boundary dissolution with
memetic alchemy
In astrophysics, implosion describes what happens when a massive star collapses into the dimensionless singularity that forms
the heart of a black hole.
In our world, implosion is most obviously catalyzed by the media, which dissolves the boundaries between sectors of the real, intensifying the feedback loops wherein signs and images, commodities and data, circulate through institutions and individuals. The speed and intensity of these flows erode traditional structures of knowledge, communication, and culture–indeed, they erode "structure" in general, giving way to a world of process and mutation.
Expanding on McLuhan's insight, Jean Baudrillard argued that the media's primary object of dissolution was the boundary between media and everything else: "There are no more media in the literal sense of the word–that is, of a mediating power between one reality and another, between one state of the real and another."
- Erik Davis
Well, what these new technologies are doing is dissolving boundaries. The nation state, the monolithic party, and the nuclear family---all boundary -defined institutions of one sort or another---are legacies of the past; what we need is an ideology that is mercurial, shifting, non-static. And as long as we’re talking about mercury and mercurial things, there is in alchemy (a pre-modern form of thinking) the idea of the Coincidencia Oppositorum, which means that you have to have ideologies which are able to accommodate positions which within the context of the previous ideology would’ve appeared contradictory. The very notion of non-contradiction is a notion that emerges out of the linear, print-created mindset; the whole sterility of that world-view is its inability to live with the presence of contradiction.
And so it denies it, which creates the unconscious of a society where we’ve got serial killers running around.
The world is not as simple as we desperately wish to make it within the context of the linear world-view.
- Terence McKenna
http://memeticalchemy.podomatic.com
memetic alchemy
In astrophysics, implosion describes what happens when a massive star collapses into the dimensionless singularity that forms
the heart of a black hole.
In our world, implosion is most obviously catalyzed by the media, which dissolves the boundaries between sectors of the real, intensifying the feedback loops wherein signs and images, commodities and data, circulate through institutions and individuals. The speed and intensity of these flows erode traditional structures of knowledge, communication, and culture–indeed, they erode "structure" in general, giving way to a world of process and mutation.
Expanding on McLuhan's insight, Jean Baudrillard argued that the media's primary object of dissolution was the boundary between media and everything else: "There are no more media in the literal sense of the word–that is, of a mediating power between one reality and another, between one state of the real and another."
- Erik Davis
Well, what these new technologies are doing is dissolving boundaries. The nation state, the monolithic party, and the nuclear family---all boundary -defined institutions of one sort or another---are legacies of the past; what we need is an ideology that is mercurial, shifting, non-static. And as long as we’re talking about mercury and mercurial things, there is in alchemy (a pre-modern form of thinking) the idea of the Coincidencia Oppositorum, which means that you have to have ideologies which are able to accommodate positions which within the context of the previous ideology would’ve appeared contradictory. The very notion of non-contradiction is a notion that emerges out of the linear, print-created mindset; the whole sterility of that world-view is its inability to live with the presence of contradiction.
And so it denies it, which creates the unconscious of a society where we’ve got serial killers running around.
The world is not as simple as we desperately wish to make it within the context of the linear world-view.
- Terence McKenna
http://memeticalchemy.podomatic.com
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