"Everything we experience today in the mode of a limit, or as foreign, or as intolerable will have returned to the serenity of the positive. And whatever currently designates this exteriority to us may well one day designate us.
Michel Foucault in
Only the enigma of this exteriority will remain."
Madness, the Absence of Work
What else can one say, other than to express condolences? What once appeared as break-throughs now often seem to be break-ins, with everyone "in on it"--and then of course everyone is a culprit, a suspect. And those who are most innocent now even arrive with a finger pointed at them ("cocked" might be a better word)..
Yes, perilous, porous times, nothing seems to hold water, even as our collective "water breaks", bringing a flood tide of Newness (hard to characterize it much beyond that, but it always seems to involve some form of "contraption", of technology; in a new sense, as a purely formal ensemble of effects, affects, techniques, ideas, more allied to contraposition, "positioned directly opposite" but not entirely unconnected with deception, contrivance [the "demographics of invention"]--the high tech world of "virtual reality", computers, artificial life and intelligence, information technology.) A new form of the dialectic perhaps, wound so tightly as not to be clearly visible--but then, is it ever when one seems actively constricted by those coils?
The very density and scope of information flows and their effects/affects is certainly enough to give one serious pause, if not serious vertigo, even nausea. And yet this New Electronic Environment seems to be missing a certain spine tingling Otherness, related to what was once called the Sublime, that failed pursuit of A Great Thing. And always destined to fail, to not make the mark, to fall from the "vast, cool, and indifferent" Inhuman into the human: in fact, that "differend" is the very sign of the sublime according to Kant--the abysmal failure of the human mind to grasp or inhabit certain enormities but rather to only gaze upon them from well within the human, the depth of the swoon perhaps being somehow proportional to the span of the abyss. Acording to Michel Serres, that failure is coded into the very word sub-lime: to always be under the border, the limit, to see the vista but not to be able to cross over into it. (One could no doubt deputize Moses as a litigant here, for at stake is a whole range of JudeoChristian ontotheologies.) And certainly the Apocalypse can be seen as the grandest, most necessary, failure of the sublime (though Churches everywhere must always pose it as the consummate success), that Final Border under which everything else must pack it in, fall back, continually, over and over (well, it's only supposed to happen once--and later, always later-- but...someone, somewhere, is always, already in a state of premature evacuation before the Big One comes), until,--in a final, fearsome, awe-ful display of evacuation,-- the truly final collapsing of human into God, with no leftover. Perhaps the lesser historical sublime is a portent of that final Sublimation, fractally playing out backward from that played-out singular future. And maybe the relation of the sublime to the apocalyptic is akin to the pusher and the kid on the playground's edge: "C'mon kid, just a little taste can't hurt..." Us westerners don't have a lock on apocalyptic sentiments but we do seem to have installed various versions of it at the heart of many of our cultural enterprises. It could be that the Apocalypse doesn't have the Last Word; it does, however, mark a distinct border. Whether it's an unreachable Last Border is not, and may never be, clear. (We could mention Marx's attempt at a secular apocalypse, and now the extrapolations of many technonoids toward the idea of a Technological Singularity. It is in the intersticies of the latter that we begin to see the breakdown of sublime models of collapse and the arrival of more uncanny, viral, parasitic forms of cultural development.)
Technology has simultaneously, though not paradoxically, exacerbated and collapsed the sublime at the same time, finding a more appropriate affect in the displacement accredited to the unheimlich . One translation of unheimlich is, literally, "un-homed", to have been so severely displaced that one finds oneself coming back at oneself in an eery, uncanny fashion, dopplegangers everywhere. The enormous vistas of the sublime have black-holed to quantum state distances, superpositions and paradoxes, with vistas, gazes, panopticons giving way to tunneling, memory bank effects (and concomitant False Memory Effect), stochastics/demographics, and: all the differences between mass and information (those differences perhaps giving rise to the sublime) and their erasure. The erosion of those differences, the intrusions of Bataillean General Economics, lit by solar flares, filtered through protocols, strained by Nets, leads to the human sieved out, apportioned, pressured -- until fading, etiolation, occurs, meer specters of our former selves. And leakage (always happens under pressure), slow spillage rolling away from the source, giving semblances of life as it stains its way. Everything seems to skitter away like a pool of mercury hit with a ball peen hammer. At some point (not yet) the osmosis reverses perhaps: reconstruction. But then there's this: new wine in the same old bottles won't work anymore.