“We moved into the Heath. There were oilfields, and blackened earth. Jabos flew over in diamond shapes, hunting us. Blicero had grown on, into another animal. . . a werewolf. . . but with no humanity left in its eyes: that had faded out, day after day, and been replaced by gray furrows, red veins in patterns that weren’t human. Islands: clotted islands in the sea. Sometimes even the topographic lines, nested on a common point. ‘It is the map of my Ur-Heimat,’ imagine a shriek so quiet it’s almost a whisper, ‘the Kingdom of Lord Blicero. A white land.’ I had a sudden understanding: he was seeing the world now in mythical regions: they had their maps, real mountains, rivers, and colors. It was not Germany he moved through. It was his own space.”
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
Dispatch from Lüneburg, where one day before the annual convention of the Society for Media Studies, a workshop called “After Kittler. New German Media Theories” is held. Erich Hörl speaks of environmentality, of general ecologies, after Heidegger. Technology beyond utility. An assault on the “Ding-Sein” of the “Ding”. What’s hylomorphism, a mathematician once specialized in graph theory asks. Closeness, distance, proximity, togetherness. Thomas Pynchon wrote a text called Togetherness, while he was working for Boeing in 1960. Immediate encounters. Yuk Hui says, closeness is a surface phenomenon, a mere interface for questions of togetherness. Relational distance. Nothing is transmitted. All is translated.
Instead of Ontology, let there be Ontogenesis. Instead of integration, let there be intervention. My paper is titled “Media undermine our situation”, a play on Kittler’s famous dictum that “media determine our situation”. The situation, we remind ourselves, is the situation of generals. It’s a strategic situation. Tactics versus strategies. Ontogenesis versus Ontology versus Epistemology. Ontology as utopia with a political agenda.
Gegenwart und Gegenstand. Complexity. Responsibility. Discourse-induced blindness. A theory of links. Contingent determinism of a space of possibilities. Scalability. The terminology of media is too slow.
Dinner at “Osteria del Teatro”.
“A SCREAMING COMES ACROSS THE SKY. It has happened before, bu there is nothing to compare it to now. It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it’s all theatre. There are no lights inside the cars. No light anywhere. Above him lift girders old as an iron queen, and glass somewhere far above that would let the light of day through. But it’s night. He’s afraid of the way the glass will fall—soon—it will be a spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace. But coming down in total blackout, without one glint of light, only great invisible crashing.”