, the megastructure, can be understood as a confluence of interoperable standards-based complex material-information system of systems, organized according to a vertical section, topographic model of layers and protocols. The Stack is a standardized universal section. The Stack, as we encounter it and as I prototype it, is composed equally of social, human and ‘analog’ layers (chthonic energy sources, gestures, affects, user-actants, interfaces, cities and streets, rooms and buildings, organic and inorganic envelopes) and informational, non-human computational and ‘digital’ layers (multiplexed fiber optic cables, datacenters, databases, data standards and protocols, urban-scale networks, embedded systems, universal addressing tables). Its hard and soft systems intermingle and swap phase states, some becoming ‘harder’ or ‘softer’ according to occult conditions. (Serres, hard soft). As a social cybernetics, The Stack that we know and design composes both equilibrium and emergence, one oscillating into the other in indecipherable and unaccountable rhythm, territorializing and de-territorializing the same component for diagonal purposes.” Benjamin Bratton, “On the Nomos of the Cloud: The Stack, Deep Address, Integral Geography,” Nov. 2011
If everything means something else, then so does technology. It would be a mistake to reduce the menacing object-world of allegorical conspiracies to that first, fresh fear of spy systems and informants in the 1960s, when right-wingers discovered a whole new generation of just the right gadgets and someone was listening to you, but only to you personally. J. Edgar Hoover would make a most anachronistic mascot for late capitalism; while the anxieties about privacy seem to have diminished, in a situation in which its tendential erosion or even abolition has come to stand for nothing less than the end of civil society itself. It is as though we were training ourselves, in advance, for the stereotypical dystopian rigours of overpopulation in a world in which no one has a room of her own any more, or secrets anybody else cares about in the first place. Fredric Jameson, Totality as Conspiracy, in The Geopolitical Aesthetic; Cinema and Space in the World System, 1995 //
49. For primitive societies the natural world (which usually changes
only slowly) provided a stable framework and therefore a sense of
security. In the modern world it is human society that dominates
nature rather than the other way around, and modern society changes
very rapidly owing to technological change. Thus there is no stable
framework.
50. The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of
traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological
progress and economic growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that
you can't make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the
economy of a society with out causing rapid changes in all other
aspects of the society as well, and that such rapid changes inevitably
break down traditional values.
Theodore 'Ted' Kaczynski; Industrial Society and its Future / Unabomber manifesto; 1995
//
“Laing listened to her spirited description of the continuous breakdown of services within the building, the vandalizing of an elevator and the changing cubicles of the 10th-floor swimming-pool. She referred to the high-rise as if it were some kind of huge animate presence, brooding over them and keeping a magisterial eye on the events taking place. There was something in this feeling — the elevators pumping up and down the long shafts resembled pistons in the chamber of a heart. The residents moving along the corridors were the cells in a network of arteries, the lights in their apartments the neurones of a brain.
Laing looked out across the darkness at the brilliantly lit decks of the nearby high-rise, barely aware of the other guests who had arrived and were sitting in the chairs around him-the television newsreader Paul Crosland, and a film critic named Eleanor Powell, a hard-drinking redhead whom Laing often found riding the elevators up and down in a fuddled attempt to find her way out of the building.
“Isn't your apartment next to the elevator lobby?" Laing asked her. "You'll need to barricade yourself in."
"What on earth for? I leave the door wide open." When Laing looked puzzled, she said, "Isn't that part of the fun?"
"You think that we're secretly enjoying all this?"
"Don't you? I'd guess so, doctor. Togetherness is beating up an empty elevator. For the first time since we were three years old what we do makes absolutely no difference. When you think about it, that's really rather interesting…”
Ballard's “High Rise,” 1975
But the end of history is also the final form of the temporal paradoxes we have tried to dramatize here: namely that a rhetoric of absolute change (or 'permanent revolution' in some trendy and meretricious new sense) is, for the postmodern, no more satisfactory (but not less so) than the language of absolute identity and unchanging standardization cooked up by the great corporations, whose concept of innovation is best illustrated by the neologism and the logo and their equivalents in the realm of built space, 'life style' corporate culture, and psychic programming. The persistence of the Same through absolute Difference - the same street with different buildings, the same culture through momentous new sheddings of skin - discredits change, since henceforth the only conceivable radical change would consist in putting an end to change itself. But here the antinomy really does result in the blocking or paralysis of thought, since the impossibility of thinking another system except by way of the cancellation of this one ends up discrediting the utopian imagination itself, which is fantasized as the loss of everything we know experientially, from our libidinal investments to our psychic habits, and in particular the artificial excitements of consumption and fashion.
Parmenidean stasis or Being, to be sure, knows at least one irrevocable event, namely death and the passage of the generations: insofar as the system of Parmenidean simulacrum or illusion is a very recent one, constituted in what we call postmodernity, the temporality of the generations in all their mortal discontinuity is not yet visible in results, except retro actively and as a materialist historiographic imperative. But death itself, as the very violence of absolute change, in the form of the nonimage - not even bodies rotting off stage but rather something persistent like an odour that circulates through the luminous immobility of this world without time - is inescapable and meaningless, since any historical framework that would serve to interpret and position individual deaths (at least for their survivors) has been destroyed. A kind of absolute violence, then, the abstraction of violent death, is something like the dialectical correlative to this world without time or history. Fredric Jameson - Antimonies of the Postmodern
