My throat went tight like someone wrapped a cord around it when I realised that never seeing you again is the equivalent of you being dead. Or never seeing you again is you dead. Once you are out of my perception you no longer exist. Existence is an evidence based phenomenon. I can see you breathing, therefore you are alive. Does that mean that people die and are resurrected at multiple points in time when they cease to be within one’s horizon and then re-enter at will?
If this is the case then ‘true’ death could merely indicate that the person has exited your perception. Or perhaps everything, everything exists simultaneously; time, history, purpose. And if this is the case everything is existing all the time and perception is the ultimate mass murderer/terrorist.
The only problem with this theory is that I cannot perceive anything into being. Things exist and then don’t exist, perhaps entirely alien to (and mocking of) the limited ability of a human to perceive anything. But then: What do I perceive? In general I see existence and non-existence; my environment/atmosphere is determined by what is existing within it and, more importantly what is not existing (ie. the elephant in the room). Perception is like a glass of liquid then.
Take for example the Ipod phenomenon. Take for example the fact that houses are being built on increasingly smaller blocks of land. Take for example that you could probably hear your neighbours’ conversation if you listened. Seats are smaller. People are addicted to games. The internet galaxy. People need to seek out different worlds to insulate their increasing lack of insulation between themselves and the next concrete wall that belongs to somebody else. There is a need to create windows to perceive through that generate the illusion that one is contained in their own space, alone. The creation of the world through the necessity to determine your own space may mean that you are crafting your own perception glass, therefore perpetuating the grief of the penetration of this space by a withdrawal or unwanted inclusion. Hence the crux of this generation’s mourning is the necessary realisation that one cannot determine one’s own space/reality/perception. Ye ole self-determination debacle.
Isn’t this the same for every generation, technological or agricultural? I’m not sure. Perhaps not.
Perhaps the necessity to create space is so much more desperate in these times that the realisation that there is no space and that even if there was space, one cannot determine it fully, and the grief is greater. The grief is for a lost phenomenon of space; Innate, primal space. We are trying to recreate a womb in an Ipod and have to mourn its inevitable demolition.
I include myself in the inquiry into post-modern perception at this point. Perception of this form, in this generation, is a cycle. That is, I am within the created space and then I am ejected from the space when something else encroaches on or subtracts something from the space; denial being the key back into the created space. The only way to maintain my created space is to assume that those who exit my horizon have died. So the current generation engages in continuous mourning which their created world requires for survival. Perhaps this idea goes some way towards an explanation of the rise of depression in post-modernist times.
Point number 2 for the evening: the post-modern need for technological determination of the self. Within the created space we house the same needs that we would pursue within ‘true’ space. Most prominently, the need for recognition: to be recognised, to recognise.
Checking email or personal pages for messages, looking up your own name in Google is an assurance that one technologically exists and is recognised as a technological citizen. Posting blogs, sending emails, text messages (text messaging as opposed to calling ensures the created space), investigating other personal profiles is the need to be a recogniser within the technological community.
Interestingly, I check my email too many (obsessively) throughout the day. The frequency of checking is dependent on my intellectual engagement in the task at hand. That is: if I’m at work, guiding paper around the table, it is checked too often as opposed to say, listening to music and not considering email. I don’t think I am alone in these habits.
This admission brings me to my 3rd point: Corporation Ant Syndrome (CAS). CAS is the idea that we are forcefully encouraged to enter miniature hierarchical societies within our society ie. corporations. These mini-societies are made up of people who are encouraged into robotising their actions in an attempt to achieve greater workload per time allocation. The work that they are assigned is entirely figurative, however, that is, it is to do with seemingly inconsequential activities (as opposed to planting a number of trees in a garden and being able to enjoy that garden. Paper and documents are meaningless to the person seeking out space). Plebeians aim to fulfil unreasonable obligations in order to gain access to an office that has a view to the world outside the corporation. The corporation manipulates the worker into false economies of value in the corporate hierarchical machine. Meanwhile, the corporate ant is granted a small space behind a dividing partition. They seek the space within their computer screens to escape the lack of space (emotional and physical) within the corporate landscape.
CAS is another motivator of the creation of space in modern technology. The need for self determination of the self as separate from the corporate collective is indicated by the personalised pages and sites that litter the internet. The aggressive consumption of created space is fuelled by an obsession about space creation in order to receive recognition of the self as an entity/citizen in a seemingly meaningless corporate hierarchy built on paper.
[this contemporary spatial manifesto is unfinished due to the inattention and unreliability of its author.]
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