Point of Departure
Culture, TechnologyA conversation . . .
Debord:
In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation. The images detached from every aspect of life fuse in a common stream in which the unity of this life can no longer be reestablished. Reality considered partially unfolds, in its own general unity, as a pseudo-world apart, an object of mere contemplation. The specialization of images of the world is completed in the world of the autonomous image, where the liar has lied to himself. The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living.
Plato:
Someday, in the distant future, our grandchildren’s grandchildren will develop a new equivalent of our classrooms. They will spend many hours in front of boxes with fires glowing within. May they have the wisdom to know the difference between light and knowledge.
Derrick Jensen:
When you don’t know how to connect, when connection frightens you so much, I suppose this simulation is better than nothing. Isn’t it better to watch nature programs than to never see nature at all? We’re substituting imaginary experiences with the images of things for experiences with the things themselves, having already substituted the experience of things for the possibility of relationship with other beings.
Martin Buber:
Through the Thou a person becomes I. The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable: through the embracing of one of its beings.
Jean Baudrillard
Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things.
June 5th, 2009 at 5:22 am
It won’t be long before artificial intelligence makes us all their slaves, eh? ;)
June 5th, 2009 at 1:35 pm
Gilles Deleuze
Systems in which different relates to different through difference itself are systems of simulacra. Such systems are intensive; they rest ultimately upon the nature of intensive quantities, which precisely communicate through their differences. The fact that conditions are necessary for such communication to take place (small difference, proximity, etc.) should lead us to believe not in a condition of prior resemblance, but only in the particular properties of intensive quantities which may divide, but do so only in changing their nature according to their own particular order. As for resemblance, it seems to us to result from the functioning of the system, like an ‘effect’ which it would be wrong to take for a cause or condition. In short, systems of simulacra must be described with the help of notions which, from the outset, appear very different from the categories of representation.
Jean Luc Nancy
The perspective of truth thus regards this lack as the site of what it desires just as well, but whose lack it is devoted to revealing. By revealing the lack — the figure itself, the imitation, the representation, the allegory, the mythology, literature — it speaks the truth about it: that it is a lack, that it is false (error, illusion, lie, deceit). In speaking this truth, it however speaks only half the truth: it lacks presence beyond the figure, or within the figure itself. But the discourse of truth claims that this presence is beyond being. This discourse itself proceeds until this beyond, where it perishes in an excessive light, the dazzle in which every possible figure disappears…
Rather than a lack, it is a surfeit of presence. It hollows out the space of self-outpouring in which every presence comes into presence and is presented…
But such is the very stuff of our experiencing this time. Such is our very territory; and a voyage through it demands that we go beyond every territory, compelling us to begin from that very same place where we thought we would end.
The Rolling Stones
I know it’s only rock ‘n roll but I like it.
June 23rd, 2009 at 7:48 pm
Thank goodness the kid is a good looking, able bodied, “normal” white boy. Someone we can all identify with!
June 23rd, 2009 at 7:51 pm
Thank goodness Milo is a good looking, able bodied, “normal” white boy. Someone we can all identify with!