The demise of God
and the Reinstantiation
of the devine as media
At bottom, despite the differences in epochs and objectives, the representation of power has remained under the spell of monarchy. In political thought and analysis, we still have not cut off the head of the king. Hence the importance that the theory of power gives to the problem of right and violence, law and illegality, freedom and will, and especially the state and sovereignty. [Foucault, History Of Sexuality, Vol 1.]
Each religion begins with a simulated hallucination of the divine and each religion comes to an end as simulacra of the divine. A modern PreSim is the slave of eternity and it doesn't matter what kind of eternity you like. Eternity means pure history or the pure divine order of logic, or beauty, or language or the human being without realization of its own reinstantiation. They are illusions because they never can be finished (Zeno's first paradox), and remain as real human deeds of action, not abstraction. Or maybe you still think that eternity is something other than the Power of media-generated gestalt? Something outside the power structure of monarchy? Perhaps not.
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves become gods simply to be worthy of it. [Nietzsche]
Maybe all gods are liars and maybe god is not a Cretin. Strictly speaking, that is not the matter of exegesis for any [real] person within a finite system [see Godel]. God is really a |problem space| of multiple dimensions held in adjacency, and containing many facets. Every historic blood-stained epoch has its own image of the divine like it's own image of the divine. If you are not a worshipper of this ironic parody, you may feel that now the image of a monotheistic singularity-[G]od vanishes into thin air and only eternity as parody remains for common use. We needn't rush into other religious-formal-systems. We would do our best to find a new image for our dying epoch, but all the same we remain monotheists and monarchists which are absolutely caught in our consciousness, inside the sphere, staring at the center.
'And what is the saint doing in the forest?' asked Zarathustra. The saint answered: 'I make songs and sing them; and when I make songs, I laugh, cry, and hum: thus do I praise God. With singing, crying, laughing, and humming do I praise the god who is my god. But what do you bring us as a gift?' When Zarathustra had heard these words he bade farewell and said: 'What could I have to give you? But let me go quickly lest I take something from you!' And thus they separated, the old one and the man, laughing as two boys laugh.
But when Zarathustra was alone he spoke thus to his heart: 'Could it be possible? This old saint in the forest has not yet heard anything of this, that God is dead!'
[Nietzsche]
The reinstantiation of the divine is interesting only for the PreSim him/herself, in the case for past generations which lost their belief, but for us now there isn't any interest except our deep intention to appear in the cultured world as a very witty, bitter and insightful person which can ruin heaven. As to me, it is more important to answer present questions, or in other words, to follow my instinct towards extinction. I must die to move beyong my own world and to expose it to my children, not for future generations, selfish conceit incarnate.
Oh, I think that few of us are truly PreSim because I believe in the eternity of our historic way, because we must believe in our own eternity. We all get accustomed to a modern gestalt's version of eternity – and this is wrong. One can destroy somebody's dreams but dreams can't die; one can destroy plans, ethics, culture but these human deeds don't need to die to become manifest-real. Our events rarely need our selves to experience reinstantiation, and therefore, they exist like modern people, without realization of their own need for reinstantiation (which is why so few are PreSim). I am not right, I am not a lone PreSim. The simulation of mankind qua mankind enters the third millenium destroying old values of artifice as if old values can't die, but the vision of the artifice fast-forward on the screen.
The illusionary nature of film is of the second degree; it is the result of editing. That is to say: In the film studio the apparatus has penetrated so deeply into reality that a pure view of that reality, free of the foreign body of equipment, is the result of a special procedure, namely, the shooting by the specially adjusted photographic device and the assembly of that shot with others of the same kind. The equipment-free aspect of reality has here become the height of artifice, and the vision of immediate reality the Blue Flower in the land of technology.
[Benjamin, 2003:263]
Murder remains the universal instrument of human discourse. It is not the matter who is the murderer (who is the signifier), and our century reveals for us the eternal beauty of social murder when we construct the artifice of new histories - revolutions, civil wars, two world wars; the eternal beauty of criticism [the eternal beauty of genocide] - we tried from the beginning of our century to put an end to rationalism, to metaphysics, to religion, to modernism, to futurism. You may not kill somebody to prove you are a murderer. You may only take one's own reinstantiation, or, in other words, all of us know that we must struggle for the right-to-live, but who knows that everybody needs the right-to-reinstantiation too?
I operate as a man-machine interface - that is, as a technological form of natural life - because I must necessarily navigate through technological forms of social life....Because my forms of social life are so normally and chronically at-a-distance, I cannot navigate these distances, I cannot achieve sociality apart from my machine interface.
[Lash, 2002:15]
I understood that I should perish if I couldn't die. I need reinstantiation to stand in the impetuous world of simulation of history; I need reinstantiation to stand in itself because I needn't a new personal image, new social place, but to act as an interface between history and instantiated future, a future that doesn't Become, and future that is manufactured.
The class of Diophantine sets
is identical to me, me squared:
The finiteness of my memory
the restricted access to it (on purpose?)
respectively,
constrain the capabilities of
finite-state transducers
pushdown transducers;
converting the energy of experience,
into the simulation of memory,
a class of Turing semidecidable
sets, of thoughts,
experiences, images.
[Evans, Hyper-Reality Memory, 2006]
I was so astonished that I forgot the reinstantiation of an epoch, the reinstantiation of the neo-Cybernetic space at once. I must die and I need to die or maybe I feel that it would be better to die - I don't remember exactly, hense the finiteness of memory. One can easy understand the reinstantiation of history or the reinstantiation of philosophy, and it is very interesting to bury something and it isn't interesting absolutely for me to bury myself as simulation and easier than thinking about the reinstantiation of the devine as media, itself.
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Comments: 9
The fractal twists of nature
give way to helixes
made of miters and rhomboids,
cool futuristic efficient.
Mice and ants
just roving boxes with legs,
and birds no color at all
but transparent angle wind,
their scattered remains
pin-pricked and encased
under beveled glass.
Can you imagine this place
wrapped in parallel cellophane,
tied with cut diamond ribbon?
I can't find a curve outside
the salt water trail
from cheek to thigh.
The easy crescent of my mother
winks from a rectangular mirror.
One can destroy somebody's dreams but dreams can't die; one can destroy plans, ethics, culture but these human deeds don't need to die to become manifest-real. Our events rarely need our selves to experience reinstantiation, and therefore, they exist like modern people, without realization of their own need for reinstantiation (which is why so few are PreSim).
Life goes on without us, but our history carries forward, even if it is as you say "manufactured."
Especially since, even though many of the popular deconstructionist strategies of discourse ( decentring language and context through Sassurean paradigm, intertextuality, de-legitimation of tradition through de-familiarization of discursive site, critic supplanting author as final arbiter of cultural artifact, re-interpretation of history as diachronic provisional draft, etc) of these Continental postmodernists entered into the American liberal arts mind stream in the Eighties and Nineties as gospel through the efforts of key influential though vastly lesser thinkers such as Paul de Mon, Harold Bloom and Stanley Fish, and the importance of Yale in the late Seventies as a viral institution, so many of the same thinkers later repudiated or completely redeveloped their own views, or were repudiated and vanquished by an ultimately far more robust pre-existing Anglo-American tradition of empirical and pragmatic realism based on Pierce, Whitehead, Russell, Wittgenstein, and later no nonsense philosophers such as Princeton's Richard Rorty or John Searles. Just because a "way of thinking" becomes the dominant paradigm--in this case relativistic postmodernism--for a couple of generations doesn't make it the more correct or acceptable version of human existence; and now almost all of these modes of looking at the world are either being tenaciously defended by tenured professors who would look ridiculous doing otherwise, or they are on the retreat on the intellectual horizon. There is a need for a new vision, a looking forward, a manifesto of sorts about our emerging simulationist realities in all their multiple contradictions and extensions of Reality. I would argue--and you would probably agree--that postmodernism is the phenomenon that is dead, even if Zarathustra no longer needs to be invoked to give the curse or supply the new "chain of genealogical meme ties."
But I congratulate you on choosing Foucault: Michel is the hardest to debunk, and there is a good reason for that: In ARCHEOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE and MADNESS IN CIVILIZATION (as well as in the History of Sexuality Pts. I-IV) he sets out arguments identical to your opening ones, which contest the legitimacy of any individual institution or "discursive site" (whether monarchy, religious body, law court, prison, madhouse) to critique another, without attempting to appear the center of everything. Nietzche's will to power becomes a contest of brute power throughout all history between vying institutions, with the formal monarchical model of feudalism hanging over the whole ghastly affair as does religious belief as preponderant voluminous umbras of synchronic weight in language (our unique form of semiotics to record and transmit historical circumstance with any accuracy), toward an unforseeable eternal endpoint (the imaginary "death of history" that is impossible because of your aforestated alignment with Leverenze in the Zeno's false pre-socratic false proof) which is the same as Foucault reliance on different types of reasoning and discourse being relativized depending on which institution is looking at another.
You have done a good job with your research; now let us look at the possible preSimulationist human that may be projected into the future, in this Gospel's terms.
Let's cut to the chase: I agree with Laurie White: this is the key passage: "Oh, I think that few of us are truly PreSim because I believe in the eternity of our historic way, because we must believe in our own eternity. We all get accustomed to a modern gestalt's version of eternity – and this is wrong. One can destroy somebody's dreams but dreams can't die; one can destroy plans, ethics, culture but these human deeds don't need to die to become manifest-real. Our events rarely need our selves to experience reinstantiation, and therefore, they exist like modern people, without realization of their own need for reinstantiation (which is why so few are PreSim). I am not right, I am not a lone PreSim. The simulation of mankind qua mankind enters the third millenium destroying old values of artifice as if old values can't die, but the vision of th the artifice fast-forward on the screen."
I don' t agree entirely with this position. I think there are truly few pre-Simulationists yet because most people nowadays and indeed in all ages do not usually grasp the current circumstances they find themselves in, let alone comprehend the historical modes and postures that have been modified, adapted, or (in preSim terms) memetized within their lifetimes. They also cannot see where the future of their cultural lives will lead, because they are in a state of profound perplexity or "trance" brought on by the contrast between eternal recurring situations of human exigency over survival needs, and the false "abundance" promised by whatever current state of technological innovation is in place (I understand I need to reject Althusserian Marxist economy theory here, but I haven't the time and I will do it in my own pre-Simulationist Manifesto.) The issue of their relationship to any immortality project whatsoever in the postmodern vision of things as you clearly showed--whether it be 'afterlife through God', ' accretions of wealth or fame in materialistic terms, temporal power over others--may be of vital importance to them, but does not affect their capacity to see the new as pre-Simulationists. Only understanding the context of how their lives are being altered by the new virtualities matters. So, much to do about Eternity in this Gospel but what matters for a "re-instantiation" to occur (by which I take you to mean shift of awareness on a level that can actually change the culture) is knowledge of what will happen in the foreseeable and distant future. The long view, as it were. And right now sadly it is the globalizing technocrats and the merchants of commercially viable mind viruses that are the ones who are acting like the genuine preSims (as Alexander Leverenze brilliantly shows in his stunning preview of next stage web blogs) not the artists, writers, poets, painters, and musicians like ourselves in the main, though there are some notable exceptions, such as yourself.
I am going to stop here. I do not want to demolish your impressive edifice of superceded postmodern theory here, nor dispute it categorically, because I agree with so much of it, as I agree with Foucault's essential notions of power and continuity of culture despite institutional change; I only wished to re-orient your thinking away from rejecting as preSims people who celebrate eternity in atemporal terms, because the "sacred time" has always been understood (long before Malinowski and the dawn of anthropology and later Claude Levi Strauss and Fredrick Turner) to be outside secular history, except on the plane of violent religious history, which has absolutely nothing to do with genuine spiritual or mystical experience anyhow. The direct perception of the cosmos (either mediated or unmediated by the senses) is possible; I have experienced it; and I am a prescient pre-Simulationist. But I don't do it with my thinking cap on. I do it when I am not there, but the One is.
And that is how I glean my insights into the next millenium.
I need a lay person's explanation of this thread.
As to the Infinite Will series - you really have to start with Part 1. After I finished the other parts to this, I am combining them all, and revisiting with a significant set of edits. Until then its just rough and raw.
I will wait for the combined piece and read with great curiousity. I recommend Eric L.'s story the Golem to you.
And also wish you a lovely weekend.
I like martinis but avoid them like bad champagne.