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Tassili Algebra


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Authors

horvath, agnes 

Abstract

This article addresses three questions. First, how did technology first appear as a plot in history? Second, what are the basic plot-components in the Mesolithic Tassili images? Third, how to identify these components as elements through which the integrity of forms can be invaded in order to multiply things? This manner of proceeding offers a novel understanding of technological knowledge by placing the accent on the fact that technology is built on systematic transgression, on the infringement of forms in the sense of incorporating emissions of altered properties and so producing something merely semi-similar to the authentic one: newly and artificially incorporating nil again into matter and so disturbing the original arrangement of the things in forms with the aim of procuring multiplication, and thus wealth and growth. The aim of the plot is therefore unlimited acquisitiveness.

Description

The idea of the paper is a novel understanding of technology. It approaches central problems of contemporary technology indirectly, through the distance generated by anthropology (in space) and history (in time). Cybernetics, as inspired by the work of Bateson, could also offer a valuable contribution to a better understanding of virtual spaces generated by mind, the living force of the brain, that could be named ‘bio-power’, taking further Foucault’s concept, according to which power is gained by the invasive incorporation of the human body. Here the paper adds the power of images, which is derived not from the mobilisation of the body (an idea shared by Freud and Foucault), but the mobilisation of the mind to catch an external, foreign power, which can be called the ‘divine’ or the ‘superhuman’, and which in this paper, in lack of a better word, identifies with the ‘nil’. The nil is a positional number, the naked one, not having any substance on its own, but exerting a powerful impact solely by the position it occupies in a system and in this sense is a spiritual essence more than anything else. This is why this paper is entitled ‘Tassili algebra’, as it deals with the effect and the impact of the nil in the realm of forms of desert paintings, transforming reality into something virtual. Here the emission of images by the human mind has central importance, as such images are more powerful the more they deviate from reality, replacing the geometric equality of nature (Plato, Gorgias) with hybrids (the grotesque, taking Bakhtin’s terminology).

Keywords

technology, liminality, transgression, nil, virtuality

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