Against Theory, For Machines

I wrote this yesterday:

Rather than come up with an overall "theory" of this clip, I just want to draw your attention to some elements. I've been working on a theory of criticism lately, of various narrative arts, that instead of trying to apply an overall "theorem" to the piece or genre or form, instead finds various machinations of how any such theory will work. I'll go into this later when I have my ideas more solidified, but for now, let's leave at this: if you were to approach a complicated machine like a car, you might not try and explain "how the car works", but instead pick out some unique and emblematic parts of the car, and explain how those work. You might explain a wheel and axle, or a disc brake, or a 4-stroke combustion engine. These are all parts of how the car works, but do not attempt to explain it in totality, which would necessitate various economic theories of production, design theory, raw materials processing, social forces in transportation, and on and on. Nothing works independently of anything else. But to learn anything, we have to start taking things apart. And you start taking apart most things by unscrewing some bolts, and unplugging a few wires, looking carefully while you do so.

I was reminded of this again when I started to pick apart Kazys Varnelis' essay on history, temporality, and modernism.

I have this pet peeve about cultural studies (not that the essay is cultural studies, but you'll see where I'm going). I appreciate the work of cultural studies, of not throwing away anything in the pursuit of evidence about what exactly we, as a culture, might be up to, philosophically, historically, anthropologically, and so on. But it leads to a all too common problem; the theorist, in the effort to present as much evidence as possible and still tie it all together, is forced to wash over certain pieces, or many pieces, in the effort not to spiral out into a Arcades Project style work. Rather than, say, returning to the car example, "let's start by talking about how a combustion engine works"--starting with a particular instance of the material--they begin with a general conclusion: "a car works by burning fossil fuels and creating CO2." Which is true, of course, and important. But while it is culturally important information about a car, the statement is not promoting any understanding about how a car works, or more importantly, how we might fix the negative effect described.

Back in my (more) headstrong youth, I had an unfortunate run-in with a cultural studies professor, in which I said that her work, which collected examples from pop culture that "caused young women to have a poor body image" was obvious, and superfluous. Clearly some women have a poor body image, and naturally, some elements of pop culture are related. But the research said nothing about the link, the mechanism, or which women might be affected, and to what degree. It presented the same statement about the car and CO2. It presented a generalized conclusion about media and body image, by merely identifying some evidence that were probably the cause, and some evidence that were probably the effect.

Although I feel badly about acting like such a jerk about it, I still think the criticism is relevant. It is really easy for a reader already harboring the preconceived idea of A -> B to fall into the trap of spending time reading theory that is essentially tautological, or at the very least, generalizes conclusions rather than studying the mechanism. The mechanics of our theory is the basis of being about to do anything about it. Anything else is pure mythos, a nice story that makes us feel better about the way things are without intentionally affecting them. Successful theory, or stories for that matter, change the way we think about things, at the very least presenting an angle for cross-reference of our experience and perceptions. Rather than simply be a jerk (which like generalizing, is more than easy enough) I now hope to draw out at least a few mechanisms when I encounter something perhaps leaning towards the urge to generalize. Show someone how to change the oil filter maybe, or point out a coolant leak. Have a few beers and discuss the pros and cons of alternate fuel sources. That sort of thing.

I actually don't know a lot about all the details of cars. But I know a little bit about metaphysics, and psychoanalysis, so this is where my explanations of epistemological mechanisms often comes from. (One day, I'll write a metaphysical Chilton's guide to the unconscious. The Ego and the Id, but with better diagrams updated for the current models.)

Everything that I'd want to add, as diagrams of metaphysical mechanisms, to Varnelis' essays, I've actually already written, in a long drawn-out annotation of Heidegger's Section 73 of Being and Time: "The Vulgar Understanding of History and the Occurence of Dasein." Which you should dig through by all means, if you are some kind of meta-structural engineer with a taste for blog writing.

But what I really want to get at is the metaphysical distinction between temporality in Heidegger's notion of the "world-historical", and temporality in his notion as the "temporality of being". In one sense (I know what I just said about generalizing, but this is a blog post first of all, and I can feel your attention waning, and I'm trying to meet those unacquainted with Heidegger halfway) this is the difference between the past and the present. The element of the past in things is its connection to a world of the past, a certain time that is not this time. Whereas, our sense of "now", our connectedness between our consciousness and the things we are conscious of, is part of Dasein, or authentic being. Heidegger is so firm on separating these two notions of temporality that he calls the former "secondary historicity" and the latter "primary historicity", a clear privilege of being over objects.

The reason I'm so interested in psychoanalysis, is that despite anything you may feel about the pros and cons of the clinical method, it is one of the most compelling attempts at theorizing the mechanics of the brain, from a metaphysical perspective. In other words, while neuroscience is the best at theorizing the mechanics of the brain from a chemical perspective, psychoanalysis excels at finding the roots of philosophical issues in our heads. Where does the notion of space and time exist in the function of the brain? Well, there are areas of the brain that affect our conception of time and space. But what is the metaphysical relationship between time and space, such as existing inside the chemistry of the brain? What, in other words, is time, and what is space, such as they exist in the brain? It is a phenomenal reduction: a reduction of metaphysics to the metaphysical, that which can be affected and studied in the means through which we perceive it. Neuroscience is a chemical reduction: a reduction of consciousness to what can be affected and studied by chemistry. Very few studies have taken place that combine these two. What would happen if we asked a renowned metaphysician to review his/her theories while certain areas of his brain were stimulated with electricity? Drug users are probably the closest to this concept, ironically. By taking unscientific risks, and by describing the world in humanistic generalities (read: new agey hippie nonsense) they are re-theorizing the world as they re-organize their brain chemistry. Maybe the Third Eye is more philosophically and scientifically relevant than the credit we give it. But that's another tangent, another part of the car.

But as far as temporality goes, what Heidegger distinguishes as "primary historicity" or Being, in my opinion, deserves no more authenticity than "secondary historicity", or world-history. Being, our conscious knowledge of the present, and "nowness", is no different than our appreciation of the historical value of objects.

The best example is a historical artifact. An electron tube is an artifact--no longer current technology, it has since been replaced by newer objects. But it still acts as an electrical component, despite its apparent "age". An even better example is an arrowhead. When I was a kid, I found any number of rocks, which I was sure were "actually arrowheads". When does the rock stop being a rock, and become an arrowhead? In my six-year old mind. We ascribe value to objects, label them with significance, based on a large network of semiotic structures in our mind. The "age" of the object is actually, not relevant. It exists only simultaneously with its current presence, and its current significance.

But there is an lingering element of "authenticity", Heidegger's privilege, given to certain objects within their semiotic language. An amplifier built with tubes is more "authentic". This is the meaning of its "age" to us. My arrowheads were more important than other rocks because of what my six-year old mind believed them to be. The authentic form of temporality Heidegger identified is no more than the most significant signifier in our language of time--Being, the present. The zero of the number line, point from which duration stretches, the ego as the surface of the consciousness, the Signifier, the body without organs, a unified monad, to which everything else must attach itself if it is to be meaningful.

The concepts I just referenced as the authentic point of signification all share a characteristic: they don't really exist. They are formed from their sub-infrastructural elements. They are the architecture, the perceived significant art, the "pure" expanse of color formed via the absorption of visible radiation, the "blank" wall, made from conglomerated minerals. They are the simplification, the generalization, the "I" in the ecology of consciousness, The "Mother Nature" in the chemical dynamics of biology. The vast field of significations of time and temporality only seem to come to a head in our sense of "now", when really the writing stretches all across and through the wall, and on any visible surface, and in any perceivable sound, in the outlines of any recognizable shape, and it the infinite extensions of any cognizable dimension.

Which is a lot of different places, both "real" and "not". It's a whole lot to make sense of, and a lot to form into any unified theory of consciousness, time, space, epistemology, philosophy, physics, or for goodness sakes, the Internet. But this is a place to start.

A car was not built from the driver's seat.

But luckily, we don't need to build a car to be able to drive one. What I want to say about Varnelis' essay is that there seems to be a bit of confusion, some back and forth between epochs of the "world-historical" and implementations of "temporal being". Even Heidegger seemed a bit confused by the distinction, and naturally so: in the modernist age, it would have been very difficult for anyone to reject the overwhelming authority of the "I", of the deep-rooted primary temporality of consciousness. Lacan capitalized the Signifier with reason. Back then, you better believe it was a proper noun.

But here's the thing about temporality, and accordingly, atemporality--the lack of importance of the primary historicity in current society is, actually, its own proof that it was never really so primary. How does a word get purged from a langauge? Everyone simply stops using it, without realizing that they don't use it anymore. The tip of an iceberg may not tell you anything about the shape of the ice underneath, but if you don't see the tip of an iceberg, then there's nothing underneath.

We are becoming predominantly fluid in our conception of the world-historical. Network culture, etc. Meanwhile, we are relying on temporal-Being less and less to define the world-historical. Have you noticed that April Fool's jokes thrive on the Internet? It's because Reality, the plane upon which a joke rests, is all warped on the Internet already. April Fool's jokes are proliferating, because our concept of world-history is now based on Wikipedia. Irony, trickery, double-meaning, and the good old nudge of the elbow are insinuating themselves into our concept of Truth. We roll with the punches, and nod along with the joke, because not even the serious is serious anymore. And yet, we still get things done.

So, the legacy of "ends of history" are not really important anymore. Any theory needing to call itself post-____ is not really relevant, either as a positive or negative example, because it is still naming itself "I" based on an authority of a temporal relationship. We don't need this evidence of increasing meaninglessness of historical narratives. We get the sense that we've already seen this episode, or at least maybe the episode this is a remake of. You don't need to be able to read a watch to know that it is stopped. You can hear the absence of ticking.

I always thought the the first sign of the end of grand narratives is that we'd look up and say, "Narratives? what are those? Is that like a riddle? Or a song?" When we say, "timeline? You mean like Twitter posts? Or youtube comments?" Then we'll know that causality is really over. Time will not be over just by theoretically "wanting" it, it will be over when you lost your watch, and you forgot to care.

This doesn't mean that there is nothing to do, or that we shouldn't bother talking about it until it's already happened. Because we are doing it, and we are talking about it. Just some of us more than others. We just need to stop theorizing connections, and just connect, which theory does, to a large extent. But where it really connects is not where it attempts to generalize about theory as a whole (though we are all guilty of this, either to a small or a large extent). It connects with Tab A going into Slot B, with the material production of new significations that replace the old connections. Let's go out there and find the atemporality. Let's find it in Marx, let's find it Galileo, let's find it in Irigaray, let's find it in cave paintings. Let's find it in places that aren't books, or the Internet. Let's bring these tools, these working parts back to the garage, set 'em up, and start actually using 'em to make stuff, not just put them on the shelf. Share 'em, too. Metaphysical tool library. When we are finding little parts of the "I" in all these supposedly "historical" things, and when we are using and moving back and forth across different epochs of time as easily as we perceive and express ourselves, then we will already be there.

Being-with-Internet

Before I begin with the recollection of your new favorite section of Being and Time, number 73, I want to say a few things about Heidegger.

There's books written about this guy, and way more books than about other troubled intellectuals who did bad stuff, because, well... because. Generally, the sides on Heidegger are two. Either he is a Nazi, whose philosophy is inseparable from his political history, or his philosophy is metaphysics, and not political. I'm of the opinion that his philosophy should be considered separately from his political history... and that this philosophy reeks of Fascism.

He's brilliant, sure. I've said before that Being and Time taught me how to write. Every word is so carefully chosen, not only as a signifier but within the delicate structural framework of syntax and semantics that is philosophy. Just look at all the quote marks thrown around words, and the italics. These are not just emphasis, thrown out casually. Each is done with the same purpose as putting a castle on a hill, rather than a valley. There is literally an architecture to Heidegger's prose, and it backs his philosophy across every square, grade, stairway, sloping rooftop, and empty space in his thought. It's some of the best philosophy of the 20th century.

But it's also Fascist. The more lenient philosophers and political thinkers will often let Lenin and other leftists off with a wag of the finger, and a wise word about propaganda, political movements, and state power out of control. But this is not just a guy with a captive audience, and ego-crush on history. The architecture of the thought is Fascist, and it is so close to really good metaphysics that it should scare anyone who still cares about metaphysics.

Of course, writing philosophy is one thing, and kicking Jews out of academia is another thing. Anyone can do either, but it took Heidegger to do both, and seemingly, with the same univocal hand and mind. There is mass Fascism, and there is micro, little-Eichmann Fascism, and then there is intellectual Fascism. Being and Time is the reason I give anyone I hear talking about "authentic" anything a long, hard look. No matter how much Heidegger will argue that there is no moral distinction between authentic and in-authentic being, you can hear the goddamn crazy in his voice. He is lining people up in his head. Just a few sections on, in 75 and 76, when he starts talking about "resoluteness", and "loyalty" to the being of history. And in the famous Rectory Address (which you should really read if you haven't, to know what I'm talking about), when I visualize him actually speaking this, it's uncanny.

The point is, when I implement Heidegger here to make certain points about Time, I am doing so with this in mind, and also, against Heidegger. I have no doubt that he, and many Heidegger scholars, would disagree with the reading I'm about to make, and that is good. It is intended to pull away from his philosophy. His writing is still very well done, and very powerful, and this section made me think about time in certain ways that drew out my conclusions. But I would not say that what I'm about to draw out is Heideggerian. Who knows, however; perhaps, if he lived now in the age of digital reproduction, he would see that authenticity for the sham that it is, and maybe his metaphysics would go in a different direction. Maybe not. This is the strange part about history: that ultimately, it both is what it is, and is what it isn't.

Heidegger's text will be in blog block quote style, and my comments will not. All emphasis is Heidegger's.

Section 73 of Being and Time: "The Vulgar Understanding of History and the Occurence of Dasein."

Our next aim is to find the right position for attacking the primordial question of the essence of history--that is to say, for construing historicality existentially. This position is designated by that which is primordially historical. We shall begin our study, therefore, by characterizing what one has in view in using the expressions 'history' and 'historical' in the ordinary interpretation of Dasein. These expressions get used in several ways.

The most obvious ambiguity of the term 'history' is one that has often been noticed, and there is nothing 'fuzzy' about it. It evinces itself in that this term may mean the 'historical acutality' as well as the possible science of it. We shall provisionally eliminate the signification of 'history' in the sense of a "science of history" (historiology).

Isn't this great?!? Okay, a helpful hint: look at the different implementations of the word "history". There is "history" the noun. There is "historical", the adjective, or the state of something being history. There is also noun of this adjective, "historicality". Then there is "historizing", the verb that is the act of something being made history (more or less), and lastly, there is "historiology", or the science of deciding what all these words mean.

Heidegger is very careful with these words, and the different between the different parts of speech will spell out how he thinks history functions, from a metaphysical and existential standpoint. In the next few paragraphs, we'll see how exactly he wants to separate and unify these terms.

The expression 'history' has various significations with which one has in view neither the science of history nor even history as an Object, by this very entity itself, not necessarily Objectified. Among such significations, that in which this entity is understood as something past, may well be the pre-eminent usage. This signification is evinced in the kind of talk in which we say that something or other "already belongs to history". Here 'past' means "no longer present-at-hand", or even "still present-at-hand indeed, but without having any 'effect' on the 'Present' ". Of course, the historical as that which is past has also the opposite signification, when we say, "One cannot get away from history." Here, by "history", we have in view that which is past, but which nevertheless is still having effects. Howsoever the historical, as that which is past, is understood to be related to it, either positively or privatively, in such a way as to have effects upon it. Thus 'the past' has a remarkable double meaning; the past belongs irretrievably to an earlier time; it belonged to the events of that time; and in spite of that, it can still be present-at-hand 'now'--for instance, the remains of a Greek temple. With the temple, a 'bit of the past' is still 'in the present'.

This is the first of four significations of "history". Something 'past', in that "'the past' has a remarkable double meaning; the past belongs irretrievably to an earlier time; it belonged to the events of that time; and in spite of that, it can still be present-at-hand 'now'.

What we next have in mind with the term "history" is not so much 'the past' in the sense of that which is past, but rather derivation from such a past. Anything that 'has a history' stands in the contect of a becoming. In such becoming, 'development' is sometimes a rise, sometimes a fall. What 'has a history' in this way can, at the same time, 'make' such history. As 'epoch-making', it determines 'a future' 'in the present'. Here "history" signifies a 'context' of events and 'effects', which draws on through 'the past', the 'Present', and the 'future'. On this view, the past has no special priority.

Second signification. History is a becoming, a separation from the basic dimension of time, or to describe it in a familiar but perhaps problematic way, 'how we make our fortune'. To take our place in history, or to write ourselves into the history books, etc. To separate a span of time from other spans of time, and to segment it.

Further, "history" signifies the totality of those entities which change 'in time', and indeed the transformations and vicissitudes of men, of human groupings and their 'cultures', as distinguished from Nature, which likewise operates 'in time'. Here what one has in view is not so much a kind of Being--historizing--as it is that realm of entities which one distinguishes from Nature by having regard for the way in which man's existence is essentially determined by 'spirit' and 'culture', even though in a certain manner Nature too belongs to "history" as thus understood.

Third signification. History is the works of man, as split off from the rest of Nature. Again, post-modernly problematic, sure, but the way we casually refer to history may be problematic. However, I might argue that it is not problematic at all. Differentiating any single thing, be it human, animal, object, or idea, from the rest of the shapeless undifferentiated chaos of the world, is the first step towards representation.

Finally, whatever has been handed down to us is as such held to be 'historical', whether it is something which we know historiologically, or something that has been taken over as self-evidence, with its derivation hidden.

And the last signification means, in my view, history as history, or those past, epochal, cultural products we refer to as history and manipulate and study as such. This is the "meta" signification I guess--the pure history that is the subject of history as science, outside of our memories, products, and opinions.

If we take these four significations together, the upshot is that history is that specific historizing of existent Dasein which comes to pass in time, so that the historizing which is 'past' in our Being-with-one-another, and which at the same time has been 'handed down to us' and is continuingly effective, is regarded as "history" in the sense that gets emphasized.

The four significations are connected in that they relate to man as the 'subject' of events. How is the historizing character of such events to be defined? Is historizing a sequence of processes, an ever-changing emergence and disappearance of events? In what way does this historizing of history belong to Dasein? Is Dasein already factically 'present-at-hand' to begin with, so that on occasion it can get 'into a history'? Does Dasein first become historical by getting intertwined with events and circumstances? Or is the Being of Dasein constituted first of all by historizing, so that anything like circumstances, events, and vicissitudes is ontologically possible only because Dasein is historical in its Being? Why is it that the function of the past gets particularly stressed when the Dasein which historizes 'in time' is characterized 'temporally'?

If you aren't familiar with Being and Time then most of that just shot past you. Here's the gist, about which I can think of several professors who would be shaking their heads sadly if they knew I was writing. Heidegger believes that true being comes from being-there, in connection with various other beings, also being-there. Da-sein, get it? Of course, it's much more complex that simply being-there. There is 'care', which is the state of being with others in a way that one can say one is being-with them but also sort of seperate. And there is also time, which is a dimension in which Dasein must exist, for two there-being beings to be said to be there-being at the same time. Right? So time is necessary, for this true being, this Dasein. Not so far fetched, right?

Okay, so Heidegger is asking if history, of which we have just finished outlining four different ways in which we use the word, is the way that things be-in-time, then what is the relationship between history and these four different significations, and Dasein proper?

Personally, I'm more interested in his discussion of history than Dasein. As I said before, I think when he starts separating authentic being from inauthentic being is where he gets off course. There is no Proper-History, and Pedestrian-History. All of it is simply history, though it may have different facets. Same thing with Being. The thing about Being, is that no matter what you call it, what you dress it up as, or what titles and crowns you give it, it is still just Being. That's why it's so mysterious! Unless you eat psilocybin. Then Being is a whole lot of other things too. As my friend Steve once said, "energy is happen". But let's get back to history. Onward.

If history belongs to Dasein's Being, and this Being is based on temporality, then it would be easy to begin the existential analysis of historicality with those characteristics of the historical which obviously have a temporal meaning. Therefore, by characterizing more precisely the remarkably privileged position of the 'past' in the concept of history, we shall prepare the way for expounding the basic constitution of historicality.

The 'antiquities' preserved in museums (household gear, for exmaple) being to a 'time which is past'; yet they are still present-at-hand in the 'Present'. How far is such equipment historical, when it is not yet past? Is it historical, let us say, only because it has become an object of historiological interest, of antiquarian study or national lore? But such equipment can be a historiological object only because it is in itself somehow historical. We repeat the question; by what right do we call this entity "historical", when it is not yet past? Or do these 'Things' have 'in themselves' 'something past', even though they are still present-at-hand today? Then are these, which are present-at-hand, still what they were? Evidently these "things" have changed. The tools have become fragile and worm-eaten "in the course of time". But yet the specific character of the past that makes them something historical does not lie in this transience that continues even during their objective presence in the museum. But then what is past about the useful thing? What were the "things" that they no longer are today? They are still definite useful things, but out of use. However, if they were still in use, like many heirlooms in the household, would they then not be historical? Whether in use or out of use, they are no longer what they were. What is 'past'? Nothing other than the world within which they were encountered as things at hand belong to a context of useful things and used by heedful Dasein existing-in-the-world. That world is no longer. But what was previously innerworldly in that the world is still objectively present. As useful things belonging to that world, what is now still objectively present can nevertheless belong to the "past". But was does it mean that the world no-longer-is? World is only in the mode of existing Dasein, that is, factically as being-in-the-world.

Blam! My mind is blown! How can we say something is old, if it still exists right in front of our eyes? What is historical about them--because certainly there is something historical about them--is that they existed in a dimension of time that is-no-longer. They are from another epoch, whether it be the neolithic, the dark ages, "the Orient", or the 50s. We call them whatever we want, but still, they are in different rooms of the museum. Furthermore, they are in the museum to begin with. These things belong to our world now, but they also belong to another world then, which is definitely no longer this one.

The historical character of extant antiquities is thus grounded in the "past" of Dasein to whose world that past belongs. According to this, only "past" Dasein would be historical, but not "present" Dasein. However, can Dasein be past at all, if we define "past" as "now no longer objectively present or at hand"? Evidently Dasein can never be past, not because it is imperishable, but because it can essentially never be objectively present. Rather, if it is, it exists. But a Dasein that no longer exists is not past in the ontologically strict sense; it is rather having-been-there. The antiquities still objectively present have a "past" and a character of history because they belong to useful things and originate from a world that has-been--the world of a Dasein that has-been-there. Dasein is what is primarily historical. But does Dasein first become historical by no longer being there? Or is it historical precisely as factically existing? Is Dasein something that has-been only in the sense of having-been-there, or has it been as something making present and futural, that is, in the temporalizing of its temporality?

Here he is checking in with Dasein, by commenting on a difficulty. If the old stuff belonged to a world that is past, then in that world, it must have had Dasein (or the sort reserved for things rather than people) in order for it to really belong to that world. But the problem is, Dasein is characterized by it being now, among those Beings currently existing. So what happened to the old Dasein? Did it evaporate? Or is there as Dasein-shaped hole? Or is it something to do with the nature of Time as a continuum, that fundamentally supports the possibility of all Dasein, and through it, history? (WOW! You guessed number three! Good job! In metaphysics, it's always the most complicated rhetorical question that is the correct one. Either that, or none of them are.)

From this preliminary analysis of the useful things belonging to history that are still objectively present and yet somehow "past", it becomes clear that this kind of being is historical only on the basis of its belonging to the world. But the world has a historical kind of being because it constitutes an ontological determination of Dasein. It may be shown further that when one designates a time as 'the past', the meaning of this is not unequivocal; but 'the past' is manifestly distinct from one's having been, with which we have become acquainted as something constitutive for the ecstatical unity of Dasein's temporality. This, however, only makes the enigma ultimately more acute; why is it that the historical is determined predominantly by the 'past', or, to speak more appropriately, by the character of having-been, when that character is one that temporalizes itself equiprimordially with the Present and the future?

We contend that what is primarily historical is Dasein. That which is secondarily historical, however, is what we encounter within-the-world--not only equipment ready-to-hand, in the widest sense, but also the environing Nature as 'the very soil of history.' Entities other than Dasein which are historical by reason of belonging to the world, are what we call 'world-historical'. It can be shown that the ordinary conception of 'world-history' arises precisely from our orientation to what is thus secondarily historical. World-historical entities do not first get their historical character, let us say, by reason of an historiological Objectification; they get it rather as those entities which they are in themselves when they are encountered within-the-world.

If 'the past' is part of Dasein, how is it separate from our own individual pasts, and furthermore, separate from our sense of time in general? Well, let Heidegger introduce you to primary historicality, which is Dasein, and secondary historicality, which is the network of the world outside or our Being. Our Being relates to the world via Dasein, and objects relate to the history imbued to the world via Dasein, what he calls "the world-history".

This is where I step in. I am fine with a phenomenological reduction of history--things that are historical only are because we perceive them as such. But the only reason Heidegger is interested in creating a first/second order historicality, is so he can continue to privilege Dasein, the authentic Being, as something metaphysically more awesome than other things. After all, the 'volk's' sense of history is more important than, say, the history of production relations. Right? Because who cares about the factory, when OUR HISTORY AS SUBJECTIVE ACTORS is under discussion! Drill, baby, drill!

But really, look how he justifies it, as we continue:

In analyzing the historical character of equipment which is still present-at-hand, we have not only been led back to Dasein as that which is primarily historical; but at the same time we have been made to doubt whether the termporal characterization of the historical in general may be oriented primarily to the Being-in-time of anything present-at-hand. Entities do not become 'more historical' by being moved off into a past which is always farther and farther away, so that the oldest of them would be the most authentically historical. On the other hand, if the 'temporal' distance from "now and today" is of no primary constitutive significance for the historicality of entities that are authentically historical, this is not because these entities are not 'in time' and are timeless, but because they exist temporally in so primordial a manner that nothing present-at-hand 'in time', whether passing away or still coming along, could ever--by its ontological essence--be temporal in such a way.

He's so close, it kills me. He's right in saying that things do not become "more historical" by being older according to the timeline of years. And he's also right by saying that if "historicity" is not a factor of distance across this dimension, then temporal distance (say, number of years) in itself is "of no primary constitutive significance for the historicality of entities", and not because these things are somehow divorced from time, and timeless, beyond measure. They can be measured, and this measurement doesn't matter to their historicity.

But he thinks this proves that it is a sort of history that is therefore separate from our "present-at-hand 'in time' ": our present sense of the difference between past and future. It's a tautology--because Heidegger believes that current, present Being is fundamentally distinct from all historical, past senses of Being, then the difference between our appreciation of time-as-presence must be fundamentally different from our appreciation of time-as-history.

I would argue precisely the opposite. Our only sense of time is of time-as-history. Many philosophers have argued that the cone of perception extends only into the past. Of course, it is infuriating to us that we cannot "remember now", because as soon as we do, it is past. But think about it--what he is describing about history is precisely how we think about time. Our sense of history is not concerned with the difference in years. But our sense of history is certainly no separate from our subjective sense of "time passing". So doesn't this lead us to believe that our sense of history, and our sense of temporality are unified?

The trouble, it seems to me, is our necessary layering of measurement onto the segments of time. Remember the second signification of history? After the first, that past is both past and present, there is the second, that any particular past, is a derivation from such a past-present. A number line extends to infinity in both directions, but the minute you grab any segment of that number line, you must identify some sort of units to clarify which portion of the line, in relation to all other portions. To say segment 1,2 is different than 3,4 is easy; but to say segment 1,2 is different than -infinity,infinity is much more difficult. Hence, we develop the term 'zero', the point from which we extend in either direction towards infinity. But remember, 'zero' is also an infinity point. "Now" is just as non-existant as "zero past" and "zero future". Sure, we think about the past backing its way up to Now, just as the future extents outward from now. But this is simply a factor of time's passage, which in dimensional geometry, isn't actually "going" anywhere. Imagine backing up in time from a point in 10,000 BC all the way to Zero Past, or the point at which the dimension of time expires. Just as much of a pain in the brain as trying to "remember now", isn't it?

But this is the way we think about time. You could call it the Dasein in Time, or the fundamental condition of Time (or history, if you want to try this argument from the Marxist angle), or the authentic, primary history. It really doesn't matter what you call it. Time still is what it is, and is what it isn't. What we do know is that we have a sensation of time, and a sensation of history as time 'that is past'. If we reduce time and history to our phenomenological perception of it, this is what we are stuck with. We have the line of time, we have the expression of various segments along it, and we have the head-pounding problem of when we try to invent zeros for this line, in order to measure it correctly.

I contend, what is primarily historical, is this problem. We will always hurt our heads thinking about it, but we won't stop trying to think about these zeros, either.

But what is very interesting is what these meditations have uncovered about the way we think about time, which we ignored, maybe because our heads hurt so much, or just out of habit, trying to keep all the measurements straight. When we look at them, they only ensnare us further into the problem, but in ways that are very interesting, and provoke thought about new aspects of the problem.

Heidegger's four significations of history are true. We think about the past in terms of a unified past and present. We separate the particular past from our 'sense of the past'. We use history to define our world, and our place in the world. And most interestingly, we take up the material of our history, and study it as history, to try to know more about ourselves.

And all of this changes, the more work in historiology we do. The more 'raw data' of history we accumulate, and the more we categorize it and sift it, bringing it into our 'now', the more our history changes. What would Heidegger have thought of the Internet? No authentic Being out there, to be sure. But an awful lot of other stuff. Lots of being-in-general. Lots of history, both being studied, created, and lost. The Internet is a giant web of presence, but a presence that is impossible to measure, and is never infinite. It changes our perception of temporality, but nevertheless extends our temporality, allowing us to look at particular moments and segments in repetition, completely skip other moments, and interact with history at a speed we find comfortable, whether fast or slow. The Internet is a master tool of historiology. It is a SF nightmare scientific tool, but the tool is set to work on our perception of the world, and can never be unplugged, and we cannot look outside of its scopes anymore. The Internet began as a repository for data, but now it is the tool for producing the data, distributing the data, and the tool for producing the tools, and the relations of production. The Internet is the world-history, both as a repository thereof, as creator, and conduit, and content. You can unplug from the computer, but you cannot unplug from world-history. There is no timelessness outside of cyber-time. There is history that signifies in a seperate segment from cyber-time, but because cyber-time is part of our phenomenal perception of temporality, and part of our history, there can be no temporality existing separately, and no alternate history. There is only one history--a tangled web of then-and-now, ever changing, re-expressing itself, and constantly being experienced.

Really, its not just the Internet. Any tool, any object in the world changes our interpretation of it, and our Being in the world. When you pick up a hammer, your hand is changed. It can bash in nails. It can bash in heads. It is still your body doing these things, but it is doing it as part of being-with-hammer. The Internet is the same, only we are all connected to the same Internet. We are being-with-Internet. It's not all the same Internet, but none of it is different. It is all part of the same world. It is only so apparent because it is instrumental in our perception of history, which as you remember, is how we visualize our selves in the world. We all have always been connected via the ecosystem, and via our species, and via the distributed genetic logic of our interior chemical structures. ACGT. All of our chemistries speak the same language, and are in the same temporality. But because of consciousness, through some peculiar mechanism, we are driven to understand the span of time and space by segmentation, by splitting it into categories, and egos, and nows and thens, lines and dots, and all the rest. Now, with these consciousnesses interfacing with the same machine, we are starting to bring these individual, conscious-ego world-histories back together, re-writing and re-reading our historiological understanding of our own histories, and creating the world-history anew as we go. We are ditching some of the more quantitatively temporal segmentation strategies as we go. Minutes of the day.... time zones... yesterday versus the day before... what does it matter? All that matters is what history continues to be, and continues to show us about itself. And, what it still refuses to allow us to comprehend, by way of its own structure.

It will be said that these deliberations have been rather petty. No one denies that at bottom human Dasein is the primary 'subject' of history; and the ordinary conception of history, which we have cited, says so plainly enough. But with the thesis that 'Dasein is historical', one has in view not just the ontical fact that in man we are presented with a more or less important 'atom' in the workings of world-history, and that we remains the plaything of circumstances and events. This thesis raises the problem: to what extent and on the basis of what ontological conditions, does historicality belong, as an essential constitutive state, to the subjectivity of the 'historical' subject?

The easy way out would be to say that in this post-property Internet dimension, nothing belongs to anyone any more. Not even history; not even historicality. Historiology, the province of entrepreneurial metaphysicians, is now open territory to anyone. But, this is not really the answer to the question. Historicality does belong to someone; it has to, if it is something distinctly historical. You can't have a phenomenological reduction without someone to observe the phenomena. But I think what has changed is, what it means to 'belong'. We are not really atoms in the structure of world-history, nor amino acids, nor even electrons. We are fully conscious and individual animals, capable of independent worldly life and thought, that never the less choose to plug in and share with each other, creating new dimensions of time, space, and being where there were not before, and leaving old ones behind in the recesses and gutters of our collective memory. And that, when you start thinking about it, is really much more complicated.

Time for pCARL Time

Two years ago, frustrated at a nationally known amateur-writer holiday month thing that takes place in November, but whose name will not be spoke, I created my own little writer's holiday.

I know--creating your own holidays is one of the first signs, isn't it?

Basically, despite being a jerk and a general curmudgeon, I think that setting an arbitrary word count as a month long writing exercise is probably the least effective practice in writing. And the holiday aspect of it is equally silly. Writing a little over 1600 words a day is really not that hard. If you need help to write that much in a sitting, you might want to find a hobby that you actually like.

But I think there could be something in this annual, force-yourself-to-write in a new and different way (just if a "new and different way" is 1600 words in a sitting, then, well... you get it). So I invented pCARL: the psuedo-Creative Annual Ritual for Literature. As originally discussed, part of the charm is the name sounding like a marginal sex act. You can read more about it's traumatic birth here, in the FAQ.

The deal is this: in the month of November, the pCARLer will REWRITE a piece of literature they know, love, admire, hate, or otherwise have casually met. The only rule is that it must have originally been written by someone else.

The prototype is to rewrite the piece directly, word for word. With pen, woodblocks, keyboard, whatever. Of course, pCARL is not the sort of holiday that would get all up in your business by telling you exactly what to do. No! That is for other holidays with much less awesome acronyms. So, if you feel like getting creative with your rewrite process, for example, adding some of the things you think the author meant to say the first time around, but must have gotten accidently cut in the editing, go right ahead. The only rule is that the piece must have been written by someone other than yourself, and when you are done, will be somehow posts and shared, with the original author's name still given credit, albeit with the sub-title, "rewritten by ____."

It may sound stupid, and maybe it is. But once you have taken the trouble to actually rewrite something, you see the benefit. Also, maybe the benefit of doing it only once a year. Even to place an original text next to the keyboard, and bend your head to think about the letters of each word as they flow through your fingers, is good exercise. It's like reciting a Shakespearian monologue. The cadance of the text, and the shape of its symbols pass through your mind like a train through the countryside.

Sure, you can write pages of "original" prose. And you can reread the classics a lot faster than you can rewrite them, and gain more from the reading experience. But rewriting a text is like stepping into history; it's not going back into history, but like lifting the fibers of your historical view of the world and literature, and stepping inside, to see how things look from another vantage point.

The first year I did the first chapter of Melville's The Confidence Man. I don't remember what I did last year, but I think I did end up doing something (other than writing about it on the Internet). This year I re-wrote a section from Heidegger's Being and Time, into which I inserted my own comments about history, time, and the internet, and which I published as a post in conjunction with this one.

Part of the reason I did them together, is because the conclusions I drew from the passage, are relevant to pCARL itself. Clearly, this holiday does not avail itself to the stricter interpretations of what Intellectual Property is. But additionally, it casts the literary canon in a different light than simply paying for a book, and putting it on the shelf. It brings work into the present, into a state of literary being. The passage of Heidegger was written in 1926, but now it was also written in 2009. Maybe you prefer the '26 version better. It certainly will continue to be the "true" version that will be republished, and the next time I want to read the section in question, I will probably reach for the '26 as well. But nevertheless, because I am posting it on the Internet, the 2009 version exists, and will continue to exist. It was here, part of the present, and will remain so, though most-likely ignored. I'm sure I don't have to tell you how today we only know of many great historical works because they were mentioned in other commentary--all original copies being lost. I don't claim this will happen with Being and Time, but still, it proves a strange, dopplegangered existential quality for such referential work.

The original English translation of Being and Time was completed and published in the 60s. My physical copy is the Stambaugh re-translation, completed in the 90s. Translation is a form of re-writing, of course, and definitely suited to pCARL's mission. When I typed the text, I used the older translation, most of which is available via Google Books. Not all of it, however. Because of Google Books' innane "preview" deal, there was one "unviewable" page from the section in question. This renders the work nearly useless, in my opinion. Thanks, for nothing Google. But, since it is easier to retype something on the screen than a book in one's lap, I used the portion that was available, and then filled in the missing page from the Stambaugh translation. Among other fun pCARL experience, this laid differences in the translation bare. I was able to pick up the missing page easy enough (without using the standardized page numbers of the original edition), but I actually had some trouble figuring out where the missing page ended, because the wording was so different. Key phrases are translated differently throughout the text. The newer translation prints "Dasein" as "Da-sein", to better show the composite nature of the term. This gave me some clues, but when the sentences are completely transposed in the clause order, it gets difficult to tell what sentences are "equivalent". I left the language true to each version, but I did write all "dasein's" without the hyphen, just to keep it the same.

So have I violated copyright, or not? I used the publicly available, fair-use Google Books preview of one edition, and then supplemented it with a fair-use portion of another edition, with a totally different copyright. Or have I violated the copyright of the Heidegger estate? I don't think so, because I think 1927, the date of the first edition, renders it public domain. But this doesn't qualify further translations, with their own copyright. But then, isn't all of what I did fair use? I inserted more commentary than original text. Or maybe nobody cares. This is the Internet, after all.

Despite the hard-to-understand measurements of Intellectual Property, what I did was to create a segment point at which this text re-enters world-history. This text is canonical; it is historical. I have reinvigorated it's being in the present, by making it something both old and new. I have made it signify according to all four of Heidegger's listed significations of history, which I discuss in the post. Is it more historical now, or less? I'm not sure.

Regardless, pCARL will press onward, ever pushing to boundaries of what my mind and the Internet will tolerate, or completely ignore.

Forward!

A Number of Syncretious Posts

So, in the repetition of a little November custom I have (more on that immediately) and in the pre-requisition of thought in preparation for something new (more on that much later), and because I am just the sort of weird guy to do it, I found myself sitting down with my copy of Heidegger's Being and Time last week.

This book is a lot of things. Above all, it's pack to the walls with stuff. After you've first tangled with it, unless you are making your career on its back, it's the sort of book you read a few passages of at a time, and then put it back on the shelf. Luckily it's so packed full, and arranged into relatively small, detailed, topical sections, that it bends itself in this direction.

Due to recent interests of mine, and the items mentioned in the first paragraph, I decided to turn to the sections on temporality. Everybody (everybody?) knows about Dasein, or "there-being", but it's easy to forget that the second half of the title is actually about good old Time, the more interesting half of metaphysics, in my view.

What I'm going to do here, is to re-write section 73 of Being in Time, entitled The Vulgar Understanding of History and the Occurence of Dasein. Interspersed with these paragraphs, I'm going to insert my own commentary, explaining just what I found so interesting in this passage, as relates to some of my favorite ideas about cyber-time, atemporality, history, perception, and materialism.

Why I'm doing this, other than flexing my atrophying philosophical muscles and wasting blank space on the Internet we will never be able to recover, as well as minutes of your life and mine which we will never get back and therefore be that much closer to death, is actually a blog post in itself, which you can read about in full here. Whether this post comes first, or that post comes first, is a little vicissitude we'll leave up to Blogger, because I'm going to post them at exactly the same time. Maybe the other post is the main point--or maybe this one is. Maybe neither are. But, more on these problems... in time.

Interdome Notes, Vol. 1

Although most of my posts are long-winded, pseudo-philosophical, personal exhibitionism exercises, I'm going to try and and insert more short segments and brief thoughts, with possibly even no theoretical relevance whatsoever. (We'll see how I do with that.)

Though I've provided ample exegesis on my fondness and support for Google's many projects (even while I feel a bit like Heidegger's 'Rectory Address' every time I declare my metaphysical love for a corporation with a market cap. of $140 Billion; that's right, not like Heidegger but the address itself) I think Google Reader is my favorite. This is actually an affinity for the concept of RSS scripts more than Google; RSS is a little cousin of html and xml script that let's you create your own synchronized newspaper with an appropriate client.

In Reader there is a delightful "share" function, which creates your own RSS feed, similar to a mini-blog, with RSS entries that one finds compelling, with one's appropriate commentary. So, since I have no Reader buddies, I will be sharing these little internet tidbits via my blog; hopefully this will increase my post frequency and also spread the RSS love a bit, since I know that I have at least a few regular readers here.


So, here is
Interdome Notes Vol. 1(general link to my shared material enclosed)

Boing Boing brings us this little tidbit, about McSweeney's apparent plagerism of heavy metal website Encyclopaedia Metallum. The website, and the book, are nothing more than a list of all known metal bands (also the title of the McSweeney's publication). If you didn't already have a reason to dislike McSweeney's, here is another (heh heh). I'm all for open-use and circulation of materials on the internet, but republishing for profit, when it's not in the public domain? That's a no-no. Especially if it is still currently in "print", which the website most certainly is. What's next? Are they going to print Wikipedia too?


Anyway, more of these little items as I find them. I would also mention the current stock market turmoil, which I am watching with interest--but there is no need to enclose a link to that, because you can find that as soon as opening the internet.


Cheers,
Adam

What if I Told You that the Hegelianism Never Ended?

I think my last post responded to a column on Erik Davis' website Techgnosis (though originally it was published elsewhere). As I think I mentioned, I'm a big fan of his writing and his work because I haver such a confluence of interest with his topics.

For instance, this recent post that deals with Blade Runner, Slavoj Zizek, and SF literature. As potent a melange as a beet, cherve, and dandelion-green salad!

But let me add the vinegarette, if I might be so bold: Davis draws attention to the uncanny realization of the replicant in Blade Runner. He quotes Zizek, discoursing on the film:

"Let us recall how, in Blade Runner, Rachel silently starts to cry when Deckard proves to her that she is a replicant. The silent grief over the loss of her “humanity,” the infinite longing to be or to become human again, although she knows it will never happen; or, conversely, the eternal gnawing doubt over whether I am truly human or just an android—it is these very undecided, intermediate states which make me human." [Davis' emphasis]

Yes, this is indeed the post-modern aesthetic that makes such movies and stories so popular in this modern age. "I thought I/it was... but in reality, it was..." The horror, the tragedy! Our ideas explode into flame on the jagged, gothic spikes on reality. The matrix has us all, and we constantly struggle (uselessly) against its modern power that even gets into our minds, (bodies) man!

And self-described Hegelians like Zizek try to argue that it is this liminal zone, this uncanniness, that is the very reality of consciousness, or humanity. And non-self-described Hegelians do as well. (Whether they are Hegelians or not...) Most of the critical thinkers of the last century draw our attention towards some sort of liminality, some borderline, or sublime transference between two states that is used as a point of pivot for their theory. And they are not wrong to do so; this is a very new concept for theory. Many philosophies rigorously distinguish between the this/that, and totally ignore the and/or point. It is a new point on the dialectic: the point of transfer that unites the entire equation...

Or is it? I will can the rhetorics; no it is more of the same. It doesn't really matter how uncanny it is, or that it is "shaky" as opposed to the ur-ground of older philosophers. What it is really looking for, is a new point of authenticity.

Authenticity. I said it again. This is word that I use for it, harvested from the translations of Heidegger that I have read. Heidegger is a great example of this search for authenticity for several reasons. One: despite the very historically-important dualities that he disregards and deconstructs, the authentic vs. the inauthentic is a constant parallel to which he returns. Two: although he all but explicit states that there is no qualitative preference for authenticity of inauthenticity, you can read, very loudly, that he is striving for the authentic. Authentic being, authentic metaphysics, and authentic society. This last item brings us to point three: he accepted Nazism. Now, I would not put his work in the "Fascist" section of the library, nor would I say that it should be read as a causal vector towards Fascism. However, it can't be ignored that brilliant and groundbreaking as he was, he was swayed to desert his colleagues, fellow humans, and even lover in favor of the volk, with such horrific general consequences of which we are all very aware.

Oh, and lastly, "authentic" is a word that is pretty easily accessible to those who haven't read Heidegger. Which, for some reason, seems to be a category that includes almost everyone. It meaning is not so nuanced: there are different ways of doing to same thing. You can win by striving hard according to the rules, or you can win by cheating. One is authentic. Why? Because it wouldn't be a race if it didn't have a start point and an end point, and a prescribed course between the two.

Human race, Aryan race, 100-meter dash... all the same? No, of course not. But all have "authentic ways of being" what they are. This is what Humanism is. A relatively recent development, it takes a collection of moral axioms and cultural standards culled from over the last 5,000 years or so, and binds them all together in one agnostic, ill-defined package called "humanity". For example, if there is a genocide or other tragedy somewhere, you must declare outrage at the fact of suffering, but not necessarily do anything. Competition is fine, as long as there is a general belief in the "fairness" of this competition. Monogamy, for some reason, is really sweet. Love is also great, as long as you submit sacrifices of lust on the altar from time to time, because courtly love is like, way creepy. This is what it means to be human, authentically, circa 2008.

Of course, this is not a monoculture. We have plenty of counter-authenticities. Being ironic in the face of other's suffering is cool. Opting out of competition is also really chill. And generally thwarting monogamy to be "in love with lust" is really current. Especially if you post about it on your blog. You can also post about Zizek on your blog: case in point, myself.

And this is what Zizek is doing; he is defining a post-modern, self-described Hegelian, sub-Lacanian, authentic humanity. Which is: a totally un-humanity, where we are constantly disturbed that in this crazy, year-of-our-internet we don't know where the human begins and the iPhone ends. This isn't a humanity of commandments, or of morals, or that you can write about in a book. Oh, wait, Zizek has written it in a book! How many books has he sold lately?

And it is a very attractive idea to the humans who are constantly stunned by what "they" thought up next, or what's on the internet now, or what's new and different. What if we did wake up and discover we were all robots? Oh well, that's just these times that we live in. My entire reality is rewritten via Wikipedia every night, and broadcast on YouTube every morning.

No! This isn't humanity, or authentic anything! It's channel surfing; it's hyperlinking; it's trivia night at the local hipster bar! The problem is, the authenticity itself is false. It is a wild goose chase, a constant search for what is real, or even, ironically unreal, in and among these shifting sands of modern... what? Irreality? Unreality? Falsehood? Machinery?

This is what PKD is getting at in his books: you can't bet on anything to be what you think it is, not ever--whether it be robots disguised as humans, humans disguised as robots, or humans who think it is cool to be a robot. All his main characters are stumbling through worlds of bizarre, uncanny occurrences. But, these are not worlds of quick-sand reality, where the bait-and-slip is so, so post-modern. SF is always already the questioning of reality. What if we could fly to the moon? What if the Germans won WWII? These are concepts that fuck with reality. PKD's character's do not have reality because their events occur in worlds that are already twice unreal--they are fiction, and speculative fiction that is meant to be different then reality. The characters trip through worlds of sensation and harshly cut-together events, and the only reality is the sense that the phenomena creates at the moment. Any search for meaning in a more meta-sense is doomed to break itself off in a fiendish circle of double, triple, and quadruple ironies that expose the fascination with such metaphorical curiosities as the fashion circus that it is. Sometimes the characters find an ending, and sometimes they don't. There is no reality, and yet, it is as real as anything ever is, anyway. Take Man in the High Castle. This speculative concept of an alternate history: what is the conclusion? The conclusion is, this world is made up, invented by an author. Germans win, germans lose, there was a war, people die after living their lives, those who survive now live in some sort of post-war world. Of course, everything in contingent on what does happen. But what is the end result of reality? Nothing. Except itself. No historical is more authentic than another, and in fact, no reality may be more authentic. If one day we wake up to find it was all a sham, guess what? We still have to go to bed that night and wake up again the next morning. What if this town is the battle ground between chaos and order? What if I'll die tomorrow? What if I'm already dead? What if none of these statements are true? It's not nihilism. Nihilism is the constant, fleeting search for meaning that ends with us dying, having found nothing more than when we started, but only flitting from eternal truth to eternal truth, to the death of eternal truths, to the birth of tangential truths only found in gritty (and cyber-punk, if possible) liminal spaces.

The movie of Blade Runner can be interpreted either way, depending on what is important to the viewer. Is authentic humanity important to you? Then waking up as a non-human would be a huge problem, and one where you could philosophically find your real, true humanity (and sell books about it). Or is simply living important, as it seems to be to Decker? If you can't tell the difference between your authentic humanity and your replicated humanity, why worry?

"Too bad she won't live... but then again, who does?"

The Nexus-6 who dies after rambling on about C-beams glittering through space (an excellent scene, by the way) is dealing with problems of existence, not of humanity. What is it like, to die? Well, he's actually lucky because he has discovered, from the boiler-plate on his spine, that he has a maker, and can go to his address. And when he fails to put off the issue of life/death into the future for you, you can kill him, and maybe feel a little better. Most of us don't have the option, and instead we can only muse about such problems of existence in SF novels or on blogs.

But what if I woke up tomorrow, and discovered that I wasn't going to die? Well, I suppose it would be a little weird at first. I would probably have to find something else to blog about. But is my toast going to taste different without the sword of Damocles hanging over my head? Maybe, if you are a humanist and thought that this relationship between you and your end colored your entire life with meaning. Or, if you a self-described Hegelian, and your conception of reality was based upon a flip-flopping from one plateau of the dialectic to the next, given gravity by that huge authentic signifier forever floating out above your head somewhere. But if you were a realist, and understood all meaning to be as uniquely real as it is transient, then perhaps you merely grin and see if you could get a date with that hot replicant-receptionist. It's not buddhist. It's simply real. I always thought it was funny how, despite the existential, speculatively-mind-warping time-space crises that PKD's characters live through, they never seem to miss an opportunity to sleep with a woman or imbibe a mind-altering substance.

So, when that pharmacist shows up at your door with an energy beam that reminds you that the Empire Never Ended, just smile, take the bag of painkillers, and see if you can pimp it into a SF trilogy. Thanks, and goodnight.


ps. One technical note, that I thought of after finishing the post. If the replicant is truely undergoing a universally human, existential experience upon the realization that one is actually a synthetic human, rather than a wetware version, then it follows that the ability to have an existential experience such as this is actually a synthesized experience. Then it is not a "truly human" problem, and the Nexus corp. only engineered it as a truly synthetic experience. There is no way to say how a true human would respond to the discovery that they are synthetic, because a true human could never, truthfully, discover such a thing. However, the fictional tale of someone very-much-not-quite-unlike a human finding out this truth could evoke a lingering doubt in true humans, who would then philosophize on the idea despite it's purely speculative nature. And, perhaps this is the actual meaning of existentialism--the pondering of realities that are like our current reality yet outside of the reality of experience (e.g. "hell is other people", yet who has written the book about what the opposing heaven is like?). After all, part of the interest in what happens after we die is that there is no one around to give us a review. What are the limits of experience if there is no way to experience them?

But anyway, I think this conundrum brings up a much more interesting question re: Blade Runner. Why the hell did the Nexus corp. invent a machine that would have an existential experience? Was it a philosophical experiment, under which they created a machine in their own image, that had questions about life, the universe, and everything that they themselves had? Or was it a programming bug that developed while they were trying to create a machine with conscious-like artificial memories (the key being, the memories linger but fade, and can be recalled in a not-quite conscious way, giving rise to an understanding with a limited scope of consciousness, that would invariably question what lay outside such a consciousness)? Or was it more purposefully? Frankly, that's a pretty good fail safe. You're memory machine breaks down, and realizes that its a fake (in other words, that limited consciousness now sees more than it was supposed to). So, just like Windows, it phones home the fatal error! The machine travels across the solar system with no desire greater than wishing to meet its maker. Master, I have fatal exception E845FG1, (error code: theorization of the limited totality of consciousness) please fix me!