[-empyre-] Re: TechnoPanic

[Simon Taylor <swht@clear.net.nz>]

Dear empyre,

the internet/www. provides a source of panic. Is in its totalising
pretensions towards global-convergence (of the sensa, sensorium - aesthetic)
Pan-ic and not only pan-opt-ic, built and split along the aesthetic lines of
soap and porn.

the early part of this discussion's constatation of IT as having a military
app.s provenance or military-industrial-establishment provenance was quickly
abstracted into Art app.s and their impunibility - for the paternal or
matricial sins. That is, acknowledgement of this provenance led into the
recognition-acknowledgement loop of appropriation-recontextualisation
without pausing to consider the ramifications: panic instruments vs. terror
tools.

are artists terrorists and terrorised or is there a choice? Are artists the
victims of their medium, insofar as the adventure that comes to them by way
of technological media simply offers the prospect of being returned to the
complex hands of state-endorsed corpocracy as property? Doesn't it precisely
_play_ into those hands? (A victimology of panic is possible?)

the internet/www. is the panic event of mass society, which it already
promises. Its time, in envisioning the future as its own futurity and the
past as its proper archive, while pretending to a total present, is like
Deleuze's 'event' a sign, but of the horror vacui on a global or worldwide
level because use/value in the agora/marketplace generates the panic effect
of fear of lack of value/use.

is it possible to say that there is then an agora-phobia brought about by
the endlessly echoing and extending nautilus of technological interactivity?
Which might relate very well to Virilio's dromospheric pressure, its
contrafactual submarine compression while bearing on the factual overseas
expansion of its compass - pushing the technological-corporeal envelope. And
the envelope, as the end, hidden-in-plain-view of agoraphobia, being a
claustraphobia, counterinstinctively.

so what of these terror tools? A friend related to me today that the
political content at www.stateyourposition.com received f. all comments
where mention of postmodernism & metaphysics creamed it. Might it not be
that metaphysics with its analogical form, of aesthetics, authorised by
Kant, wears the same state-endorsed aspect of panic as the proprietary
version introduced at the birthplace in the www. matrix?

terror tools would be Stockhausen's: low-grade, low-res pathogens, now that
spectacle is anaesthetic.

love,
simon taylor
www.squarewhiteworld.com