Is there a form of social conflict which is not terrorism and not capable of being delayed and repeated – represented – and which does not exemplify, provide a situation, a theatre for operations – with the suffering of people serving as backdrop to an ’empty space,’ from which bursts of monologue?
And this is not to ask again whether terrorist acts serve as backdrop to capitalism, seen as some kind of homogeneous system of the world, in the theatrum mundi … but to get at what Simon Biggs called ‘complicity.’
Media work in what Deleuze called a theatre of repetition, reliant on recognition, the habit of the first passive synthesis. Acts / encounters which aim to break the deadlock, rock the status quo, engender thought, lose / have lost particularity in what used to be the anodyne of media commentary and is now the acid bath. They are habitual and become general. Virilio’s image, his analogon, is that they are total, turning the mirror on the work of art, on aesthesis, to give us the full immersion media-experience of their Ganzfeld virtuality. This gaze is pitiless.
Where I mean to draw attention to a ‘complicity’ is not only with the Image of thought-as-representation, rather than Deleuze’s thought-of-thought, of the media and its (re)mediation of spectacular terrorism, but also with art – as a disctinction-without-difference. I mean that the Crisis of Representation has left us with this legacy on the one hand and that on the other we have the past-futurity, the futurism, of a global Crisis of Values, which rests on the complicity of art, capital and terror, to the power of a ‘triplicity,’ and is that show in which this triunity is spectacularly confirmed.
In the circle of repetition of the selfsame there is no drama because it consists in what Neal Stephenson called a ‘consensus cluster.’ Conflict resolves before it arises: and its resolution is High Definition. The Society of the Spectacle … is also this … is also that … terror / capital … art / terror … art / capital … in endless combination, at rates of oscillation and substitution (exemplification) invisible to the naked eye …
– João Magueijo, cosmologist
… another sense is needed, beyond the habitual five, or six – the sixth being death, in which the creative act shall have no dominion – in answer to the problem of light which is faster than light.
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