[-empyre-] Virtual Embodiment

[simon]

Dear <<empyreans>>, Johannes,

I apologise for the drift of/f topic in the following notes.

On 05/08/14 03:50, Johannes Birringer wrote:
> the expense of people and things
as soon as the body is at stake we make recourse to metaphor; and, as 
far as things are concerned, they withdraw endlessly: things can't go on 
like this.

They go on. I'll go on and I think of how it goes on with devalorisation 
and am put in mind of Oscar Wilde's "cost of everything" and "value of 
nothing", which has some epistemological weight - invoking as it does 
too -  the value of nothing as nothing, of which, that nothing may come, 
is precisely Lear's mistake.

Valorising narratives are put forward in the arts and humanities and 
sciences and business studies, as if, when disinterested or personally 
disinvested, in constatation - and sometime contestation - of the 
relativism of value (knowing it nothing  - which it protesteth greatly) 
over the value of relativism (not to know). Isn't there a link between 
value and virtue, an intimacy that is if not bodily at least systemic? 
such that virtual embodiment promises greater and recurrent return for 
its internalisation of the virtual system within the body of absolutely 
relative value?

Augusto Boal writes that "Machiavelli was the first ideologist of the 
then incipient bourgeoisie ... And the ideologist of this last breath is 
Dale Carnegie" ... "The "self-made man" of the decadent is the same "man 
of virtù"". No, I know not where this leads... nor this:

> Simon how exactly are you "stepping out or escaping in the time-images [you]  are making"?
The right not to know: is the escape, however, adequate? I don't know 
and it is this which is spurring on the research, beyond the adequacy of 
the image to the adequate image of virtual embodiment - where I entered 
this discussion, aware that Minus Theatre's fleshly 'nothing' is of a 
different coin than that socio-technically mediated 'nothing' of 1800 
lives in Gaza, leading me back to the question of what possible virtual 
embodiment adequately imagines the lives lost? against the 'everything' 
constituting Israel's strategic military objectives.

I wonder about "the expense of people and things" that they clearly 
belong to different horizons and that to put people under the sign of 
things, or of technical media, is only justifiable - as an expense - in 
the world of things. A waste of shame, perhaps, and there seems to be, 
remembering Deleuze and Guattari, some effort towards restoring a belief 
in the world. But belief is rendered cheap in the mess of the 'all', the 
'everything' the actual insistence of which Deleuze might be right is 
the opposite of its existence.

However to know how is to know there are infinitely many steps in 
stepping out or escaping - on a flight, perhaps of the body, on a line, 
perhaps of the institution, along the tectonic fold, where a tremble, a 
tremor, is the asignifying precursor of a virtual image in 
non-narrativisable embodiment. The escape is not infinitely deferred but 
a question - given a temporal world order - of a differential - or even 
dialectical - time, an extemporisation of the virtual and an 
instantiation of the embodiment.

But I return to the phrase that first captured me here because it 
seemed, counterindicatively, to open some kind of possibility: encarnó, 
nada.

Best,
Simon Taylor