Among the earliest written sentences in the world were those carved into the base of statues of ancient God-Emperors, proclaiming, in the first person, the power, will or accomplishments of the ruler—kind of like Shelley’s “Ozymandias.” It’s not too much of a stretch to derive from this that the purpose of writing is to speak through inanimate objects. And the purpose of speaking through inanimate objects is to speak to everyone who will come into contact with those objects, and thereby speak through them as well. But it would be more precise to say that you want your voice installed within each individual, and made part of its self-centering—no individual could literally say, on pain of death or being deemed insane, “I am Ozymandias,” etc. Rather, “I am Ozymandias” engages with, countermands and overrides, other voices competing for expression in your data banks. The most historically consequential example of this is God’s revelation of His name to Moses: one speculation, which I find convincing, as to why it is forbidden to say the Name of God is that you can’t do so without proclaiming yourself to be God (I Am That I Am). Brian Rotman directly ties the disembodied Name of God as declarative sentence to the invisible source of the voice entering your mind when you read: you are hearing the identical voice as everyone else, equally inaccessible to and unidentifiable by all. In writing, we try to relay that voice through the Stack so as to have it enter, not only, by this point, everyone’s mind, but everyone’s social, material and institutional ecology.
Writing as Technics
Writing as Technics
Writing as Technics
Among the earliest written sentences in the world were those carved into the base of statues of ancient God-Emperors, proclaiming, in the first person, the power, will or accomplishments of the ruler—kind of like Shelley’s “Ozymandias.” It’s not too much of a stretch to derive from this that the purpose of writing is to speak through inanimate objects. And the purpose of speaking through inanimate objects is to speak to everyone who will come into contact with those objects, and thereby speak through them as well. But it would be more precise to say that you want your voice installed within each individual, and made part of its self-centering—no individual could literally say, on pain of death or being deemed insane, “I am Ozymandias,” etc. Rather, “I am Ozymandias” engages with, countermands and overrides, other voices competing for expression in your data banks. The most historically consequential example of this is God’s revelation of His name to Moses: one speculation, which I find convincing, as to why it is forbidden to say the Name of God is that you can’t do so without proclaiming yourself to be God (I Am That I Am). Brian Rotman directly ties the disembodied Name of God as declarative sentence to the invisible source of the voice entering your mind when you read: you are hearing the identical voice as everyone else, equally inaccessible to and unidentifiable by all. In writing, we try to relay that voice through the Stack so as to have it enter, not only, by this point, everyone’s mind, but everyone’s social, material and institutional ecology.