The Nova Trilogy

Clinamenic said:

But whats crazy is that the scale varies so widely that some of these structures are absolutely dwarfed by even the smallest of biological systems, depending on where you draw the biological line and what you consider a structure.

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version said:

Yeah, that or zoomed right in. You're looking at either distant stars and galaxies or microorganisms - maybe even both.

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version said:

I like the idea of zooming in far enough that it becomes another world/landscape. Worlds within worlds. The grooves on a record become valleys.

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I think I skimmed it or just watched the start.

Have you read any Burroughs?

Clinamenic said:

And across all scales, the structures themselves seem to emerge as a consequent of the parameters by which smaller systems interact with one another, e.g. electric and magnetic fields, massive bodies attracting other massive bodies, etc.

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This is how I understand D&G too, or at least one aspect of D&G. Crisscrossing flows.

Clinamenic said:

No, but I've listened to maybe six or seven talks he gave. But I hear the textual experience is singular in its own right.

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Yeah, you should read him.

Clinamenic said:

Whats really cool is to visualize difference over time on a linear axis, on which every point represents a moment in the evolution of energy in the universe, and it all starts to seem like a grand cosmic dance of sorts.

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That's Bergson, I think. A seed is a plant is a dead plant all at once, depending on which point in the timeline you're concentrating on.

Yeah, I was gonna say... We're part of it. We're not just observers. It's like being lost at sea in a hurricane. You can observe the hurricane, but you're also being tossed about in the middle of it.

It's quite uncomfortable, that. The feeling you've got one foot in, one foot out. You can see it happening as though its separate from you whilst knowing that it isn't.

Clinamenic said:

I'd also like to expand this understanding through electronic devices, which while still drastically less structurally complex than organic matter, are making perhaps alarming/exciting progress, depending on where you stand.

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You should read McLuhan's notes on Burroughs.


3. That man provides the sexual organs of the technological world seems obvious enough to Burroughs, and such is the stage (or “biological theatre” as he calls it in Nova Express) for the series of social orgasms brought about by the evolutionary mutations of man and society. The logic, physical and emotional, of a world in which we have made our environment out of our own nervous systems, Burroughs follows everywhere to the peripheral orgasm of the cosmos.

4. Each technological extension involves an act of collective cannibalism. The previous environment with all its private and social values, is swallowed by the new environment and reprocessed for whatever values are digestible. Thus, Nature was succeeded by the mechanical environment and became what we call the “content” of the new industrial environment. That is, Nature became a vessel of aesthetic and spiritual values. Again and again the old environment is upgraded into an art form while the new conditions are regarded as corrupt and degrading. Artists, being experts in sensory awareness, tend to concentrate on the environmental as the challenging and dangerous situation. That is why they may seem to be “ahead of their time.” Actually, they alone have the resources and temerity to live in immediate contact with the environment of their age. More timid people prefer to accept the content, the previous environment’s values, as the continuing reality of their time. Our natural bias is to accept the new gimmick (automaton, say) as a thing that can be accommodated in the old ethical order.

5. During the process of digestion of the old environment, man finds it expedient to anesthetize himself as much as possible. He pays as little attention to the action of the environment as the patient heeds the surgeon’s scalpel. The gulping or swallowing of Nature by the machine was attended by a complete change of the ground rules of both the sensory ratios of the individual nervous system and the patterns of the social order as well. Today, when the environment has become the extension of the entire mesh of the nervous system, anesthesia numbs our bodies into hydraulic jacks.