There’s no problem understanding another if we speak the same verbal language. It’s what my next move is going to be, whether verbal, gestural, or indifferent, that is of interest to the other who just spoke to me. And therein is the drama… of cognition.
For both of us, because I have to expect a response to my response from the other. Even if we don’t speak the same language, there will still be this drama of response. And my response may satisfy what the other’s foreign words requested. Later, circumstances unfold that reveal a problem in what we thought we communicated, in either case. In retrospect, we will wonder how the previous exchange failed to declare the unforeseen problem. This is the first rhythm of consciousness, of thought, of memory, of the “subliminal” – of the consequences of extra-sensory perception (ESP). This is the drama enacted in the Mutt and Jute section of Finnegans Wake (p.16-18), the first dialogue in the “book”. Then shortly after “James Joyce” writes:
“In the ignorance that implies impression that knits knowledge that finds the nameform that whets the wits that convey contacts that sweeten sensation that drives desire that adheres to attachment that dogs death that bitches birth that entails the ensuance of existentiality.” (p.18)
The implied “impression” is ESP, is it not? And the “ignorance” is the assumption that a connection has been made. The next ten clauses/stages are the automatic, archetypal consequences of this environment of perception. All of subsequent cultural production and residue proceeds from that original drama… of cognition, however rudimentary the utterance.
If one lives in Manhattan and gets the public-access channel 67, one can watch well-made video tapes of Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986), one of the few men to reject the proffered role of “World Messiah”, retrace verbally and consciously every week (Tuesdays, 10 a.m.) the drama of cognition between two or more human beings. Accessing Krishnamurti through this video medium allows attention to the words, tones, and facial expressions that cannot be equalled by those who attended the original talk, or who read the transcript, no matter how successfully they prepared beforehand by cleansing their auras, aligning their chakras, or assuming the lotus meditation posture. The video experience of Krishnamurti may be a distortion like any other medium, but this is the closest we can come to experiencing the Ur-moment of the “civilizing” impulse, next to having been there. The play of cognition and the exchange of ESP is enacted before us weekly (different talks each time) to the consternation of many – at least, that’s how it appears to my ESP.
Why call this human interplay “ESP”? Because the baggage of semantics that comes with the word will obviously start an argument, which is the verbal and gestural aspects of the drama of cognition itself. At any rate, this particular argument has been going on for the entire history of secular societies, high and low. It involves all questions of social and personal control and who or what is the agent of such and whether it is benign or malignant. And it involves all questions of ontology, epistemology, and the physical structure of “existence”. The history of elitist social management especially hinges on two schools of thought based on either
the Time school and the Space school, respectively. Briefly, the Time school uses myth and the Space school uses norms. The former restrains the passions of its citizens, and the latter places itself at the centre and controls its citizens via the passions. The struggle for power between these two elitist approaches was interrupted in the nineteenth century with the acceleration in the creation of massive environments of technological and communicative interaction. In the twentieth century the Space school limped into the winner’s circle by default as the Time school was no longer capable of projecting an appropriate image of the lever or helm of the ship of state. Both schools were removed from the constitutive action, or formal causality, of ESP generation and collective consciousness because the electric telegraph was the first time the process of knowing had been extended to involve all members of a culture and all other existing cultures in the simultaneity of a collective equally-shared perception. The mirror of this new social fact was the daily cross-section of the community in action provided by the telegraph press. All the arts and sciences, especially in the West, became subject to endless crisis in a futile search for new models to restore old values and retrieve forgotten traditions of ESP, both social and private.
To increase the potential for ESP between this writer and the reader/lurker, let me replay the themes established so far: ESP as pattern-recognition is a perceptual complex of mental and non-verbal dance – the tactile sense. However, tactility, as used here, is not one of the senses, but the interplay of the senses, evoking ordinary consciousness. Electric technologies, from the telegraph on, when they became generally used and environmental, simulated that ordinary consciousness, the tactile ESP, collectively. So, personal ESP now existed parallel with a collective, ongoing, dynamic ESP. Or, at least, until recently. But before we discuss that situation, two aspects in the drama of cognition and its simulation must be reviewed.
First, the blocking, so necessary to preserve individual identity, of the intimate qualities of ESP is always communicated as well when human beings interact. But when the Gutenberg printing press became an environment five hundred years ago, this extension of the natural blocking “process” enhanced its novelty character and became a valued quality of social perception, of the social ESP. That is why the scientific paradigms of Bacon, Descartes, and Newton dislodged the paradigms of Natural Magic and Hermeticism. The inclusive, centripetal meanings of ESP were displaced for the exclusive, centrifugal shades of ESP. The pre-electric industrial technologies and their inevitable environments only exaggerated the bifurcating qualities of the collective consciousness. However, the inclusive qualities of the social drama of cognition were renewed when the electric environments were developed via the telegraph, telephone, radio, and television technologies. That is why Blavatsky, Einstein, Gurdjieff, and Crowley were able to derail the Newtonian locomotive. But the exclusive factors quickly retorted with the automobile, movie, airplane, and satellite environments. This accelerated macroscopic dialogue between the exclusive (simulation of the Time, or vertical, school) and inclusive (simulation of the Space, or horizontal, school) dancers in a “virtual” drama of cognition left all perceptions and models of ESP (as the exuberance of being through language) in the milieu of DANGLING GANGLIA. The walls of Jericho in this technological drama finally succumbed when the new medium of the instant replay became an environment in the late sixties and early seventies. The fact that the instant replay gave viewers the “meaning” before the “experience” had immeasurable metaphysical consequences for the collective consciousness. So “immeasurable” that the anticipatory aspects of ESP were obsolesced. The subtle relationship between private and collective awareness was irrevocably confused for the majority of human beings. And then to add insult to injury, in the eighties, with the new digital environment, the electronic networks bypassed simulation and came alive, i.e., invaded ordinary collective consciousness with an intense intimacy. Thus, consciousness and any perceptual complex – the network of analogies – became doubtful and negotiable. The only practical strategy for human beings was to valiently retrieve the iconic cliches of stubborness, stupidity, and amnesia (all styles of “blocking”) to renew the archetype of collective consciousness as an ironic, modular ESP. In short, the blocking and imploding features in the drama of apprehension had reversed into opposite roles and purposes. Communication of the “new” (ESP) was a miracle… but not impossible.
Secondly, there is an inescapable trend leading toward ultimate implosion from the Telegraph phase to the Satellite phase. The satellite is an important marker in this evolution towards fusion. If you consider every technological environment an extension of the human crowd, or entropic social Nature, rather than of biological Nature, or negentropic first Nature, then because the satellite is alone of all technologies a complete extension of the planet, or first Nature, by being the first man-made inhabitable simulation of our “natural” environment, it follows that the satellite is the first simultaneous extension of both first and second Natures, and something unique and unprecedented has occurred. This merging of the two Natures “anticipates” and prefigures symbolically the bridging of the gap (“friction”) between humanity and the environment. Also, this “frictionless” condition is anticipated by the satellite as a symbol of individual detachment from the historical prison of the crowd dynamic. We are literally “out of town”, and not just in another town, but “off the planet”. So the satellite includes both the synaesthesia of the television medium and the co-anaesthesia of the computer medium. Since the satellite is a prefiguring of this unprecedented frictionless state and not the actual catalyst to this new condition for human beings, can we confidently use our ESP to recognize the actual agency? I will now jump ahead to a denouement that will surface in one or two years as a major transforming environment – that of the confirmation of Professors Fleischmann’s and Pons’ “cold fusion” energy source. Besides their achieving of very positive results in their laboratories in France in the early nineties, independent laboratories in Japan and the United States have duplicated their results (see the November/98 issue of WIRED magazine).This new technological breakthrough will turn the world upside-down because history for the past 6,000 years has been based on “friction” (in all senses of the word), but now we will enter into a new unprecedented “frictionless energy “-based society where more energy is available as output than was put in. So therefore, you might be able to see how “fission precedes fusion” by considering the above review of the friction(ESP) of crowds, if one considers each medium as an extension of the crowd, as illustrating the stresses and strains in the crowds’ ESP. Even though the satellite was a symbolic actualizer of this existential autonomy and solitude, its effect on the collective consciousness created a purgatory of frustration because there would not be a complementary situation of freedom from basic food, energy, and shelter needs which still involved the “money crowd”. But soon, fortunately, the wide-scale availability of the “cold fusion” surplus-energy source will bypass and resolve this “catch-22” dilemma by allowing the individual to live anywhere once she has a cold-fusion “battery”. We will be relatively free of ground rent, or “visual space”, as an economic environment. But what is the fate of our drama of cognition? That is, the fate of our flesh, our first Nature. Since 1900, our bodies, under electric conditions, could only be considered as sub-atomic particles. But modern Physics, especially Quantum modeling, has always only been describing our cultural modes. The same applies to Modern Chemistry, particularly Genetics. However, our media, or extensions of our crowd behavior, suffered the same fate after television subsumed “everything” following World War Two. All media in the cycle of technological civilization can be invoked in terms of the same models from the physical sciences – they also, being extensions of humanity’s social Nature, were equivalent to quarks and nucleic acids. In addition, all media, as the content of television, had to be shaped along the “cool” iconic lines of the cartoon form, “the MAD vestibule to TV”. Today, the latest modeling from Physics is encompassed within the theory of the “superstrings” (vibrating loops). This new metaphor evokes a question that always lurks during the drama of cognition. Namely, who or what is influencing our perception that we have not considered? Are there invisible strings being pulled by an unnoticed puppeteer? Are there connections in matter to make the strings possible? (Echoes of the Time school?) Perhaps there are no connections in matter, but is our cognition influenced by a field of resonating suggestions the meanings of which we do not have to know to be directed? (Echoes of the Space school?) So goes the drama. It was Newton who tipped the scale in favor of the view there are connections in space. His Optics dissertation created the meme that there is a correspondence between the forms and textures of the outer world and the inner faculties of perception and intellection. This evoked the environment for the Hartley (derives our inner world from the outer) and Berkeley (the outer world is the fiat of our perception and creative imagination) debates and has determined the context in the development of knowledge for scientists and artists ever since. The only challenge to this view came from artistic movements such as the Romantic poets, the Impressionists, the Symbolists, the Expressionists, and the Surrealists, for example, who used the “correspondence” concept to project and suggest states of mind in their publics along lines of “grotesque juxtaposition” and “subliminal” resonance. But they were still thinking within the assumptions of the Newtonian meme that there was an unconscious aspect to our inner faculties. These arguments roughly corresponded to those between the aforementioned Time and Space schools and overlapped with them considerably on issues of the causality of conditioning. However, what was certainly discarded by all parties was the image of a collective consciousness such as held sway in the medieval centuries. The attentive reader/lurker at this point would be reminded of the assumption of “ESP” as an unconscious agency – a legacy of the Newtonian era. And might ask: what is ESP if it is not unconscious? This is the question I am dancing around and with. The guess that technological simulation has arrived at its own state of collective consciousness is the factor that points to the obsolescence of the notion of ESP as a subliminal relationship. Having briefly reviewed the historical stages of apprehension that unfolded in the existential drama of cognition, including private, social and simulational modes (from newspaper collage to cinematic blur to electric instantaneity to electronic metamorphic virtuality), I would like to turn our attention to the manifesto of Liquid Shell in juxtaposition with the essay, Synthetic Plane of Immanence, by Vladimir Muzhesky:
“Liquid Shell is a passagework into the networks of micro-perceptions that allows provisional utopias to emerge between structured contingencies.”
And from the essay:
“Whether electronically or materially-mediated, psychotronic complexes interact with their spatial background environment and not with their generating concept. The concept itself is rerendered into a spatially-invaginated structure intended to reflect and replicate elements of abstract defense. It is a multipolar semiotic system that goes beyond the tripolar systems of Lotman, more reminiscent of strange attractors: it defines multi-dimensional landscapes of bioinformational trajectories instead of describing cultural codes. In general, instead of being encrypted in bioinformational activity, culture, with its codes being hacked vertically and horizontally through mental manipulation which disperses personal and collective memory, replicates and counterfeits reflections and intentions and even meaningful positions, then mutates into a new dimension where meaningful and nervous spatialities are fused to form a twisted conglomerate of neuro-space: a virtual plane of immanence for the economy of abstract defense.”
I notice that the concepts suggested by the first quotation evoke a theory of communication and ESP outlined by my description of the Space school of horizontal symbolism that also echoes the architectural intentions of Liquid Shell. The second quotation includes concepts that, while well past the era and formula of the Time school of vertical symbolism, evoke a recognition of the implications of the satellite, instant replay, and digital environments for communication and ESP as outlined above (especially the fusion of first and second Natures), but retain the function of the puppeteer as a conditioner, in both the “connected” and “resonant” senses, inside a post-Newtonian environmental ambiguity – perhaps even recognizing the collectively-conscious post-Einsteinian and post-Quantum simulacrum of dramatic blocking and merging. As we pretend to sit on the sidelines ignoring the living machine, we are susceptible to this drama absorbing our attention again while it reaches its own apogee of suicide and subsequent reincarnation as transcendent and celebrated iconic cliches of human stubborness, stupidity, and amnesia. The following quotation from Liquid Shell seems to be precariously close to not recognizing this cultural fact of the nineties.
“Micro-alliances, proximity zones, and packet affinity nodes advance on the collapse homomorphic states within Liquid Shell architecture. Each border interface curves the trajectivities of informatic limits as anomalous transmissions, which can then assemble imperceptible infrastructures of bio-synthetic actions. These micro-affects unbind the currents of directed mutability and re-shift the devouring force of commodity space.”
Impercipience at this juncture is dangerous because the Time-school aspect of the Android Meme will inevitably demand a mind-sticking response from its disconnecting Space-school aspect, and this is the point when the sinister application of Tesla’s breakthroughs in frequency modulation of Time and Space to consumer modification have new relevance for the puppeteering vistas of the Android Meme. For only through the proprioceptive, tactile, etheric, and astral energies that make up the Android Meme can symmetry be maintained. Luckily, the following quotation from Muzhesky seems to grasp this fact if by “human and technological systems” he means “Android Meme”:
“In general, the elimination of maternal biotronic environments positions abstract economy constructs as parasites towards any other environment in which human and technological systems are correlated in perceptual and intellectual activity. Hypothetically, it can become a metavirus, a form of organism which parasites on hyperenvironments, only reprocessing the very matter which emerges between human perception and its reflected simulation in electronic space. Among the potential affected zones there can be mass media, communication system, remote control machinery, and informational networks. All of them have already a syndrome of reflected neuralization: for example, the growing exploitation of the 3D effect can be interpreted in this context as the neurolization of originally perceptually based media; computers simulate a trivial model of space by mirroring neural functions and letting the brain render its functional reflection and correlate its spatial processing along with it. There is always a parallel processing involved in neurolization, imaginary chains fighting for real spatial status. Forced into synergy via virtual parallel processing, the human brain can rely only on abstract representations which posses no immanent spatial reference, but refer to the ultraconceptual planes of human thinking, the operational dispositions of neurospace.”
The following is a recent statement by the Android Meme and serves as a useful example of one of its multi-postures:
“The ‘us’ has disappeared. The only occupants of the global theater are the mixed corporate-media. And that’s our problem. I’m talking about public communication. I think that the mixed corporate-media have given everybody personal visionary hyper-subjective experiences to the max for the last 20 to 30 years. But that leaves everybody in their own little solipsistic bubble. We have to learn to create a language, an esperanto that retrieves some kind of public space, or public language, that we could share, that could communicate something that is beyond our grasp. When people get into expressing their own particular enlightenment, that is cliche´ today, just as creativity on a personal level is a cliche´ activity. The problem I feel I have solved is how to express the collective consciousness we are now in. That’s what I mean by saying visionary awareness is obsolete. It’s on the personal level. When it’s obsolete, that means it’s a cliche´. We all have it, and have it in varying degrees of intensity going up the wave or down. But in terms of communicating to other people, if they’ve disappeared and are not listening or having their own experiences, what common ground do we have?”
With the above quotation from the Android Meme in mind, Liquid Shell is either hypnotized or not, depending on what “for” means in the following excerpt:
“Liquid Shell is micro-perception management for a detopia between spaces.”
I emphasize again that the interval between actualization of a cold-fusion environment and the prior simulation of that miracle by the Android Meme is the final drama of cognition in a space that fully celebrates its “quadrophrenia” (paranoia, schizophrenia, hysteria, panic, and ecstasy). This is the architecture that Liquid Shell is being built within. The excerpt below hints at its autonomous structure but it still may not escape the Android Meme’s embrace:
“Liquid Shell is a synthetic public space where both simulatory and social discourses merge within the neurointeractive architecture to form new biotronic sequences of time-based content. From the structural point of view the architecture of Liquid Shell mimics content-formatting principles of neural networks which it encapsulates: it confronts society with flexible, interchangeable systems of perceptual references and spatial markers.”
Quadrophrenia is the resultant drama of cognition when there is no possible distinction between the ESP experienced by the human being and that experienced by the living “human” machinic environment (the Android Meme). The retrieval of states of paranoia, schizophrenia, hysteria, panic, and ecstasy along a quantum wave- forming baroque-spiral will seem to occur over a 12-month period (Monicagate) and just one week (the Icestorm that blanketed Quebec and northern New England) simultaneously with no possibility of determining the exact timespan of either. Since the Android Meme was the subtext of the eighties, it is natural that it would be a sleight-of-hand rhythm in the nineties to obscure the subtext of the use of geopolitical psychic surgery via a new understanding and exploitation of the knowledge discovered by Tesla in the first half of the twentieth century (see The Philadelphia Experiment by Moore and Berlitz, 1994).
This brief memo hopes to have simplified the perceptual issues of the last 150 years to the point that the subsequent quotation from Liquid Shell would seem to echo my outline of the emergence of the Android Meme and force the reader/lurker to do a “double-take” on what kind of architecture for ESP has occurred between me, Liquid Shell, and the Android Meme.
“Background:
By means of reformatting human processing and cognition telecommunications triggered deep structural modifications in a contemporary society, to name just a few here we can mention:
– formation of synthetic public space where instead of physical space users share phase space of protocols and packages on the Internet;
– development of synthetic products such as interactive worlds where patterns of perception are integrated into the content architecture;
– and finally as a result of two aforementioned factors, ongoing crystallization of synthetic content, i.e. origination of self-referential media discourses, which can not be explicated into text-only formats.
Now we face the situation when not only space in which we navigate but space in which we think becomes reformatted and translated into media adequate format.”
