mezomian community?

Death of a voice, birth of an era?

Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) - taken from simulation.dk

 

Artforum says:

03.07.07 - The French critic and provocateur Jean Baudrillard, whose theories about consumer culture and the manufactured nature of reality were intensely discussed both in rarefied philosophical circles and in blockbuster movies like The Matrix, died yesterday in Paris, reports Patricia Cohen for the New York Times. He was seventy-seven. Michel Delorme, director of Galilee, Baudrillard's publisher, announced his death, which he said followed a long illness. Baudrillard, the first in his family to attend a university, became a member of a small caste of celebrated and influential French intellectuals who achieved international fame despite the density and difficulty of their work. The author of more than fifty books and an accomplished photographer, Baudrillard ranged across different subjects, from race and gender to literature and art to 9/11.

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As someone who read a lot of Baudrillard in my early student days, when I first started studying philosophy and communication, this is an event to notice. I have loved his thoughts, his books, especially La transcendence du mal, in which he diagnosed the danger of the fear of viral difference in our culture, a fear which he predicted would have fatal consequences. No doubt in my mind that this is proved to be right again and again.

World of virtuality

A world where creation and emergence are the most important social values. A world of virtuality.

Is this the world we live in? Is it, like the rabbis say, the same but a little bit to one side, which would make it paradise? Is it a possible future - or is it too late already? What is valued in a world like that? What does the world of virtuality that could replace to worlds of classification and of power? Let's play with the idea.. one morning..

You wake up in the morning, but you don't know where you will be going or what you will be doing. Instead, you spend the first half hour meditating, sensing, feeling the memories of your body parts and mind, sensing where you think your mind might be going today, and whether you wish to be productive or reflective, learning or teaching. Of course, if you want to do something totally new to you, this demands a check with the area that you want to attack, so that there are at least some people present that are not new to it. So far, this has not been a problem yet, as the habits so dear to humans in the old world still exist, and are generally accepted as one of many traits of human nature.

Finally, when you have reached your idea of whether you wish to go on doing what you did yesterday or you wish to do something new, you grab your planning dailogue tool, and give your opinion. Within a few seconds, you receive either a go or a number of options, including how long you will probably be able to continue doing this. All is based on a combination of probability calculations, fuzzy logic, and complexity systems analysis tools, based in a main framework, one for each region, with connections to all the others. No humans are directly placed in charge of these decisions of placement and displacement, as they have a conservative tendency which should not be encouraged. The human race has discovered that leaving logistics to technology and creativity to humans has increased the development of human consciousness, finally, after so many centuries of stagnation.

Gone are the simplistic systems of certain ratios and time regularities - these were irrational aspects of a system of power control, that capitalism had built to preserve its system and reduce the effect of revolutions. With capitalism replaced by the new cooperatism, the world has finally started moving in new directions, where there is a general consensus on the need for new solutions, and a general acceptance of the right to diversity, difference, but also to mixing, travelling, displacement, spontaneity, and a number of other aspects that were very problematic in the ages of classification and potentiality. In the age of virtuality, humanity has started to understand that development and change never comes from defence or restriction, but from interaction between forces of creation. This was even found in the wars of the old ages, but transformed so stupidly into weaponry that reduced the fantastic aggressive forces into pure destruction. All for the sake of controlling, restraining, and preserving.

People have even started challenging some of the most stable structures in the modern world: the romantic idea of the closed couple or family, be it monogame or polygame; the idea of the company, the firm, that had, after all, almost dissolved itself, and only needed the abolition of private property to production means. This abolition did take time, with the long conferences on the nature of things and processes aorund and in humans. But things started moving, when a voice was raised that anything that could be compared to life could not be owned, so all thinking devices were given rights of their own, and all machines, creatures, and other moving, acting individuals, were granted the power to create future, so they could not be reduced byu the ownership of someone else. This of course led to other conflicts and debates, such as the right to soil or land, which had been treated in various ways in the past centuries. Finally, it was accepted that soil could not be owned, only used. The global phrase was stated that the earth belongs to our followers, so anything we do that will reduce its value to them, is impossible.

In general, the thing that made everything start to move, was not the development of some technology or other, or of specific rules and regulations - everyone knows that both answer needs or relational aspects. What changed things waas a mentality change, the displacement of what is considered to be real and what is considered to be possible. In the old age, only the present was real, and most systems linking to the future were designed to relate to the present. When humans started understanding the power of virtuality, they understood that the future not only exists, as does the past, they are so tightly intermingled that their very classification was what made them inaccessible to us. Once the barriers were broken down and time began to be seen as the fluent, complex strands or folds of movement and action, that do not "take place" in three divided zones, but create zones of reality that are much more complex than the old humans had dared to accept, a part of control slipped away, time was set free. With it, a tendency started towards also setting bodies free, and minds, and processes. It was slowly understood that virtuality is freedom, and that only the interaction with virtuality could increase our share in freedom. Not killing people (of course!), nor emprisoning minds in contractual relations, or in forced systems of threat and fear.

Does this sound like the beginning of a neo-hippie-fantasy? Yes, possibly. Or no, maybe it jhust doesn't really make sense to you, because the meaning of the virtual (no, this does not refer to virtual reality, but, as Zizek writes about Deleuze, to the reality of the virtual, which is something totally different) is so far from being accepted and understood. This is indeed a fantasy in the sense that "I" will not live to see it. Nor will it look like I imagine. But I know that there are elements in this that are right. Describing this will probably take me the rest of my life. But I know that there are a few people out there listening, thinking, acting, in this direction. That are working for virtuality, for increasing the movement of creation, rather than trying to increase ownership, control, or regulation.

Anyway, try to replace this by what is developing in our part of the world: a massive recapturing of culture and art, thriving on the power of seduction of the event, but always asking: "What can we make from this", "How can we own more by cultivating this domain", etc - instead of simply turning the phrase, to ask instead: "How can the realisation of thsi force or process lead to more creation, and will this creation in its turn lead to more creation" etc. - which, btw answers the question of the good or bad of creation: no, the development of the atomic bomb obviously does nto lead to more creation, end of question. This was a mistake. What else can we say? Could we have obtained the knowledge in other ways? No, because the direction of knowledge that was entailed by thte development of the nuclear weapons is one that leads to more destruction. Learning more about creation and creating more would necessitate other choices. We all know this. And basically, I don't think it's all that complicated. It's about understanding creation. Not just life, as biological life, but understanding the forces that make life. Getting on with what Prigogine, Stengers, Deleuze, Maturana and Varela, Guattari, and all the rest, started.. and making it work, not just talk. It's simple, but the consequences are huge, much greater than stupidly going back to communism or any other control ideology. Even the dreams of present-day anarchism tend to focus on romantic ideas of the individual. Good-bye.. get on with it. See you there or join the ride.

The real is virtual.

The machine and the future of virtual minds

In an evocative post on the machine which is already over us, Kevin Kelly is reposted in Abraxus' Space  (original in Sydney Morning Herald Website) - in terms that occasionally are more Deleuzian/Guattarian than the outhor probably recognizes. The text is not about abstract machines or war machines, but about a very real and not abstract machoine (or is it..), thought of simply as the web as we have come to live with it - do you recognize the idea that the web IS, that it is a liing entity, albeit machinal? Do you recognize the feeling of wanting to know what the web has to say about this or that - making us want to google a fact before trying to remember it, as the author says. Here is a short passage of the text:

"The human brain has no department full of programming cells that configure the mind. Brain cells program themselves simply by being used. Likewise, our questions program the Machine to answer questions. We think we are merely wasting time when we surf mindlessly or blog an item, but each time we click a link we strengthen a node somewhere in the web OS, thereby programming the Machine by using it.

What will most surprise us is how dependent we will be on what the Machine knows - about us and about what we want to know. We already find it easier to Google something rather than remember it. The more we teach this megacomputer, the more it will assume responsibility for our knowing. It will become our memory. Then it will become our identity. In 2015 many people, when divorced from the Machine, won't feel like themselves - as if they'd had a lobotomy."

More here..

What strikes me is the freedom that this gives to us as human beings - we can use a limited amount of our time putting information onto the machine, a limited amount of time developing its technological potential, and a limited amount of time retreiving information, when we need it. And the rest of our time? It's pure virtual, you know..

Think of all the rituals in organisations that are only performed in order to keep up the spirit and memory of the organisation itself, in order to make sure that memory does not go away. But memory does not go away. And with the machine with us, it does not go away at all, there will always be a way to get the information back - if anyone ever bothered to record it, that is. The rituals are all about power, not about remembering. They are about control, not about force of creation.

So skip the rituals, the machine is with us to remember, we can share that duty, put away say 5 hours a week to load memory some more (there are hundreds of millions of people out there to help us do that) - and we can spend the rest of out time making the societies that we want for the coming generations. How much tiume do we spend on that? How much energy is put into making people capable of creating societies??

Virtuality is freedom. This is the age of constantly growing virtuality. And yet, we are locked in the trap of searching to increase the time we use for classification (forgetting that there are hundreds of millions of hands out there to help us do that) - and increase the time we spend trying to gain potentiality (or control, put it as you like, so much energy is placed in talk about control and gaining it and losing, and...), forgetting that potentialising is only meaningful when it is put to the service of creation, of merging with the virtual.

Starting of tomorrow, we should turn the equation around: from 50 % classification/identification, 45 % potentialisation/power fetichism, and 5 % creation/virtuality, to just 50 % creation/virtualising, and the other 2 could share the remaining 50 %. Imagine the world that would be? No, you can't. And that's very much the point. The way we spend our time would be so much different. And I am sure the world we would leave for the future would be a bit different, too.

But I don't know, do I?
 

..desire, energy - our words for these "things" (no, they are not things, not in the static meaning of the word, anyway..), so simple, think of how many forms of movement, a word like desire is supposed to include and somehow describe. It attempts even to describe something going on in and through the person listening to the word or reading it, while this happens.. yes, philosophy does try to make up words for these "phenomena", but we can't really keep up with what we ought to, if we were to really try to change the relations between order and disruptioon, or between balance and change.

And philosophy has to overcome all the barriers set up by paradigms such as assigning movement only to entities - as if only things could move. What about the movement of mevements? The movements of forces? The movements of feelings? Imagine, if we had just as many words for movement and becoming, as there are words for snow in Inuit language, or horse in Lithuanian.. wow.

What word do you use for the movements between blogs in and out of blogospheres?