Jean Baudrillard Did Not Die

[luka]

i definitely live in the condition of total speed even when, as so often, im sitting down, virtually catatonic and staring at the wall. i assume this is true for all of us.

 

[version]

I dunno that it's possible to live outside it unless you go live in the sticks somewhere. Any contact with technology drags you into its tempo.

 

[luka]

i can't pull back at all, i can't recover the slower time-pulse, the reflective mode, the contemplative mode, i can't create any distance becasue im always plunging into the future.... yes, exactly, the technology imposes it and there is no escape

 

[version]

There's one instance where I can do it whilst directly engaging with technology and it's what I was talking about in response to mvuent's recent stuff re: music and the imagination. That takes me out of time somewhat, even listening to stuff at the computer on YouTube.

 

[luka]

this is one of the main reasons emotions are no longer possible. you can't feel sad under these conditions. you can feel heavy, sluggish, tired. you can be blank, flat, affectless, but you can't feel anything as exquisite as melancholy.

 

[shiels]

Ballard was a big fan.

They have the same ‘cool fascination’ kpunk mentioned upthread - on psychoanalysis and death, sex, advertising, beauty in violence.

I take the cool to mean that the moral indignance is removed? An unflinching indifferent observation?

 

[version]

i can't pull back at all, i can't recover the slower time-pulse, the reflective mode, the contemplative mode, i can't create any distance becasue im always plunging into the future.... yes, exactly, the technology imposes it and there is no escape

There's a warped physicality to sitting online. It mostly mental on paper as you're sat more or less stationary and it's all to do with thought and vision, but it can feel absolutely knackering, breakneck, whereas actually being outside somewhere big and empty, walking around, can feel as though your body's on autopilot and you're completely in your head.

 

[version]

They have the same ‘cool fascination’ kpunk mentioned upthread - on psychoanalysis and death, sex, advertising, beauty in violence.

I take the cool to mean that the moral indignance is removed? An unflinching indifferent observation?

Ballard talked about his and Burroughs' fascination with medical science and how it translated into their writing as cool descriptions of otherwise hot situations, e.g. violence, sex scenes.

"I've always used a kind of scientific vocabulary and a scientific approach to show the subject matter in a fresh light. I mean, if you're describing what happens when, say, a car crash occurs and a human body impacts against a steering wheel and then goes through the windscreen, one can describe it in a kind of Mickey Spillane language with powerful adverbs and adjectives. But another approach is to be cool and clinical and describe it in the way that a forensic scientist would describe what happens, or people working, say, at a road research laboratory describing what happens to crash test dummies. Now, you get an unnerving window onto a new kind of reality...

The same applies to, say, describing a man and woman making love. Instead of using all the clichés that are marshaled wearily once again in most novels, approach it as if it were some sort of forensic experiment that you were describing. An event that is being watched with the calm eye of the anatomist or the physiologist. It often prompts completely new insights into what has actually happened.

So yes, I've done that and Burroughs did that in a different way. His novels, particularly "Naked Lunch," are full of almost footnote material explaining the exact route to the central nervous system taken by some obscure Amazonian poison on the end of a dart as it pierces its victim. He was very interested in that sort of thing, the exact mechanisms by which consciousness was altered by drugs of various kinds. I think I share that with him too."

J.G. Ballard on William S. Burroughs' naked truth

The experimental writer J.G. Ballard, author of "Crash" and other controversial works, on the late, legendary William S. Burroughs.

www.salon.com

 

[shiels]

There's a warped physicality to sitting online. It mostly mental on paper as you're sat more or less stationary and it's all to do with thought and vision, but it can feel absolutely knackering, breakneck, whereas actually being outside somewhere big and empty, walking around, can feel as though your body's on autopilot and you're completely in your head.

this disparity, this widening rupture with the virtual and the physical body is gradually opening an ever larger new theatrical space and this widening gap is one reason why we have our current crisis of self. It’s why luke thinks we have no emotion. Meta verse advocates pish themselves at the possibilities here but i don’t think its gonnna properly happen well all go completely insane before it does

 

[luka]

thats why i keep saying Prynne and Ballard have a lot in common

 

[version]

I assume it's to do with stimulation. You're always taking things in, but the rate, quantity, style and delivery is drastically different online to wandering around in the countryside. Much more fragmented, crawling with text and images, disconnected from your physical movement. Maybe it's some form of motion sickness. The speed at which the brain's being forced to move totally out of sync with the stationary body.

 

[version]

Stan will like this,

Once, while the boyfriend carved a roast chicken, Burroughs began to describe the right way to stab a man to death and he was graphically illustrating it with this large carving knife. His head was filled with all sorts of bizarre bits and pieces culled from "Believe It or Not" features and police magazines and all kinds of obscure sources. But he was very interested in scientific or technological underpinnings. I think, in a way, I share that with him. I've always felt that science in general is a way of ordering one's imaginative response to the world.

@Clinamenic

 

[luka]

the thing i do when i switch the internet off for 6 hours in the middle of the day does generate good results, i write a book or i reverse the ageing process or whatever, but it doesn't really allow me to recapture those older, slower time-pulses. those are gone, i think, forever. it just frees up a fairly significant wobbling slab of libido that can be used elsewhere

 

[version]

Slow cinema can sometimes do it. You can really push against it though. That's how I felt watching The Passenger. Someone in the Antonioni thread described it as being engaged and wanting to race forward, but being tied down by the director. You feel like an excitable dog straining against the lead.

 

[luka]

Prynne is always doing things like tracking the passage of glucose into the blood, as a counterpart to, like, feeling perky all of a sudden

 

[luka]

Slow cinema can sometimes do it. You can really push against it though. That's how I felt watching The Passenger. Someone in the Antonioni thread described it as being engaged and wanting to race forward, but being tied down by the director. You feel like an excitable dog straining against the lead.

i think the one time i pop up in that giant k-punk book is in reference to the 'slow time' thing i was on about at the time. i talked about slow cinema and also watching the surface of a river as ways to open out into slow time. but that was almost twenty years ago and anyway i was smoking a lot of skunk.

 

[shiels]

I assume it's to do with stimulation. You're always taking things in, but the rate, quantity, style and delivery is drastically different online to wandering around in the countryside. Much more fragmented, crawling with text and images, disconnected from your physical movement. Maybe it's some form of motion sickness. The speed at which the brain's being forced to move totally out of sync with the stationary body.

A thing i think about wrt the evolution of emotion, and we’ve talked about it on here in conversation about fame, ‘the puppets’, the face etc. is that in terms of expression ourselves, we’ve mostly been in smallish tribes with a community of people we know, but are now exposed to thousands of faces per day. And share our lives with hundreds some times thousands of people daily, getting huge amounts of feedback (or not)

There’s something about velocity too, the real time speed of face to face and facial expression as regulator of social interaction.vs an increasing amount of our social interactions now take place without much face signalling and we have this dissonance *straight face* : LOLOL dying etc

 

[version]

i think the one time i pop up in that giant k-punk book is in reference to the 'slow time' thing i was on about at the time. i talked about slow cinema and also watching the surface of a river as ways to open out into slow time. but that was almost twenty years ago and anyway i was smoking a lot of skunk.

Tarkovsky can do it.

 

[luka]

Prynne is always doing things like tracking the passage of glucose into the blood, as a counterpart to, like, feeling perky all of a sudden

i rip this off in Prediction Tablet becasue i like it so much

Flood receptor sites insurgent bliss crescent
swathe incursion over limit phase-shift
now what have we got here?
inspection at border site-
load limit registration check procedure
Pass - you can go through now


although Bliss Crescent is actually the name of a street near me

 

[version]

That DeLillo novel I read a while back, Point Omega, had a lot in it about the time-dilating effect of the desert.

“It's all embedded, the hours and minutes, words and numbers everywhere, he said, train stations, bus routes, taxi meters, surveillance cameras. It's all about time, dimwit time, inferior time, people checking watches and other devices, other reminders. This is time draining out of our lives. Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There's an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what's left is terror."