Violence rules before the law, “the force that comes from within to remind us that law is always an authorized force.” 6 These entities, being fictitious persons, are more or less endowed with cybernetic and circuit characteristics.” 5 Bateson’s ecological, feedback media gods are too kindly conceived for the twentieth century, in which the circuits overheated and anyone issuing an order was greeted as God or Führer. Gregory Bateson described this in 1967: “I suggest that one of the things that man has done through the ages to correct for his short-sighted purposiveness is to imagine personified entities with various sorts of supernatural power, i.e., gods. But gods should conversely be understood as the ideas implicit to media setups, which, beyond short-term individual interests, maintain wider collective processes and procedures in the long term. The appearance of gods is supposed in lights, sounds, and symbols, from electromagnetic fields and electronic circuitry. This order is prematurely, and under changing media conditions, attributed to the divine, especially when its orders seem to come from nowhere. Here lies the media aspect of the Moses complex: to bring out the underlying and imperceptible structure or order of possible relationships within artworks and practices. It isn’t about the “terrible abstraction” that George Steiner saw as provocation and “Jewish extortion,” 3 but rather a caesura and a resulting “now of discernability.” 4įor this reason I don’t examine the meanings of sounds or images but the texture and connectivity of tones and shots. The Moses complex deals with monotheism as a problem of conceiving the unconceivable under respective historical conditions. Forces and power relationships, which as politics underlie new perceptual spaces, the behavior and action they initiate, and their results, can be located in connections and transmissions, rifts and caesuras, but also in latencies, temporal shifts, and stratifications. It isn’t shown in images, meanings, or in a logic of representations, but in constellations and relations that bring about image and sound spaces. In the following a Moses complex will be discussed in relation to musical composition, cinema, and psychoanalysis as cultural theory. The Moses complex is about recognition from decisions, relationships, rifts, from the blind typographic blank, the fraudulent vanishing point of painting, the logic of signification, and the constitutive relationships in sound and cinema. If he hears nothing, he can move on with his sheep. Not imagination but attention, recursion, decision. Moses admittedly has to make his first distinction out of nothing: burning bush-voice thing-God noise-message. Identity and knowledge are generated from gaps, and can only be gained recursively. People can always be counted or added up anew or differently if you want. Because recursions are constitutive, things don’t remain with a politics of identities. Cultural techniques bring symbolic systems retrospectively into the arena, but they also distort them. Numbers will have been there, but only when Moses counts his people, in order to make tribes, armies, gangs, families from them, does counting become the organization of people in space. Writing will have been there, inscribed, when Moses is called before the law through smoke, fire, and mountain thunder. Its temporality isn’t linear or simple but recursive and complex. It marks the problem of not simply being able to fall back on memory but having to continually rewrite and reconstruct it. The Moses complex is about the difficulty of realizing this emerging politics without imagining it. In speaking of a politics of sounds and images, I don’t mean emotions or effects but the construction of effective spaces and people’s distribution and connection within them. Exile, desert, and camp are the constellations from which the emergence of a coming society is perceived. The Moses complex, so the premise of the following deliberations, raises the question of the transformation of the political under media conditions, under new and unknown media conditions. “We are strangers,” is a worn-out Christian sentence.īut consider for a moment the potential that lies within it.
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