Once (pagan) witchery was abolished, plagues spread throughout medieval Europe. Coincidence? Biological warfare was the response, euphamised as sanitation, as if cleanliness was unheard of prior to the plague.
A hyper-exclusive focus or a process of repetition to the point of unconscious automation, addiction conveys a heightened intolerance to change or any minor perturbation, like a slight smudge of dirt thought harboring deadly implication (if only to your name). It would seem
"an unwitting, clandestine, unacknowledged addiction to the ordinary sets in against all idealistic pretension to the contrary".– anomynous
The addiction may just be to invented or acquired truisms, tautologies of "selection bias" where red is ever the color of blood leaking onto a black floor and health is its opposite, the cold, disjunctive intrusion in constant need of purge or re-pare.
Like any good fix, that which can be turned toward or confused with stillness (which is peace), death (which is rest) or inert (albeit useful) object will be subjected by the state (co-opted), consumed by civilisation (this is, of course, more redundant information – if it's dead you can eat it, if alive you can use it to death!), after which it all turns to shit. Seems natural enough, just like digestion!
In 1988 or there abouts, the term extropy, a perfectly reasonable sounding antonym for entropy, was coined to represent "the improvement of mankind" (sic) via the advance of the machine. It is magical thinking at its worst, should one consider the machine as a useful, albeit disposable extension or appendage. There was a time it was only thought a clever means of getting out of work. But peace or hypo-stasis never seems to come; all work is thought a negentropic meddling to avoid the ever-present entropy, like death around the corner just waiting for your slip or a lax moment to occur – god forbid we get lazy with technology! That argument can proceed forward and reverse in perfect simultaneity, enough to get your panties in a twist.
Is it ironic that efficiency (defined as the greatest output – work – from the lowest input – energy) is said to be consistent with technological progress? (we call it "industrialisation" or "the development of productive force", and where wage is substituted for energy, "capitalism"). It would seem to me a machine prone to run out of fuel because of its own swelling (like a priapic membership) is nothing like efficiency – entropy may only mean release of pent-up energy).
Just to avoid stagnosis, as a machine-work's jutting growth is then deemed more important than its efficiency, quality steps backstage in reverence to improved or alternate fuel extraction and its accumulation. Quantity of work increases in the effort to produce more fuel and then, not even paradoxically, employment becomes increasingly scarce and competitive.
The system has, again, turned inside out (we call it "post-industrialism"), as the former output, work, is now the energy input (and perhaps a reason we treat our toys with more regard than children). In one sense, progressive entropy is a self-referencing system heading toward pure tautology – energy no longer circulates, movement stops, particularly when the inconsequential humans at the controls run out of food or can't adapt fast enough to subsist on increasingly toxic industrial excrement.
Negentropy, the incessant plugging of leaks, would only seem to produce chaos, the inductive reply to inflexibility, birthing new questions concerning any-and-all regimes or regimental representations. The thing and its negation have either merged, or were merely two heads on the same coin wagging along behind the tale from the get-go. "Exentropy" is just fancy sounding jargon for the flexibility of an in-out turn, well familiar to snow-bunnies making seasonal adjustments between margaritas and hot buttered rum.
Is it ironic that us homebodies who wonder what has become of our own lives do not question a death "urge" in wanting to see the light of day in different destinations, or even raise an eyebrow when state-of-the-art theories of cognition model themselves on the internal processing of primitive (by organic standards) computers, where intelligence is measured only by the speed of sorting increasing amounts of randomly stored (internalized) information, like a game of trivial pursuit, and proceed to call the artificial "superior", forgetting altogether that the "I" in A.I. can just as easily refer to insemination and to insurrection?
Like Marcel Mauss' insistence on gifts, like shedding guilt or hot potatoes, a moral duty, is it surprising that Georges Bataille could not see beyond the ritual cannibalism of civilized Aztec or problematic translations of indigenous potlatching cultures which consistently avoided or destroyed accumulated excess, for his cross-cultural samples which justified a universal focus on death and excrement as the secret code of existence, informing the operating system of the cosmos itself? Or was it all just a rationalisation to justify a relentlessly lingering melancholy over the death of his sweetheart?
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