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Fall
back into light… away from the crowding-in of dark, light-denying shapes and
demands, all with a claim on ones time, all crowding-in, crowding-out our
better options, blocking out our light, bustling all around one, filling up the
senses, denying clarity, blocking focus - offering choice; unfolding chaos. A
forest of dim presences competing, calling, impinging on our space, using up
our time. How to choose? How to orientate? A clearing, a place of shining
light, a space to breathe, space to see, the space of presence, a glowing frame
for the desired object, a space apart with a special time, uncluttered, clear,
real, there. Just there. For the picking. That’s all we ask.
Guaranteed. And the guarantee lies
in the sacrifice, in payment.
And
just when (potentially at least) plenitude seems actually possible and the land
of plenty appears finally to have made its millennial arrival (heralded by the
choice of the world’s harvests in our supermarkets and the choice of a of world
of information and entertainment on the Web): then we invent new forms of
scarcity. New forms of discrimination. New ways of delineating a hierarchy of
choice. New forms of marking out. New things, and things that are not even
things (virtual or services) - just new.
New
technology and new forms of exchange perpetuate old forms of hierarchical
division; which in turn stimulate new gradients of differentiation, from the
choice of fruit by shape and size and colour (ever finer distinctions) to the
cultivation of rare fruit as the product of pruning, of cutting back technology
(limited editions, designer labels), all provoking the development of new
technology. New ways of re-conjuring the aura of the ‘special’, marker of
quality, magic dispenser or immediate status.
The concept of ‘aura’ and its
history is coeval with that which is rarefied, rare, and desired in part as a
result of this very scarcity. ‘Aura’, as connoting a value in parallel with
mere monetary value (but often strangely measured by it…) as well with the
value accreting to sacred objects. A value supposedly evaporated by mass
production. Yet as we view the world, it would appear that the sense of ‘aura’
has not been lost (as suspected by some, like Walter Benjamin, from whom we
have borrowed the term) but rather become, discovered, recognised as a standard
feature of valued objects (a form of presence) varying with time and situation,
a product of a type of exchange. Therefore we can now address ourselves to the
history of different kinds of aura – determined by the combination of scarcity
with belief system or culture (the symbolic context of the demand for any given
object, or its form, when pure need is not the issue – which it rarely is, the
exception, for example, is the case of disasters).
So now the ‘aura’ is slave to the
new flavours of monopoly and rarity, and the cultural identities (often defined
against one-another, gender, generation, class) and of these as the guarantors
of authenticity, of immediacy. Of presence, manufactured artificially, the jubilant
sense of presence that results from getting it before the rest… from being
distinguished from all the rest (whether as an individual or as the member of a
–real or imaginary- group) …and paying for it…
Such as the transmission of sport
and music events. Also news, now the medium, or better conduit, for the arrival
of current affairs events. The event, access to the event, as defining feature
of the media; the event - live/direct. The excitement of actuality/history as
it is being made, as it happens… All else (is past) is available free (or soon
will be) as recordings, images and symbols circulate at ever faster speeds.
(And should the harvesting of their profitability slow them down, then the
profitability of the bootleg – also driven by the same logic of impatience, of
a demand for the quickest access the most cheaply -will oil the fluidity of
their circulation).
Time is the key. And with time,
presence, prow of existence. We believe it
is actually happening, that it is live somewhere and that it comes into
our presence as soon as humanly (technologically) possible. Or at least sooner
than for others – sooner than for those who do not pay. A present to ourselves;
the present, present.
One glimmer of further utility in
all this: the sense of open-endedness that lends such a favour of excitement to
live events, together with the accompanying sense of being aware of possible
futures, as a result of being ‘up-to-date’ with events. Is there a sense of
preparation and so - in other contexts – of survival in all this (perhaps the
trace of an archaic function left in us - largely males? - from our
hunter-gather period, like the competitiveness of sport and mock combat)?
There is also the sense of
participation that accompanies any live event; a sharing, commonality, a
communality, brought into birth by a rituality which trumps the purely
individual pleasure, the individual form of putative elite status (I can watch
this, possess this: others can not). Behind any ‘I’ is always a ‘We’; our
implied community of recognition, the event-communion as residue of
recognition, a desire that requires (positive) others, a ‘We’ (and with the
‘We’ there is always a ’Them’; the ‘other’ others, the negative others). There is marking-out and there
is marking out.
But
it is precisely when we cannot be sure of what happens, of what the outcome
will be, that this positive facet of uncertainty may turn sour; for in this
case, we can never be sure of the quality, of the value of what we watch.
Value, that which comes with judgement, comes afterwards, as a result (at the
very least) of reflection, of comparison. We may have wasted our time (the
match was a bore, the performance uninspiring). Our sacrifice will have been in
vain. We will have gambled… and lost.
So the sacrificial urn fills slowly
up with ashes. But we do not witness its filling; we do not keep account, not
on this level; the possession of scarcity is its own reward, the possession of
the moment, self-possession. The waste we create, the shadow we cast, does not
concern us, not until it impinges again upon our consciousness, clutters our
existence, makes of choice an intolerable burden. (in the name of choice, we
pass on choice itself: itself we pass on to others to make for us, for which
service we pay…)
The vision of the garden of
plenitude in this way becomes blurred, becomes confused with the waste
accumulating on the city’s edge, the toxins in the blood, the ticks in the
nervous system and the gentle, suffocating warming of the planet as it begins
to depart from an ecological balance which bought us into being and upon which
we all depend.
The lantern that is followed leads
us over fields of invisible debris in quest of the glimmer of a new presence.
Somewhere in the forest a light is
discerned.
A light left burning in the window,
the weary traveller’s Grail of a safe haven…or the lure of the hunter. The
light of the angler fish shinning in the depths of the ocean, a light leading
directly into its waiting mouth. The black hole in the corner of our universe
into which we throw our earnings, our time, ourselves.
Falling back into light… present now, the Grail of our time; a cause for
sacrifice.
Copyright 2005 Peter Nesteruk