[-empyre-] Les Exilés du dialogue

[Nicholas Ruiz III <editor@intertheory.org>]

Can life exceed representation without subscription to
Deity?  I doubt it.  A physical location is at once a
representation: in light, manner, concept, appearance,
thought and so on.

One's Code is not a destiny, but this in no way
releases us from its currency, its natural
environment, its marketplace of selections.  La
monnaie vivante, no?  And this has nothing to do wtih
activism or democratic space, until we render such
entities.  And even then, what is at stake are bodies.

The limit of thought is at the level of the species,
the level of our particular Code.  There is a
singularity and universal in play at such a point. 
Try to stop breathing for a few minutes, the Code's
grip manifest as a need for oxygen becomes rather
deafening quite quickly, a universal effect.  Singular
effects are as simple as a DNA fingerprint, or the
biometrics of one's voice or facial construction, or
one's thought.

So, what did Baudrillard mean in that quote?  Only he
could say.  But for myself, I will say that his words
conjure an idea that expresses more than he would have
attributed to it: that we are irrevocably tied to our
specific protocol as evolving Code and persons.  The
destiny of thought being to die, like the destiny of
the species, leaves us knowing thought must never
devour the distance it maintains from itself, that
indeed, it now devours as it clones itself.

This is a bit like where Thomas Pynchon writes:

"From this height it was as if the Chums, who, out on
adventures past, had often witnessed the vast herds of
cattle adrift in ever-changing cloudlike patterns
across the Western plains, here saw that unshaped
freedom being rationalized into movement only in
straight lines and at right angles and a progressive
reduction of choices, until the final turn through the
final gate that led to the killing-floor."

NRIII


Dr. Nicholas Ruiz III
Editor, Kritikos
http://intertheory.org