Speaking Jabberwocky!

The terms of experience in our time, seem to be limited by the plasticity of appropriation and not of transmission. What are we meaning with transmission here? We think of the links between people. How we appropriate experience is referred to pack it as manageable documents with predetermined tools, and mimetic repetition. This is nothing new, it has happened before. But, the transmission is set aside as a technological aspect, that seems unreachable. Technical developers construct transmission in a separate community. This way Technology delivers Experience instead of using it.

Walter Benjamin was concerned about how the change from the experience transmitted from generation to generation is substituted by the experience of war, the silent experience of war. When immersed in technical experience, do we have a silent approach to it, what is there to be transmitted?

This is not to be understood as a conservative call, an attack on technology, our experience is now, mediated through it and it changes the way we live. But, just like after the First World War the people came from the traumatic experience of the battlefields, and Walter Benjamin was asking himself about the place of experience in a generation that has lived the terror of such direct experience, thinking how can they talk, how can we do it now.  What are the mechanisms to say and transmit that? How to deal with that aftermaths of Technology after the conflicts of that aspect after Second World War, after the Latin American or Asian Dictatorships, and the Afganistan and Irak wars, what about the people in Kosovo or in Palestine. How is this experience going to be spoken?

How can our strategies of narrativity transcend the limits of a experience with this kind of experience and enrich existence. How can somebody talk with technologies and relate to life? There is not a clear limit between one another. That is the labor of experience. How to re-technologize the myths, the politics, the religions, the art. Not simply as a matter of blind continuity, but as the labor of  finding in symbols and significants, action. Not to condemn poverty of experience that is projected through phantasmatical dispositives. Not to condemn experience to just the pass by of a reminder of biological existence as mute. Walking in the darkness of kitchens at noon, silent and lonely, cleaning the household and having menial work, to consume and dispose. But, to build through technical aspects something else.

The societies of our time have to deal with muteness. The strategies of connectivity that try to make transparent the voids of disconnection. We hope that through connections, the possibility of transmission is increased. The phantasmic presence of people in Facebook, of sex in Tinder. But reading it in another way, the mechanisms of community construction can’t be expected to be limited to the disposition of tool feedback, but by the use. In a movie called Wie man sieht the happening of technology leads us to the forking of the roads. The same concept that drove to the plow lead to the firing mechanism of a gun. Technology is always the act of forking (in Spanish sounds way better, el acto de bifuración).

We need to find ways to talk about the technologies juxtaposed to our bodies. The poverty of experience, as Benjamin called it, has to be rethought as a way to narrate technology. These are barbaric times, like those were to Benjamin, we can consider them to be similar. The speech of the lack of drinking water, global sicknesses and extermination, lack of food are those of bare survival. But, again, apocalyptic thought has always been part of a human mechanism related with transition and change. Technology in its silent stage, lets this flow, deaf development acts as death without redemption.  Considering the spaces of technological objects is a challenge of the act of scission.

¿How to talk about technological artefacts as part of existence in an enriching way?

Benjamin looks at the writings of Scheerbart for how our telescopes, airplanes and rockets make the men of antiquity worthy of our attention. To dig into technology is to surpass the magical astonishment and transit into the limits of fiction and action. Here is the clue we are looking at. Technology and its relation with the narration of the past, who this produces a new space. Not thinking it as a necessity for today, the coming of future. We look back into technology as a way to provide it to experience. It is not a matter of understanding how language works to write a manual, to technifgy it, or to demand it certain organic matter, call it for the ability to modify reality, not describe it, Walter Benjamin’s is thinking.

The problem is here, that is a common issue in Benjamin’s thought: What is there after the auratic? The conflict of poverty of experience is to find a way to express what has come to be impoverished. How to keep bringing existence to transmission. When the word Erfahrung is selected over Eraignis or Wissen for this particular spectre, it is clear that we are in a workshop, technique here has to be related to the problem of what to do. It is not a matter of the instantaneous succession or the accumulation of knowledge, but to make it a practical way to think.

In the end of Experience and Poverty, Walter Benjamin addresses the place of a radical place in this impoverished existence: Mickey Mouse. Fucking Mickey Mouse. We have here a comical dream, after the tired boredom of existence, that all we have to do is to express how technology   from the body of Mickey Mouse or the animation around it. Things have some kind of answering back to existence. The comparison between technology and animation comes as a need of speaking in other terms. That’s where we at, but with a material component that has dragged the lack of speech into a mechanism. Technology is more related to animation than to that what is mute. It comes as an answer to a lack of transmission. We animate relations with technology. A few days ago I was watching a new movie with Keanu Reeves: John Wick. In this movie, the classical scene where the beatdown hero in his last breath remembers the lost paradise in which his lover and him were bonded in bliss, and it is represented is substituted by a video in an iPhone screen. The relation with remembrance is exposed. It is animated by video and by the phone, and the network and the little things that build up, at the same time the memento and the base. But the transmission is still falling apart, how to recuperate it comes as a technological question.  That is the packed document that needs to find a way to transmit.

The excess of documentation as an opposition to transmission. What does this vast photo collections, video collections, word collections bring us or how does it bring it to us. It has to be made. What we are looking at is a field that asks to come to experience. Not as a dream or as nightmare. After the auratic, the question is for new ways to bring technological objects to the enrichment of experience.