scribbled on notepad (Mainly from Late 2008)
1. Here’s an illusion:
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vN2IlvW8FJQ&feature=grec]
Perhaps this is what’s happening to us… A state where we think there’s still weight, mass, and depth to our lives, but really it’s drained out and we’re living – for a short time – on the fumes.
2. Here’s a quote that couldn’t be truer: “The image of death is the beginning of mythology” – Joseph Campbell
3. The secret is out: the postmodern knows in her heart, as the physicist does, that the world is but a play of forces without an inherent directionality. And yet, the physicist keeps working, and the postmodernist keeps playing. The physicist has not turned away from attempting to discover, in Hawking’s words, “the mind of God”; contemporary North Americans, heirs of Kant’s attack on the “thing” as knowable “in-itself” do not lapse – like Hamlet – into a lethargic nihilism. Rather, the faith of scientists in their endeavors and the spirit of the West (however one interprets that spirit) remains intact. For this reason, one ought to think carefully about opposing “truth” with “relativism”.
3.1. We live in a resolutely relativistic age – whereby our entire cosmology is governed by a theory of relativity – and yet uphold our belief in the “truth” of certain systems of beliefs or ideologies. In other words, one needn’t ask the question of relativism: after all, who, nowadays, is not – to some extent – a relativist? You will ask: How can one be a relativist to an extent? The matter is not black-and-white, it is not either/or; rather it demands detail and care.
4. It is not that the human does not exist, that it is a construct, an effect of power. This notion strikes me as ludicrous and as dangerous as what it is intended to combat: namely the solidification and naturalization of identity demanded by Fascism. Certainly the human, like everything else in the world (including the natural world), is conditioned by political, social and economic factors. But is it reducible to these factors? Do these factors explain it away? Is it true that at each moment, each instant, we are confronted with a brand new universe – with new possibilities and new potentials?
5. The nature of decadence. Is not the modern a time of decadence? Is not, in our time, the number of Des Essientes’ legion? Is there not, the uncomfortable sense of anachronism, that runs through these decadents, trailing back to 66 A.D. where the first course of Trimalchio’s elaborate dinner features cuisine intended to “represent natural foods as something they are not – here damsons and pomegranate seeds look like a fire beneath the griddle. Later pork will be presented as fowl, and so on” (Petronius’ Satyricon). What ties 66 A.D. with 2066 A.D. will be that decadence remains marked by the aestheticization of the ‘natural’ order.
6. It is unfathomable that the time for savoring is always so oddly out of joint.
7. Like the finest wines – of which we often drink too much – the memories we savor, leave only a drunken dark spot.
8. A lover of literature – well versed in the narratives that, since Gilgamesh, homo-sapiens have told themselves – would offer you a very clear solution to the question of what the human is.
9. We were human insofar as our humanity was enigmatic. Like belief, once something is de-mystified, it is de-vested (i.e. de-humanized, de-historicized) – its strange pit, or core, has been removed, and all it can do is wither and rot: that is the lesson of the generative force of alienation.
10. Strange life at the heart of the Imagetropolis: Obsessed by the ‘organic’, reliant on the past as a ‘rock of ages’, the acceleration of religious fundamentalism and the transplant of God from God of the Word to God of the Digital, surrounded by waves of electronic noise…
10.1. It is no coincidence that this trace of the real is clung to like a rosary amidst the DJ’s machinelike-beats and the alcoholic lubricant, often supplemented by a stimulating tin can of ‘caffeine (80mg) – taurine(1000mg) – glucuronolactone(600mg)’ that ensures Taylorist efficiency well into the night.
10.2. It is the thrill we feel upon seeing the vinyl of the turntable. The return of the LP, nearly dead, now valorized: a call for the grooves of the vinyl over the binary numerals of the digital. Surrounded by the noise of the machine, learning to dance in a cybernetic feedback loop as the bears-per-minute exceed 160, we are calmed by sight of the vinyl, we are warmed inside: the sound compelling our bodies to learn to dance faster was produced – thank goodness – by physical ridges and grooves.
