The Age of Living in the Crack

I came across a quote from the film director Jean Renoir to the effect that “A director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it into pieces and makes it again.” It could well be said (and has been said well) that the same is true of books and ideas: most writers and thinkers have one book and/or idea which they massage variously in a life-long career. I was thinking recently as I was working on a bit of writing that that is surely the case with me. Although looking over whatever meager production I have done in installation art or writing or sound production has all veered in the same direction -- although when called to state the connections between the pieces and the way they move together (like , say, when one is asking for money to do something), I become a little flummoxed since, to some degree, it defeats the purpose of a more subterranean approach. There is no necessity for so corraling events except under the duress of money -- which can be a considerable pressure these days.

At any rate I was re-reading The Political Theology of Paul by Jacob Taubes and came across a long quote which Taubes attributes to Carl Schmitt (within the quote at the end Schmitt quotes Kierkegaard) which seems to address much of what I've been concerned with, in however feeble a manner. In reading the quote over several times it strikes me as to how much the bifurcation spoken of therein spreads out to many other contemporary artistic, cultural and theoretical concerns:

Precisely a philosophy of concrete life must not withdraw from the exception and the extreme case, but must be intersted in it to the highest degree. The exception can be more important to it than the rule, not becasue of a romantic irony for the paradoxical, but becasue of the seriousness of an insight that goes deeper than the clear generalizations inferred from what ordinarily repeats itself. The exception is more interesting than the norm. The normal proves nothing. The exception proves evrcything: it not only confirms the rule; rather, the rule exists only through the exception. In the exception the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition. A Protestant theologian who demonstrated the vital intensity possible in theological reflection even in the nineteenth century stated: "The exception explains the universal and itself. And if one wants to study the universal correctly, one only needs to look around for a true exception. It reveals everything more clearly than does the universal itself. Eventually one grows weary of the incessant chatter about the universal; there are exceptions. If they cannot be explained, then the universal cannot be explained either. Generally, the difficulty is not noticed because one thinks the universal not with passion but with a comfortable superficiality. The exception, however, thinks the universal with intense passion."

It's interesting to think that this may a sort of theological notion (think: the resurrection, miracles), albeit one which underlies much of secularist modernism in its administrative overflow (see G. Agamben's recent work for elucidations).

Although it could be argued that actually LIVING in the exception could be difficult, perhaps that is exactly what living in a messianic age would entail: coping incessantly with the exception. And after all what is the current idea of the coming Singularity but exactly that? It would certainly be something close to impenetrable.

Outside the Borders of the District: on District 9

Outside the Borders of the District: on District 9
part 1

"At first glance, it appears that the uncanny is a fear of the familiar, whereas nostalgia is a longing for it; yet for a nostalgic, the lost home and the home abroad often appear haunted. Restorative nostalgics don’t acknowledge the uncanny and terrifying aspects of what was once homey. Reflective nostalgics see everywhere the imperfect mirror images of home, and try to cohabit with doubles and ghosts."

Svetlana Boym

"In all mourning there is the deepest inclination to speechlessness, which is infinitely more than ability or disinclination to communicate. That which mourns feels itself thoroughly known by the unknowable. To be named – even when the namer is Godlike and blissful – perhaps always remains an intimation of mourning. But how much more melancholy to be named not form the one blessed, paradisiac language of names, but from the hundred languages of man, in which name has already withered, yet which, according to God’s pronouncement, have knowledge of things …

"In the language of men, however, [things ] are over-named … over-naming as the deepest linguistic reason for all melancholy and (from the point of view of the thing) of all deliberate muteness."

Walter Benjamin

"Time is precisely the impossibility of an identity fixed by a place.

[….]

While place is dogmatic, the coming back of time restores an ethics."

Michel de Certeau

Giorgio Agamben begins The Open with the now-famous passage concerning a painting in the back of a Hebrew bible from the thirteenth century of animal-headed humans at a banquet table of the righteous on the last day, a possible reconciliation of the animal and the human at the point of concluded humanity.

However, with the power of computers in special effects we no longer have to wait for the reconciliations ofthe end of time and concluded humanity, since chimeras are the bread and butter of the film industry. And while theriomorphs (the combination of gods and beasts) can only be simulated who is to tell how far that simulation will, in a thousand years, eventually reach?

District 9, while giving off the glint of a simple metaphor of apartheid, transferred to stranded space aliens, would indeed be a weak film (as would the whole concept of science fiction) if that was the only conjecture/concatenation being proferred. (The very same 'weak' thesis of the movie was put forward by the-president Ronald Reagan in the context of a world that would become united if there were the threat of invasion by space aliens.)

The deeper reading would be two fold and each related to the other: 1) the nature of the exilic condition, of homelessness (and the relation to the uncanny); and 2) the relation of the human to the animal (and that unsettling of relation to one’s own body as home and the uncanniness that results).

The next day after seeing the movie, I recalled the place of the hand in Heideigger’s meditations on techne (the well know ready-to-hand and present-to-hand) and Derrida's attempt to investigate the undecidability of touch and the hand (in both Jean-Luc Nancy and Heidegger). Now is not the time to rehearse any of these positions other than to point out the primacy of the human 'hand' in the movie as it turns into its alien other – which of course would be closer to the parallel of the hand associated with the radical other, the tentacle.

(I’m also now reminded of an earlier project, the text of which follows:

The Discovery of People in the Invisible Part of the Universe

In the recent Korean film ‘Old Boy,’ the protagonist is put into solitary confinement for 15 years, with nothing but popular television for entertainment. When he escapes, the pivot scene happens when he stops into a sushi bar and orders something live. He is delivered a live octopus that he maniacally consumes, then falls into a swoon. Thus begins a switch into another symbolic level of (in)operabilty, signaled by the omnipresent signifier of radical otherness, the tentacle. (As a hint: the film very cleverly plays off the relations between 'octopus’ and 'Oedipus,' both entities signposts of coming forbidden liminal states.)

'Tentacularity' is always a spectacular gateway to various extremes of otherness in cultural representations, a representation of that which is furthest from the human and which is always portrayed as a monstrous collapse into a regime at destructive odds with the human. The most well known popular representative of this visual motif is the portrayal of the aliens' craft in the recent film 'War of the Worlds.'

One can be sure that the arrival of the tentacle is also the arrival of the inhuman and uncanny in opposition to the human. One only has to remember those animations in the fifties of the world picture of the great octopus of communism and its encircling red arms.

But tentacularity is part of a larger body of symbology which includes Medusa and the concept of aura. All three, tentacle, medusa, and aura, are active liminalities which reach out beyond their immediate ground to encircle and tear from the human it’s essential humanness, Medusa causing a stone-like paralysis, a mortification of time, and in the aura, or halo, a radiance creating a 'leak' in the human into the divine as well as effecting a porosity into (and out of) the material substrate of it's surroundings.

The recognition of these three facets – an unapproachable and monstrous inhumanness, a lapse into the pure materialty of a stone-like death, and the leakage into and out of the human by some form of transcendance -- signifies a rupture and switch into new forms.

(By the way: these three states all entail some form of luminescence: the octopus uses a form of polarized light to communicate—and it has been theorized that this ability to perceive in the polarized state acts a ‘secret’ form of communication with its kin, perhaps through its ability to change the color and patterns of its skin through chromatophores; the medusa effect is a cessation of sight through a direct seeing of the forbidden, while the aura / halo is an excess of light, radiance, and intolerable to a materialist culture, a form of incompatable de-monstration.)

Even though the protagonist, a human, is slowly turning alien, his hand has apparently turned completely into an alien hand/tentacle , a fact which, significantly, allows him to fire the alien weaponry (which cannot be operated by the human hand). There is certainly 'monstrosity' here but it is uncertain what 'shows forth' (at the root of the word monstrous, eg., de-monstrate): the human, the alien, or the animal. One might say that the coalescence of the alien and animal (the gestures of the scavenging stranded space creatures all reference apes, and predators; the only time that this does not appear to be the case is in the presence of the technology they have hidden and are using to reach their home world: in that case they take on the bearing of the human, even to the point of incorporating an infant alien) yields the possibility of an uncanny third, almost a gnostic concept (perhaps by way of a more contemporary bio-cybernetic) of relation of flesh as sheath and consciousness as inhabitant of vessel.

N.B. Some might wish to look over the J. Derrida's series, Geschlecht (especially Geschlecht II: Heidegger's Hand) where issues of chirology (right/left symmetry) and issues of sexuality and related issues of race, genre, nationalism and the idea of a neutrality between positions; certainly in terms of the aliens in District 9, they seem effectively neutered even though the idea of interspecies sexuality is raised to discredit the protagonist. Not knowing the codes of that species, they seem flattened in terms of the categories humans most often use to make judgements: race, sex, nationality, etc. The idea of the uncanny is largely unfigured here. )

The (square root of two) Resurrection of the Body: Hyrdrocarbon Angels Streaming Down the Gulf

pt 3

"Only a resurrection redistributes death and life to their places, by showing that life does not necessarily occupy the place of the dead."

Alain Badiou: St. Paul ...

"A higher calculus without remain(s): what consciousness wants to be."

j. derrida, Glas

"… it is a question of opening up the earth—dark, hard, and lost in space."

Jean-Luc Nancy, Dis-enclosure of Christiantity

"The (any) return is always a form of technic, always ahumanly existing before the human, and creating the human. To want to return to the before of return is to want to return to either the animal or the divine, difficult sometimes to tell the difference. [….] To want to see the singular (re) appearance of what has gone, died, disappeared: is that not the height of folly as well as the greatest experiment in the technical, the engineering of an alternate world, a world that is potentially present everywhere, all the time, a threshold continuously being opened and closed simultaneously, a world constituted by the individual subject, the human continuously striving for sovereignty, eve the object world brought along, skein of nodes: “In my view, which can be justified only by the exposition of the system itself, everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject." (Hegel in Phenomenology of Spirit. This taken from a section in The Political Theology of Paul by Jacob Taubes. Shortly after the quote Taubes glosses this by referencing Spinoza and Schelling as they pursue it in a generalized sense but extends it by allowing as to the possible of the individual 'I' being included in the equations: this would have to be the materialist reserve of any possible Christian vectored resurrection, no generalized eastern resumption of essence but a full-flavored self, the 'I', as improbable and fantastical that sounds to modern ears.)”

Fehta Murghana from That Which Comes

Can a re-gathering of distributed being be considered resurrection? If it is a simple numerical dispersion, it’s a question of: can it be done by human structure or is it an impossible proposition? (We humans consider anything that we can’t do to be impossible). This, even though it has been an imperial command for since we became conscious,. There is something in us that wants to come back, sometimes against our best (collective) wishes. Is that something that knows better than our individual consciousness …or is it a simple remnant of past eras encoded in our thought, myths, conduct? Whatever, it forms the most formidable thought for those who can think it and none can really, fully, since to think it totally means that one has come back. Which means that it passes from thought/potentiality to a fait accompli, ceasing to be impossible, passing from mere zombie thought into total presence, into our very objects, environment, stones, machines, the cry of the inanimate becoming audible, the invisible becoming only transparent.

An interesting article by Fernando Vidal (Brains, Bodies, Selves, and Science: Anthropologies of Identity and the Resurrection of the Body, Critical Enquiry, summer 2002) covers a great deal of ground but a couple of quirky attempts to account for bodily resurrection are those of Bernard Nieuwentijt’s 'stamen' theory from 1714 and Charles Bonnet’s 'other brain' theory. Stamen means filament or thread and if resurrection is possible, reasons Nieuwentijt, then identity must be somehow ‘threaded’ through matter and time, reproducing itself or hatching, like the stamen which continues the flower, into matter but keeping some ur-identity. Vidal glosses this in a footnote: "The stamen theory, which may be called the germ theory of bodily identity, has a descendent in Saul Kripke's notion of the necessity of origin, according to which a person’s identity is ultimately defined by genealogy; the one thing we cannot be is the offspring of parents other than our own". See Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity, Oxford, 1980. Of course this has the taint of that now much feared idea of essentialism, not to even speak of the taint of questions of origin. This reference certainly made me go back to the venerable Kripke book.

Vidal glosses Charles Bonnet (late 1700s) thus (I quote at length because it seems oddly prescient for a futurist, cybernetic world):

"Personal identity depends on memory (Locke’s thesis), and memory is based in the brain. It follows that, if man is to keep his identity in the afterlife, his soul must remain united to some indestructible organ, perhaps the same that functions as the seat of the soul. Bonnet describes it as a 'little ethereal machine' and as an 'indestructible brain' encased in the brains of our terrestrial bodies. In addition to being the seat of the soul, the little machine is the germ of resurrected bodies. I will therefore act in truly embryological fashion, producing bodies in accordance with the preformationist emboîtment theory of generation.

In short, our present brains enclose another brain, destined to develop in the afterlife and to restore our identity, personality, and boy together. Since the resurrected body will be spiritual and incorruptible, the 'small human body' hidden in the seat of the soul must be physically different from our bodies of flesh."

Perhaps the mystery is not that things are different but that they remain the same.

Perhaps science (or at least science's 'body,' technology, the point at which idea becomes material) is another venue for the mystery.

Some wait, as if paralyzed, waiting for the dream.

footnote to previous part 2, regarding number and resurrection:

"In effect, it is law at the purest, formalist level, law as "the ideal of the
matheme," that governs the new coming into being of the subject. Thus, to the
question: "But why is it necessary to reject law onto the side of death?" Badiou answers:
"Because considered in its particularity, that of the works it prescribes, the law blocks the subjectivation of grace's universal address as pure conviction, or faith. The law 'objectifies' salvation and forbids one from relating it to the gratuitousness of the Christ- event." As such, the event is, by itself, an "illegal contingency, which causes a multiplicity in excess of itself to come forth and thus allows for the possibility of overstepping finitude." The evental situation, before subjectivation, is the site of "the excess of grace, thus, of a pure act," i.e. the resurrection.

Although Badiou addresses a philosophical-political question in his analysis of
Paul and the law, what comes through the apparent antinomianism of the message is, unexpectedly – as if to corroborate the very evental process he describes – the
reanimation of law in a different guise. That is, in the truth-event, there is not a rejection or repudiation of law sensu stricto, but its realignment, rearrangement, to effectuate the resurgence (resurrection) of the subject."

Re-interpretation of Paul's Concept of Law
Tawia Ansah

The Hemipygic Resurrection of the Glorious Body: The Law En-Fortressed and Made to Walk
part 2

I had work done on my car recently and they needed the VIN number, a 17 digit identification number that details type of car, origin, where assembled, the order in which it was asembled etc. I was thinking that it is sort of the car’s DNA code, providing the car with a barebones bid for immortality – at least as much as 17 digits can provide. All the threads that concern the physical makeup of the car and the genetic we might say, as opposed to contingent knocks and bumps of acccidentality that make up real life as opposed to VIN life. The VIN numbers are threads that, when knotted together form the vehicle secret life.

That said, perhaps it would seem feasible to resurrect the car given a totalizing accident. However, and without going into philosophical disquisitions on identity from the Greeks to the computer age, most folks would contend that the car was reconstructed, not resurrected. The 'secret code/life' of a human would have something to do with consciousness and not necessarily with place of assembly (which is not to say that would not have an impact, contingent and genetic somehow coming together in a knotted tsunami of time, place, terrain, perhaps even position in re: to the rest of the universe; to a greater or less degree it seems this is what we think of as the human -- and perhaps other living, impactable entities -- with perhaps even some added dispositions and reckoning that we have little kin of, except by hearsay, myth, magical thinking or other eldritch considerations, none of which I discount by the way). I suppose the purported law-like regularity of the universe, always, everywhere and everywhen, could be called to the bar at this point. (Although, now that I think on it, the VIN resurrection scenario fits perfectly now, at least as far as filmic bring-backs; one only has to think of the Transformers series and maybe even the Terminators…certainly don't seem that far from a zombie re-instatement of an appliance and calling it alive.)

The Law (of matter) perhaps only seems implacable here, filmed over, encrusted with its own come-backs, precedented, trusted to have been here before, perogative of lost innocence, portrait of returns piling ever higher: the Law does not have a human face and after it has broken free from the natural world it has no 'Age' but looks 'back' which it configures silently, invisibly, out in the Open and inato the Forward, Janus -faced. (The Christian Resurrection would say, in its very heart: the Law is made to be broken and it will be done by Him after which we all follow, facing into the sun, rising from our graves, round the rim of the earth, the air on that Last Day filled, packed with shining Dead; well, that's the plan anyway....may take our trusty servant, the Machine, that other Law, to open the graves even more than it has already done.... what is it w. benjamin said? "... even the dead will not be safe", only the barest of the bare lifers will be let in. Huzzah! )

LivingDead the Law marches silently over the frozen tundra, The Law as zombie machine (number) has taken over all possibilities of resurrection, until the real Messiah returns to break one and install another regime. And that is always 'any minute now,' (the same as my grandfather's disposition (deacon's sketch) of time and salvation sketch at the front of this article which hangs on my desk now, timeless Law becoming a matter of genealogic threading though matter, the Law of Reproduction the only law that counts, oddly enough, for an inhuman law, your DNA (the soul's VIN?) nailed to the cross, spiraling, spiraling ever onward...

At the heart of the heart: does anything beat there? There beats the Inhuman Resurrection, composed of those same angel feathers, insanely beating, lifting....


"Resurrection: Borgo San Sepolcro"
Rowan Williams

So the black eyes
fixed half-open, start to search, ravenous,
imperative, they look for pits, for hollows where
their flood can be decanted, look
for rooms ready for commandeering, ready
to be defeated by the push, the green implacable
rising. So he pauses, gathering the strength
in his flat foot, as the perspective buckles under him,
and the dreamers lean dangerously inwards. Contained,
exhausted, hungry, death running off his limbs like drops
from a shower, gathering himself. We wait,
paralysed as if in dreams, for his spring.

The (Half-Assed) Resurrection of the Body: Angel Feathers in the Gorge
part 1

gorge (gôrj)

noun

1. the throat or gullet
2. the crop or stomach of a hawk
3. 1. the maw or stomach of a voracious being or animal
   2. food or a meal to fill or stuff the stomach
   3. the contents of the stomach
4. a feeling of disgust, anger, etc. it made my gorge rise
5. the entrance from the rear into a bastion or projecting section of a fortification
6. a deep, narrow pass between steep heights
7. ☆ a mass that blocks up a passage

It is no wonder that the zombie has become a leading cultural indicator in the current ‘new age.’ It seems inevitable that the various Copernican revolutions would lead to the final dethroning of all forms of agency and subjectivity, to the point that official rationalist ideologies would leave nothing behind their razed path but mindless matter and soul-less motion.

Oddly enough, such a turn of events may make the idea of the ‘resurrection of the body’ less of a transcendental theological idea and more of a contemporary immanentist conceit. A populist/futurist version of projected resurrection can be encountered in the so-called Toynbee Tiles . (If their origin is correct, the relationship between memorialization and the idea of zombies – that is, half-assed resurrection as a memorialization of rage – becomes more tenable),

And yet….while bandied abut often in techno circles (freezing the body or just freezing the head; or uploading consciousness into a container and robotizing the body into which it would then be downloaded), all of them are about a truncated continuance of existence, a zombified existence; not a re-birth as a portal or threshold or opening. (|) .Apparently this ‘death-in-life’ would be the continuation of the neoliberal state by other means. But whatever it, death, means it is one of the most untouchable of the untouchables while yet remaining the most formative of life.

I like this long piece form Nancy’s Noli me tangere on the ‘non-ness,’ the pushing away of Christ’s resurrection:

“What for religion is the renewal of a presence that bears the phantasmatic assurance of immortality is revealed here to be nothing other than the departing into which presence actually withdraws, bearing its sense in accordance with this parting. Just as it comes, so it goes: this is to say that it IS not, in the sense of something being fixed within presence, immobile and identical to itself, available for use as a concept. “Resurrection” is the uprising [surrection], the sudden appearance of the unavailable, of the other and f the one disappearing IN THE BODY ITSELF AND AS THE BODY. This is not a magical trick. It is the very opposite: the dead body remains dead, and that is what creates the “emptiness” of the tomb, but the body that theology will later call ‘glorious’ (that is, shining with the brilliance of the invisible) reveals that this emptiness is really the emptying out of presence. No, nothing is available here: don’t try to seize upon a meaning for this finite and finished life, don’t try to touch or to hold back what essentially distances itself and, in distancing itself, touches you with its very distance (in both senses: touches you with and from a distance). It is as though it were touching you while permanently disappointing your expectations, touching you with what makes rise up before you, for you, even that which does not rise up. This uprising or insurrection is a glory that devotes itself to disappointing you and to pushing your outstretched hand away. For its brilliance is nothing other than the emptiness of the tomb. The ‘arisen’ does not mediate the one through the other: he exposes (he ‘reveals’) how they are the same absenting, the same gap that one dares not touch, since it is this gap alone that touches us to the quick: o the point of death.”
[….]
“The resurrection is not a return to life. It is the glory at the heart of death: a dark glory, whose illumination merges with the darkness of the tomb.

“The glorious body is the one that leaves and at the same time the one that speaks, that speaks only in leaving, that withdraws, withdrawing as much into the darkness of the tomb as into the ordinary appearance of the gardener. Its glory radiates only for eyes that know how to see, and those eyes are nothing but the gardener. But the gardener speaks, and he says the name of she who mourns the departed. To say the name is to say that which both dies and does not die.”

This is a somewhat claustrophobic (non) vision one might say. No wonder that the demotic imagination would prefer UFOs piloted by the dead or telephone calls from the dead, the vast pyramid of the dead waiting to be funneled into ‘here’ from wherever they are (or not – one can hardly say ‘where they are stored’ since that is not exactly what is meant; in fact it becomes hard to say exactly WHAT is meant when speaking of death All we can say is that as long as language continues and that reproduction continues a sort of resurrection continues and which is different from a zombie resurrection of death in life which techno threatens (and oddly enough under the same sort of hubristic expectations that religion engenders in coming up against that black and endless wall.) All life is asymptotic against that wall in a positivist view and a lemniscate of Bernoulli in a more mystical indeterminacy, death a crossing, moving from one node to another., perhaps not resurrection but a recombinant infinite return: Christianity in all its forms (social, bureaucratic, scientific world view) as opposed to the sorceric pagan (one might also call the idea of ‘resurrection’ as a personalized particularity as opposed to the triumph of anonymous materiality.

But what is matter but a continuous string of itself, continuing to coil through itself, returning always to the same place?

Falling Rocks, Becoming Rock: roll away the stone!

For quite a while I had been looking for a DVD of the 1957 movie by director Jack Arnold (who also did The Creature From the Black Lagoon) called Monolith Monsters. It is apparently not available but I happened to do a search for it yesterday on YouTube and there it was in all its black and white fifties glory.

(It will sometimes give you an option to watch all 8 segments automatically)

The storyline: A small western community is beset by a strange phenomena. Apparent a meteor has fallen and is composed of a strange rock-like material but the fragmented pieces of which have the startling ability to grow a hundred feet tall when water hits it, and then to topple whereupon the tip begins the cycle all over again, rising and falling, crushing whatever is in the path of this roving forest of falling rocks. And of course the town people take various actions to ‘cut them off at the pass’ as the deluge proceeds down from the high desert.

Oh, and I forgot one thing: if a person touches one of the weird rocks, they themselves start to slowly turn to rock.

I suppose if I had not posted the article on otoliths ('rocks' inside the head/ear which establish direction, stability, and hence ‘way-finding’ if I can put it that way) and its opening on the holy ka’ba, the Islamic black rock which some claim to be a meteorite, I would not have been so struck by (re)finding Monolith Monsters, about rocks which seem to have a, albeit crude, life of their own and can cause a reification (becoming thing-like) in living creatures.

I use the term reification purposely. It is often used in socio-political studies to indicate an effect that various state apparatuses can have on the individual, making them purposeless, with little affect or direction other than what the apparatus gives them – rock-like in other words!

And of course we HOPE that artistic/creative activity can have an apotropaic quality [From Greek apotropaios, from apotrepein, to ward off : apo-, apo- + trepein, to turn.]
'referring to an image or device which is designed to ward off unwanted influences' --- and often times by being a part of the evil, or by seducing it, in order to get it closer and deal with it (e.g., homeopathic medicine). Although in this case I think of those Japanese beetle traps which contain a hormone, intending to entice the bugs but ALSO sending out a general signal which can flood the area with unintended consequences. (within the context of the film, the apotropaic magical substance that undoes the rock monsters is…salt, which of course is a crystalline thing itself and if it had to be used widely , that is, outside the saintly mystical precincts of the desert where such monstration often and appropriate takes place, would wind up killing all life!

The line between living/dead, creative/destructive, the sacred/profane wavers tremendously. As far as I can tell, the apparatus seeks to confine that oscillation while creative activity often seeks to live in that oscillation and even to expand it. Of course that used to be the idea of the 'avant-garde' (living in that oscillatory boundary) and all the other arts (which seek comfortable perception and hence form part of the walls and devices that make the apparatus work; this is called ordinary life and can be a good thing...think life in war time -- er, the old sort of war time -- when nothing works).

Now that doesn't seem to be the case, since the central core of capitalism seems to be a sort of experimentalist impulse which it has found out can be a way of expanding markets and inventing new resources (the cyberworld) which it can exploit. We see now that the advance guard in the arts was aptly named. The image and the apparatus have found a way to mutually reinforce themselves, and most times with little regard for the 'human' element but rather most importance placed on the structural supports (not that it’s that easy to tell them apart—but that’s another story…sorta.) In a way, which I won't expand, everyday life now IS a sort of wartime, at least in the speeds, tensions, collisions, accidents, disruptions that now seem continuous.

But the becoming-alive of the obdurate, admantine stuff which surrounds us is an old story (along with the becoming-rock of the human, most famous being the tale of the medusa; but that’s another story too… sorta) as is really the blurred line dividing the two (e.g. Ovid's Metamorphosis). Perhaps what is different now (arguable. Some would say nothing is different now) is the tech we have to facilitate those transitions…what happens when artists are able to make chimera with table top equipment? (which reminds me of a new movie which I haven't seen yet – Splinters - but which seems to have some elements in common with the Monolith Monsters with the same difference as other fifties sci fi / horror films from then: then the horror was always from the outside trying to get in; now its from the inside trying to get out; think Invasion of the Body Snatchers and its remakes.)

Perhaps that is where the apparatus and the image truly fuse … but I wouldn't start jumping for joy just yet …wait until you REALLY hear rocks falling.