/Dumpprep
January 28th, 2009
A dissolution of consciousness. Not a derealization, because in fact the moment, its context, and its sensations are incredibly real. They are immediate, but as if unfocused, irrelevant, insignificant. It’s not a cessation of self because the narrative continues, although its voice is warped into near-unintelligibility. The overall message, though, the drum beat of the plot movement, never loses time.
But in a sense it is a cessation of self. What else could you call that clueless-ness as for what to do next? The inability to situate plans, responsibilities, to-do’s, and free time in a logical and all-accommodating continuum. It’s not that there is no time — there is — and its not that there is nothing to do with the time — there is plenty. It’s that there is only so much free time, and too many things of equally medium importance approaching their far-off (but still incoming) critical masses at the same slow trot. It’s the struggle to paint a flat landscape with a cloudless sky, or a head-on view of the sun. It’s the struggle to narratize any adventure or even a simple mission out of a long disordered list of things that need to be gotten around to sooner or later, when later is just as well.
Then there are those reliable smelling salts and time kills — cigarettes, the squandering of money on things you can make an argument for needing, but not urgently, and don’t really want any more than you want a shower immediately upon waking in a climate-controlled room.
If analogy is to analogue as digital is to digit, can you really digitize the universe with the self?
If an analogue is not the thing itself but an analogue thereof, what is the same thing’s digitalization? A digital analogue? An analogue digitalization? An analogous digital thing? Or can the digital really be said to be composed of discreet entities, do digital “things” really exist? Is not the digital a raw sea of data which takes shape only when processed and interpreated by a certain series of complex mathematical algorithms? And how then is the digital different from the physical, which is a sea of energy which only begins to take comprehensible shape when subjected to the algorithms of the sensory organs and central nervous system?
So now there are three worlds where there had been two, and sometime before only one. In order, whatever it is the order here actually means remaining unclear:
1. The “Actual” World. i.e. the physical, the real, the present.
2. The “Analog” World. i.e. the world invoked in literature and art, in mental, written, and verbal recollections of events which have transpired in the past of the Actual world, in mental, written, and verbal suppositions about the future of the Actual world. This is the world of metaphor, of symbolism, of imagination and memory.
3. The “Digital” World. i.e. the world of externalized memory and imagination. Simulations and projections made not by the human mind but by secondary devices existing in the Actual world, invented specifically to amplify the power and accuracy (as measured against the Actual world) of human memory and imagination. Copies and recordings of real-world objects of phenomena made not as individual human internal memory but as objective tangible external memory.
This is a departure to some extent from the previous colloquial and technical uses of the word “digital” in that it includes some mechanical devices normally referred to as “Analog,” for example film photography, vinyl musical recordings, sound or video recordings on magnetic tapes, etc. But for all intents and purposes these devices were all created with the same goals as modern digital technology, that is the recording, storage, and transmission of that which prior to the creation of such devices was by necessity only able to be experienced as real-time performance or internal memory. It is worth noting that modern digital technology exists almost entirely as a result of a drive for continuous improvement upon these same devices, so even if one cannot accept “digital” as a term encompassing phonographs and flash-bulb photography, there is no avoiding the fact that these things are in fact the ancestors of digital technology. Calling them “pre-digital,” as might be he impulse for the sake of technical accuracy, still puts them on the same trajectory and therefore puts the memories they stored squarely in the world of the digital, external and objective; and not the analog, internal or personal.
It may seem now that this definition creates a problem of scale. So defined, the trajectory of “digital” technology and thus the “digital” world can be said to include even the technology of writing. Writing certainly exists as a result of the impulse to allow for the “recording, storage, and transmission of that which prior to the creation of such devices was by necessity only able to be experienced as real-time performance or internal memory.” And there is actually great value in noting this. Writing, then, may have been the earliest, or among the earliest “pre-digital” technologies. Alongside it would of course be sketching, drawing, painting, and the like; and the accompanying technologies of cartography, chart-making, and architectural planning. All of which, it is observed easily enough, are now carried out digitally more often than not.
The fact is that writing makes use of language, which may arguably also be a pre-digital technology. But regardless of where one falls on this question, writing and illustrating both make use of first the analog faculties of memory and imagination before converting the products thereof into external, digitized memory. And all digital devices themselves were also engineered through liberal use of these same analog faculties. In fact the very state of being able to design or invent or create — that is, knowing how – on the part of the human being, is the result entirely of a self-contained internal analogue world in which thoughts standing in for objects can be manipulated like the objects themselves at minimal cost and no risk, before the desired process is carried out in the Actual world.
What is the relationship between the three worlds, then? And to what end does the human being move among them, obsessively building bridges from one to the other and back?
