In Paul Virilio's The Aesthetics of Disappearance, his Heathcliff attempts to wrangle out a minor metaphysics from the situation of the approach from the distance, and as this was written at the dawn of the internet age, only sounds barely ironic, and to me, quite poignant, and sort of Futurist. Now I can't quite find my copy, but I've rooted around in the google books thingy and drawn out a paraphrasal nugget which I think neatly sums up the entire project of that book, namely, the aesthetics, metaphysics, and psychology of the prosthesis of acceleration, and this is considering all time-compressing techniques as a single prosthesis, and really as sort of a historical culmination, but more imprtantly as a biological extrapolation, in other words, the prosthesis of acceleration is LITERATURE.
Now, why LITERATURE? to be honest, it's just because yesterday, a little blues song crawled into my head, and while my wife was changing into dinner clothes, I had made Cajun Bean stew and rice, I was singing a song whose most favorite refrain was
Literature is skanky
except I was giving it all the Etta James I had, skatting a stuttering the Ts and repeating the ank sound,
etc. She was chuckling into her beans.
I guess what I'm saying is that what Virilio is sort of saying is that The Prosthesis of Acceleration is something which isn't just about going faster, seeing, acquiring more quickly, but is apart of a transformative biological becoming, uh oh, Deleuze, well, you could easily put it into Deleuzian terms, that the collective human brain, in a deterritorializing fashion is entering into a dialectic with the body, with the fragmented body of techniques, as if method itself were a sort of junkyard / garden. As if Method were the broken body of Osiris, etc..
Anyway, let's just continue the approach,
our own speed
has destroyed the narrative,
we are in the prosthesis of acceleration
and as in Einstein's world of post-light speed phantasmagoria
weird things just fly by
snakes and twisted Heathcliff's
Jane Austen fucking a werewolf in a space station that looks like some version
of the Parthenon. Baudelaire mouthing the word:
L'Héautontimorouménos
For what reason? Hmmf.
I guess maybe I let it go on too long, but look at the sentence,
"The only reason it should continue is because it exists." Which perfectly echoes the opening, and dare I say,
mood-setting machinery in Alain Robbe-Grillet's awesomely excellent philosphicallly surreal pulp 'film'
Recollections of the Golden Triangle (I've high-lighted the Virilionesque bits)
Hear the voice, the voice of the collective, as the voice of the junkie, not the vulgar junkie of the street, but an ontological junkie, hungry for something else, its collective self trapped in the vast distances of the moor, flowing anywhere it can, looking for the fixe, to end its fixed ideas, the transformation fix.. This process could be likened as Virilio does to a Quantum Biological Dialectic, and one could easily add
an historico-reflexive quantum biological dialectic
with art, or method being the saddle bag, the yolk sac..
I've changed the header image to a tribal worm of joy. Reminiscent of a native of Papua New Guinea
the irronism apparent to myself is
Pupa / New Genesis.
Can't you just see those weird cities? hovering amoeba students gliding through university 'data-gardens'
'having sex with living books' statues of things like
Captain Kirk crossed with a Koala bear wearing sea-horse bling that smells of cotton candy and pop-corn?
