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ACT ONE—Medial Contestation
Gripped by invasive aspects of multifactorial collapse, we are bound to ask about the nature of technological impingements and their political resolve. Part of the job description involves keeping pace with the cognitive shakeups provoked by technical mutations and their existential counterparts—critical rounds that can wear one down and kill one's creative engines, particularly if one is inclined to think that one has covered the material, more or less. Yet, a thinking grrl's duty consists in tirelessly checking the premises of updated windows and opaque techno-clusters, whose status often clocks in as obsolesced on arrival. Still, we grind on. The speculative task force pulls overtime, becoming especially pertinent as reproductive rights and technologically dependent protections, including those of the fairly straightforward American voting machine, come under regressive attack. Historically, the fascistic tendency is to split off from the technological gridwork on which a totalitarian impulse fixates and primes its killing sprees. Mythologizing nationalisms routinely dispense with the platforms that are counted on to propagate a syntax of aberrant claims. Each viable technological innovation, whether of nano dimension or oversized by virtual expansion, deserves stubborn assessment based on urgent protocols of investigation. With every turn (and turnoff), technology, since it became a question and bully concept, calls for a theoretical size up.
When Nietzsche lamented the loss of our prime spectator, he foreshadowed the way Gd's removal would be supplanted with the reproving gaze of the digital media, its capacity for merciless hounding from a nearly theologically-based hideout in the cyber-kingdom. Had I sufficiently wide expanses at my disposal I would analyze a host of substitutive topoi and entanglements—cutting from Benjamin's phantom swarms to state-of-the-art experimental sites in Austin, TX—that involve wet-labs, mixed medical reality, electronic sniffers, biopolitical installations, ghost guns, the Gatso speed camera, and so on, without downplaying the increasing importance of regenerative farming and enhanced pharming (starting with fractal split-offs ascribable to the pharmakon).1 In terms of a critical history of inoculation I might want to close in on the cable, linking Dr. Jenner and Kant, that relates phantasms of freedom to body phobias, anti-vax rhetoric and transcendental incorporation—or examine the way billionaires get their rockets off when Mother Earth crumbles into an immunocompromised pose.
Narrowing the...