Robert Cheatham

William Shatner had it all wrong. The "final frontier" is not space but time, or more particular still, the end of time, death. The history of modernity has seen repeated attempts to open channels to the dead via various tele-'s: -graphy, -pathy, -vision, -phony. One only has to read biographies of Edison, Bell, Tesla, Marconi, all working to channel both dead relatives and modern electric tech to its feet while at the same time spiritualists were wrestling with ectoplasm, thereby forming the new teleplasm we inhabit today.

The latter days of technology now seem involved in the wider aspect of cross-dressing the animate and the inanimate: artificial life and intelligence; cloning; and the rise of the master concept of Coding, which governs both transmission and storage. The categories of 'subject' and 'object' and 'organic' and 'inorganic' are being rapidly dwindled to stasis (storage, object) and flow (transmission. subject) --though even these morph into their partner, the very nature of Coding being a porous chiasmatic instability.

Art was originally an evoker of the dead, rescuer of the dead AND the living by visiting the ‘dead’, shuttle craft across the last abyss, a rattle shaken over a decomposing body, a vision pursued through an induced psychotropic haze or abject bodily exhaustion, then revivification with true hallucinations.

Does art still have a psychopompic role to play or has the very speed of transmission / storage precluded even that minimal protestant state? We desire art to come out from some essential place and so art has always gravitated (in one way way or another and before the current era of anti-gravity contraptions which are promised to levitate us beyond the ‘essential’) to the MOST essential, that is, the negative, that is, death.

The supplement, the prosthesis, now speaks to us of non-orders of being, paratactic arrangements of existence that preclude living/dead, truly a levitation beyond all groundings. This not a regime of Truth much less ‘facticity’. More akin to the simultaneous realm of ‘is / is not’ that Schrodinger’s quantum cat lives/does not live out unseen in its unopened box.

Or, perhaps more uncannily closer to home (where strangely enough the greatest distance from ‘home’ can be found, that close distance being the very nature of the uncanny) we could consider also Agamben’s examination of the ‘Bartlebyization’ of these essential positions: "The experiment that Melville entrusts to Bartleby is of this kind. If what is at issue in a scientific can be defined by the question ‘Under what conditions can something occur or not occur, be true or be false?’ what is at issue in Melville’s story can instead be formulated in a question of the following form: ‘Under what conditions can something occur AND (that is, at the same time) not occur, be true NO MORE THAN NOT BE TRUE?’ Only inside an experience that has thus retreated from all relation to truth, to the subsistence or nonsubsistence of things, does Bartleby’s ‘I would prefer not to’ acquire its full sense (or alternatively, its nonsense)."

It could well be that these are not ‘thinkable’ ‘positions’; at least, not a ‘thinking’ as we have heretofor held it to be consituted; nor ‘positions’ arranged like nuggets on a planetary string. As we know from quantum mechanics, other accountings are called for.

But what could possibly constitute a quantum society?

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"Two ruling ambitions in modern technology appear in the phonograph: the creation of artificial life and the conjuring of the dead."

-- John Durham Peters / Speaking Into Air: A History of the Idea of Communication

"..the sex-appeal of the inorganic."

-- Walter Benjamin / Paris, Capital of the twentieth Century

"What are the dead for us, if not--first and foremost--books? Among all forms of prehistoric religion, the strangest and most difficult to understand in our own day seems the cult of the dead, the constant presence of the dead in every aspect of life. To a prehistoric man, in contrast, our strangest and most mysterious form of worship would be our use of books. Yet these two forms of belief converge. Concretized as portable objects that accompany us--our parasites, persecutors, comforters--the dead have settled on the written page. Their power has never diminished, even though it has been wondrously transformed."

-- Robert Calasso/The Ruin of Kasch

"Written kisses don't reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts. It is on this simple nourishment that they multiply so enormously. Humanity senses this and fights against it and in order to eliminate as far as possible the ghostly element between people and to create natural communication, the peace of souls, it has invented the railway, the motor car, the airplane. But it's no longer any help, these are evidently inventions being made at the moment of crashing."

-- Franz Kafka /Letters to Milena

"What Carnot enables us to see is that human technology is basically a species of neg-entropic capture designed to ward off catastrophism, but whose invention always exceeds its own constructed apparatuses of capture on account of its deterritorializing character."

-- Keith Ansell Pearson /Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the -- Transhuman Condition

"If death is the real, and if the real is impossible, then we are approaching the thought of the impossiblity of death."

-- Maurice Blanchot/ Writing the Disaster

"To be haunted and to write from that location, to take on the condition of what you study, is not a methodology or a consciousness you can simply adopt or adapt as a set of rules or an identity; it produces its own insights and blindnesses. Following the ghosts is about making a contact that changes you and refashions the social relations in which you are located."

-- Avery F. Gordon / Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination

"The two key existential facts about modern media are these: the ease with which the living may mingle with the communicable traces of the dead, and the difficulty of distinguishing communication at a distance from communication with the dead."

-- J. D. Peters/Speaking Into Air...

"The spirit-world is as large as the storage and transmission possiblities of a civilization."

-- Fredrich Kittler/Grammophone, Film, Typewriter

"The apparatus consisted of two glass prisms, one coated with resin; an electric bell; and a dry cell. All these components were connected by various wires. A light metal triangle was balanced between the proisms, next to one of the connecting wires. The bell would activate when the metal triangle was pushed (psychically, that is) into contact with the positive connceting wires, thus closing a circuit between the component parts. The device was never meant to bring through communications form the dead per se, and Vandernuelen himself felt that it could best be used as a signaling device. As the patent papers explained: 'The purpose of the signaling device is in informing persons who are busy otherwise that an entity desires to make communication'"

-- D. Scott Rogo and Raymond Bayless/ Phone Calls From the Dead

"To be haunted is not a contest between animism and a discrediting reality test, nor a contest between the unconscious and the conscious faculties. It is an enchanted encounter in a disenchanted world between familiarity and strangeness."

-- A. Gordon/Ghostly Matters...

"Conjuration is anxiety from the moment it calls upon the dead to invent the quick and to enliven the new, to summon the presence of what is not yet there. This anxiety in the face of the ghost is properly revolutionary. If death weighs on the living brain of the living, and still more on the brains of revolutionaries, it must then have some spectral density. To weigh is also to charge, tax, impose, indebt, accuse, assign, enjoin. And the more life there is, the graver the specter of the other becomes, the heavier its imposition. And the more the living have to answer to it. To answer for the dead, to respond to the dead. To correspond and have it out with obsessive haunting, in the absence of any certainty or symmetry. Nothing is more serious and more true, nothing is more exact than this phantasmagoria."

-- Jacques Derrida/Specters of Marx

"During my last visit to Stuttgard, I was walking down a street when suddenly two boys came rushing out of a backyard: a little boy who was being chased by an older boy. Not only did the older boy appear to be much stronger, but he also held a long wooden sword in his hand. Just before the pursuer had reached his victim, the little boy suddenly turned around, picked up a small piece of wood from the ground, and with the courage of desperation attacked the big boy with the long wooden sword. Brandishing his small piece of wood, he cried, 'It's electric, it's electric!' The older boy was so stunned that he dropped his wooden sword and escaped, running off into he backyard. Thus I became a witness to the genesis of a myth: the spontaneous creation of the myth of the third Prometheus. Apparently the theology of electricity has deep roots in human nature and in the structure of the Universe."

-- Ernst Benz/ The Theology of Electricity

Conversation with parapsychologist Barbara Honegger:

"Some view communication with the dead as sinful or devilish."

"There’s nothing evil or devilish about communicating with those you believe dead. There’s no fundamental difference, in my opinion, between talking on the telephone with someone you’ve never met and using the Ouija board. Both are ‘disembodied’ communication."

-- Stoker Hunt/ Ouija: the Most Dangerous Game

"A man or woman who communes with the departed or with a spirit guide ought to forfeit their own physical lives..."

-- God/Leviticus 20:27

"It’s better for the invader, of course, if the victim is alone, isolated, exhausted and ill. Thus, the entity will encourage its victim to drop real friends and rely only on Ouija communications for counsel, advice and companionship. To this end, it will send the victim on wild, purposeless trips. It will recommend dangerous stunts and wild adventures while discouraging healty activities and proper medical care."

-- Hunt/Ouija...

the following two stories were quoted by a therapist in a recent ‘Wired’ magazine:

1) A 40-year old man shot himself in the face in response to a delusion that friends played an embarrassing prank on him. He says they placed on the internet photos of him masturbating and videos of him and his girlfriend having sex. He also believes his friends placed a link between his web site and his body so that when web surfers browsed on his site and hit certain keys, they could cause his extremities to jump.

2) A 41-year old man claims he is a witch and that he runs an on-line service for new witches. He reports that he creates web sites for others, and he believes his powers are so strong that he can surf the internet using only his mind. He also says that he receives magnetism from the internet each day at 2, 4, and 7 p.m.

Neither patient had any, or minimal, experience with computers or the internet.-

"The cult of the dead in any given culture is coextensive with the media extensions of the senses current in that culture. Psychoanalysis, our culture’s institution of mourning keeps open lines of communication with the deceased which are precisely lines of telecommunication. Freud’s disinterment of the phantom voices of the superego, for example, coincides with the advent of phonographic or radio recording...just as photography and film project and animate those phantoms which, in Totem and taboo, haunt those who are unable to grant the dead proper burial."

-- Lawrence Rickels/ Aberrations of Mourning

"What status of otherness can be ascribed to the Other somhow located in the telephone? The telephone has no site as its property, which makes it break down the limits of spatiality -- this is what makes it uncanny, the inside calling from an internal outside. To what degree has the Other become a technologized command post, perhaps even a recording? The telephone appears to have procured a subject who in a Lacanian way, may well be headless, but only because the technoid headset doubles for a head that is no longer entirely there."

-- Avital Ronell/ The Telephone Book

-"The apparition--the nucleus of Marianism in the absence of scriptural ‘facts’--has invariably been an instrument of conquest, ‘evangelization’, revival and agitation."

-- Nicholas Perry and Loreto Echeverria/ Under the Heel of Mary

"When all was ready, Van Helsing said:--

'Before we do anything, let me tell you this; it is out of the lore and experience of the ancients and of all those who have studied the powers of the Un-Dead. When they become such, there comes with the change the curse of immortality; they cannot die, but must go on age after age adding new victims and multiplying the evils of the world; for all that die from the preying of the Un-Dead become themselves Un-Dead, and prey on their kind. And so on the circle goes on ever widening, like as ripples from a stone thrown in the water."

-- Bram Stoker/Dracula

"[....] death, time, their originary absence and their arrival qua the fall itself, the appearance of man as his disappearance, the realization of his possiblity qua his derealization -- it is here, then, in the double of the technical and the human, or rather in the double question of technics and the human, that the relation between anthropology and technics appears as a thanatology."

-- Bernard Stiegler / Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus

"Photos of departed loved ones, letters that may never arrive, disembodied voices that cannot reply -- these and many other facts of everyday life add to the haunting of communication. The people who so blithely dream of dialogue as a robust encounter between two sovereign souls forget the harsher, more uncanny fact that all communication via media of transmission or recording (which have come to include our bodies and souls) is ultimately indistinguisable from communication with the dead."

-- J. D. Peters / Speaking Into Air...

"Human language as articulation (that is, as arrestation and preservation) of this ‘vanishing trace’ is the tomb of the animal voice that guards it and holds firm its ownmost essence: ‘that which is most terrible, i.e., ‘the Dead’ (Hegel)

"For this reason, meaningful language is truly the ‘life of the spirit’ that ‘brings on’ deathand ‘is maintained’ in death; and so -- inasmuch as it dwells in negativity -- it has the ‘magical power’ that ‘converts the negative into being.’ But language has this power and it truly dwellsin the realm of death ony because it is the articulation of that ‘vanishing trace’ that is the animal voice; that is, only because already in its very voice, the animal, in violent death has expressed itself as removed. Because it is inscribed in voice, language is both the voice and memory of death death that recalls and preserves death, articulation and grammar of the trace of death."

Giorgio Agamben/Language and Death: The Place of Negativity

"Today is the bull whose blood must fill the ditch, so that spirits of the dead may appear at its edge."

- Walter Benjamin

originally published online / PERFORATIONS 8 : Death

http://www.pd.org/topos/perforations/perf8/perf8_index.html