add that it is our duration that thinks, feels, sees. The first creation of
consciousness would then be its own speed in its time-distance, speed
thereby becoming causal idea, idea before the idea.5 It is thus now
common to think of our memories as multidimensional, of thought as
transfer, transport (metaphora) in the literal sense.
Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine
We wake up in the morning. We grab a cup of coffee and head towards the next moment. A self-reflective illuminated screen will be found somewhere. As our memories begin to reverberate at light-speed, as the marketing campaigns of the algorithmic future-present continue to swarm around the data-body from all directions, the algorithms themselves no longer believe in gravity. They never had to, theres was cybernetic world of heading towards the optimum calculation. Within this novel architecture of a continuous lenticular vision of real-time, one where any screen moment, becomes a novel screen-memory of the present to come which is already here. This is a way of seeing. It is, as Peter Sloterdijk has stated in his book, The Critique of Cynical Reason, a way of seeing vision which is double, or multi-faceted which is not foreign to the spy or philosopher.To achieve this sort of vision is to also become aware of a certain so-called conscious state of being: seeing oneself see. This is what Sloterdijk calls the eye-dialectic.
It is perhaps no coincidence today that when one takes on this relation to one’s own psycho-geographical location, that one is within a world of doubles, sitiuational architecture, and confusion. Power relations here work from a different position. For power to work today, it is merely in trying to reign itself in. If we are, as Jean Baudrillard states, in The Agony of Power, within the period of the violence of the global,where we find that universal human rights become watered down within an accelerated sphere which carnivalizes itself, feeds on itself, cannibalizes itself, we are also within the realm of the potlatch of information exchange where, as Baudrillard says so well, "We no longer match the perfection of our technical devices. What we produce is beyond our imagination and our representation. Humanity, confronted with its own divinized model, with the realization of its own ideal, collapses." (The Agony of Power, p. 82)
As we continue our voyage into the cybernetic theatre of cruelty, the digital moebius strips keep on updating, backwards and forwards, we weave a hyper-frequency of cinematic eye-dialectics that has us seeing each other see. A doubled-up dialectic swarm. Sloterdijk will speak of a novel architecture that has begun to carve itself out of the 21st century digital dromospheric landscape. He speaks of spheres and foams. Identity strains stream out in all directions, and become foam-like, bubble-like, leading to morphogenetic emergence. It is perhaps here, that we can begin to re-think the Greek philosophical problem of the accident of substance. Within an accelerated realm of spheres within spheres, psycho-geographic foams spill over into each other through the digital network sea of hyper-frequencies. Here, we are in the realm of the eye-dialectic. But this visual machinery apparatus is not only allowing us to see ourselves see, such as the philosophers used to craft with their cauistic techniques of rhetoric, but it is a position of seeing what the networks see. Here we can perhaps begin to see that spheres can also be viewed as lenses, reflecting or refracting the illumination of vision. We are not only seeing ourselves see, but seeing the networks see us. As power itself becomes in this lenticular universe, we will continue to find ourselves brushing up against our own spherical natures, ever changing in the becoming vision of the future-present.
Baudrillard, Jean The Agony of Power, Semiotext(e) Intervention Series 6, 2010 The MIT Press
Sloterdijk, Peter The Critique of Cynical Reason, University of Minnesota Press, 1988
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