"What Is It You Know and When Did You Know It?"

fam' ble -- to stammer

Webster's Second International Dictionary

Stammer -- to speak or say with involuntary pauses or blocks, often 
with rapid repetitions of syllables or initial sounds, as 
temporarily from excitement, embarrasment, etc. or 
chronically as a result of muscle spasms believed to 
result from mental conflicts.

How like a stutterer the contemporary family is. A stamping machine (simultaneously crsuhing to pieces and shaping to fit), it is now caught in a loop, filled with blocks and tics which force it to re-cycle. If much of current thought is about the demise of any sort of dialectic, then the family seems to be the ur-foundation of that 'rising' (and failing) assembly. Because there seems to be something caught in the gears. The shuffling re-combinatoric which the family instituted on the genetic level and nurtured through a complete auto-formative cycle, spawning, fractal-like, images of itself which would then pullulate also, has turned its full force on the family structure. As a breeding and nurturing assembly, the family has become almost completely porous, riven with streams of data and movement (one is loathe to call any of it 'labor' in any traditional sense).

The speed of assembly/dis-assembly (all a part of boundary transgressions / perforations / disolutions) has become so rapid that the family can no longer shuffle the deck with the requisite speed, for the game currently in play, for the game itself is no longer certain. All the family can do now is a propaedeutic to the game, a blocked 'shuffling,'continually rehearsing and preparing for an event not to come --that is, a copy of itself. The biological act of reproduction itself, core of the Hegelian dialectical family, is now nothing more than a stuttering machine, caught in cultural overdrive and feeding back into the culture those opaque inchoate physical stammerings. The physical act of sex and seduction, has become the overt piston of the cultural engine (especially in its gravity-free representations): the socioeconomicopolitical counterpart being the social re-combinatoric of 'games of chance' -- betting, gambling, lotteries, etc, the most effective way for a stochastic statistical society to 'cash out' its analyses. Representation, in the old civic sense, gives way to polling and market surveys.

For almost all cases now, of anything, there is evidence of what we might call 'lift off' or separation from any kind of 'gold standard.' Everything begins to ramify increasingly on the terms of the recombinatoric itself rather than any standardized measures. Paradoxically, both stasis and tremendous acceleration can result. [phenomenologically, and relativistically, they seem to be easily reversible one to the other. And like the moving 'now' point of the Penrose light cone, moving into the widening cone of the future, leaving a narrowing cone of the past, there is a large part 'laterally' which can not be seen/predicted/known.

One way of 'flattening out the cone,' that is, including a larger area of observation/control, is through monstrosity, or the inclusion of more and more heterogeneous elements in paratactic, non-hierarchical formations. 'Monsters' however are 'mules', and cannot reproduce but require an external assemblage for their re-production, hyphenated because actualy closer to production in an industrial sense. A species is simply the result of sports, a mutant monster that found another monster close enough in genetic structure (both being thrown up by external circumstances) and were able to found 'likeness'. The process of external instantiation has apparently moved to a new level of combinatorics, no longer needing the traditional family. Perhaps this will mean ultimately the generation of human 'mules' and monsters exclusively (which is precisely the advanced cyborg thesis).

The ultimate 'flattening' of this cone (in an oscillating form, so mindful of the sexual act itself) is the messianic ideal, the flatline of teh apocalyptic millennialists' dream, an infinite synchrony, collapse of yesterday and tomorrow into only Now (Walter Benjamin's jetzzeit, shards of messianic time shooting through the 'now', threatening to collapse them all together.)

The family has become the bottleneck of this ever-widening cone, trailing genealogy, kinship, and, increasingly, trauma and suffering behind it (as memory shifts from ROM to RAM) and failing to project it's old fractilized image into the future. The paratactic machinery of the cyborg nation requires complete portability / plug-ability / scalability (what passes for cyborg genealogy). The famble family, stuttering, stammering, stamping its way out of existence, is too slow, awkward, shot thorugh with too many impediments (chief among them, biological reproduction and the concept of 'motherhood' itself.)

This messianic flattening (which simultaneously brings a horizon in to view and is intrinsically tied to the collapse which techné brings) , inasmuch as 'communicative monstrosity' is an integral part, must include machinic assemblages as a constitutive aspect of this new re-combinatoric. Although a machine cannot take part in reproduction, it can increasingly act as incubator until mechanical control of genetic recombination becomes possible. (The culture 'knows' all this and constantly presents itself with images, scenarios, etc. in the form of an increasing stream of movies, tv shows, computer games, etc, which show as well as embody -- special effects, which turn into spectral affects -- in the actual process of technology, this machinic recombinant.)

No amount of rational cognition will bring these issues into focus, much less control. The attempt to do so merely institutes a reversal, or iteration into another dimension of the complex (the 'elsewhere' of the light cone. The excavatory techniques allied with modernist subjectivity bring to bear an assemblage of techniques in an attempt to 'flatten the cone,' open up all spaces to interrogation, and subsequently speed and then disappearance, as both Paul Virilio and Jean Baudrillard have observed. BUT...there is always that blind spot on the driver's side, or a skotoma, or dark spot, a spot whcih art and poesis have tradionally dealt with (and, always allied with art before the era of lift-off, shamanism, witchery, sorcery in their conjunction with controlled systems of chance and divination, making use of 'skotographs' or devices -- metaphorically -- for writing in the dark. This ontology of crossings is at odds wtih the ontology of the Cross. The difference, perhaps, between erections and weavings.)