The One

This programme “The One” distils or reduces love and human identity to a DNA codification. We seem to have wholly accepted, like evangelical science Christians, an idea that our perceptual sense of self is shaped by a code akin to the algorithm which conveniently shapes our human relations. The very idea that there might be other factors in the cosmos beyond the hard-wiring of DNA and the genes seems to be a heretical suggestion. The suggestion that that we are not individual units of power shaped by a numerical sequence is again akin to saying I believe in leprechauns or even God. perhaps the code has replaced God. I would say that this faith in the rational shaping of code is a clinging to the raft of Medusa as the ship of progress sails into the sunset. We apply our Botox whilst devouring each other’s limbs. It is faith we have in binary switching systems and we find it cleaner and more wholesome to believe that our one true love could be shaped by the pairing of our DNA-sequence strands than the idea that love emerge from experience and around an intuitive aesthetic engagement.

 

In a similar way to Burroughs, Derrida sees this imprisoned mode of thought as emerging from a logocentric culture. For Burroughs the word is a virus, for Derrida ink poison. The suggestion is that the problem is not what we think but the model of thought itself. An example of how we seek to continually validate this model might be how Occidental culture chose to annihilate Native American Indian culture. The West preferred to force native children to be educated in the Western ways of accumulating knowledge as equivalent value rather than nurture an indigenous aesthetic culture of experience, deemed below the intelligence of our cognitive systems. This aesthetic culture of Native American Indians, for instance, is the very thing that will help us to solve the problems of alienation, separation, division and dislocation. However, we continue to evangelically promote the word and the reading of code as the method of efficient problem solving. Efficiency and answer seeking are relevant only to the logocentric empire. 

 

So the problem is not so much the system as the method of continually re-installing the system. Much activism is based around response to hierarchical system within the hierarchal system using a sort of moral framework because intuitive feeling cannot be trusted to get us over the line. In the same way that people rightly feel the need to prevent global warming, I myself feel very activated in suggesting that it is a human necessity to acknowledge affectual frequencies. It is vital that we at least speculate about the extent to which actions are shaped by our aesthetic engagement with each other and our surroundings. We repeatedly choose to see feeling as a secondary response to a reasoned framework, which then leads time and again to the need to make moral judgments.  A mistrust of intuition, empathy and feeling, endemic in logocentric culture leads to activists ignoring the affectual modes of understanding. Punk was an attempt to create an alternative culture broadcasting and receiving affectual frequencies and this is also the kind of thing Extinction Rebellion was attempting. These embodied forms of sense making quickly get turned into the cultural equivalents in the Empire of Like and become about the word and coded forms rather than a continuing to try and build an affectual realm within which we can construct relationality based on a depth of collective feeling.

 

So now to talk of emergence and a need to acknowledge the transformative agency found within engaging with material vitality is no longer just a whimsical notion but has become more like something to regard as an activist mentality. I think it is imperative that we began to acknowledge affective register as human beings and contemplate an aesthetic culture based on feeling within which our cognitive processes can once more become useful rather than the things that shapes our whole identity in a coded mode of equivalence.