The
dimension of the #future
has
disappeared. We're trapped in the 20th century… What it means to be
in the 21st century is to have 20th century culture on hi-res
screens/ distributed by high-speed Internet, actually."1
The
future has been cancelled or to be more exact has
always already been anticipated – calculated
in
different speculative scenarios: in meteorology, in finance,
policing, risk-
or artistmanagement
and many other fields –
and thus processing the yet to come. Big
data is nowadays the primary tool in which the idea of fortunetelling
became scientific. As Hans-Christian Dany put it: What we experience
right now is the comeback of Laplace‘s demon. „According
to determinism, if someone (the demon) knows the precise location
and
momentum
of
every atom in the universe, their past and future values for any
given time are entailed; they can be calculated from the laws of
classical
mechanics.“2
While
this idea has already been proven wrong back in the 19th century,
with new technologies of measurement & quantification in
empirical science, daily developing computer power and following the
hope for making sense of big data, scientists nevertheless revived
the idea of an absolute & totalizing determinism. More recently
and especially with companies like Cambridge Analytica, SCL Group,
Psy-Group or Black Cube, as well as scientific labs like
Max-Planck-Institute
for
empirical Aesthetics and police-projects
like ‚Precobs‘
predictability as
a concept expands to the fields of socio-psychology. Besides the
Max-Planck-Institute, which also aims on broader fields of
application – mainly in neurological understanding of the brain &
AI-development – all of these work with predictability as a means
to control.
The
main-concept behind most of their analyzes are the ‚big
five
personality traits (aka
five-factor
model)‘ using
the statistical technique of factor analysis for describing aspects
of personality and expected behaviour breaking it down into 5
categories:
Openness
to experience (inventive/curious vs. consistent/cautious)
Conscientiousness
(efficient/organized vs. easy-going/careless)
Extraversion
(outgoing/energetic vs. solitary/reserved)
Aggreeableness
(friendly/compassionate vs. challenging/detached)
Neuroticism
(sensitive/nervous vs. secure/confident)
While
using contemporary physiology-tracking-devices & big data might
prove useful for lighting up former blind spots, it is necessary to
understand all those tools rather as sensing technology than for
making sense.3
Which most scientific approaches basically fail to acknowledge. Thus
making errors in comprehending the real, as
the immanent One or the indivisible One as Laruelle calls it.
Understanding the one-in-one as an immanent category asks for the
heterogeneous4
and is not hermeneutic. „The heterogeneous here is by no means to
be understood as a collection of different things, but as pure
differentiation. Laruelle does not say that the real is virtual, but
it must be borne in mind that while it remains immanent in itself, it
is at every point and therefore virtual to every point. And the more
radical immanent it is, the more universally it determines in the
last instance philosophy and the philosophizable, i.e. the world.“5
With
this said, it‘s about time to slowly approach the arts and more
specific „Aphàiresis“. With Clicks & Cuts – or probably
more popular Glitch6
– we speak of errors & imperfection in the context of
technology. Small mistakes, misusage of code, data & media, and
their application in arts as
aesthetic-phenomenon in themselves rather than garbage which has to
be sort out and cleaned of. While
Gianluca
Iadema mainly uses „Aphàiresis“ for describing process of
abstractions (deriving from the Greek „L‘Apha“, abstraction)
and the disturbances, interferences, imperfections & distortions
coming along with it, I would rather stress the second meaning he
himself proposes „aphar“ - dust:
„We
must occasionally remind the dust (aphar) that it was once man and
immortal matter. A vibrant and pulsating presence anxieties.
Uncertain whisper and accurate and imperfect “silere”. Fear of
glances at the announcement and the contraction of the day. For
always and again the shattered appears to us with each discolouring.
Always and again we propose ourselves in the molecular colours of
nembi. It is felt more intense far away, where the lenses barely
perceive the dense breath of other universes. It insuffles itself
decisively and, by leaps and bounds, it infiltrates into our poor
houses and bodies. A little sparkles out in the open and soothes in
the sacred enclosure of dreams. Perhaps this is why a piercing pain
resonates in the hollow organs and reverberates inadvertently. And so
it is worthwhile to step aside and listen to one another on the
sidelines.“7
In
this sense, especially in contemporary times with the omnipresence of
technology8
& tools that link the personal with technological-devices –
almost no tool is as abstract and as subjectively personal/individual
as the computer – , it might be helpfulp to understand Clicks &
Cuts or Glitch – errors, imperfections & distortions in media –
also as a means to understanding the distorted & dysfunctional,
even traumatized minds & brains of mankind. The
Post-Human or Trans-Human, more science-fictional the cyborg, is
itself traumatized not only traumatized by the process of its
production and the impossibilities of catching up with this new
reality – on a personal- and inter-personal- or collective-level,
but also because the apocalyptic has already happened, is happening,
and was continuously developing ever since: The tragedy is our time,
right now – the contemporary. What is to be hoped for is that the
tragic, as Georges Bataille searched for within the
sacred-conspirational group Acéphale, is the point from which
mankind comes together, developes a sense of its inter-dependencies.
Therefore „Aphàiresis“ is not only to be understood as
abstraction & material in play with form, but also – and this
is what I would like to point out – as that which is silent, which
is incapable of articulation and is not speaking. Anxities and fears
inscribed into the body/bodies, sometimes sensible, but always, even
if conscious about it, almost out of reach. The problem is not so
much that it is unconscious, but that consciousness itself doesn‘t
help. The traumatic articulates on several layers first of all as a
problem of sensing, meaning:
making it conscious, which results in diverse displacements,
distortions
and
misattributions. On
another layer it haunts us as repetition, reappearance and
reenactment transforming ourselves into revenants –
acting as some sort of time-distortion or time-travel so to say.
A
moment repeats itself, appears to be reappearing, something happened
long time ago, but only gets to our mind later – we travel back to
that point in time. It is surreal, unreal, as things can be different
to what we understand them, (different) times can overlay each other
– infiltrate or leak (out). Moreover more than one thing can be at
the same time, it‘s not necessary to decide for one or the other,
even if things are contradictory. Last
not least it is inscribed – not just a question of mind or ghost –
as a physical and material problem9,
it
is conditioning;
it articulates behaviour that is beyond our personal control even if
we know about it:
Bearing
similarities
to the
real of Laruelle, it is immanent and at the same time beyond our
comprehension, determining our behaviour in the last instance. Not
only individually, but also collectively; a sort of commonly owned
unconsciousness10,
actualizing itself in process.
1Mark
Fisher: The Slow Cancellation Of The Future
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCgkLICTskQ&
2https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laplace's_demon
3http://www.ephemerajournal.org/contribution/political-economy-pulse-techno-somatic-rhythm-and-real-time-data
4The
category of „the heterogenenous“ tracks back to Georges Bataille
elaborated in his work about „The Psychological Structure of
Fascism“ linking nihilistic philosophy with unconventional marxism
with psychoanalysis & with a quite special/personal sort of
surrealism. For Bataille the heterogenous is everything cut-off for
the production of the homogenenous – both words throughout his
thinking work, sometimes explicit, mostly implicit, as ambiguous
linking-categories for a broad field of sciences.
5For
further reading: https://non.copyriot.com/laruelle-the-one-the-real/
6It
is important for me to note at this point, that the umbrella term
‚Glitch‘ is producing a lot more confusing and misunderstanding
than it does help. Therefore i suggest to understand ‚Glitch‘ as
marketing term and recuperation of „Clicks & Cuts“ as
guerilla tactics.
7Gianluca
Iadema https://forceincmilleplateaux.bandcamp.com/album/aph-iresis
8„Science
fiction’s cyborg was a literal chimera of meat and machine. The
world’s cyborg was an extended human nervous system: film, radio,
broadcast television, and a shift in perception so profound that I
believe we’ve yet to understand it. Watching television, we each
became aspects of an electronic brain. We became augmented. In the
Eighties, when Virtual Reality was the buzzword, we were presented
with images of…. television! If the content is sufficiently
engrossing, however, you don’t need wraparound deep-immersion
goggles to shut out the world. You grow your own. You are there.
Watching the content you most want to see, you see nothing else.
The physical union of human and machine, long
dreaded and long anticipated, has been an accomplished fact for
decades, though we tend not to see it. We tend not to see it because
we are it, and because we still employ Newtonian paradigms that tell
us that “physical” has only to do with what we can see, or
touch. Which of course is not the case. The electrons streaming into
a child’s eye from the screen of the wooden television are as
physical as anything else. As physical as the neurons subsequently
moving[…]“
William Gibson. „Distrust That Particular
Flavor.“
9Likewise
the labour-work, or in it‘s most extreme form slavery, which
inscribes itself as a destruction of bodies and articulates in
health-issues and certain behaviour.
10“…OK,
let’s see… I guess that I’m confused again. Am I here, or am I
there? I don’t know. Over there, I’m everywhere. I know that.
But here is connected to over there. Is that right? But then, where
is the real me after all is said and done. Oh! There is no real me.
I guess that’s it. I only exist inside those people aware of my
existence. But what about this me that I can hear talking right here
and now? It’s me, isn’t it?
(Static appears in transmission) This me that’s talking. Who is it? Who’s me? (Transmission is cut off)”
buy here
watch here
Der Beitrag error & imperfection in techno-psychology (review of „Gianluca Iadema – Aphàiresis“) erschien zuerst auf non.copyriot.com.