homo sapiens is not a machine or device for
producing recognitions of the human, but instead a machine or device for
producing modalities of not recognizing – it is (as far as we can tell) the
first fleshed modality of forgetting.
the web expresses the paradoxical coincidence
of reciprocal blindness. technology as
ecstatic trance. the created as a
forgetting to remember.
technology is mysticism – mysticism
commonized, globalized, reflected, affordable, redeemed through metal,
sleepless, improvable, systematized, visible, accepted and acceptable, light,
sensuous. in short, a sleight of hand,
for mysticism does not appear as these things.
mysticism does not appear.
technology is a collective magic trick of a species, a longed-for ruse.
technology is a collective human creation to
remember forgetting.
if mysticism is the void behind poetry,
poetry the void behind language, language the void behind the human, and the
human the void behind mysticism, what is technology? might it be the movement of this circle, the
circle itself, expansions and contractions of the circle to a sphere through ruach, the sphere itself?
might technology be the machine of forgetting what is behind and the
drive to expand the circle so as to prolong the meeting ahead of what has been forgotten?
it is not as if memory is simply being increasingly externalized beyond sarcous surfaces, but that its diameter is being stretched while it is equally being internalized within such surfaces: at one point – the unseen collective black hole of interiority; at the other – vast diffused exteriority; in between – the elasticity – the human. interiority the lost and sought memory of origins, of myth and time now recycled through factories and apparati of historical reconstructions, recreations, resuscitations; exteriority the relational facticities of which the internet and its techno-meteorological formations are the most obvious. and so of the human? isn’t the human neither point nor point, but an experiment in cosmological pliability, the between among points of opaque, infinite, and gaseous memories? the human may hold nothing itself, but may only be this stretching. memory may be a function of divine interiority and technological exteriority, the human only necessary to provide currency – that is, transmission – for it. so from plato’s alphabetic fears to our modern post-apocalyptic dramas, there has been no necessary devolution in human capacity: it has always and equally depended on centers and extremities, interiorities and exteriorities – the only issue being the mass the human negotiates (regardless of its loci). what sort of risks does this bulk – its possible increase – present to the human? this rephrasing (recontextualization) of plato’s concern, made possible by technology, shifts the ground from the qualitative to quantitative concerns … through the shifting, the tectonic linguistic-cultural disasters and displacements, the negotiations and fears, the human clings to its betweens: the human, which may be nothing more than incarnate forgetting, this eternal between.
it is not as if memory is simply being increasingly externalized beyond sarcous surfaces, but that its diameter is being stretched while it is equally being internalized within such surfaces: at one point – the unseen collective black hole of interiority; at the other – vast diffused exteriority; in between – the elasticity – the human. interiority the lost and sought memory of origins, of myth and time now recycled through factories and apparati of historical reconstructions, recreations, resuscitations; exteriority the relational facticities of which the internet and its techno-meteorological formations are the most obvious. and so of the human? isn’t the human neither point nor point, but an experiment in cosmological pliability, the between among points of opaque, infinite, and gaseous memories? the human may hold nothing itself, but may only be this stretching. memory may be a function of divine interiority and technological exteriority, the human only necessary to provide currency – that is, transmission – for it. so from plato’s alphabetic fears to our modern post-apocalyptic dramas, there has been no necessary devolution in human capacity: it has always and equally depended on centers and extremities, interiorities and exteriorities – the only issue being the mass the human negotiates (regardless of its loci). what sort of risks does this bulk – its possible increase – present to the human? this rephrasing (recontextualization) of plato’s concern, made possible by technology, shifts the ground from the qualitative to quantitative concerns … through the shifting, the tectonic linguistic-cultural disasters and displacements, the negotiations and fears, the human clings to its betweens: the human, which may be nothing more than incarnate forgetting, this eternal between.
