[-empyre-] moins en plus

[simon]

Is there a form of social conflict which is not terrorism and not 
capable of being delayed and repeated - represented - and which does not 
exemplify, provide a situation, a theatre for operations - with the 
suffering of people serving as backdrop to an 'empty space,' from which 
bursts of monologue?

And this is not to ask again whether terrorist acts serve as backdrop to 
capitalism, seen as some kind of homogeneous system of the world, in the 
theatrum mundi ... but to get at what Simon Biggs called 'complicity.'

Media work in what Deleuze called a theatre of repetition, reliant on 
recognition, the habit of the first passive synthesis. Acts / encounters 
which aim to break the deadlock, rock the status quo, engender thought, 
lose / have lost particularity in what used to be the anodyne of media 
commentary and is now the acid bath. They are habitual and become 
general. Virilio's image, his analogon, is that they are total, turning 
the mirror on the work of art, on aesthesis, to give us the full 
immersion media-experience of their Ganzfeld virtuality. This gaze is 
pitiless.

Where I mean to draw attention to a 'complicity' is not only with the 
Image of thought-as-representation, rather than Deleuze's 
thought-of-thought, of the media and its (re)mediation of spectacular 
terrorism, but also with art - as a disctinction-without-difference. I 
mean that the Crisis of Representation has left us with this legacy on 
the one hand and that on the other we have the past-futurity, the 
futurism, of a global Crisis of Values, which rests on the complicity of 
art, capital and terror, to the power of a 'triplicity,' and is that 
show in which this triunity is spectacularly confirmed.

In the circle of repetition of the selfsame there is no drama because it 
consists in what Neal Stephenson called a 'consensus cluster.' Conflict 
resolves before it arises: and its resolution is High Definition. The 
Society of the Spectacle ... is also this ... is also that ... terror / 
capital ... art / terror ... art / capital ... in endless combination, 
at rates of oscillation and substitution (exemplification) invisible to 
the naked eye ...

... another sense is needed, beyond the habitual five, or six - the 
sixth being death, in which the creative act shall have no dominion - in 
answer to the problem of light which is faster than light.

Best,

Simon Taylor

www.squarewhiteworld.com
www.brazilcoffee.co.nz

Verena Conley wrote:
> Nice comparison between a colonial hotel (built in 1905) and a Roman 
> media coliseum and thanks for the comments on replays and repetitions. 
> Interesting too how the terrorists hit a lot of non-places and how the 
> symbol of the colonial hotel has evolved. This is not to take anything 
> away from the terror of the situation and the suffering of innocent 
> people.
>
> Speaking of suffering, do go to "Pogrom, Gujarat, India, 2002." There 
> is an especially good article from the Guardian (March 2007). The 
> numbers, facts and horrific details are staggering. Also, the 
> non-coverage at the time.
> Verena
>