NP postmodernism stutters

[Otto Sell]

from the D & G-list:

This essay ruined my Sunday . . .
http://www.anu.edu.au/HRC/first_and_last/works/realer.htm

Massumi reminds us of "Blade Runner" (one of my favorite luddite-movies with
one of my favorite Dutch actors, Rutger Hauer as the monster, the monster's
monologue near the end of the movie, echoing "Frankenstein"), the best
argument against cloning and modeling humanity to any kind of simulacrum I
can think of: "if only you could see what I have seen with your eyes" - but
turned onto ourselves again this is a reasonable complaint against our
limited lifespan we could speak out if faced with our creator ("What if God
was one of us").


REALER THAN REAL
The Simulacrum According to Deleuze and Guattari
Brian Massumi.
Originally published in Copyright no.1, 1987.

"Our world, Jean Baudrillard tells us, has been launched into hyperspace in
a kind of postmodern apocalypse. We breathe an ether of floating images that
no longer bear a relation to any reality whatsoever. That, according to
Baudrillard, is simulation: the substitution of signs of the real for the
real. In hyperreality, signs no longer represent or refer to an external
model. They stand for nothing but themselves, and refer only to other signs.
They are to some extent distinguishable, in the way the phonemes of language
are, by a combinatory of minute binary distinctions. But postmodernism
stutters. In the absence of any gravitational pull to ground them, images
accelerate and tend to run together. They become interchangeable. Any term
can be substituted for any other: utter indetermination. (...) Meaning is
out of reach and out of sight, (...) Objects are images, images are signs,
signs are information, and information fits on a chip. Everything reduces to
a molecular binarism. (...) a theory of simulation can be extracted (...)
that can give us a start in analyzing our cultural condition under late
capitalism without landing us back with the dinosaurs or launching us into
hypercynicism.
(...) Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner shows that the ultimate enemy in this
war of ruse is the so-called "model" itself. The off-world replicants return
to earth not to blend in with the indigenous population, but to find the
secret of their built-in obsolescence so they can escape their bondage and
live full lives, and on their own terms. (...) : if only you could see what
I have seen with your eyes. (...) Every simulation takes as its point of
departure a regularized world comprising apparently stable identities or
territories.
(...) So what we are left with is a distinction not primarily between the
model and the copy, or the real and the imaginary, but between two modes of
simulation. (...) One, (...) is normative, regularizing, and reproductive.
It selects only certain properties of the entities it takes up: hard work,
loyalty, good parenting, etc. It creates a network of surface resemblances.
(...) It is not a question of Platonic copies, but of human replicants.
Every society creates a quasi-causal system of this kind. In capitalist
society the ultimate quasi-cause is capital itself,20 which is described by
Marx as a miraculating substance that arrogates all things to itself and
presents itself as first and final cause. This mode of simulation goes by
the name of "reality."
(...) The other mode of simulation is the one that turns against the entire
system of resemblance and replication. It is also distributive, but the
distribution it effects is not limitative. Rather than selecting only
certain properties, it selects them all, it multiplies potentials: not to be
human, but to be human plus. This kind of simulation is called "art." Art
also recreates a territory, but a territory that is not really territorial.
It is less like the earth with its gravitational grid than an interplanetary
space, a deterritorialized territory providing a possibility of movement in
all directions. Artists are replicants who have found the secret of their
obsolescence.

links:
http://www.anu.edu.au/HRC/first_and_last/links/massumi_works.htm


So the catastrophe already has taken place.
Maybe it's best to "sit back and laugh (but I fear tomorrow I'll be crying)"
[Epitaph, King Crimson].

"If God had long hair and a good tea.
And if his eyes were pretty glazed if he looks faced out.
Would you buy his story, would you believe he had an eye infection."
(Joan Osborne&Weird Al Jankovic)