Bioshock: Infinite

Kinetoscope: “A City in the Sky? Impossible!”

Technification is making gestures in the meantime precise and rough – and thereby human beings. They drive all hesitation out of gestures, all consideration, all propriety [Gesittung]. They are subjected to the irreconcilable – ahistorical, as it were – requirements of things. Thus one no longer learns to close a door softly, discreetly and yet firmly. Those of autos and frigidaires have to be slammed, others have the tendency to snap back by themselves and thus imposing on those who enter the incivility of not looking behind them, of not protecting the interior of the house which receives them. One cannot account for the newest human types without an understanding of the things in the environs which they continually encounter, all the way into their most secret innervations. What does it mean for the subject, that there are no window shutters anymore, which can be opened, but only frames to be brusquely shoved, no gentle latches but only handles to be turned, no front lawn, no barrier against the street, no wall around the garden? And which auto-driver has not felt the temptation, in the power of the motor, to run over the vermin of the street – passersby, children, bicyclists? In the movements which machines demand from their operators, lies already that which is violent, crashing, propulsively unceasing in Fascist mistreatment. Not the least fault for the dying out of experience is due to the fact that things assume a form under the law of their purposiveness which restrict their interaction to mere application, without the surplus – were it that of freedom of behavior, were it that of the autonomy of the thing – which might survive as the kernel of experience, because it is not consumed by the moment of action.

Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia

••••••

I laughed a bit, but in all honesty… it’s all much too loud.

When you’ve realized you’re human, it’s all laughable. Things we do, pants we wear. Then what’s there to do but to try to go beyond that? That’s silly too (transcendence is), but it’s interesting — it’s interesting to try to unwind our stories and our age-old notions of how things are or how they might work and… let nature talk, instead. What else can we be — how can we rearrange our systems, our sets of atoms and body-stuff? We can’t even know. It’s an act of creation. The greatest art work. To know would require knowing the plan of nature, and apparently nature doesn’t have one (despite what we may have liked to think, again, for centuries.) Funny. Good one, really. So, how far can you go, what can you become, how can you experience what’s extra-trans-post-super-uber-outer-sans-human, without dying?

(via wildcat2030)