Nostradamus
foresaw an age of Mercury, he also felt that we would not understand it.
The machinery of signs and numbers has become also the machinery of
cultural and sensory prosthesis. The
sign itself has become the currency of barter.
We are beginning to create for ourselves another world of the chosen
significant, one the technologists believe offers an elective immersion and the
sociologists believe is an inescapable relativity. The presence of signs and
chosen forms, collated in our technology and known when we buy and work, form
another presence, a subliminal ambience of the intention and
consciousness of others. We begin
to exist in a crowded room, called
away from nature, drawn by siren
voices and sensual overtures. We
begin to forget our selves. Nostradamus
was perhaps right.
The
crowded room, presence, manifests itself differently but is always the coercion
to be social, to proscribe oneself, or more properly behave and understand the
world as social. The hubbub of the
party I understand to be mine, my gifts and voice I understand to be yours,
ours. We shop, we watch, we are 'creative'.
The only brake on my total sumblimation in the cultural 'we' is my
body, the root of objectification, the ostensive materiality which is the
context of sentient presence. The
material world does not represent an empirical other to the social, it is
irrefutably the source of our selves, the possibility of perception, action and
intention. The awareness of
sentience, including our own, arises from matter. It is predicated on the need
to outline things and know them as the agents of events.
In our struggle against death, this world, material presence, is more
important than that of language and culture (the site of 'we'), it has first
place in our psyche, it is our objective soul. The habit of this objective form of consciousness is to place
belief before knowledge and to refute loss of perception and seek lucidity.
Its responsibility is our own power of material agency and as such it
struggles to overcome the vague, the relative and the indeterminate.
This quality of self, that which emerges from material presence
finds itself in direct competition with social presence which engages
with the endless nuancing and production of cultural signs and forms and which
urges us to belong. Social presence
compounds language, matter and time in an endless discourse, we can assume, out
of nature, this discourse must produce a dissatisfaction or annoyance in the
objective soul which we do not personally know as a hesitant voice but as a
locating and identifying sense.
Ultimately,
from this psychic tension, must come a desire to articulate that tension, which
will find its way into the social presence.
The corresponding power that may come with that articulation (some might
say this has already begun) is the ability of individuals to reject social
presence in varying degree. The
media, virtual reality, consumerism all have in them the seed of dissatisfaction
because they do not offer the sure and frequent points of rest the objective
soul desires, they offer only an endless task of interpretation and pursuit, union and reunion.
As long as we cannot articulate that dissatisfaction the path of our
social forms must be an increasingly frenzied one, sign upon sign, voice upon
voice and the path of our behaviour must follow. In Design and in Art we
currently understand this frenzy as Postmodernism, an inclination to play, made
possible by a glut of collective knowledge, shared by maker and customer.
We presume, considering the limitation of our lives and our memories that
such play might be perennial, that there will be no point of exhaustion.
However social presence, the knowing habit of signing, is a feature of
our civilisation and extends beyond the particular and specific. The organic
growth of cultural and social systems of signing are linked to that civilisation
and establish themselves in its timescale, they are also by virtue of their epic
scale, beyond management. The more
we rehearse cultural play the more it will become inadvertently methodised and
delivered, our consciousness of that play at some point gives way to our
consciousness of its various forms of methodisation.
At this point the individual's choices of action do not contend with the
dismissal or approval of genre or content but with the dismissal or approval of
actions of communication, which in turn becomes a social evolution, an
aggregation of sentiments about the way we expect to live and behave and the
nature of our sociability. In this
way the objective self will assert its expectation for lucidity as it always
does and outside the 'dialectic'.
The
difficulty, Nostradamus' expectation, is that the methodization evades us and
indeed why should we know Mercury's age when it is upon us?
The prosthetics of contemporary communication make it a fair bet that we
are in the right age. The
availability of computers, broadcast media and mass production themselves bring
a further qualification which relates to the magnitude and turnover of social
presence, founded in the repetitive receipt of cultural and consumer product.
That presence itself is manifested both in consumer goods and communication
technologies but what can we understand of its methodization?
Should we understand the need for our metaphorical 'singing'
through the concepts of language, politics, commerce, design?
Or should we attempt to understand it as we understand the objective
self? If there are very human motivations for the objective self
then so too we might expect ones which create the social self and in these rest
the logics which give rise to social presence and determine its material,
temporal and technological mediation. To
understand collective and personal motivations for communication and expression
in an advanced society is quite different to an explanation of their form or
reference, it is perhaps instead a requirement to understand their natural
force. Like some liquid they will
ultimately find their own level, for the time being we are in the first flood.
The
objective self will react. Through an action of silence...through a
destruction of noise. At some point in our future evolution we will
recognise a need for an escape from social presence in the lifespan, the
handswidth that counts each individual's time. There is a mechanical,
deterministic quality to that which awaits us...the emergence of presence,
until it is insufferable and inescapable...the knowing of presence,
the increasingly tired, cheap sign, the unending chorus, the intrusion of
minds...and then...outside
and deviance and exhaustion, an information terror...stopping immersion