child at play

Αἰὼν παῖς ἐστι παίζων πεσσεύων· παιδὸς ἡ βασιληίη.
Aion [eternity] is a child at play, playing draughts; the Kingship is a child's.
Heraclitus

Lucianus, Vit. auct. 14. Context:--And what is time? A child at play, now arranging his pebbles, now scattering them.

•••

In the 1996 Time Burton movie, Mars Attacks! (based on a baseball card series from 1962 of the same name) all the aliens speak in a smack-smack repetitive baby babble talk. All the sounds seem to be the same mak-mak-mak over and over again. How can that possibly convey any information? But entering the film (a spoof on the genre), we emerge, like most of Burton’s films, into a child-like syncope. Faltering rhythms and animation drop us out from the real world into a cartoon world, fit and yet not-fit for babies. Vast instrumentalities are represented in a humorous way – the same as with the world of babies and childhood in general. We embark on a voyage into an uncanny valley, and in the case of childhood, the formation of startling chreodes which gradually, with time and persistence, wear into grinding patterns of familiarity: adulthood.

But for a short period we are witness (and participants only as second order audience) to the animated remains of a once glorious kingdom (the threshold now available only through extensive and sophisticated technical means); a mysterious communication of non-sense with action: the place of gesture as precedent to language, where objects, gesture, ritual become so deep they appear disconnected from contemporary bare life, language floating around incantatorily, performatively: phantasms increasingly severed from the intimacy of gesture and place (a severance which has been in motion since the beginning, but perhaps now within creased velocity).

It is a place which has dropped out of sight so far from ordinary experience (which, in a way, is dropping from sight also) that its fabulousness, this kingdom of hidden presences, seems to be entirely one made from a frayed, thread-worn, and gossamer cloth, spider-web cloth, melting in the noonday sun, the only entrance now through our machines; which brings it (this uncanny abyssal which is continually cracking underfoot) back with a terrifying immediacy, an otherness … but with yet a strange familiarity to it. The mak-mak-mak syncope of childhood aligns with the disappearances of children into the mysterious hill over yonder, abduction by fairies, aliens, now everything slowly coming into sync with the technical alien.

To Heraclitus we are perhaps all babies on that eternal beach, caught in yet a higher order swoon, an arhythmic hiccup, waiting in vain for some vaster presence to pick us up, to stop the crying, to salve the wounds, to point out another hill over yonder (techne) which we can enter and disappear for an aion or two.

Hidden behind the Double

The Hidden

Occasionally the surface of language which we inhabit (and whose promises we fulfill or not) take on a slightly less burnished quality. The everyday seems a bit less reflective, a bit more perplexing. Under the right circumstances poetry can have that effect (though to the extent that it has to announce itself as such, the effect of 'peering beneath/through the surface' may be diminished; I'm fully aware that this terminology is not re rigeur these days and that all we are supposed to have are a gradually escalating/descalating series of imbricated structures proceeding through micor- and macro-scales. I suppose there is little yet in the physicalist spectrum that would lead us to think other wise.) But language may be another matter, so to speak, a peculiar combination of matter and anti-matter whose point of rupture can everywhere be felt and no place where it can effectively be focused on, purely and simply as itself, outside the regime of the necessities of communnication.

I am reminded of the possibilities that language holds encoded in its structure, by a recent article (here) in physics site where in words are modeled after entangled quantum states, (what they call 'spooky action at a distance' after the quantum spukhafte funverkungen of Neils Bohr) and seems to say basically that all words are somehow tangled together and speaking one may somehow elicit a great many others. I will leave it to others to try tosay how reliable such ascheme may be for further exploration, but it does leave the door open for various other weird phenomena e.g., the reverse speech effect (record a speech, play it backward and uncannily there seem to be sections which are intelligible and which seem to undo the meaning of the promissary speech.

Lest one be though a complete kook, the last years of Ferdinand Saussure's researches involved the anagrammatical properties of language. In his case, a study of an ancient poetic form called the Saturnian in which poets encoded a name (gods, patrons, etc) into the words of the poem: a message within the poem. Apparently he became disturbed by his findings (they existed only as a large series of notes and weren't published in his lifetime); presumably by the poetic, verging on the mystical, taking precedence over the pragmatic. As Julia Kristeva put it, "poetic language adds a second, contrived, dimension to the original word" said second language "transgressing the rules of grammar" at the point where "reason strives to hold madness back to the limit of its own truth." (Sylvere Lotringer, The Game of the Name, a review of Jean Starobinski's book on Saussure's collected and assembled notes, Les Mots sous les Mots, published in 1971.)

But what if there are anagrammatical moments when the contrivance, the method of secondary poetic/prophetic inscription, becomes obscured or even occulted? When the question of who, if anyone, has overlaid one text to another becomes problematic indeed and a secondary structure WITHIN the primary text seems to come alive on its own accord, even haunted by an aspect for which an accounting is hard to come by. That is, Sassure's hunt for an 'authorial intent' was to bear no fruit because this (somewhat anomalous) structure of language itself somehow contrives to write on and beyond itself, as in Heidegger's notion that 'language speaks us.' There psychoanalysis has found fertile ground. One wing of this 'monoblock' thesis of language led to post structuralism and deconstruction. You wouldn't necessarily know it from the academic language but this can be spooky stuff as can be seen by the bible code folks, reverse speech advocates, steganography, and in fact all areas where there is a surface and a hidden, encrypted substrate. Popular culture is filled with examples

Within this doubled 'substance' there is another question of authorial intent: the coding is put there by human agency; the coding appears as an 'accident' of structure (whatever/however accident could be said to operate in such circumstances; off hand I can think of no convincing explanation/proof of the way those two levels would communicate with each other, although I suppose evolutionary biology would contend that the relation between phenotype and genotype has been taken care of. This is not exactly what I'm thinking of, but this is: a code written upon the DNA code. I'm also reminded of the failed attempt by William Newbold to find meaning in the scratches of the penstrokes of the writing of the Voynich Manuscript. It seems that pursuit of an uncanny encrypted world fosters its own form of madness.) And the third possibility would be that it was placed by a non-human agent. The last does not fit any measure of scientific correctness with the exception of the faint possibility of an alien consciousness somehow placing a code.

Anf finally to place somehow in juxtapostion here, the idea of 'telepathy' and 'text' as a massaging of the quantum field effect as postuated above. I would point to the lastest issues of the newly revamped (?) Oxford Literary Review's issue on telepathies which I enjoyed tremendously but which may of little use for someone attempting to solve something.

One of a Kind

One of a kind, None of a kind

We cherish the idea of a one of a kind. But the sui generis is a problematic concept --- assuming it could exist and that if it could exist that it could be recognized. After all, what does it mean, to recognize something? Usually to slot it into a category, either Kantian if you are slightly metaphysical, or everyday, or even into Foucault's Chinese dictionary where things start to form their own categories. I suppsoe the latter is a start at problematizing a species which heads its own genus. We could stick Wittgenstein's admonition against the possibility of a private language also, as the opposite of such, or at least an oxymoron, since the very idea of language is something that has hooks outside itself and maybe is even totally consisting of the outside with an inside (not total for sure) being merely a condensation of sorts.

The sui generis is a hinge concept being hate and loved, seemingly simultaneously. On the one hand, the one of a kind is a mythical beast much beloved by collectors and when it enters the economic realm of valuation it is truly priceless: either not worth putting a price on it or astronomically valuable, only affordable by, say, institutions or individuals so weatlthy that they function as institutions.

But then of course monsters are sui generis. Having no kin (think of Victor Frankenstein's creation) they roam lost and abandoned, excoriated, practically unseeable because of their category confusion and when they are seen, confusion begins, and almost immedately thereafter the lighting of torches and, as Jeff Goldblum puts it in Jurassic Park "then later there is running and screaming." One could even say that monsters are de-monstrations of 'hinge-ness' (aligned with that favorite of cultural studies 'hybridity').

'Hoaxing' is rife at this hinge point, a hinge between the human and the in- or non-human, the barely sensed and the no-sensened but nevertheless felt in some fashion, btween self-consciousness and consciousness which simply seems to have a self. For some, the lucubrations formed by this pivot demand the daylight, an agency which will dry up, expose, what is perceived as the dankness, or at the very least the anxiety caused by uncertainties of origin, placement, and apparent irrationality due to febrile human perception. Often times, the only way ordinary human perception/conception can make sense of the 'one of a kind' is to imitate it in a teasing manner, so as to say, 'look, there is really nothing there; I did this." Perhaps art started that way; perhaps in some respect it still proceeds in that fashion, in the long Hegelian haul of some obscure, half-seen (itself we see now as somewhat monstrous) dialectic.

the one of a kind, the sui generis, hence falls prey to the legal concept of res nullius, from Roman law meaning things which are unowned, or lost and abandoned, but which CAN therefore be taken up by the first one who comes along and claims ownership. I would say that hoaxing is a form of ownership, as well as de-coding that which was formerly lost and abandoned in the sense of unreadable. The untranslatable: from a certain viewpoint everything SHOULD be translatable, should have its Champolion and Rosetta Stone ... if it doesn't have such (that is, theatens to remain res nullius) then it must be a hoax and ownership can be claimed under the rubric of a default because of a sort of false consciousness. (The Voynich Manuscript is the most recent example of this phenomena....and interesting that it compares it to the 'monstrous' text of H. P. Lovecraft, the Necronomicron).

But what of the idea of the 'offene stelle,' a blank space akin to silence, to withdrawal, maybe akin to apophatic 'prayer', maybe Eastern nothingness, maybe what was formerly known as 'nature' before it began to cease to exist? Where is the neceesity of blankness now to be inscribed, in a completely ajudicated world, a world where being-filled-formed-taken ('ownership') is peremptory? (Late Latin peremptorius, from Latin, destructive, from perimere to take entirely, destroy, from per- thoroughly + emere to take: 1 a: putting an end to or precluding a right of action, debate, or delay)

Close to Infinite

Anthropocentric Metaphysics

I just came across an article which came out in the academic journal Political Theory from 2005 which I somehow missed. I suppose because of my own theoretical bias (e.g. they reference Agamben and Derrida, etc) I find it one of the most interesting approaches to 'liminal studies.' Certainly there are not many such articles on the UFO phenomena in academic journals to begin with so it should stand out. The article is entitled 'Sovereignty and UFOs' and is available here.
There is also a response to a critique of the article here. The comments section is interesting to peruse since it seems to indicate the same problems of the almost-unavoidable idea of surmounting 'anthropocentricity' -- which is the very thing the authors are trying to point out: how do you know that you don't know something? Mostly it would seem that ignorance is much like the old joke of the man looking under the street light for a lost item, not because that is where the item was lost but because the light is better there. An 'epistemic failure,' as they put it, of the reigning paradigm of all human studies -- that is, the 'human' -- puts govenance mechanisms in a troubling situation. It's certain seems easy to see that such state sovereignty regarding such has been at work in the 'modern' for quite a while. It is almost as if certain anti-bodies are formed to work against not only many liminal states, but also the human populations which carry the 'infection' of what the sovereign state sees as the irrational and the superstitious. And since a cul-de-sac of knowledge exists on both sides (albeit in different directions), it gives mis-recognition of both sides.

This obviously not an easy thing to perceive. Philosophically, perhaps it could be said that the phenomenological tradition (especially deconstruction) is an attempt to 'dust' all sorts of linimal portals at the threshold of the human and to at least illume those limits. The crossing of those portals is another thing altogether. Often times charges of verging on, or passing over into the 'inhuman' result from those investigations.

Interesting then that so called 'speculative materialism' is putting forth another philosophical strand which attempts to dance into some of these issues. (The most fabulous, in all senses of the word, is the recent book by Reza Negarestani: Cyclonopedia:Complicity with anonymous Materials, speculation and philosophy...lots of speculation... And also the journal COLLAPSE from Britain..see also After Finitude by Quentin Meillassoux and many new blog sites devoted to the general area).

A couple of short quotes from the article:

"Because the contemporary capacity to command political loyalty and resources depends upon it, the assumption of anthropocentrism must be unquestioned if modern rule is to be sustained as a political project."

and

"This does not mean that UFOs are in fact humanly unknowable,
but they might be, and in that respect they haunt modern sovereignty with
the possibility of epistemic failure."

Ufologists often talk about a coming date (always coming) when secret files will be released etc. This certainly doesn't deal with such conspiratorial issues but the article is very successful in pointing to a skandalon, perhaps indemic to human cognition which might stand in the way of any real recognition of the phenomena.

I'm also reminded of The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb and the place of ignorance and chance in forming most aspects of the world. I've found that there is even a new term for the study of ignorance: agnotology. More data does not necessarily mean we know more; in fact it may give a complacency about what we (think) we know.

On another website, I seemingly misleadingly said that the Black Swan lends itself to the proposition that anything can happen at any time...perhaps not quite so radical as that but it would seem to verge toward the same sort of ignorance of events and both their probability and improbability....and as Wendt and Duvall put it, a threat to anthropocentric integrity -- rather a threatening failure of systems how we know things.

"I push one step beyond this philosophical-logical question into an empirical reality, and one that
has obsessed me since childhood. What we call here a Black Swan (and capitalize it) is an event with
the following three attributes.first, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past
can convincingly point to its possibility.Second, it carries an extreme impact. third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable. third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable. "

Many find it better to just keep looking under the street light...afterall it's almost impossible to see anyplace else.
And besides way too much trouble to even attempt.

Half Lit

"There comes a point in the creative course of every great artist or
poet, when the image of beauty which, up to that moment, he had pursued
in a seemingly continuous upward movement, suddenly reverses direction
and becomes visible vertically, in its fall. It is the movement that
Holderlin defined, in the notes to his translation of Sophocles, as
'caesura' or ‘'anti-rhythmic interruption': when the word, as if checked
in mid-flight, for a moment reveals not what it says, but its own nature
… that untitled messianic moment in which art stays miraculously still,
almost astounded: fallen and risen in every instant."

"Bellezza che cade", Giorgio Agamben
published on Cy Twombly, 8 Sculptures, Roma, American Academy, 1998,
p. 5.(Unfortunately, I've not been able to find the whole Agamben article in English so it would be too forward to to comment on what is not there. But the tone of Agamben's often work is often, superficially I think, is often looked upon with suspicion in America because of instants like the beautiful last two lines. For many, perhaps, there seems to be an unbearable proximity to a sort of Biblical hermeneutic; and then of course there is the formidable relation with other fields of humanistic discourse that is a bit overwhelming for American analytics.)

The quote is immediately striking because of the syncope that art 'suffers' in pursuit of beauty, a fainting away from what many would see as the true vocation of art into a mysterious stillness, perhaps even silence and accompanying inaccessibity of a sort. But what sort is it? It is as if the art work has been salvaged from its yoke to the human and has become simltaneously alive and dead, the portal of art made available to another side... if there were another side. Impossibly, it hangs there, tremulously, half lit, half in darkness.

The Dead in a Forced March

Dead Reading

Three different items have recently oriented me to the title above. 'Nekros' mean 'dead body' in the original Greek. While not an oxymoron, the term 'dead body,' from the point of view of a die-hard materialist would have to seem somewhat problematic, perhaps needing to find a necessity to disavow life as any special category . Or for that matter, 'dead' as a special category, both being (for that hard-dead materialist) simply positions on a continuum of some sort of movement/non-movement. And while there can be forms of life, can there be forms of death? One would suppose that our straw materialist would reply that is a barrier (not even a barrier really, which after all assumes that there is something, a threshold, abyssal/abyssmal or not, on another 'side': there would only be here, within an imminent monad I suppose.

But nevertheless, necrological concerns abound, popular forms of death-in-living, such as vampires, and zombies, as the chiasmatic form life-in-death. In fact we would not be too remiss to say that these two forms (that is, death-in-life and life-in-death) set up the polar co-ordinates between which most of thought and culture moves. (One might also say in concordance with this that the mostly-hidden CONVERGENCE and folding of those two forms into the apocalyptic, forms another massif under modernist western archepelagos: various fundamentalisms and/or the technologial singularity seem to escape from all sides of the valley of consciousness and genealogy. leaving us to wax nostalgically about when we were alive, or, in the case of our objects and gadgets, when we were not-alive.

I just finished Lucius Shepard's The Golden, a fabulous tale of intrigue within the vampire world ... and if you've read any Shepard you know that the writing itself is often fabulous and with a tinge of the hysterical which only a vampire novel can provoke in its depictions of the realms of the dead. But of course hysteria is somewhat appropriate, since the term itself denotes an ecstatic wandering of desire outside of itself, a dislocation. (And as regards a social dyspeptic, hysteria seems to be high on the list as a built-in feature of the digital universe and dislocated psyches in various mass convergences.)

Disaster

Catastrophe

"Nature is constantly straining against its chains: probing for weak points, cracks, faults, even a speck of rust. The forces at its command are of course colossal as a hurricane and as invisible as a baccilli. At either end of the scale, natural energies are capable of opening breaches that
can quickly unravel the cultural order."
Mike Davis / Dead Cities

Catastrophe works like fingerprinting techniques at a crime scene. ‘Dusting for prints’ reveals that ‘absence’ is never absolute and that both the innocent and the guilty hover around every scene of misery and disaster, occasionally one being mistaken for the other. But in the end, they are all human prints and the grief is always contained and analyzed (‘triaged’ as they say, in the early accounting that medical emergencies require), and packed away as trauma requires. Or worked out as ‘just keeping going’ requires. The military draws a cordon around the diseased area and, eventually, rebuilding commences…

But natural catastrophes (if one were sufficiently scientific and objective, every catastrophe would be seen as ‘natural’) don’t really leave fingerprints. In fact, they are more like the dusting substance itself, revealing, as Mike Davis’s quote above alludes to, latent breaches and cracks in the social order, the cracks that underlie every human endeavor but which remain muted or covered over and which all human order is devoted to maintaining.

Our cities are monuments to this octopus like quest by humans to search out every exposable facet of natural potentiality and put it to work in the service of a human motivation. (Usually these days that exploration is in the service of capital acquisition; it has becomes hard to extricate that aspect of late modern life from any other aspect of life, some are ready to tell us there is no difference anymore—and, really, never was a difference).

But while the human agenda is always to quell the urgency of the natural (one suspects that the military is merely the outgrowth of this extremely long term human trend: ‘repelling the intruder’ covers much ground). ‘Global survival’ is merely shorthand for technical competence and engineering .. that is, more, but better, levees, earthquake predicative apparatuses, mid-ocean tsumnami sensors, satellite surveillance.

The Great Missoula Flood

On TV last night there was a special about an area in Washington state called the Scablands. The topography of the area is so strange that it took a few years before scientists think they discovered what caused these weird rock formations that covered an area hundreds of miles in length. Apparently 20, 000 years ago a gigantic glacier some 23 miles wide and 500 ft or more high formed in one of the valleys during a period of extreme glaciation. They theorize that the huge wall of ice stopped up the river going through the valley and caused a lake to form bigger than two of the Great Lakes. At great pressure, the case at the bottom of this immense frozen block, the water does not freeze at its normal 32 degrees Fahrenheit but manages to stay liquid till it is 31 or 30 degrees. There it slowly begins its regime of crackdom, slowly but surely bringing down the huge mass, its very size inculcating its demise. Nevertheless, the cracks don’t signal a permanent new regime since the old conditions are still present and the mass slowly begines to form and rise again.

Catastrophe of the south

I’ve written before about the apocalyptic mindset of the southerner. I recently came across a southern artist who had concentrated his large canvases on southern disasters and it made me realize the special relationship that the south has to catastrophe, all the way from it’s founding as a center of slave activity, to floods and hurricanes, to the fighting and subsequent defeat in the civil war, to economic collapse of king cotton and so on. No wonder the peculiar mind set of the old south, the feeling of being put-upon by outsiders, and the isolation that came before that, the inferiority complex and the aggression that often accompanies that state of mind.

The final end of catastrophe is often disappearance, perhaps not even all at once that ways of life succumb and transmute or just are destroyed. In fact, it would be unusual for catastrophe to have THAT much power. More often it’s simply the power to command abandonment, a small tricking away of power.

The Relation of the Extreme(s) to the (always coming) Disaster

The radical ends (primordial and eschatological) are always far before and far after. The current cultural fascination of the extreme in all areas is perhaps in its own way a recognition of those radical possibilities, but in an immanentized version of the old transcendental, the always present possibility of being un-homed and even the courting of the uncanny through the extreme, the possibility of strtetching the human to the limit of sensation, cognition, possibility even to the point of death, the only really firm extreme that anyone will experience. (Even then it’s problematic whether it could be called an experiencing of a limit.)

Outside the Borders

Outside the Borders of the District: on District 9

Outside the Borders of the District: on District 9
part 1

"At first glance, it appears that the uncanny is a fear of the familiar, whereas nostalgia is a longing for it; yet for a nostalgic, the lost home and the home abroad often appear haunted. Restorative nostalgics don’t acknowledge the uncanny and terrifying aspects of what was once homey. Reflective nostalgics see everywhere the imperfect mirror images of home, and try to cohabit with doubles and ghosts."

Svetlana Boym

"In all mourning there is the deepest inclination to speechlessness, which is infinitely more than ability or disinclination to communicate. That which mourns feels itself thoroughly known by the unknowable. To be named – even when the namer is Godlike and blissful – perhaps always remains an intimation of mourning. But how much more melancholy to be named not form the one blessed, paradisiac language of names, but from the hundred languages of man, in which name has already withered, yet which, according to God’s pronouncement, have knowledge of things …

"In the language of men, however, [things ] are over-named … over-naming as the deepest linguistic reason for all melancholy and (from the point of view of the thing) of all deliberate muteness."

Walter Benjamin

"Time is precisely the impossibility of an identity fixed by a place.

[….]

While place is dogmatic, the coming back of time restores an ethics."

Michel de Certeau

Giorgio Agamben begins The Open with the now-famous passage concerning a painting in the back of a Hebrew bible from the thirteenth century of animal-headed humans at a banquet table of the righteous on the last day, a possible reconciliation of the animal and the human at the point of concluded humanity.

However, with the power of computers in special effects we no longer have to wait for the reconciliations ofthe end of time and concluded humanity, since chimeras are the bread and butter of the film industry. And while theriomorphs (the combination of gods and beasts) can only be simulated who is to tell how far that simulation will, in a thousand years, eventually reach?

District 9, while giving off the glint of a simple metaphor of apartheid, transferred to stranded space aliens, would indeed be a weak film (as would the whole concept of science fiction) if that was the only conjecture/concatenation being proferred. (The very same 'weak' thesis of the movie was put forward by the-president Ronald Reagan in the context of a world that would become united if there were the threat of invasion by space aliens.)

The deeper reading would be two fold and each related to the other: 1) the nature of the exilic condition, of homelessness (and the relation to the uncanny); and 2) the relation of the human to the animal (and that unsettling of relation to one’s own body as home and the uncanniness that results).

The next day after seeing the movie, I recalled the place of the hand in Heideigger’s meditations on techne (the well know ready-to-hand and present-to-hand) and Derrida's attempt to investigate the undecidability of touch and the hand (in both Jean-Luc Nancy and Heidegger). Now is not the time to rehearse any of these positions other than to point out the primacy of the human 'hand' in the movie as it turns into its alien other – which of course would be closer to the parallel of the hand associated with the radical other, the tentacle.

Post Script to Law Life

footnote to previous part 2, regarding number and resurrection:

"In effect, it is law at the purest, formalist level, law as "the ideal of the
matheme," that governs the new coming into being of the subject. Thus, to the
question: "But why is it necessary to reject law onto the side of death?" Badiou answers:
"Because considered in its particularity, that of the works it prescribes, the law blocks the subjectivation of grace's universal address as pure conviction, or faith. The law 'objectifies' salvation and forbids one from relating it to the gratuitousness of the Christ- event." As such, the event is, by itself, an "illegal contingency, which causes a multiplicity in excess of itself to come forth and thus allows for the possibility of overstepping finitude." The evental situation, before subjectivation, is the site of "the excess of grace, thus, of a pure act," i.e. the resurrection.

Although Badiou addresses a philosophical-political question in his analysis of
Paul and the law, what comes through the apparent antinomianism of the message is, unexpectedly – as if to corroborate the very evental process he describes – the
reanimation of law in a different guise. That is, in the truth-event, there is not a rejection or repudiation of law sensu stricto, but its realignment, rearrangement, to effectuate the resurgence (resurrection) of the subject."

Re-interpretation of Paul's Concept of Law
Tawia Ansah

Stiff Law and it's remains

The Hemipygic Resurrection of the Glorious Body: The Law En-Fortressed and Made to Walk
part 2

I had work done on my car recently and they needed the VIN number, a 17 digit identification number that details type of car, origin, where assembled, the order in which it was asembled etc. I was thinking that it is sort of the car’s DNA code, providing the car with a barebones bid for immortality – at least as much as 17 digits can provide. All the threads that concern the physical makeup of the car and the genetic we might say, as opposed to contingent knocks and bumps of acccidentality that make up real life as opposed to VIN life. The VIN numbers are threads that, when knotted together form the vehicle secret life.

That said, perhaps it would seem feasible to resurrect the car given a totalizing accident. However, and without going into philosophical disquisitions on identity from the Greeks to the computer age, most folks would contend that the car was reconstructed, not resurrected. The 'secret code/life' of a human would have something to do with consciousness and not necessarily with place of assembly (which is not to say that would not have an impact, contingent and genetic somehow coming together in a knotted tsunami of time, place, terrain, perhaps even position in re: to the rest of the universe; to a greater or less degree it seems this is what we think of as the human -- and perhaps other living, impactable entities -- with perhaps even some added dispositions and reckoning that we have little kin of, except by hearsay, myth, magical thinking or other eldritch considerations, none of which I discount by the way). I suppose the purported law-like regularity of the universe, always, everywhere and everywhen, could be called to the bar at this point. (Although, now that I think on it, the VIN resurrection scenario fits perfectly now, at least as far as filmic bring-backs; one only has to think of the Transformers series and maybe even the Terminators…certainly don't seem that far from a zombie re-instatement of an appliance and calling it alive.)

The Law (of matter) perhaps only seems implacable here, filmed over, encrusted with its own come-backs, precedented, trusted to have been here before, perogative of lost innocence, portrait of returns piling ever higher: the Law does not have a human face and after it has broken free from the natural world it has no 'Age' but looks 'back' which it configures silently, invisibly, out in the Open and inato the Forward, Janus -faced. (The Christian Resurrection would say, in its very heart: the Law is made to be broken and it will be done by Him after which we all follow, facing into the sun, rising from our graves, round the rim of the earth, the air on that Last Day filled, packed with shining Dead; well, that's the plan anyway....may take our trusty servant, the Machine, that other Law, to open the graves even more than it has already done.... what is it w. benjamin said? "... even the dead will not be safe", only the barest of the bare lifers will be let in. Huzzah! )

LivingDead the Law marches silently over the frozen tundra, The Law as zombie machine (number) has taken over all possibilities of resurrection, until the real Messiah returns to break one and install another regime. And that is always 'any minute now,' (the same as my grandfather's disposition (deacon's sketch) of time and salvation sketch at the front of this article which hangs on my desk now, timeless Law becoming a matter of genealogic threading though matter, the Law of Reproduction the only law that counts, oddly enough, for an inhuman law, your DNA (the soul's VIN?) nailed to the cross, spiraling, spiraling ever onward...

At the heart of the heart: does anything beat there? There beats the Inhuman Resurrection, composed of those same angel feathers, insanely beating, lifting....


"Resurrection: Borgo San Sepolcro"
Rowan Williams

So the black eyes
fixed half-open, start to search, ravenous,
imperative, they look for pits, for hollows where
their flood can be decanted, look
for rooms ready for commandeering, ready
to be defeated by the push, the green implacable
rising. So he pauses, gathering the strength
in his flat foot, as the perspective buckles under him,
and the dreamers lean dangerously inwards. Contained,
exhausted, hungry, death running off his limbs like drops
from a shower, gathering himself. We wait,
paralysed as if in dreams, for his spring.

The (square root of two) Resurrection of the Body: Hyrdrocarbon Angels Streaming Down the Gulf

The (square root of two) Resurrection of the Body: Hyrdrocarbon Angels Streaming Down the Gulf

pt 3

"Only a resurrection redistributes death and life to their places, by showing that life does not necessarily occupy the place of the dead."

Alain Badiou: St. Paul ...

"A higher calculus without remain(s): what consciousness wants to be."

j. derrida, Glas

"… it is a question of opening up the earth—dark, hard, and lost in space."

Jean-Luc Nancy, Dis-enclosure of Christiantity

"The (any) return is always a form of technic, always ahumanly existing before the human, and creating the human. To want to return to the before of return is to want to return to either the animal or the divine, difficult sometimes to tell the difference. [….] To want to see the singular (re) appearance of what has gone, died, disappeared: is that not the height of folly as well as the greatest experiment in the technical, the engineering of an alternate world, a world that is potentially present everywhere, all the time, a threshold continuously being opened and closed simultaneously, a world constituted by the individual subject, the human continuously striving for sovereignty, eve the object world brought along, skein of nodes: “In my view, which can be justified only by the exposition of the system itself, everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject." (Hegel in Phenomenology of Spirit. This taken from a section in The Political Theology of Paul by Jacob Taubes. Shortly after the quote Taubes glosses this by referencing Spinoza and Schelling as they pursue it in a generalized sense but extends it by allowing as to the possible of the individual 'I' being included in the equations: this would have to be the materialist reserve of any possible Christian vectored resurrection, no generalized eastern resumption of essence but a full-flavored self, the 'I', as improbable and fantastical that sounds to modern ears.)”

Fehta Murghana from That Which Comes

Can a re-gathering of distributed being be considered resurrection? If it is a simple numerical dispersion, it’s a question of: can it be done by human structure or is it an impossible proposition? (We humans consider anything that we can’t do to be impossible). This, even though it has been an imperial command for since we became conscious,. There is something in us that wants to come back, sometimes against our best (collective) wishes. Is that something that knows better than our individual consciousness …or is it a simple remnant of past eras encoded in our thought, myths, conduct? Whatever, it forms the most formidable thought for those who can think it and none can really, fully, since to think it totally means that one has come back. Which means that it passes from thought/potentiality to a fait accompli, ceasing to be impossible, passing from mere zombie thought into total presence, into our very objects, environment, stones, machines, the cry of the inanimate becoming audible, the invisible becoming only transparent.

An interesting article by Fernando Vidal (Brains, Bodies, Selves, and Science: Anthropologies of Identity and the Resurrection of the Body, Critical Enquiry, summer 2002) covers a great deal of ground but a couple of quirky attempts to account for bodily resurrection are those of Bernard Nieuwentijt’s 'stamen' theory from 1714 and Charles Bonnet’s 'other brain' theory. Stamen means filament or thread and if resurrection is possible, reasons Nieuwentijt, then identity must be somehow ‘threaded’ through matter and time, reproducing itself or hatching, like the stamen which continues the flower, into matter but keeping some ur-identity. Vidal glosses this in a footnote: "The stamen theory, which may be called the germ theory of bodily identity, has a descendent in Saul Kripke's notion of the necessity of origin, according to which a person’s identity is ultimately defined by genealogy; the one thing we cannot be is the offspring of parents other than our own". See Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity, Oxford, 1980. Of course this has the taint of that now much feared idea of essentialism, not to even speak of the taint of questions of origin. This reference certainly made me go back to the venerable Kripke book.

Vidal glosses Charles Bonnet (late 1700s) thus (I quote at length because it seems oddly prescient for a futurist, cybernetic world):

"Personal identity depends on memory (Locke’s thesis), and memory is based in the brain. It follows that, if man is to keep his identity in the afterlife, his soul must remain united to some indestructible organ, perhaps the same that functions as the seat of the soul. Bonnet describes it as a 'little ethereal machine' and as an 'indestructible brain' encased in the brains of our terrestrial bodies. In addition to being the seat of the soul, the little machine is the germ of resurrected bodies. I will therefore act in truly embryological fashion, producing bodies in accordance with the preformationist emboîtment theory of generation.

In short, our present brains enclose another brain, destined to develop in the afterlife and to restore our identity, personality, and boy together. Since the resurrected body will be spiritual and incorruptible, the 'small human body' hidden in the seat of the soul must be physically different from our bodies of flesh."

Perhaps the mystery is not that things are different but that they remain the same.

Perhaps science (or at least science's 'body,' technology, the point at which idea becomes material) is another venue for the mystery.

Some wait, as if paralyzed, waiting for the dream.

 

 

Invisible People

from an installation:

The Discovery of People in the Invisible Part of the Universe

In the recent Korean film ‘Old Boy,’ the protagonist is put into solitary confinement for 15 years, with nothing but popular television for entertainment. When he escapes, the pivot scene happens when he stops into a sushi bar and orders something live. He is delivered a live octopus that he maniacally consumes, then falls into a swoon. Thus begins a switch into another symbolic level of (in)operabilty, signaled by the omnipresent signifier of radical otherness, the tentacle. (As a hint: the film very cleverly plays off the relations between ‘octopus’ and ‘Oedipus,’ both entities signposts of coming forbidden liminal states.)

‘Tentacularity’ is always a spectacular gateway to various extremes of otherness in cultural representations, a representation of that which is furthest from the human and which is always portrayed as a monstrous collapse into a regime at destructive odds with the human. The most well known popular representative of this visual motif is the portrayal of the aliens’ craft in the recent film ‘War of the Worlds.’

One can be sure that the arrival of the tentacle is also the arrival of the inhuman and uncanny in opposition to the human. One only has to remember those animations in the fifties of the world picture of the great octopus of communism and its encircling red arms.

But tentacularity is part of a larger body of symbology which includes Medusa and the concept of aura. All three, tentacle, medusa, and aura, are active liminalities which reach out beyond their immediate ground to encircle and tear from the human it’s essential humanness, Medusa causing a stone-like paralysis, a mortification of time, and in the aura, or halo, a radiance creating a ‘leak’ in the human into the divine as well as effecting a porosity into (and out of) the material substrate of it’s surroundings.

The recognition of these three facets – an unapproachable and monstrous inhumanness, a lapse into the pure materialty of a stone-like death, and the leakage into and out of the human by some form of transcendance -- signifies a rupture and switch into new forms.

(By the way: these three states all entail some form of luminescense: the octopus uses a form of polarized light to communicate—and it has been theorized that this ability to perceive in the polarized state acts a ‘secret’ form of communication with its kin, perhaps through its ability to change the color and patterns of its skin through chromatophores; the medusa effect is a cessation of sight through a direct seeing of the forbidden, while the aura / halo is an excess of light, radiance, and intolerable to a materialist culture, a form of incompatable de-monstration.)

1996
Fehta Murghana
Robert Cheatham
Chea Prince