The Prosthesis of the Event in Cyberspace: La reserche du temps perdu beyond Oedipe and Gnosis
Symposium:
Session Title:
- East & West (High & Low)
Presentation Title:
- The Prosthesis of the Event in Cyberspace: La reserche du temps perdu beyond Oedipe and Gnosis
Presenter(s):
Abstract:
Abstract
The story developed in Ulysses, the narrative of a lonely, cunning hero and his magnificent victories over the mythological powers, was not by any means a commentary on ‘the reality’ of the already realized event, of the discreditation of mythological timelessness, and on the establishment of the three-faceted structure of time, as Horkheimer and Adorno imagined in ‘Dialectics of Enlightenment’. On the contrary, it was the act during which the possibility of a narration of it, distanced from ancient myth was constituted for the first time. In the real world, structured like a text, an interactive interface with the past is impossible.
‘The Book of Life’ is meant to be read only once. Of the fragments of the Book, only those events that irrevocably sink into Lethe, can be subordinated to ‘re-reading’. These fragments can be equalled to ROM files: they can be given rebirth in memory, and for any number of times, but you cannot change anything in them. As opposed to the real world, in the virtual reality of cyberspace, no prohibitions are known to the reactualization of any event. Potentially, i.e. not depending on the hardware, the software can be multiplied infinitely, and in every act of copying the software remains the same because of its digital nature: since Plato’s time we know that in the case of ideas or numbers we are dealing with essences that cannot be effected by spatial or temporal changes. The digital nature of the beings and essences of cyberspace is based firstly to their protistic nature – all the members of a digital number group 0-9 are characterized by complete mutual transformability into each other – and secondly, to their prosthetic nature – the finger of a hand is explicitly an organ that centers in itself all the original capability of touching, dispersed in the somatics, which will then be modified into five senses and into all the prosthetics of human corporeality available today, that meditatively expand the scope of bodily touch to every existing thing. As a consequence of this, the prosthesis of an event in the virtual reality of cyberspace can be described as follows. Even a distinct digital simulation of an event does not know any spatio-temporal restrictions: it is simultaneously both in space and in time, a simulation of every possible and impossible event in the real world, completely corresponding to the ancient formula ‘One is all, all is one.’
