Applied Theory: The Digital Map
Written as a Part IV of my Basis of Love series. Ideally you should read those, here. The ‘hyperlink’ TOC does not work on mobile. Please use on desktop if you want to use it.
Overview:
In our Foundations we established a reality of “forgetfulness” and “unconsciousness” in our lives—our Seinsvergessenheit. Realistically, the digital is accurately a technology (if, that is, we only view it as that which enables us to enter into a door) to the digital-realm; much like how Magellan is an avatar in proving “the world on the map”, when he traverses the globe. Secondly, the reason I choose these two terms (modernity and technics, and now literacy and environment) is the difference between technologies and realms. How do we describe a realm, a sheath of being, a reality?
The inability for anyone to think of anything beyond “the digital” is the same reason scientists created the naming convention of the “common era”—the beginning of modernity. It once was taught in schools that our historical periods—what lies between old history and new history, with then the introduction of a prehistory much later in the students development—were separated by A.D. and B.C.. The “After Death” and “Before Christ”. It had recently became an immunological or institutional problem to science. There can be no real elements of history in our teachings, because to not intend the “proper” realm they inhabit is to commit some sin against science. We must divorce ourselves from what we had actually named time, named history, and create the most minimal distinction available to continue to keep some semblance of a “truer” reality.
There is, of course, nothing wrong with the new a-Christological naming convention; but the problem is really if we ignore the fact that for much of American history, and Western at large, we’ve taught the old ways to ourselves. To not give history to that namesake is an ugly marker of modernity-as-forgetfulness. It is the privileging of an incursive technology to upkeep a simulation of a particular reality through the lens of an (arbitrary) discipline. One should remember Pastoureau’s defense of his cultural history versus the (wrongful) natural histories. To use an example, it is like we are donning a virtual-reality headset, or even an augmented reality headset. No longer is there an engagement, an orientation to ultimately transcendent modalities, it is just a war over data—the increasing war-games of institutions as these, almost, nation-state realms fighting over one another. Much like how we explained in Christianity, the rat-race-like accumulation of followers, faithful words are really just smoke and mirrors for justifying the swinging of the hammer of the institutional body—using meritless, inertiatic force against what are otherwise moral goods, and good peoples. If only they had the ability to take off their institution's ‘VR headset’, and genuinely engage with real people, then we’d see an authentic communication happening.
It is the realm of the ego to relentlessly submit all others to its navel-gazing appetitive views. Rather than renounce technology, much like many have done, or take upon a solemn apathetic duty to what really is a rather mundane materialistic swab, we should accept its existence. Maybe, with a manner of divine-like suave and swagger, to indicate a kind of trust among members of this new, integral and transcendent grouping. Is it not the case that the foundation of all aspects of reality come to a single ineffable origin, that all conscious actions are connected through a transcendent pole? For older cultures, with simpler wars and a more cohesive identity, it was far easier to see this. Why is it that all sin is cast into appetitive objects of the body, for example? It is never that any single realm is daft or uneducated; simply that is they, without human touch (or an orientation to the Divine), will have become simple and banal technologies. To shy away from technology is create another simulation, to don the VR headset of your given utopia, and to shirk a better higher-minded objective to the moral advancement of history.
Hyperrealism and Hypermodernity
The surplus of industrial automatons in their own realm and the information-imagistic sirens in their own digital realms has produced a “semiotic excess”. In this sense I am borrowing from Ebert and Culkin’s out-of-print Hypermodernity. It is the rule of “hyper modernity” to be in semiotic excess and to dissolve any boundaries and walls that are put up by any particular force. It all seems to collect into a giant semiotic pool—reminiscent of another term, liquid modernity. It is a deluge. An unending multiplicitous flood.
Realistically, the older humans saw the previous forms of lives much like how we should view technology. Take depth psychology, for example: the child has their various rearing phases, oral fixations and tendencies. Its structure is in likeness to simply another stage of consciousness that you grow out of. Never was it the case that we would lose the luster for these more primitive structures completely. For the Orientals this protection is exemplified in Kundalini Yoga, where it is the bringing forth of consciousness through the physical, sexual and so forth up into the Divine, again. For the Westerns it was the devotion to the hardening of the ego, a “growing up”—where our “seriousness” is in respect for the earlier structures. The only true sin we have is forgetting the transcendent Divinity ever-present around us, always there to help if we open up. In a flood of information we begin to lose any kind of seriousness to the mundanities of life and particular referents. It is the foolhardy who dive into these pre-history cavemen-like attitudes that we “just need to return to older cultures”—much like the paleoconservative mess emergent in the right—to try and solve this. Again, this is just another virtual reality and isn’t a true quality of leadership.
While Baudrillard seemed to believe (at least in his illumination of a metaphysics of the hyperreal) that we could never “truly” find the genuinely real again, I disagree; that, to me, is weakness. The hyperreal, as he describes in Simulacra and Simulation, ‘is an abstraction of a model of reality with no real origin in the real’. Yet, if it is just simply that, then that, itself, isn’t all that surprising—for we can then backtrack to some model of the real, give it referents and then submit these abstractions. In fact, any abstraction must always be commanded in the real to begin with, anyways. Someone is always saying something somewhere, right?
The Digital Map
The World Picture and the Map
One needs only recall some of the beginning statements to David R. Olson’s World on Paper to get a brief history:
McLuhan told of some northern Intuit who were looking for a cache of supplies, the location of which was marked on a map. After some hours of fruitless search, their urban companions, unable to locate themselves on the map said “We are lost.” The Inuit, on the other hand, insisted that they were not lost: “It is the cache which is lost.”
Take this, too:
Eisenstein is undoubtedly correct regarding the important role that printing played in the establishment of an accumulative archival tradition. […] To review, as long as knowledge was thought of as in the mind, the usefulness of writing was limited […] [writing] is to construct visible artifacts with a degree of autonomy from their author and with special properties for controlling how they will be interpreted.
Some problems of representation were relatively trivial, such as developing a convention for putting North at the top of a map. Others were much more serious, like inventing a mathematical grid of lines of latitude and longitude for specifying locations. This abstract grid was what allowed integration of detailed cartographic knowledge into a “world picture”. […] The important step was to see the world […] as a sphere with [mathematical] properties[…] Only then, did the paper world become the conceptual scheme in terms of which the perceptual world could be organized.
The-World-On-Paper’s transformation into Simulation
Make no mistake Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation begins with a reference to the dissolution of this map-making and the provision of a replacement for the “world-picture”. What he presents, as an innovation, here, is a complexification of the literacy as being imbed, through time, in the world-on-paper:
Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory—precession of simulacra—that engenders the territory, and if one must return to the fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map.
History: A Retro Scenario
The great event of this period, the great trauma, is this decline of strong referentials, these death pangs of the real and of the rational that open onto an age of simulation. Whereas so many generations, and particularly the last, lived in the march of history, in the euphoric or catastrophic expectation of a revolution—today one has the impression that history has retreated, leaving behind it an indifferent nebula, traversed by currents, but emptied of references. It is into this void that the phantasms of a past history recede, the panoply of events, ideologies, retro fashions—no longer so much because people believe in them or still place some hope in them, but simply to resurrect the period when at least there was history, at least there was violence (albeit fascist), when at least life and death were at stake.
On the Implosion of Meaning in Media
Evidently, there is a paradox in this inextricable conjunction of the masses and the media: do the media neutralize meaning and produce unformed [informe] or informed [informee] masses, or is it the masses who victoriously resist the media by directing or absorbing all the messages that the media produce without responding to them? […] Are the mass media on the side of power in the manipulation of the masses, or are they on the side of the masses in the liquidation of meaning, in the violence perpetrated on meaning, and in the fascination?
If anyone even remembers, or perhaps can intuit it as I’m writing, I used to write much how Baudrillard does. Ebert in his book review of Simulacra mentions it as “poetry prose”, which I would describe as accurate. I’ve always been fairly self aware, but there’s a certain type of mind that engages in this form of rhetoric; once noticed, every subsequent time it enters into someone’s style it appears with a loud band. You can tell if you eye the rhythm of the words repeated, the playing with sounds, phenomes, that are alike, the way the alphabet letters resemble each other (even if they don’t sound the same) and so forth. Mostly this structure appears in how many syllables are in a linguistic chunk, a partial clause, and the stress of those syllables—the similarity between idioms, so to speak. It’s always a joy seeing a natural at their best. And Baudrillard is arguably both in Simulacra.
One will recall Sloterdijk’s writing, too. His associative portmanteau’s of various historical institutional categories is very much similar to Baudrillard’s semiotic wailing about. Baudrillard is much like a warrior, attempting to both demonstrate and cleave through the brush of simulated enemies and bushes of real perpetrators with a machete. This machete is his iron-made ruler-stick that his intellect uses to digest the realm before him—this is the emblem of his capable, high linguistic aptitude. Sloterdijk is the same, but rather than having his sights on the metaphysical object of the ‘hyperreal’, his is integralist, sequential spherisms. This sets his manner of fighting through-history, rather than just being in the moment describing the land at the present moment. For Baudrillard, naturally, this full sequential history is seemingly improbable, as it’s woven into his framework. We see that enmeshing of the past into the present in the above History: A Retro Scenario quote.
He observes a process that he describes as the liquidation of ‘strong referentials’; again, I’ll prefer to use the imagery of a deluge to draw further attention to this. First, we have the wave, then the ocean. It is the entering of the technology, which expands into an immunological space, and then the subject must use procedures to continue being-in, as a process of perfecting and refining this new realm—that is to say, the deluge is when we mess around with older abilities of sheaths of our being in a new playground. We test the waters of a new realm but are molded by the bounds of the map, or the shape of the stage we enter. For higher abstracts representations this, then, begins to easily eclipse all the previous ones. As we mentioned in Foundations, in order to avoid unnecessary “forgetting” we must not confuse simple complexity in abstractions but find ways to climb between them. It is the forgetfulness of our Seinsvergessheit that enables the simulation to “harbor” an imaginary elixir, proclaiming to be before all other modes of theory. These are the previous ones, older, primal ones; as we have mentioned, it is a technology, a VR headset, used as a therapeutic discipline to escape from the real.
(One could think of this in the implicit command of an ostensive before us, to use Generative Anthropologies terminologies. To be presented with an ostensive is to minimally be exposed to the ‘absence’ of its ostensibility. That of which, is identical to an imperative. When we come into contact with an entirely new ostensive—or in this case, the embedment of an abstracted principle, or new structure with consciousness enters—we must face its absence.)
Precession of the Realm through the Map
Herein, the digital, a technology wholly unique to the post 1975~ cultures (with the publication of the internet) is preceded by, again, resource-driven societies. Beyond the first and second World Wars, as Baudrillard points out, we eclipse the deferred time of pre-war cults. I say time is deferred because it has a sequential nature to its march, rather than a vortex which swallows up all historical moments into an enmeshed abstract. A seed of simulacra which enables the expansion of a simulation; much like some primordial Lovecraftian “cosmic horror”.
The map of the world was only enforced when the abstract representation was brought down through an intermediary discipline. The “model” of the globe acts as a global literacy, one that anyone who wishes to participate in global-marking, or to prove its existence, like Magellan, must submit to the discipline or institutions enabling its existence. Here, literacy enables the prospect of not just one, accurate, map that lays over the territory of interest. It activates a higher abstract (the mathematization of the sphere as preceding the globe) and the creation of the “intentional” map-making, itself—an intermediary discipline which all other “global maps” must submit to. We are no longer in the discipline in which a particular map may be made but the model with which we must, then, subject all sequential maps to. In this, the simulacra of the mathematized sphere now precedes and enables the “real” to exist. This may occur only if we lose sight of the original principles (why, exactly are we making maps to begin with?).
The digital realm presents many abstractions with which we have the cogent dissemination of these intermediary disciplines. Wikipedia, Reddit, YouTube and others had once started as emblems of some troupe, or group of peoples, dedicated to an ideal. As they progressed, and became subjected to the demands of the resource-driven madness of modernity, then develop an internal literacy. No longer is it the product of sentiments but the production of sentiment factories, the technologization of men and women into marketable units. What is the term influencer, but an article of this truth? Your job is on influence, not media. What makes this different, in modernity and in regards to the global-map cults, is that our maps are maps of the real. They are videos, they are words, they are organizations and algorithms. This causes much to chagrin—it enables the belief that all of this is truer than reality.
As Baudrillard mentions in the Implosion of Meaning, it is a question of whether the people are getting exactly what they want, or whether they are just becoming atomized themselves. Realistically, we’re just talking about different institutions and individual reactions to this increasing technics-of-surveillance. If we have communication and consciousness, then it is moral, if not, it’s just a dystopian phantasm.
There is much to love there, and within the internet era the precession of the Digital Map of the real has proven quite useful. Technologies such as Khan Academy were useful to me in my earlier years, where I had begun to teach myself math. We have produced a principle resource repository of intellectual webs the likes of which history has never seen. Guitarist virtuosos abound, so much more to love with these people dedicated to the refinement of what was originally just clubs. We’ve allowed a professional discipline to inject itself into any local man or woman anywhere—that they can tap in, and through a right-ness of discipline, teach and become a star.
However, what does Magellan do after sailing the globe? With an act of faith and reverence (to the intermediary disciplinarity of the globe-map cult) as large as that…what is left?
In an age in which agency is outfitted and resources are no longer asked of people, but people are molded to do it of their own free will, it is a question of agency. Only when one engages in origin hunting, and not simulated VR therapy, do solutions begin to emerge. This will, as always, be metapolitical in nature. The questions of communism and fascistic tendencies are faux results. The march of history never truly stops, even in the absence of true, strong, world altering events. We all participate in history as we mark upon it; it is the goal of man to divinize and bring about consciousness into life. Maybe, we can construct a utopia, built upon a futuristic virtual, but, for it to be a global-map cult the likes of which can consume all of our referents, in this hotbox of commodities, it would have to miniaturize into the ineffable. That of which is similarly Divine.
I will cut it off there, but hopefully I’ve presented something good to see out of this mirage. There is much more to discuss on modern history, but I’m trying to refine my writing down.
I’ve always appreciated pop, and I think they’re being far more conscious of this as time goes on. Don’t be a crude simpleton.
Drink up some bub’, walk wit a limp.