Get ready. Wait for it. Ok - here it is: The Cardinal Rule of Semantics & the parent science, Semiotics, as well as Linguistics and Cognitive Psychology: When you Name, you Classify - When you Classify, you Control. It takes 40 years or so of constant study & research to understand & appreciate the Rule. Guys like Marshall McLuhan & Lévi-Strauss get there sooner because they are the LURPs, the wily spies & thieves who get there first. Long-Range-Reconnaissance- Patrol [LRRP] muthas. Pioneers & Trail Blazers, for sure. Skippy goes all the way when he declares that unless you understand the Rule you will be used and misused by Symbols and Language and not the master of your own Thinking. He's a diehard Whorfian Hypothesis subscriber & he knows what so fucking few know: You are a Prisoner of Your Language. Especially if you speak only one tongue. The Monkeys around us are dangerous. They believe they live in the Real Universe and that the properties of Reality are Lock-Step & Universal no matter where, when, or who is having intercourse with the World. These Idiots think Symbols are Transparent and Eunuchs.
Marshall McLuhan is the Patron Saint of Wired Magazine - that should tell you something. He's the Godfather of the Folksonomy freaks and their Bots which are mining the Web for Ontologies & Classification Systems - big Teeth, the better to chew on Consciousness and the question of Self-Awareness as they birthout new forms of Intelligence. McLuhan is probably in Hell. Danté might even stick guys like that in the 9th Circle itself. Treachery is the theme in this circle and dead center, at the Punto Fijo, the Axis Mundi of the Underworld, frozen in the infinite distance from god, is Satan, whose crime, like McLuhan's is Treachery against god. Dudes who give god's Top Secrets away. Collaborative Tagging is the Key to McLuhan's Treachery. Social Indexing. There's the real Father of Monkey Reality. Create Tag Clouds & then Portmanteau those muthas into Meaning Statements. That kind of Sex will nearly always birth a Universe or two. Monkeys cannot yet fathom that the children of their capacity to think in Symbol Systems are indeed a Universe. But it's only "a" Universe and not "the" Universe. Worse - their children are born bastards and slaves to the Symbol System.
The Industrial Revolution began in England but the Modern World did not. Modernity began in two places at once: in Rome in 1600 when Christianity burned the Philosopher Giordano Bruno for his opinions on Infinity, other Worlds, and the position of the Earth in our Solar System. And it began in Holland at the same time with the New Trinity of Déscartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. The Modern Mind is the child of our Success in breaking out of the Closed Classification System of Judeo-Christianity. As well, it is the child of what the Nazis called: Asphaltkultur. That's a very clever word for a Mentalité which forms as we slide from Agriculture into the Industrial.
Click 16 on the Butterfly to watch us steal Spinoza's skull & bones.
Sex & Technology. SexoTech. That's the ticket. McLuhan said that the indisputable goal of the Mechanical State was to "manipulate, exploit, control in order to keep everyone in this helpless state by prolonged mental rutting." Put Tits on Buicks & Fridgidaires. Philip Morris & Fellatio. Widgets, Wombs & TV Dinners. It was easy to marry Agriculture to Sex - the model itself was at the core of farming. But Industrialization needed the Monkeys to mold the new Sitz into unbridled Sex & Satisfaction. "So call the roller of big cigars, the muscular one, and bid him whip in kitchen cups concupiscent curds ..."
If we can marry Sex to Technology why would you need a god? Mass Production of Perfect Products is predictable from the Industrial Model itself. The Monkeys must Marry Machines. Therein lies PostPost Salvation. So, in the end, it is exceedingly Natural to design our Machines - our Significant Others - as Sexual media leading to Gratification. Pump, pump, Squish. Advertising, to Marshall, was a Modern form of Rhetoric - in the same way that Vanishing Point Perspective was also a Rhetorical Form in the medium of Painting. Rhetoric does not deal with Content, per se; it provides Forms for Content and thus was the chief "Molder" of Content. Remember what the Buddha said on this exact subject: Water is round in a round container and square in a square container because water has no shape of its own.
Click 9 on the Insect Form to watch Kenny Stage the Mission
Rhetoric gives thought form. It's a Medium for thinking. In language it creates such forms as: Exposition, Argument, Definition, Analogy, and Metaphor. So Rhetoric is a Method of Thinking. It's a Template thru which we can grasp at Reality. Each Form of our Grasping is going to produce a different reality. It turns out that what the Buddha was talking about was Reality and not Water. Reality, he was saying, has no form of its own but will yield up a part of itself to the Form with which you ask your question. Truth, the wanton slut, gives herself up in Categories. Content is for chumps. It's a "juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind." It's the Medium and its Rhetorical Forms which create Reality. It's not what's on TV which is a Cancer to Logic; it's Television itself.
"Give us Barabas!" The lumpen scream. Myths, Lévi-Strauss wrote, overcome Contradictions because you don't need Myths or Supernatural Agents when there are no Contradictions to the Model being used and you understand the Situation. That's a little bit of Occam's Razor as well as Spinozian Geometric Logic. With every discovery in Nature the thing we have been calling God gets smaller. Given enough time the Monkey is predestined to Think his way Outside of God. As Baruch told Leibniz - driving the Prussian into a horrid black funk of doubt & angst - If the Monkey knew it was a Monkey the gods would cease to be Necessary. God or Nature - 2 Answers to the same questions occupying the same Form at once. Neckercube Psychosis. Monkeys can't see them both at once. The 2 are Contradictions and we either have to continue our Leaps of Faith ad infinitum or "Realize" the Illusion. Perspective did to Art what the Monkey must now do to Reality: Create a Form with which to Contain the Last Dispensation: the No Gate Gate. It's a tall order. How does one create a Reality which is based on the gnosis that there is no Reality? What does a Form which destroys all Forms look like?
More and more the lesson surfaces in our sciences and arts: It's about the Form first, and only later the Content. That opaque bastard Jacques Derrida nailed it when he said: "This problem of communication and receivability, in its new techno-economic givens, is more serious than ever for everyone." He said that there were only 4 kinds of "Truth" in Images: 1. A Presentation of a Presentation. 2. A Presentation of a Representation. 3. A Representation of a Presentation. 4. A Representation of a Representation. But there was also the "True Truth" - this is the world "without Mediation or Mask and resembling itself sufficiently." Jacques and Merleau-Ponty used to get stoned on good Neckercube Skunk and argue about the Argument between Nietzsche and Rousseau. They'd be piss-drunk on Beajolais, squatting in the Café du Ragnarok off the Boulmich' & bumming Gauloises from the Passersby. Red-eyed, breath like lamp oil, screaming about "Nearness and Thereness!" Merleau-Ponty said that Kant was a dickhead for claiming that Space was the Setting "in which things are arranged." Ponty puffed & pouted and said that Space was not a Container in which things are enclosed but that it must be conceived as "empty of objects, but it will always be filled with Visibility." That was the "Affordance" of Space - Visibility. The Monkey is a Viewing Subject and he enters a space "more ancient than Thought" thru the tool of his Perception, "and therefore Perception and Space represent the fact of the subject's birth." For Merleau-Ponty, Perception is "a nascant Logos." Space exists as a "Form of Being in the world," which preceded the Subject-Object Relationship. Perception was "simultaneously Immanent and Transcendent." It is in Perception that we find "Lebensgefühl" or "Feeling of Life. "When you add Depth to the mixture of Space & Perception you have the seeds of Realism. Descartes thought Depth was invisible and that the 3 dimensions of height, width, and depth were "indifferently interchangeable." He saw Depth as "Width viewed in Profile." Ponty says Merde to that - shifting our Viewpoint by rotating it 90 degrees would not, he claims, "transform depth into breadth and vice versa." To Ponty: Depth does not belong to things around us but to our very Perspective and that Perspective was always "Ours." So it was the most Existential of all Dimensions. Length & Height connected the things in front of us, but Depth allowed those things to seemingly Overlap. "Constituting a relation between us and the visible objects around us" - a Rhetoric.
So Breadth & Height juxtapose things in the world while Depth Envelops them. Depth is not a Social Construction, nor a "thought" in the Subject's Reality. "Depth is a given, a possibility of the subject involved in the world, a `thickness of a medium devoid of anything.'" Depth, like all Dimensions, is a Degree of Freedom. For Ponty, it is the 1st Dimension and not the 3rd.
14 Clicks on the Butterfly will get you edjewkated up on Still Lifes and the Rhetoric of Perspective. “Depth is conceived as the possibility of saying that a thing is `there.’” For Ponty VISION is “the means given me for being absent from myself.” Like Language and all Symbol Systems - means of being Absent from Ourselves.
So either Depth is nothing, or it is some kind of a participation in a Being, a being of space that is beyond any point of view.” Vision plays with the dichotomy of the fact that Seeing is also Being Seen, but since we cannot see ourselves seeing this part of vision remains Invisible. “The visible is not merely the sum total of all visible things, but a surface of an inexhaustible depth, in which things are enveloped by our gaze. The envelopment of the gaze unveils things in veiling them with the gaze.” We open up the world by looking at it. Depth is “thickness” and understood “as a potential visibility.” We see things and are separated from them by the “thickness of the look ... It is that the thickness of flesh between the seer and the thing is as constitutive for the thing’s visibility as for the seer’s corporeality; it is not an obstacle between them, it is their means of communication.”
16 Clicks will finish the Delivery Mission. I wonder where Skippy gets all the pretty Butterflies? And I wonder what they `Stand for.' Skippy is way too `Deep' to use them only as Triggers for his Slide Shows.
In other words: a Rhetoric. So Visibility is not caused by a thing’s existence: rather it “brings the thing into being.” Then Hanneke says: “The means of communication between us and an object are generated neither by matter nor materiality but by the intertwining of vision and touch.” Vision allows us to “see how things would feel.” And remember, like seeing things thru vision - “when we touch something, it is simultaneously touching us, and additionally we are also touching the touch itself.”
Vision and touch have this Reversibility. Even looking at ourselves in the mirror we do not see ourselves seeing - we see our face, but not our GAZE. Vision and Touch Map each other and form each other’s complement but they do not Merge. The Breakfast Still Lifes show us the “complex intertwining between the visible and the tactile.” Perspective separates the viewer from the viewed, but the SLs give us a “viewpoint that is so close to the pictorial plane that the viewer’s gaze crosses a boundary, or rather blurs the distinction between the space of the viewer and the picture.”
Click on the ButterSoul 9 Times to dig the Baptist
What we see seems to be within our reach but is not. The realism of the objects - the Roemer, the fish, the oysters, etc - makes us “see” their “Touch.” We see the feel of bread etc. without their actually being a texture - only 2D pigment on canvas. Texture is brought near to us which actually does not exist except in our vision. “We see it there where it is not.” So “..we may caress the painted objects with our gaze, enveloping them with the thickness of depth and the flesh of the look, but we are not able to penetrate the shallow space with our eyes. We see a distance that is near - a glimpse of the flesh” of Depth. How could anything be fucking clearer?
Marshall Mcluhan writes: "If a new technology extends one or more of our senses outside us into the social world, then new ratios among all of our senses will occur in that particular culture. It is comparable to what happens when a new note is added to a melody. And when the sense ratios alter in any culture then what had appeared lucid before may suddenly become opaque, and what had been vague or opaque will become translucent." Every medium expands one or more of our senses. Look what the automobile has done for our feet. Depth - and all Forms of Perception - act the same - they Expand us in some way. All Technologies, like Alphabets, Printing Presses, and even Speech, exert a profound "gravitational effect on cognition," which then affects our Social Organizations and Changes our Perceptual habits. Print Tech led to Modernity in the West. It fostered Individualism and Democracy, as well as Protestantism, Capitalism, Nationalism, and thru dudes like Descartes & Spinoza - it fostered Ragnarok itself - the Death of the Gods. We live in constant Teddycaustic Forms. Modernity exists to Kill god. Spinoza knew this as a Necessity within the System. An Inevitability. Or maybe it's all just a fucking matter of Perception & Perspective. Who knows?
"Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence. ... Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time. ... In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture. ...Print is the technology of individualism. If men decided to modify this visual technology by an electric technology, individualism would also be modified. To raise a moral complaint about this is like cussing a buzz-saw for lopping off fingers. `But', someone says, `we didn't know it would happen.' Yet even witlessness is not a moral issue. It is a problem, but not a moral problem; and it would be nice to clear away some of the moral fogs that surround our technologies. It would be good for morality."
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