Edges

Richard Long, “Walking a circle in mist” (Scotland, 1986)

Beyond telepathy. At long last, after centuries if not millennia, and perhaps only if conditions will have it such that the voice may reach its fullest expression and height, we may foresee it finally passing; into the imperceptible. In this future beyond the future, the noontide of vocal expressivity; the death, or at least becoming invisible, through an unrecognizable transformation, of speech. At the outer limit of writing, beyond telepathy, an opening onto new luminous substrates of expressivity.

Silences. The voice passes through the frozen core of negativity, passing beyond permutational abysses into infinite variation, accelerates along a sensible surface. The death of the voice, which would not yet necessarily mean the death of the signal, the signifier, but would instead indicate their profound disruption, perhaps the most intensive intervention and intensification possible: immersion into chaoid fusion, language de-imaged, noise decrypted; time decoded. At the very end of a life lived at this point on a planetary-ecological scale, a new universal order of expressivity. Perhaps through a maximizing frenzy of sublimation? –Asymptotically decoding and optimizing the voice, exponentiating it into diffusion; into perfect and prescient silence?

Edges. The present-absent voice, this sensual-spiritual medium, finally accelerated through every ramified variation; the eclipsing of the voice by another signal. The noon of one the dawn of the other. Continuously camouflaged until this last transformation and acceleration beyond any fixity of substrate; the decoding of the roots of the unity of the voice, the author, the work; the signal, the sign ‘bootstrapping’ the voice into pure chaos; and this again only at very long last, after centuries (if not much longer.) This long-prophesied death-of-the-voice from exponents of a kind of science of the uncannily-accelerated signal (the spiritual-cyberneticians Nietzsche, Guattari, Derrida; and in a very different way Negarestani, Land); in these hands such prophecies immolate the ink they are written with, transmute the reader in an active critical and even theological re-configuration. It is no glowing utopia of ubiquitous wealth that is summarily predicated in this superficially ostensibly-terrifying oracular image of speech “dying”; but rather an uncanny politics of biological and spiritual transformation, one co-extensive with and driving technological and economic acceleration… What is beheld in this image of de-imaging is the incipient becoming-computable of culture.