impermanence and the digital word

i’ve been crawling through walter ong’s Orality and Literacy for a while now, savoring it a few pages at a time. this is one of many luxuries being out of carleton has provided (though the tradeoff, that i have to wear business casual for 40 hours a week, has me wishing i could go back.)

one thing that has alternately amused & frustrated me is Ong’s focus on western scriptures and literature. i suppose it’s only to be expected - he was a jesuit priest and his book was published in the 80s. but my rudimentary knowledge of buddhist history gives me the sense that the development of this religion both tests and demonstrates for ong’s ideas.

the historical buddha lived sometime around the 5th century BC. we don’t know for sure, because nothing was written down. for four hundred years, the sayings of the buddha were maintained through recitation. the role of monks was always to maintain the teaching of the buddha for as long as they could. as the religion developed, becoming institutionalized and state-sponsored under the ashokan empire, its practices of recitation grew more sophisticated. no one monk could recite the entire canon - instead, it was scattered among many monks.

the stability of recitation that buddhists achieved meant that sutras could be effectively treated as texts. this enabled a kind of abstract analysis that ong associates with textual study, and resulted in the creation of the abhidhamma. where the sutras are essentially colloquialisms, the abhidhamma are the product of sustained, systematic philosophical thought. they take the teachings which were orally situated in the lifeworld of siddartha gautama and render them abstract, infinitely applicable, replicable. but this philosophy is still essentially oral in character: its written form isn’t treatises and arguments, but summaries and lists - what ong might call a memory aid.

once the scriptures get written down and buddhism develops into a more literatre religion, shit gets WILD. this is the origin of mahayana buddhism: the greater vehicle, which states that there are an infinite number of buddhas and bodhisatvas teaching in an infinite number of universes which are eternally going through cycles of growth and decay, anyone can write a new sutra and say it was revealed to them by a buddha, and so on and so forth. essentially: an already fruitful culture of oral abstraction, given widespread literacy and prosperity (and cultural contact with hellenism), rapidly blossoms into something bold and strange.

but even before this blossoming was the doctrine of impermanence. it’s pretty straightforward, as far as doctrines go: there is nothing permanent. everything material is subject to change. (the corollary being: don’t get too attached to what you’ve got.) as a metaphysical position it seems closely linked to, specifically, the transience of the spoken word. Ong attributes Plato’s philosophy of permanent metaphysical forms giving rise to our physical world to his literacy, but the illiterate religions of south asia took a different route

text isn’t as stable in 2016 as it was in plato’s day. the digital word can change when you’re not looking at it; it is produced and discarded on a whim. the physical referent for the word isn’t ink held on paper - it’s a sequence of stored charges that can only be interpreted by an elaborate device. we have very suddenly come into this paradigm, where written language can be treated with the disposability of spoken language. it has brought us to this churning boil of an election; who knows what other repressed demons it will bring forth.

authentically irrational

“we were struck with the fact that, in all the mass of material from which the record is composed, there is hardly one authentic document!”

the novel dracula ends on this ominous note. the vampire is eradicated, england is safe, and transylvania has become a pleasant tourist destination. but the authenticity of the record of the conflict is left hauntingly ambiguous.

“the vampire is dead, you idiot,” a man made entirely out of straw attempts to tell me. “that’s all that matters.” you don’t know how wrong you are, straw man. after all, documentation is central to dracula. the entire novel is composed of documents composed by the main characters. they’re created chaotically at first but the latter half of the novel sees them regimented and used as the first line of defence against dracula. documentation, in this novel, is control.

this regimentation, however, also changes the form of the documents they produce. they move away from modes that more thoroughly or purely capture their subjective experience: Jonathan Harker writes a diary in a shorthand script that only he & his beloved can read; Dr. Seward speaks into a phonograph that records his voice on wax cylinders - but is totally unsearchable, and illegible without mechanical interpretation.

one part of the action of regimentation is mina’s transcription of these documents. she converts unreason into reason with her typewriter, translating every encoded word or emotion-imbued phoneme into the controlled, interchangeable letters of type. she also duplicates the records several times.

replication and interchangeability: the hallmarks of reason. atheistic materialism organizes desire through these rational principles. if it can’t be replicated and sold somewhere else, to anyone else, then it can’t exist. but like jonathan harker, reviewing the copies without origin, ppl have grown anxious about authenticity.

to a degree the idea of a product or place or experience being ‘authentic’ is a construction of savvy marketers. but they didn’t make the anxiety about authenticity; they’re only responding to it.

the craving for what is authentic is a craving for what cannot be or has not been replicated; something that has an origin beyond the black box of mass production. it is a desire for a feeling of location that reflects subjectivity. it is a desire for a truth born out of history, not engineered by marketers. it is irrational and undefinable precisely because it exists to demarcate a space where reason cannot enter and begin making copies.

recommended reading Annihilation (Jeff Vandermeer) Mass Authentic (Rob Horning) Village Atheists, Village Idiots (Sam Kriss)

haha, oops

hmmm looks like there's no good post for today! sorry about that. i don't want this to become a habit but it's friday and i've got nothing to post. so here's guy fieri in his aged manifestation, ready for death to take him

if you're wondering what happened to the content i was planning to put up here today, please refer to this explanatory diagram:

partial visions from my subtle body

there are things you cannot photograph with an iphone camera. its makers cannot embed a human eye in a metal frame, or generate a mind from silicon. the capitalists of silicon valley will never create a fleshless human. even their algorithms are parodic homonculi dumbly failing to anticipate whimsy. such creations are always tools, never individuals. a human draws humanity not from a mind, but from relations between mind and body, body and other, other and mind.

what, then, happens to the moonlight that is delicately striated by my window blinds? i point my third eye at it and i am blind. i put it away and sight returns: here is beauty draped over my wall.

i am a compulsive photographer, rather than a professional. my unconscious desires attract me to more or less the same things as in illustrations: clear lines, dense patterns, bold colors. my instagram displays the better results of this habit, but only scrapes the surface. most of the photographs i take are filed away mercilessly, never to be seen again.

the pleasure of these photographs is not their memorable qualities, or any intent of mine to review what i have taken. perhaps in the immediate afterglow i might stop to admire the emergence of beauty in this new object, retrace the lines and colors with my eyes. but it is the act itself that feels good. taking a picture, i steal false permanence from an always shifting world. chaotic ephemera is stablized into structure, pointlessly, endlessly. it is like building a cathedral which is governed only by math, not physics, and which stretches out endlessly into intricate wings and arches.

but what, then, happens to the color of light pollution glowing orange against the clouds? the warmth of an entire city, dimly reflected into my eyes. what happens to subtle beauties that my camera does not care about?

i suppose that’s what my keyboard is for

communication and reality

if you haven’t guessed by now i’m a bit fascinated by communication technology at the moment. i suppose its understandable, given how much of the strangeness of 2016 feels like its the result of everyone having the internet in their pocket. or does it just feel that way because i get all my news through my pocket internet?? who knows

did you know that cities in germany with at least one printing press by 1500 were 29% more likely to be protestant by 1600 than those without? That’s just one example of power structures rapidly changing in sync with rapid shifts in the information infrastructure.

Another is the enlightenment - only here the technology is the same, still the printing press, and what’s changing is the values driving what becomes widespread. What’s published in the enlightenment isn’t following the old, religious/feudal value system of the church. Now it follows the value system of the market: popular demand decides what gets the widest distribution, what has the broadest impact. This is the era of the novel, and it culminates in those great revolutions of popular demand, American, Haitian, French. This is the information paradigm out of which our american government emerged.

at the beginning of the 20th century you see the rise of what Walter Ong calls ‘secondary orality’ - the ability to record and transmit the human voice at great distances and to large audiences, a transition Ong links to the rise of fascism. I don’t know anything about that, but I can tell you this: a popular art form makes a transition to ‘high art’ when its medium has becom outdated and irrelevant. this was the anxiety of the modernist novelists. print was no longer the central technology of mass communication, but they had still deeply internalized its forms. (this is also the description of the modernists that leads into my argument for lovecraft as a modernist, but thats for another time.)

Now we see a new shift, from the centralization of television to the hyperliteracy of the internet. the affordances and weaknesses of this new medium will shape the next century, assuming it doesn’t get promptly replaced by something else. This, i guess, is why i’m so interested in learning more about it: i want to read the future.

a too-long post about slenderman

what’s the most important thing to come out of 2009? was it the bailout that saved our economy? swine flu? the movie “zombieland”?

if you guessed any of those things dear reader, you are WRONG. the most important thing from 2009 was slender man. yes, from the video game. yes, from the creepiest event ever to come out wisconsin. but more important: from 2009!

slender man emerged from a somethingawful thread in 2009 and i’d love to talk about that some time but right now i’m going to focus on the first big Slender Man Thing: Marble Hornets. Like most slender man things, Marble Hornets is hard to formally classify. it’s not a movie, though it mostly exists as videos. it’s been called an ARG, but there’s no real ‘game’ element. the closest that acronym gets is at Reality: marble hornets has a lot to do with reality.

in this way marble hornets shares a lot with lovecraft: in this story, something is wrong with what is real. something else marble hornets shares with lovecraft? it can really suck sometimes. it’s in that strange category of unintentional artwork where the creator(s) didn’t really know what they were making - and the result is something strangely expressive, unhindered by flaws or form, and more or less irreplicable. (it follows that when i’m talking about marble hornets, i’m talking about “Introduction” through “Entry #26.” the full sequence is helpfully compiled here into a playlist by youtube user SiestaYonJyuGo

these videos are strange, alarming things. their horror is not of gore, but of disorientation. they present a world which has become dissociated and unreal. they use a camera, but the images it produces are flickering abstractions, fragmented and not meant to be pieced together. distortions in the audio and visuals are a constant in the videos - they’re a sign of slender man’s presence. what they really are is an awareness of medium.

the story is told almost entirely as images and text - there is little dialogue, and what dialogue there is is almost always secondary to the images & text. the audio is important, but only for its asemic content - it’s purely affective jabs of white noise and distortion that tell you when slender man is near. when slender man is near, you are reminded that you are watching a video. you are reminded that this is not real.

the characters themselves seem to be aware of a certain kind of unreality. in addition to the abstract camerawork, they are often writing, making marks. for jay, the character who runs the youtube account and uploads the videos, his voice only comes through in what he has written around the videos: white text on a black screen, giving sparse context. he has a dark double, in the form of the masked man/totheark, who uploads videos with meaningless or garbled text, white on a black screen. along with them, we see alex (who exists one narrative layer down from jay and totheark) scribbling on pages - he creates words, asemic writing, and abstract images of slender man. he never moves towards realism.

why such a strained relationship with reality? the same reason as lovecraft - and as the writers of gothic novels a hundred years before him. the creators of marble hornets are expressing the first wave of what has become by 2016 a widespread anxiety with a rapidly changing communication paradigm. consensus reality is based in paradigms of communication - but during periods of flux, consensus reality breaks down, as do mediums of communication. marble hornets sits at the intersection of the contextless memes native to the web (and out of which it was born) and film. it doesn’t have traditional scenes or narrative - instead it matches text with abstract, fragmented images shot in an overtly amateurish (but secretly fairly skilled) way. the disorientation it produces is the disorientation of being a heavy internet user, and being on the receiving end of context collapse all the time.

the most important thing alex scribbles is the operator symbol. this is a circle with an x through it. it has no clear meaning - it shows up throughout the series, scratched on the sides of buildings or flickering through totheark videos. It is an empty signifier, an arbitrary hyperlink inscribed into analogue space. This place is connected to that place - how, why? - it doesn’t matter.

this pairs with the series’ visual fixation on buildings and structures that resist interpretation. from the scenery of Introduction to the red tower to this inscrutable concrete structure, there’s a heavy element of ruin porn in this series. but it’s not for nothing: these are structures that ostensibly have some function, but its been lost or forgotten or its just not visible in the camera - the medium cannot capture it, cannot communicate it.

this accelerates towards the end of the sequence, when doors begin acting strangely. first we see a tape of alex exploring a burned out building - climbing stairs, then ending up in the basement. then doors start taking jay to the wrong places: he gets caught in repetetive loops while exploring a deserted house, unable to get where he’s going. The physical structures of the world begin to resemble the textual structures of the web, linked together senselessly in a semiotic web with no center or content, only feeling: fear.

marble hornets is a creature intensely in and of the web - slender man the frankenstein’s creature of our era. this post is already too long, but things marble hornets also deals with: why are men’s selfies always so bad, what is it like to be observed through social media, disconnect from nature, nostalgia culture, the presence of the body in textual media, the manifold doubling of characters, human memory vs. recorded memory, authenticity, meaninglessness, encryption, possibly more?

as a palate cleanser, here’s a silly little slender man video i made in 2012, and here’s a random collection of still frames from marble hornets videos i took while writing this

Takiyasha the Witch and the Skeleton Spectre

The rebellion against the emperor failed. Mitsukuni has returned to the ruined palace of Sōma to search for surviving conspirators. Who does he find but the witch-princess Takiyasha, daughter of the warlord Taira No Masakado. For her defense, she summons a tremendous skeleton spectre, and Mitsukuni readies himself for battle.

That’s at least one interpretation of the tryptich up there. It works! It’s serviceably mediocre, like me. But maybe there’s a better interpretation? let’s go on a magical blog journey to find out.

The triptych of Ukiyo-e prints would have been made from three separate woodblocks. The skill of the artist allows one to read it easily as an uninterrupted landscape - but each panel also stands on its own.

In the first panel, Princess Takiyasha looks up from her scroll and out into the next room. Her expression is difficult for me to interpret, but it doesn’t seem like malice - she seems surprised. Framing her in the ragged texture of a broken screen suggests a privacy that has been disrupted by her father’s failure and death. Just outside her room is the hat and makeshift pillow of a traveller.

In the second panel, Takiyasha is eye-to-socket with the skeleton spectre. The skeleton is overwhelming, but it also seems quite still. It’s not a question of the artist’s skill - Kuniyoshi is capable of very dynamic compositions. The real question is who the gentleman in red is. He is not, despite my suggestion, Mitsukuni’s friend or ally. They seem to be at the end of a quick but brief altercation.

The third panel is consumed by the spectacle of the skeleton’s body. Note that behind the skeleton is not the night sky - just an empty darkness. Perhaps such details would only interfere with the details of the skeleton.

Here’s my reading, then, given all that. Mitsukuni, passing near Sōma on his way “somewhere else,” decided to sleep there for the night. He lays down to rest in an unassuming location but before he can fall asleep, Takiyasha enters. She is still living here and sleeping in her old room. She doesn’t see the Samurai just past her ruined blinds; she is reading something. She has let her hair down.

At the sight of this uncontrolled, unprotected woman Mitsuki is posessed by lust. This distracts him from the rebel sneaking up on him, the man in red. Even with the element of surprise, the rebel cannot match Mitsukuni’s skill - but he comes close. He disables his foe without standing or drawing his sword: Takiyasha looks on astonished, the man in red looks up with malice. But Mitsukuni is looking at death. It came close this time, close enough that he is overwhelmed by it. Death has torn open the temporal world, exposing Mitsukuni to the infinite darkness beyond.

or maybe it’s the first reading, what do i know anyways