Thus the touch screen restores a modicum of our humanity. We are evolutionarily predisposed to touch, to make and to make contact. Touch reminds us of our humanity, of that which makes us, as Dissanakaye would say, Homo Aestheticus. Yes, we're still fooling ourselves into thinking that the instant message in its immediacy is somehow an adequate substitute for embodied conversation. Yes, through the utilization of technology for intimate communication, one still subtly advocates for impoverished relationships. Yes, the screen name still stands in for the body. On the iPad, it doesn't seem quite so bad. It is true, over the past year I have grown to hate instant messaging more and more with each passing day.
It occurred to me while I chatted with a friend. However, substituting the iPad for the clackity-clack of the keyboard and the clickety-click of the mouse has indeed created a different-dare I say-more human, Internet experience. Of course, this is my default reaction whenever I find myself immersed in screens, widgets, and websites. Recently, I have been using an iPad in place of my plucky technological companion, the aptly named "tiny computer." While I finger through postings for the perfect job, I can't help but think about Deleuze (naturally), Peirce, and mediated experience. The spirit of terrorism and requiem for the Twin Towers. As always, Baudrillard is a little bit of a downer, but like DFW, he knows. In asserting power over life in the form of death-symbolic, actual, total-the originating agent (be it person, organization, or government) rescinds Christian dogma and centuries of cultural conditioning. Death alone is our mode of access to singularity the willful appropriation of such phenomenological profundity is not only imbued congruent gravitas, but also with awesome, hyperbolic, and symbolic force.īaudrillard writes: "Here then, it is all about death, not only the violent irruption of death in real time - 'live', so to speak - but the irruption of a death which is far more than real: a death which is symbolic and sacrificial - that is to say, the absolute, irrevocable event." Indeed, corporeal (individual or societal) manipulation is the last recourse of the desperate. Like a apathetic adolescent splitting flesh or reveling in nutritional deprivation, lacking relief our global body seeks self-destruction. It is cousin to the abundance of choice: when we can choose to watch/see/read/be anything, our human experience is troubled, gray, removed and dissociated. Baudrillard is right on the proverbial money. It is this idea of actual and symbolic self-immolation in response to saturation and secular sameness has particular resonance for me. This reversion takes the form either of open violence (terrorism is a part of this) or of the impotent denial characteristic of our modernity, of self-hatred and remorse - all negative passions that are the debased form of the impossible counter-gift." He follows this by stating that "there inevitably comes a response in the form of a negative countertransference, a violent abreaction to this captive life, to this protected existence, to this saturation of existence. It is not that giving is impossible in this culture, but that the counter-gift is impossible, since all the paths of sacrifice have been neutralized and defused."
Today we no longer have anyone to whom we may give back, to whom we may repay the symbolic debt - and that is the curse of our culture. This is what ensures the symbolic equilibrium between living beings and things. "In the traditional order, there is still the possibility of giving something back to God to nature, or to whatever it might be, in the form of the sacrifice. In looking over my notes, the following passage jumped out at me. Weeks ago, a rainy Saturday found me reading Baudrillard's The Spirit of Terrorism. Recently, I had occasion to revisit some of my notes from the last days of my time in Des Moines.
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