Full download test bank at ebookmeta.

com

Image Three Inquiries in Technology and

Imagination TRIOS 1st Edition Professor Mark C.
Taylor
For dowload this book click LINK or Button below

https://ebookmeta.com/product/image-three-
inquiries-in-technology-and-imagination-trios-1st-
edition-professor-mark-c-taylor/

OR CLICK BUTTON

DOWLOAD EBOOK

Download More ebooks from https://ebookmeta.com

More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

Seeing Silence 1st Edition Mark C. Taylor

https://ebookmeta.com/product/seeing-silence-1st-edition-mark-c-
taylor/

Media Technology and Literature in the Nineteenth

Century Image Sound Touch 1st Edition Margaret Linley
Colette Colligan Professor Vincent Newey Professor
Joanne Shattock
https://ebookmeta.com/product/media-technology-and-literature-in-
the-nineteenth-century-image-sound-touch-1st-edition-margaret-
linley-colette-colligan-professor-vincent-newey-professor-joanne-
shattock/

Advances in Remote Sensing Technology and the Three

Poles 1st Edition Manish Pandey

https://ebookmeta.com/product/advances-in-remote-sensing-
technology-and-the-three-poles-1st-edition-manish-pandey/

Advances in Chemistry Research 1st Edition James C.

Taylor

https://ebookmeta.com/product/advances-in-chemistry-research-1st-
edition-james-c-taylor/
The New Formula For Cool Science Technology and the
Popular in the American Imagination Judith Kohlenberger

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-new-formula-for-cool-science-
technology-and-the-popular-in-the-american-imagination-judith-
kohlenberger/

Making a Mark Image and Process in Neolithic Britain

and Ireland 1st Edition Andrew Meirion Jones Marta Díaz
Guardamino

https://ebookmeta.com/product/making-a-mark-image-and-process-in-
neolithic-britain-and-ireland-1st-edition-andrew-meirion-jones-
marta-diaz-guardamino/

The Tradition of the Image of Edessa 1st Edition Mark

Guscin

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-tradition-of-the-image-of-
edessa-1st-edition-mark-guscin/

Polymerase Chain Reaction Theory and Technology 1st

Edition Mark A. Behlke

https://ebookmeta.com/product/polymerase-chain-reaction-theory-
and-technology-1st-edition-mark-a-behlke/

Music and Technology: A Very Short Introduction Mark

Katz

https://ebookmeta.com/product/music-and-technology-a-very-short-
introduction-mark-katz/
Image
 ALSO PUBLISHED IN THE SERIES

Sovereignty, Inc.: ree Inquiries in Politics

and Enjoyment
william maz zar e ll a, e r i c l.
santner, and aaron schuster

Character: ree Inquiries in Literary Studies

amanda ande r son, r i ta f e l s k i,
and t or il moi

Authoritarianism: ree Inquiries

Each TRIOS book in Critical eory
addresses an important wendy brown, peter e. gordon,
theme in critical theory, and max p e nsky

philosophy, or cultural Ekklesia: ree Inquiries in Church and State

studies through three pau l chr ist op he r j oh n s on,
extended essays wrien pamela e. klassen,
and winnifr e d falle r s s u lli van
in close collaboration by
leading scholars.
IMAGE
THREE INQUIRIES IN TECHNOLOGY
A N D I M A G I N AT I O N

MARK C.

Taylor

M A R Y- J A N E

Rubenstein

THOMAS A.

Carlson

e University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London
e University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
e University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2021 by e University of Chicago
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without wrien permission, except in the case of brief
quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the
University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.
Published 2021
Printed in the United States of America

30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 1 2 3 4 5

isbn-13: 978-0-226-78214-0 (cloth)

isbn-13: 978-0-226-78228-7 (paper)
isbn-13: 978-0-226-78231-7 (e-book)
doi: hps://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226782317.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Taylor, Mark C., 1945– Gathering remains. | Rubenstein, Mary-Jane.

Above us, only sky. | Carlson, omas A. Facial recognition.
Title: Image : three inquiries in technology and imagination / Mark C. Taylor,
Mary-Jane Rubenstein, omas A. Carlson.
Other titles: ree inquiries in technology and imagination | Trios
(Chicago,Ill.)
Description: Chicago ; London : e University of Chicago Press, 2021. |
Series: Trios | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: lccn 2020056564 | isbn 9780226782140 (cloth) |
isbn 9780226782287 (paperback) | isbn 9780226782317 (ebook)
Subjects: lcsh: Technology—Religious aspects. | Aesthetics—Religious
aspects. | Religion and astronautics. | Face—Religious aspects. |
Vision—Religious aspects. | Philosophical anthropology. | Philosophy
and civilization. | Civilization, Modern—20th century. | Civilization,
Modern—21st century.
Classification: lcc bl265.t4 i49 2021 | ddc 201/.66—dc23
lc record available at hps://lccn.loc.gov/2020056564

♾ is paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (Permanence

of Paper).
To Our Fellow Students
Department of Religion
Williams College
1983– 1999
CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction
omas A. Carlson 1

G AT H E R I N G R E M A I N S

Mark C. Taylor } 19

A B O V E U S , O N LY S K Y

Mary-Jane Rubenstein } 117

FA C I A L R E C O G N I T I O N

omas A. Carlson } 189

Index 259
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
is conversation began in the 1980s and 1990s in the Religion
Department at Williams College. e time was one of consid-
erable ferment and creativity in the humanities. ough the
world has changed, the issues we explored together are more
urgent today than ever. We dedicate this book to our fellow stu-
dents, who have used the lessons they learned in ways that none
of us could have imagined.
INTRODUCTION
omas A. Carlson

All three essays gathered in Image: ree Inquiries in Technol-

ogy and Imagination could be read as revisiting, in light of to-
day’s technoscientifically obsessed society and culture, Mar-
tin Heidegger’s contention that “the fundamental event of the
modern age” is “the conquest of the world as picture.”1 When
Heidegger advances this claim in his 1938 text “Age of the World
Picture” (“Die Zeit des Weltbildes”), he means not so much
that modernity achieves one final and masterfully comprehen-
sive picture of the world; he means much more that modern
thought and culture characteristically assume that “world” as
such— any and every world— is something amounting to an
image (Bild) not only viewed by the human subject but built or
constructed by that subject. Modernity, on this view, is an age
in which the human subject is assumed to frame and thus pro-
duce the real by picturing or representing it— according to the
standards and capacities of that subject’s own rational thought
and related technological powers. From this distinctively mod-
ern perspective, the world is not (as world is for Heidegger)
understood to be that in which we mortal humans always al-
ready find ourselves, such that our thinking and doing would
depend on a world that ever exceeds our comprehension and
control. e world is seen rather to be that which the human
subject contains within its representational thinking and comes
likewise to control through its rational-technical self-assertion.
2 introduction

e world is produced and made to “show up,” in other words,

on our terms and for our uses. As Heidegger puts it in passages
that Mary-Jane Rubenstein highlights in her essay here, “Above
Us, Only Sky,” “man contends for the position in which he can
be that particular being who gives the measure and draws up the
guidelines for everything that is.”2
It is likely no mistake that this modern project of human
mastery is evoked by reference specifically to the sense of sight
and to the powers of image-making. As Heidegger points out in
Being and Time, sight has long stood as a kind of master sense,
both in the Greek and in the Christian metaphysics that so
deeply shape our Western heritage,3 and a distinctively modern,
technoscientific project of mastery has been advanced notably
by technologies that extend, expand, intensify, or otherwise re-
shape our powers of vision by means of image-making, storage,
transmission, and display. From the telescope and microscope,
which prove integral to the emergence and development of a
distinctively modern natural science and its vision of the real,4
through the still and motion-picture cameras, which transform
our powers of observation and memory in the undertakings of
science and popular culture alike,5 the technologies of image
make near what was once too distant to be seen, and they give
us distance on what was too near; they allow us to speed up what
was previously too slow to appear, just as they can slow down
and make visible what once was too fast. As the technologically
framed and mediated image becomes ever more integral to the
very appearance of our world, however, that framing and me-
diation themselves grow more hidden, obscured by that which
they seem to disclose. is logic reaches an extreme today in the
digital and virtual realms we inhabit increasingly without being
able to escape or, thus, even to see them— while socially, cul-
turally, politically, and economically they nonetheless reshape
the most fundamental dimensions of our lives, from the basic
terms and character of human interrelation to the very tempo-
rality of our days.
 omas A. Carlson 3

e centrality of image and sight to our modern construal

of the world goes hand in hand with a modern conviction that
the human subject plays an indispensable and constructive role
in the world’s very appearance or being. Our vision of the world
is integral to it. As Immanuel Kant’s epoch-making philosophy
signals when it insists that mind plays an active and construc-
tive role in staging the appearance of phenomenal reality, we
do not simply receive a world already given; we are essentially
world-forming or world-building. is construal of human
subjectivity as world-building has been central, of course, to
the modern humanistic disciplines wherein the assumption
runs deep that our reality is socially, culturally, and historically
constructed; and it has been foundational likewise, more specif-
ically, to the academic field from which all three authors in this
volume come: the distinctively modern (and, initially, largely
American) field of religious studies, which o$en defines itself
explicitly— and notably when aiming to distinguish itself from
theology— as “worldview” analysis. at distinction is o$en
made a bit too swi$ly and too easily, when for example it ignores,
ironically, the historical and cultural origins of “worldview”
itself and its correlative humanism. If religious studies— as a
humanistic worldview analysis— is founded in some projection
theory of religion akin to that found in a Ludwig Feuerbach or,
indeed, a Karl Marx, we may wonder whether it is not in fact
a specifically Christian identification of the divine that yields,
conceptually and historically, our conviction that religious or
theological visions are at boom indirect or disguised visions
of the human subject and its condition. Feuerbach, at any rate,
is straightforward about the religious and specifically Christian
logic and provenance of his humanism: “It is not I, but religion
that worships man,” he writes in his preface to the second edi-
tion of e Essence of Christianity,

although religion, or rather theology, denies this; it is not I, an

insignificant individual, but religion itself that says: God is man,
4 introduction

man is God; it is not I, but religion that denies the God who is not
a man, but only an ens rationis,— since it makes God become man,
and then constitutes this God, not distinguished from man, hav-
ing a human form, human feelings, and human thoughts, the ob-
ject of its worship and veneration. I have only found the key to the
cipher of the Christian religion, only extricated its true meaning
from the web of contradictions and delusions called theology.6

is humanistic version of atheism simply reverses a traditional

Christian thinking of the human as imago dei or image of God:
here it is not man who is created by God in the image of God,
but God who is created by man in the image of man. We image
or picture God to ourselves, on this view, according to the image
or picture that we form, or already have, of ourselves.
Aending to various histories of various purported
worldviews— o$en without much investigating the contexts
from which the very concept of worldview derives, or the history
of our reduction of “world” to something “viewed”— this version
of religious studies extends a distinctively modern, Western
project of human autonomy. As Mark Taylor richly argues here
in “Gathering Remains,” extending insights from Heidegger,
that modern project of autonomy reaches an extreme wherein
the work we do to overcome human alienation— exemplified in
Feuerbach or Marx and in their shared source, Hegel— yields a
form of self-enclosure in which the human subject finds always
and everywhere only itself. Such humanistic reflexivity, which
a recent phenomenological and theological thinking like Jean-
Luc Marion’s can take to be effectively idolatrous, was estimated
already by Heidegger to be delusional. Along lines that Taylor
emphasizes, Heidegger contends within his analysis of modern
technology that when “man” “exalts himself to the posture of
lord of the earth . . . the impression comes to prevail that every-
thing man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct.
is illusion gives rise in turn to one final delusion: It seems as
though man everywhere and always encounters only himself.”7
 omas A. Carlson 5

As Taylor has been arguing since his earliest field-altering

and field-opening works on religion and deconstructive thought,
the death of God, thought through within a deconstructive her-
meneutic, cannot mean simply a replacement of the traditional
creator God by a godlike creative human subject. For such a re-
versal, as the groundbreaking Erring: A Postmodern A/theology
puts it, “reveals the slave’s struggle against the master to be a
struggle for mastery. By transferring the predicates of divinity
to the human subject, the humanistic atheist inverts, but fails to
subvert, the logic of repression. With this inversion, the prob-
lem of mastery and slavery is relocated rather than resolved.
e death of the sovereign God now appears to be the birth of
the sovereign self.”8 While Taylor’s deconstructive thinking has
for more than three decades worked to open alternatives to this
modern project of mastery, both he and Rubenstein highlight
in the present volume that an effectively deified humanity— or
the delusional dream of such— remains strikingly persistent
among contemporary techno-utopians who aspire even to an
immortality, and liberation from material reality, that we hu-
mans might achieve by technoscientific means, such that we
might need even to speak of a posthuman condition.
Situating these posthuman aspirations within a broader
trajectory of modern thinking about human autonomy, Taylor
here schematizes three key stages within that trajectory. Each
of the three maintains a distinctive relation to the meanings
and uses of image, and each, correlatively, marks a transition
in the dominant form of capitalism. While modernity’s in-
dustrial economy of things and its related culture of the spec-
tacle give way to a consumerist economy and the postmodern
simulacrum, we find ourselves currently, Taylor argues, in an
age of financial capitalism, which entails a metaphysic of dig-
ital code that works hand in hand with posthuman fantasies
of virtual or digital immortality. Taylor frames his analysis of
this posthuman turn through a reading of Don DeLillo’s 2016
novel, Zero K, which seems barely fictive in its evocation and
6 introduction

exploration of the fantasies enjoyed by those godlike few to-

day who seek technological liberation from the material and
mortal conditions that plague the rest of us. In fact, for Taylor
Zero K is “a quasi-documentary account of the present disguised
as a post-apocalyptic fiction set in the future” (“Gathering,” 30)
where “for the masters of the universe who have funded and
invented technological innovations that have transformed the
global economy into an immaterial play of light operating at
superhuman speed, death is nothing more than an engineering
problem that inevitably will be solved. Technology is the new
religion for the posthuman age” (“Gathering,” 28).
Insofar as the posthuman turn signaled with DeLillo entails
a return of gnostic desires to escape the flesh and its deathly
limitations, that turn represents a perverse outworking of the
modern ideal of human autonomy: having pursued the ideal
of freedom as self-determination in and through technological
systems that grow increasingly pervasive, automatized, and ab-
stracted, the self-assertive human subject is itself increasingly
subjected to systems that escape our control and alienate us
from the material and temporal conditions of our finitude.
I call this outworking perverse not only because, as Taylor
highlights, we suffer a reversal wherein the creator is subjected
to and controlled by its own creation, such that it suffers a new
alienation (this is an old, o$-told story); I call it perverse also
insofar as the Enlightenment ideal of autonomy, at least in its
more astute versions— such as Kant— included a humility,
and a reckoning with finitude, that seem, as Taylor and Ruben-
stein both elaborate, comically, and painfully, absent among
the technological and financial titans of our day. As Heidegger
points out, while Kant was preoccupied with the character and
conditions of theoretical and practical self-determination, his
central lines of questioning— What can I know? What should
I do? What may I hope for?— concern most fundamentally our
human finitude. For the ability, duty, and allowing-to-hope that
are at stake in these questions each entail the not of a disabil-
 omas A. Carlson 7

ity, of a not-yet having fulfilled one’s duty, or of a hopeful ex-

pectation that is founded in privation and exposed to potential
disappointment. Or to put it otherwise: an infinite and hence
all-powerful being never needs to ask, “What can I do?” us, as
Heidegger reasons in his important and much-debated book on
Kant’s critical thought, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, “hu-
man reason does not just disclose finitude in these questions;
rather, its innermost interest is with finitude itself. For this rea-
son, it is not a maer of doing away with the ability, duty, and
allowing [to hope], in this way to extinguish finitude, but rather
the reverse. It is precisely a question of becoming certain of this
finitude in order to hold oneself in it.”9
Turning to art as a ground of resistance to the delusion and
narcissism of today’s techno-utopian fantasies, Taylor’s essay
here links the question of our finitude to the question of humil-
ity and this laer’s essential relation with the earth. An art that
counters techno-utopian flight from the limits of our mortal
and material condition is one that— leaving the galleries and
auction houses where art becomes only a form of finance—
returns us to the earth and the elemental; for it is the earth in its
material density that, in the end, receives and holds our deaths
and our dead. In resonance with a line of thinking one might
trace from Giambaista Vico to Robert Pogue Harrison, which
argues that we become human through our rootedness in the
earth, and more specifically through our burial of the dead,10
Taylor emphasizes that “‘humility,’ like ‘humanity,’ derives
from ‘humus,’ earth, ground, soil— brown or black decaying
organic maer that eventually turns to stone. Earth to earth,
humans to humus. By bringing us back to earth, art teaches us
how to live by teaching us how to die” (“Gathering,” 88).
If an earthly art teaches us how to die, then it does a work
that has long been thought to define philosophy. e tie be-
tween such philosophical art and our material ground, Tay-
lor argues, is not only an important counter to our virtual ab-
straction from the real; it goes more deeply to the nature and
8 introduction

operation of imagination itself. For the imagination, he notes,

entails a sensible, material aspect that cannot be reduced with-
out remainder to immaterial concept or its laer-day version
in digital code. In its irreducibly sensible and material aspect,
Taylor elaborates, the imagination allows us to apprehend that
which rational human thought cannot conceptually compre-
hend: its mortal condition and the immense temporal depth
of the earthly ground that sustains us. Such apprehension, he
argues, can open or reawaken us to our own humility, and thus
our humanity, which we might then receive as a gi$, rather than
flee or deny it like some poison:

Rather than transporting disembodied minds and souls to a time-

less realm, the art that is redemptive grounds those it grasps in a
profound temporality that exceeds human comprehension. e
media of this art are material and not immaterial— earth, water,
fire, steel, bone, and, yes, stone. Far from being our own construc-
tion, the world this art reveals is a gi$ that is bestowed without
reason. To receive this gi$ with humility is to give up the will to
mastery by acknowledging human finitude, and to acknowledge
this finitude is to accept mortality. (“Gathering,” 106)

An aunement to these ties between the earth and the gi$

of our mortal humility should leave us unsurprised that the
techno-utopian sensibility that seeks virtual immortality to-
day aims also to escape the earth, to transcend or stand beyond
our humble ground, in a project of conquest whose aspirations
reach the cosmic scale. While Taylor here explores the artful
imagination that brings us back to earth, Rubenstein critically
investigates the imperial imagination that half a century ago
gave us our first images— photographs— of the earth from
space, an imagination today resurgent and extended in the proj-
ect of colonizing Mars (and perhaps on the way to it the moon).
Rubenstein frames her discussion by reference to billion-
aire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk’s SpaceX project. Present-
 omas A. Carlson 9

ing itself not only as a technological project aiming to make

humankind “‘a multi-planet species and true spacefaring civ-
ilization’ by opening up space travel to civilians” (“Above Us,”
118), SpaceX fashions itself also as an artistic project that— by
leaving the earth— might “awaken the global imagination” and
thus “awaken our love of this world through otherworldly per-
spectives on it” (“Above Us,” 120). As Rubenstein’s analysis goes
on to show, however, the appeal to artistic and countercultural
awakening in fact more likely just extends the modern project
of mastery that Heidegger identifies in his speaking of our con-
quest of the world as picture: “the artist who can see the earth
from beyond earth becomes, in a sense, its master” (“Above Us,”
121). In this sense, Musk and the überwealthy, art-loving fash-
ion designer who has purchased the first SpaceX ticket, Yusaku
Maezawa, represent only the latest stage in a history of cosmic
image-making that promises the peace of unity while in fact
perpetuating a violence that effaces difference through its to-
talizing logic of conquest.
Rubenstein tracks this history’s cosmic ambition by focusing
on the role of image in space travel— reading current projects
of space colonization in light of the space race of last century,
during which humans first traveled to the moon, looked back at
Earth, and took a picture. e well-known Earthrise (1968) and
Blue Marble photos (1972) that were taken during the Apollo 8
and Apollo 17 space missions are frequently credited with help-
ing to birth modern environmental consciousness, our awaken-
ing to the “fragility, uniqueness, and unity of the earth” (“Above
Us,” 127). But as Rubenstein argues, the images purportedly
yielding this “whole-earth” vision remain far from benevolent
or simply innocent, having been as they were “enabled materi-
ally by the technological ravaging of the earth and military one-
upsmanship they were suddenly called upon to contest” (“Above
Us,” 127). We see here something of the self-contradictory mad-
ness wherein the march of modernity seeks solutions to techno-
logically generated problems in those very same technologies,
10 introduction

without calling them or their driving logics into question— a

madness akin to what Donna Haraway calls, with respect to cur-
rent threats of ecological catastrophe, our “tragicomic ‘cosmo-
faith in technofixes’” (“Above Us,” 149). e whole-earth vision,
Rubenstein emphasizes, was from the beginning inseparable
from, even complicit with, the “one-world” vision of a neolib-
eral globalized order wherein the earth remains susceptible “to
total domination in the hands of whoever manages to see the
whole thing from beyond it” (“Above Us,” 127).
If the appeal to unity and its purported peace has included
what remains an imperialistic and violent project of our mod-
ern, Western technomilitary complex, that project has also had,
as Rubenstein goes on to elaborate, a distinctly white, male,
and Christian bent. She highlights the racist energies driv-
ing our laer-day imperialisms through the juxtaposition of
two futurisms: the scientistic futurism of Disneyland and the
Afro-futurism of artists such as the musician and poet Sun Ra.
While the former, growing out of Cold War nationalism and
militarism, glorifies an exploration and conquest that merely
extend into space the imperialism guilty already of devastating
colonized lands and their indigenous peoples here on earth, the
laer creates musical journeys into space for those same people,
who, in having suffered conquest, capture, and the transport of
Middle Passage, have already lived out an alien abduction. What
seems noise to (white, male, Christian) norms of uniformity
may constitute for the already abducted alien— the hope goes—
transport to a new harmony and a genuinely other world. “Imag-
ination,” Sun Ra would say, “is a magic carpet ride,” and by trans-
porting “dehumanized peoples to otherwise worlds,” it can be a
real, and liberating, force that works in resistance to the actual
boarding of ships that “plant colonies to destroy the otherness
of worlds by making them all just like this one” (“Above Us,” 158).
However, the resurgence today of— all too similar, and
in the end unimaginative, not to say mindless— appeals to
aeronautical imagination manifests not only among the titan
 omas A. Carlson 11

entrepreneurs like Musk but also in unabashedly nationalist

and racist politicians such as D. J. Trump and Mike Pence. With
this recognition, Rubenstein concludes on the somber note that
“another world is improbable.” We would do well, then, her fi-
nal pages contend, to hear the hard claims advanced by Afro-
pessimist philosopher Calvin Warren that hope in the political
may itself be the danger, insofar as the political is “constitutively
antiblack” (“Above Us,” 169); and thus that “justice, redress, and
righteousness” are not to be sought in “other worlds,” which—
whether imaginative or actual— invariably replicate “this
same, unbearable world” (“Above Us,” 169), but instead are to be
sought in an active nihilism that looks “to end the world itself.”11
Whether or not one can embrace fully such an actively nihilis-
tic response, Rubenstein’s essay sets out in rich and troubling
detail the need for caution regarding the uses of imagination in
service to ideology and illusion, and the related importance of
reflecting on such Afro-pessimist insight into the improbability
of other worlds that would actually do other than replicate the
repressive worlds we already know; or yield a politics, and a hu-
manity, that do not simply repeat and extend the constitutively
exclusionary logics that have tended to define our politics, and
humanity, hitherto.
Insofar as Rubenstein rightly argues that our dominant
world pictures remain inseparable from “the whole techno-
military metaphysic that encapsulates the world as such”
(“Above Us,” 143), and insofar as those pictures tend, as she
shows, to efface difference even in the name of unity and peace,
we might hear in her essay tones that resonate deeply with Em-
manuel Levinas’s epoch-making criticism of “totality” as that
which invariably reduces all otherness to the same. Her essay
should also leave us suspicious, however, regarding the great
ethical thinker’s provocative claim— made the same year that
he published his first masterwork critiquing totality, Totality
and Infinity 12— that the first manned space flight, Soviet cosmo-
naut Yuri Gagarin’s orbit of the earth on April 12, 1961, opens
12 introduction

us to man “in the nudity of the face.”13 For if the face appears,
as according to Levinas, always in the singular, while calling to
each of us in our likewise singular responsibility, the unity of
our technomilitary and capitalistic world picture amounts, for
Rubenstein, to a totality of just the kind Levinas spent his life re-
sisting. As she puts it, the one-world vision “aains the unity it
commends by sweeping away differences of race, gender, class,
and religion— assembling them all into an undifferentiated,
false male universal” (“Above Us,’ 146).
A vision of seemingly cosmic scope, then, can touch the indi-
vidual in that individual’s singularity and difference— by effac-
ing them. And so likewise today, the singular faces— and private
lives— of individuals are increasingly captured, contained, and
conveyed within surveillance systems of seemingly unlimited
scope. ese are systems of “seeing” wherein each and every
face, and indeed life, can seem to become interchangeable with
any and every other for such purposes as their policing, polit-
ical control, and economic exploitation within what Shoshana
Zuboff analyzes as the age “surveillance capitalism.”14
As Rubenstein points out in her essay, the claim to any vision
of the “whole” is itself blind to its own blindness: it does not
see, or acknowledge, that it can actually never see the whole but
always only some ever-partial aspect. “Until humanity manages
to develop four-dimensional vision, no one will see the planet
‘whole’” (“Above Us,” 145). Such a failure to see the invisible
that conditions any and all vision replicates in its logic the ex-
clusive and violent gestures through which claims to unity and
totality— such as that of “humanity”— are so o$en constituted,
as Rubenstein and her interlocutors show. is is a failure that
pertains also to the lack of humility— revealed in the disconnec-
tion from earth, and the flight from mortality— that is central
as well to Taylor’s analysis and argument here.
Both the effacement of singular individuals through totaliz-
ing gestures and the relation of such effacement to our encoun-
ter with mortality are central to my own essay, “Facial Recog-
 omas A. Carlson 13

nition.” e essay treats two figures of the invisible in order to

reflect on the nature of imagination, the character of techno-
logical vision in contemporary culture, and the implications
of these for the kinds of sociality, and love, that condition our
human experience.
e fantasies of omniscience that so deeply shape our soci-
ety today play out in technologies of the image that regard quite
notably the human face— and they do so perhaps primarily by
effacing the uniqueness of each face. While pervasive systems of
technological surveillance focus increasingly on forms of facial
recognition that capture any and all faces by wholly impersonal
and statistical means, the uncanny work of “deep fake” video
technologies makes every given face interchangeable with any
other, in a way that blurs the distinction between the real and
the purely fictive, between the individual person, who is irre-
placeable, and the synthetic human, who would be endlessly
replicable.
e effacement of our singular being by algorithmically
driven imaging technologies entails an operation of substitu-
tion, I argue, whose logic has been integral to our modern and
contemporary flight from mortality. Taking direction from
Heidegger’s reading of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, I under-
stand that flight from mortality in relation to the question of
love. Our modern incapacity for mortality, Heidegger and Rilke
together suggest, stems in large part from our forgeing that
death and love belong together. Such love obeys a logic of the
heart that is eclipsed by the calculating rationality that under-
girds modern science and technology. While the calculating
rationality of modern metaphysics fabricates the endlessly re-
producible object, whether conceptual or technical, this logic
of the heart aends to things in their fragility and to persons in
their mortality. If the reproducible object is amenable to endless
substitution or replacement— such that any given object can
represent or stand in for another— the heart sees each person’s
mortal singularity.
14 introduction

ere is a paradox to such seeing, however, for the singu-

larity by virtue of which each person remains irreplaceable, is
given by that— death— which, strictly speaking, remains invis-
ible. Death “as such” or “in itself ” never gives to me something
that I can actually see, or be. e visibility of the other person’s—
invisible— mortality, the essay argues, may be understood to
depend on a work that is distinctive to the imagination and tied
inextricably to a sharing of love within social relations.
A suggestive model for this loving and socially enabled vi-
sion of the invisible can be found in the early modern theolo-
gian and philosopher Nicholas of Cusa and his 1453 treatise on
the vision of God (De visione Dei). As both Rubenstein and I have
noted in previous studies, Cusa is a decisive figure for having
understood our universe to bear the divine trait of infinity—
and thus to resist, like God himself, any full or final comprehen-
sion.15 To see aright the infinite and— therefore— invisible God
must mean, for the finite creature, to see, paradoxically, that
one does not see, even as the infinite revelation is endlessly vis-
ible. In his treatise on the vision of God, Cusa finds a figure for
the invisible God’s appearance to us in the all-seeing portrait,
which thus serves for him as an “icon” of God. Cusa explains
in the preface to his treatise that in order actually to glimpse
the ubiquitous gaze of such a portrait— which holds all of us
equally, each in our singularity, wherever we move and wher-
ever we stand— one cannot remain alone. For while I as a sole
individual can have the experience of a gaze that follows me
everywhere at all times, the appearance of a gaze that proves
genuinely ubiquitous, like that of the infinite God, requires that
each and all— in principle innumerable— testify that they too
find themselves followed by that gaze always and everywhere,
in positions and from perspectives that differ from mine and
cannot be exchanged with mine. To participate in this univer-
sality of singular positions requires a play of testimony and be-
lief within social relations that are at boom, as Cusa empha-
sizes, relations of shared love— and of love for the love that all
others also experience, each in an individual way.
 omas A. Carlson 15

In what may seem a counterintuitive connection, I take up

this way of thinking about the face of an invisible God in order
to ask about the appearance of death in the face of another. For
like the infinite God to a finite creature, death remains strictly
invisible to those who remain alive. Building not only on Cusa’s
thinking about the role of love and sociality in the invisible God’s
appearance but also on Levinas’s insight that “love” means see-
ing death in the face of the other person, I argue that the death
of the other appears to us in the measure of our love— and of
our love for the love that others likewise shared, each in a unique
way, with the beloved who dies. (I make my final revisions to
this introduction eleven days a$er the murder of George Floyd,
whose face and death appear to me, and touch me, in the mea-
sure of the love I feel for him, which itself grows in my seeing the
love he shared with his mother, to whom he cried out as he died;
and with his younger brother, who recalls the one bed in which
they slept side by side as children; and with his baby daughter,
whom he once held in his hands . . .)
In its mortality, which appears primarily, or even exclusively,
to a look of love, the face of the beloved may be understood, I
contend, as exemplary of the image more broadly. For the im-
age appears only insofar as it also disappears; the visibility of its
presence lives thanks only to the invisibility of its absence. It de-
pends, in other words, on temporal affection, which, following
Heidegger and readers of Heidegger such as Jean-Luc Nancy, we
can understand to be the essence of imagination.
e primordial temporality of imagination grounds the im-
age’s coming-into-presence, and returning-into-absence, only
by sustaining the interplay of anticipation and recollection. In
this regard, the work of imagination would be indispensable to
any worthy response that we might aempt to a question cours-
ing equally through Taylor’s call for an art that brings us back
to earth and through Rubenstein’s resistance to the imperial-
istic imagination of space travel: the question of intergenera-
tional responsibility. Can we imagine answering responsibly to
generations future, and past, for the responses we make now
16 introduction

regarding the devastation of Earth and the murderous conquest

of peoples? To do so would require imagining more fully and
richly that from which our techno-utopian cultures seem so
much in flight: the fragility of things and the mortality of per-
sons. It would require, in other words, an imagination auned
by love, and grounded in humility.

notes

1. Martin Heidegger, “e Age of the World Picture,” in e

Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William
Lovi (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 134.
2. Heidegger, “Age of the World Picture,” 134.
3. See Being and Time ¶36: “Even at an early date (and in Greek
philosophy this was no accident) cognition was conceived in terms
of the ‘desire to see.’ e treatise that stands first in the collection
of Aristotle’s treatises on ontology begins with the sentence: pantes
anthropoi tou eidenai oregontai phusei. e care for seeing is essential
to man’s Being. . . . e remarkable priority of ‘seeing’ was noticed
particularly by Augustine, in connection with his Interpretation of
concupiscentia. . . . ‘but we even say, “See how that sounds,” “See how
that is scented,” “See how hard that is.”’” Martin Heidegger, Being
and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1962), 214– 15 (= Sein und Zeit, Sechzehnte Auflage
(Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1986), 170– 71).
4. See, e.g., Hans Blumenberg’s account of the role played by
Galileo’s telescope in the triumph of theoretical curiosity that
Blumenberg takes as decisive to the success of Copernicanism,
the emergence of modern natural science, and the human self-
assertion that this entailed: “e telescope could not be abolished
or banished as an instrument of theoretical impertinence. It
became a factor in the legitimation of theoretical curiosity precisely
because, unlike any experimental intervention in the objects of na-
ture, it could be adapted to the classical ideal of the contemplation
 omas A. Carlson 17

of nature. e phenomena newly revealed by the telescope nour-

ished and gave wings to the imagination, which sought to provide
itself, by means of the ‘plurality’ of worlds, with continually self-
surpassing limit conceptions of what was as yet undisclosed”; in e
Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1985), 373.
5. See, e.g., Benjamin’s “e Work of Art in the Age of Mechani-
cal Reproduction,” which likens technologies of vision to discovery
of the unconscious in psychoanalysis: “With the close-up, space ex-
pands; with slow motion, movement is extended. e enlargement
of a snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any
case was visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural
formations of the subject. So too, slow motion not only presents fa-
miliar qualities of movement but reveals in them entirely unknown
ones. . . . Evidently a different nature opens itself to the camera
than opens to the naked eye— if only because an unconsciously
penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored
by man. . . . Here the camera intervenes with the resources of its
lowerings and li$ings, its interruptions and isolations, its exten-
sions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions. e
camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis
to unconscious impulses.” In Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays
and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York:
Schocken Books, 1969), 236– 37.
6. Ludwig Feuerbach, e Essence of Christianity, trans. George
Eliot (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1989), xvi.
7. Martin Heidegger, “e Question Concerning Technology,” in
e Question Concerning Technology, 27.
8. Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/theology (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1984), 25.
9. Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 5th
ed., enl., trans. Richard Ta$ (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1997), 152.
10. See esp. Robert Pogue Harrison, e Dominion of the Dead
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
18 introduction

11. Calvin Warren, “Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope,”

CR: e New Centennial Review 15, no. 1 (Spring 2015), 230; cited in
“Above Us,” 169.
12. Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et infini: Essai sur l’extériorité
(e Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961); Totality and Infinity: An Essay
on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pisburgh: Duquesne Uni-
versity Press, 1969).
13. Emmanuel Levinas, “Heidegger, Gagarin, and Us,” in Diffi-
cult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Sean Hand (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1990), 234.
14. Shoshana Zuboff, e Age of Surveillance Capitalism: e Fight
for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (London: Profile
Books, 2019). For a brief introduction to Zuboff ’s thinking on these
maers, see her recent opinion piece, “You Are Now Remotely
Controlled: Surveillance Capitalists Control the Science and the
Scientists, the Secrets and the Truth,” New York Times, January 24,
2020.
15. See Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Worlds without End: e Many
Lives of the Multiverse (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014),
chap. 3, “Navigating the Infinite,” esp. 78– 88; and omas A.
Carlson, e Indiscrete Image: Infinitude and Creation of the Human
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), chap. 3, “e Living
Image: Infinitude, Unknowing, and Creative Capacity in Mystical
Anthropology,” esp. 95– 112.
GATHERING REMAINS

Mark C. Taylor

“Don’t you see and feel these things more acutely than you used
to? e perils and warnings? Something gathering, no maer
how safe you may feel in your wearable technology. All the voice
commands and hyper-connections that allow you to become
disembodied.”
don delillo, Zero K

Part of my art is based on an awareness that we live in a nuclear

era. We’re probably living at the end of civilization.
michael heizer, Sculpture in Reverse

approaching disaster

A$er the explosion (or was it an implosion?) nothing remained.

Nothing remained but fragments scaered beyond recollec-
tion. Fragments of metal, stone, bodies, and bones. Dazed and
confused, he wandered through the dust and debris, hearing
nothing, feeling nothing. Nothing of the deafening noise of si-
rens and screams. His eyes were clouded but not with tears; his
gaze was unfocused leaving everything raging about him ob-
scure. Amidst smoldering ruins, nothing seemed real. Nothing
seemed real but nothing.
20 gathering remains

If there were life around him, he did not see it, hear it, feel
it, smell it, taste it. Everything he believed to be real had disap-
peared. Unable to comprehend what had occurred, he was filled
with an apprehension no words could capture. One moment
there is life, the next moment there is death; what lies in be-
tween remains without why. is uncharted interval eternally
returns as a gi$ that strangely marks the impossibility of gi$-
ing. Alone with nowhere to go, he slowly began to gather the
remains, the remains of a life he had once thought was his own.
Earth, fire, water, rock, stone, steel, flesh, bone. He had no idea
why he felt compelled to do this, or what he would do with the
gathered remains.

living death

ere had been predictions, endless predictions from the le$

and the right. Predictions had become so predictable that they
were ignored, and nothing happened. Nothing. Too much reli-
gion, too lile religion; too much control, not enough control;
too much information, not enough information; too much reg-
ulation, not enough regulation; too much power, not enough
power. What most people did not realize was that the end was
already occurring because the real was vaporizing in images on
scrims and screens connected by invisible networks operating
too fast for humans to comprehend or manage. Driverless cars,
trains, ships, planes; hospitals without doctors and nurses; fac-
tories without workers; markets without analysts and brokers;
news without journalists; classrooms without teachers. Pro-
grams and algorithms generating programs and algorithms too
complicated for humans to code re-create the world in their own
image. When it is no longer possible to imagine what comes next,
every age becomes a Post-Age. e modern search for mastery
and control leads to postmodern servitude and loss of control.
Is this progress or decline? At the tipping point, extremes meet;
true believers, whose gospels differ profoundly, not only await,
 Mark C. Taylor 21

but actively promote disaster. Religious zealots and technolog-

ical wizards join in the nihilistic hope for the end of the world
and the arrival of life everlasting in either heaven or silicon.

ey were alive. Alive as dead. Vitrification, cryopreservation,

nanotechnology. Row a$er row of bodies standing alone in
separate “pods” like statues in a museum of ruins or an ancient
mausoleum all awaiting “cyber-resurrection.” “ey’d been
stripped of their essential organs, which were being preserved
separately, brains included, in insulated vessels called organ
pods.” e “cryonic chamber” was known as “Zone K,” which
designated the temperature of absolute zero (minus 273.1 cel-
sius) required to preserve the bodies in a state of suspended
animation. Science? Fiction? Technology? Art? It is difficult to
know for sure. “Here, there were no lives to think about or imag-
ine. is was pure spectacle, a single entity, the bodies regal in
their cryonic bearing. It was a form of visionary art, it was body
art with broad implications.”1
In Don DeLillo’s Zero K, themes familiar to readers of his pre-
vious works return in a dystopian vision that assumes urgency
because time is rapidly running out. As global information, fi-
nancial, media, and social networks expand until “everything is
connected,”2 Earth becomes uninhabitable and the underworld
becomes an underground escape that turns out to be hell. is
book depicts the torturous transition between postmodern and
posthuman worlds, which is now occurring. DeLillo begins at
the end: “Everybody wants to own the end of the world” (Z 3). What
could it possibly mean to “own the end of the world”? In the era
of global capitalism even the apocalypse is for sale. Who is the
seller? Who might be the buyer? Who makes the market on the
approaching eschaton? What possible return might there be on
owning the end?
Ross Lockhart is “a man shaped by money.” Like Eric Packer,
the twenty-eight-year-old multibillion asset manager in Cos-
22 gathering remains

mopolis, Lockhart is a private wealth manager who speculates

in emerging markets. He lives his professional life surrounded
by “screens, keyboards and other devices,” which track financial
flows racing across the globe at the speed of light. His office, like
Gordon Gekko’s, is filled with works of abstract art, trophies of
his success. He had made his early reputation by “analyzing the
profit impact of natural disasters” (Z 7). In the time before the
plague, he had believed the impending disaster would be man-
made rather than natural and global rather than local. Ever the
shrewd speculator, Lockhart realizes that global disaster offers
the possibility of the biggest payoff ever. e challenge he faces
is to find a way to survive the disaster so he can profit from his
investment.
His son, Jeff, is everything Ross is not. Determined to “build
a life in opposition to [his] father’s career in global finance,” Jeff
shuffles from job to job, imagining that he might someday be-
come a poet or “a professor of philosophy or transfinite mathe-
matics at an obscure college in west-central somewhere” (Z 54).
Father and son are brought together by the approaching death
of Ross’s second wife, Artis Martineau, who is suffering from
multiple sclerosis. Artis has decided to undergo “cryonic sus-
pension” at a facility named the Convergence located in an un-
derground complex in the Kazakh steppe far from any village or
city. Ross, who is an investor in the project and serves as a finan-
cial adviser, insists that technology is rapidly approaching the
point where it will be possible to fully restore mind and body,
and thereby to bring people back to life. He admits to Jeff that
this is not a new idea:

“Faith-based technology. at’s what it is. Another god. Not

so different it turns out, from some of the earlier ones. Except
that it’s real, it’s true, it delivers.”
“Life a$er death.”
“Eventually, yes.”
“e Convergence.”
“Yes.” (Z 9)
 Mark C. Taylor 23

e Convergence refers to the merger of end and beginning,

which is “the point at which death and life join” (Z 255). True
believers willingly submit to death and pay an exorbitant sum to
con men posing as scientists and promising eternal life through
technological enhancement and revival. With her disability and
suffering increasing, Artis is preparing to undergo the proce-
dure, when Ross, who has at least twenty years of good health
ahead of him, decides to join her. Jeff is skeptical of the entire
enterprise and opposes his father’s decision, but he agrees to
visit the distant facility.

“ey will do it for you. Because it’s you. Simple injection, se-
rious criminal act.”
“Let it go,” he said.
“And in return, what? You’ve framed wills and trusts and tes-
taments granting them certain resources and holdings well be-
yond what you’ve already given them.”
“Finished?”
“Is it outright murder? Is it a form of assisted suicide that’s
horribly premature? Or is it a metaphysical crime that needs to
be analyzed by philosophers?”
He said, “Enough.”
“Die a while, then live forever.” (Z 114)

DeLillo describes the subterranean complex as a strange

combination of a closely guarded military compound and a se-
cret religious retreat. Most surprising, however, is Ross’s report
that Artis thinks this enterprise is best understood as “a work-
in-progress, an earthwork, a form of earth art, land art. Built up
out of the land and sunk down into it as well. Restricted access.
Defined by stillness, both human and environmental. A lile
tomblike as well. e earth is the guiding principle. . . . Return
to the earth, emerge from the earth” (Z 10).
DeLillo has long been interested in land art and earthworks
located in remote places and o$en alludes to works of contem-
porary artists. His description of the Convergence beneath the
24 gathering remains

salt flats and stone rubble evokes James Turrell’s “Roden Crater”
carved out of a volcano in the Arizona desert or Michael Heizer’s
“City” sunk in the Nevada desert where there is “nothing else,
nowhere else” (Z 4).3 In these massive projects, advanced tech-
nology creates works of art in which high/low, surface/depth,
modern/primitive intersect but are not unified. ese are
laer-day temples of art and religious shrines for pilgrims
searching for meaning and solace in a world the gods have fled.
For Artis, Ross, and their fellow believers, scientists, engineers,
and programmers are high priests who promise to ferry them to
the next world where they will enjoy life everlasting.
roughout history, believers repeatedly have retreated
underground to practice their religion. From the underground
paintings of Lascaux to the catacombs of early Christians to
caves filled with erotic sculptures of Hindu gods and goddesses,
the underworld has been the site of religious rituals. All of these
places are “located at the far margins of plausibility” (Z 115).
e Convergence is surrounded with a religious aura. “Monks”
wrapped in hooded cloaks and schooled in ars technica aend
“pilgrims” awaiting their final trip. In one chapel-like alcove,
a woman quietly speaking to a few people preparing for death
describes “great human spectacles, the white-clad faithful in
Mecca, the hadj, mass devotion, millions, year a$er year, and
Hindus gathered on the banks of the Ganges, millions, tens of
millions, a festival of immortality” (Z 63). A shrewd investor
who has made a living being on surviving future disasters,
Ross admits, “is place may not have been intended as the
new Jerusalem but people made long journeys to find a form of
higher being here, or at least a scientific process that will keep
their body tissue from decomposing” (Z 43).
Jeff will have none of it. In addition to raising serious ethi-
cal issues, he realizes that the mission of the Convergence poses
profound questions about the self, time, and human existence.
“How are you,” he asks, “without your sense of time?” (Z 68).4
Time haunts the halls and chambers of the Convergence in the
 Mark C. Taylor 25

form of skulls— one an imposing skull “about five times the size
of an ordinary human skull,” another a work of art reminiscent
of Damien Hirst’s For the Love of God.5 “An oversized human skull
was mounted on a pedestal juing from the wall. e skull was
cracked in places, stained with age, a lurid coppery bronze, a
drained gray. e eyeholes were rimmed with jewels and the
jagged teeth painted silver” (Z 68, 63). Like Hirst, investors in
the Convergence believe they have figured out how to profit
from death.
While touring the facility, Jeff pauses to look through a nar-
row slot into the room in which the massive skull is placed. e
Stenmark twins, whose vision has inspired the enterprise, are
engaged in a conversation that raises many of the questions that
are on his mind.

“Isn’t it sufficient to live a lile longer through advanced tech-

nology? Do we need to go on and on and on?” . . .
“Does literal immortality compress our enduring artforms
and cultural wonders into nothingness?”
“What will poets write about?”
“What happens to history? What happens to money? What
happens to God?” . . .
“Aren’t we easing the way toward uncontrollable levels of
population, environmental stress?” . . .
“e defining element of life is that it ends.” . . .
“Isn’t the sting of our eventual dying what makes us precious
to people in our lives?” (Z 69– 70)

For the Stenmarks and their followers, overcoming death is the

end of the human and the dawn of the glorious posthuman con-
dition. “We want to stretch the boundaries of what it means to
be human— stretch and then surpass. We want to do whatever
we are capable of doing in order to alter human thought and
bend the energies of civilization” (Z 71).
Jeff, by contrast, believes that death is what makes us human.
26 gathering remains

His girlfriend, Emma, asks him to talk to her adopted son, who
has dropped out of school and, unbeknownst to her, is planning
to go to the Ukraine to join the self-defense forces resisting the
Russian invasion. Jeff takes Stak to an art gallery with a single
work on display— a rock sculpture. is work of art provides the
occasion for Jeff to raise existential questions he suspects the
confused adolescent is pondering.

I looked at him intently and said in the most deliberate voice I

could manage, “‘Rocks are, but they do not exist.’”
A$er a pause I said, “I came across this statement when I was
in college and forgot it until very recently. ‘Man alone exists.
Rocks are, but they do not exist. Trees are, but they do not exist.
Horses are, but they do not exist.’” (Z 213)

What Jeff does not tell Stak is that he had first encountered
this claim in the writings of Martin Heidegger. For Heidegger,
sel\ood is inescapably temporal and, therefore, undeniably fi-
nite. Man alone exists because he is the only being who knows
he will die. Inauthenticity, according to Heidegger, is the denial
or avoidance of death; authenticity is Being-toward-death. Only
by confronting death directly and honestly can we realize the
abiding significance of the decisions that define who we are.
is lesson stuck with Jeff; he quietly confesses, “I’d never felt
more human than when my mother lay in bed dying” (Z 248).
To overcome death would be to cease to be human and, perhaps,
to become posthuman.
Research and development at the Convergence are enor-
mously expensive and require constant fundraising as well as
sophisticated advertising techniques. e halls and recesses of
the underground retreat are filled with screens and scrims dis-
playing horrifying events supposedly unfolding above ground:
disaster a$er disaster— some “natural,” others “manmade.”Im-
ages are everywhere and eventually consume viewers— floods,
fires, wars, religious and otherwise, no food, no water, no gas.
 Mark C. Taylor 27

Gangs of bandits and packs of animals roaming amid ruins gath-

ering what remains of what once had been a civilized world. e
darker life above ground becomes, the more aractive the life
promised below ground appears to be. On the other side of di-
saster, the promise not of seventy-two virgins but of a new life
in which the body is immaterial and the world glows with trans-
parent meaning:

“And they will speak a new language, according to Ross.”

“A language isolate, beyond all affiliation with other lan-
guages,” he said. “To be taught to some, implanted in others,
those already in cryopreservation.”
A system that will offer new meanings, entire new levels of
perception.
It will expand our reality, deepen the reach of our intellect.
It will remake us, he said.
We will know ourselves as never before, blood, brain and skin.
We will approximate the logic and beauty of pure mathemat-
ics in everyday speech.
No similes, metaphors, analogies. (Z 130)

e more vivid the images become, the more Jeff ’s suspi-

cions grow. “Documenting” disaster is good advertising, but
what if this whole operation is an elaborate con game devised
to make money? Jeff muses, “Is it possible that this is not factual
documentation rendered in a selective manner but something
radically apart? It’s a digital weave, every fragment manipulated
and enhanced, all of it designed, edited, redesigned. Why hadn’t
this occurred to me before, in earlier screenings, the monsoon
rains, the tornadoes? ese were visual fictions, the wildfires
and burning monks, digital bits, digital code, all of it computer-
generated, none of it real” (Z 152).
Since the beginning of time, credulous mortals have bought
into schemes promising an eternal return on all-too-worldly
investments. Cybernauts are Gnostics eager to escape the con-
28 gathering remains

fines of flesh and the “corruption” of earthly existence. While

acknowledging the precedents for his wager, Ross insists that
this time it’s different.

“Mind and body are restored, returned to life. . . . is is not

a new idea. It is an idea,” he said, “that is now approaching full
realization.”
“And you have complete confidence in this project.”
“Complete. Medically, technologically, philosophically. . . .
Nothing speculative here. Nothing is wishful or peripheral. Men,
women. Death, life.” (Z 8)

Rather than secret passwords communicated by otherworldly

messengers, cryptic codes, formulas, and algorithms calculated
by anonymous scientists. Same game, different gnosis.
Redemption always has a price. From the time of ancient
sacrificial offerings, believers have aempted to buy eternal
life by cuing a deal with the gods. My money for my life. In
the world of global capitalism, where the gods are scientific
and technological wizards write code, the price of eternal life,
like everything else, has become so inflated that only the ultra-
wealthy can afford it. e Stenmark twins admit that “life-
everlasting belongs to those of breathtaking wealth.” Revving
up their sales pitch, “Take the leap, they say. Live the billion-
aire’s myth of immortality.” Like elaborate pyramids and tombs
and architecturally designed mausoleums of earlier times, the
underground pod is the “final shrine of entitlement” (Z 76, 117).
For the masters of the universe who have funded and invented
technological innovations that have transformed the global
economy into an immaterial play of light operating at superhu-
man speed, death is nothing more than an engineering problem
that inevitably will be solved. Technology is the new religion for
the posthuman age.
Technology. Religion. Art. Artis. Art Is. Art is. Art is what?
What if Artis is right when she suggests that “we ought to re-
gard [the Convergence] as a work-in-progress, an earthwork, a
 Mark C. Taylor 29

form of earth art, land art.” She confessed, “is place, all of it,
seems transitional to me. Filled with people coming and going.
en the others, those who are leaving in one sense, as I am,
but staying in another sense, as I am. Staying and waiting. e
only thing that’s not ephemeral is the art. It’s not made for an
audience. It’s made simply to be here. It’s here, it’s fixed, it’s part
of the foundation, set in stone. e painted walls, the simulated
doors, the movie screens in the halls. Other installations else-
where” (Z 50– 51). What is the work of art a$er the death of man?
Ross eventually decides not to undergo the procedure with
Artis, but two years later changes his mind and returns to the
Convergence to join her. Jeff no longer resists his father’s desire
and agrees to help him on his final journey. As they prepare for
the departure, an “envoy” Jeff dubs Zina or Zara reassures her
clients that their investment is prudent because life on earth is
already a living death.

“at world, the one above,” she said, “is being lost to the sys-
tems. To the transparent networks that slowly occlude the flow of
all those aspects of nature and character that distinguish humans
from elevator buons and doorbells.” . . .
“ose of you who will return to the surface. Haven’t you
felt it? e loss of autonomy. e sense of being virtualized. e
devices you use, the ones you carry everywhere, room to room,
minute to minute, inescapably. Do you ever feel unfleshed? All
the coded impulses you depend on to guide you. All the sensors
in the room that are watching you, listening to you, tracking your
habits, measuring your capabilities. All the linked data designed
to incorporate you into the megadata. Is there something that
makes you uneasy? Do you think about the technovirus, all the
systems down, global implosion? Or is it more personal? Do you
feel steeped in some horrific digital panic that’s everywhere and
nowhere?” (Z 259)

Is technology the solution or the problem, the cure or the dis-

ease? If art “is the only thing that’s not ephemeral,” then per-
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
1028
.

Brunn. Geschichte der griechischen Künstler. Stuttgart 1889, I2, 239,

245, 388; Roscher, Ausfuhr. Lexicon d. griech. u. röm. Myth., p. 1358;
Denkmäler d. Klass. Alterth., p. 1401.

1029
.

Brunn. Op. cit. I2, 102.

1030
.

Brunn. l. c.

1031
.

Malleson. The life of Warren Hastings, the first governor of India,

London, 1894; Revue de deux mondes, 1 Mars 1895: Valbert. Le
dernier biographe de Warren Hastings.

1032
.

A. S., II, 20, 49.

1033
.

A. S., III, 97, 225.

1034
.

In Q. Caecil. divin., 10, 32-3.

1035
.

A. S., II, 23, 56; 25, 61; 33, 80; III, 20, 51; 30, 71; 32, 75; 38, 87; 39, 89;
58-9.
1036
.

Act. sec. lib. sec. argumentum.

1037
.

A. S., III, 16, 40; 49, 117; V, 1, 1-4.

1038
.

pro L. Flacco, 39, 98.

1039
.

pro M. Fonteio, 19, 42.

1040
.

pro L. Flacco, 39, 97-9.

1041
.

Warren Hastings and the founding of the british administration by L. I.

Trotter, Oxford, 1894, p. 207.

1042
.

Plut. Crass., 10.

1043
.

Sallust. Hist. fragm., IV, 31, ed. Kritz.

1044
.

Kritz. Comment in Sallust., fragm., pp. 332-3.

1045
.

Appian. de bell. mithrid., 92 sg.

1046
.

A. S., IV, 47, 104.

1047
.

A. S., III, 37, 85.

1048
.

Ps. Asc. Arg. in act. I; A. S., II, 40, 99.

1049
.

Marquardt. De l'organisation militaire chez les Romains, trad. franç.

Paris 1891, p. 144.

1050
.

Liv. XXIX, 1.

1051
.

Nitzsch. Die Gracchen, p. 41 seg.

1052
.

A. S., V, 25, 63.

1053
.

Ferrero E. L'ordinamento delle armate romane. Torino 1878, pp. 14,

32.

1054
.

A. S., V, 39, 102.

1055
.

A. S., V, 51, 133.

1056
.

Cagnat. De municipalibus et provincialibus militiis in imperio romano.

Lutetiae Parisiorum 1880, p. 3.

1057
.

Appian. De bello mithr., 68, 72; Reinach. Th. Mithrad. Eupator ins
deutsch. übertr. Leipzig 1895, pp. 310, 328.

1058
.

A. S., V, 48, 127.

1059
.

A. S., III, 89, 207.

1060
.

A. S., V, 69, 178.

1061
.

A. S., IV, 8, 18.

1062
.

A. S., IV, 15, 33.

1063
.

Plutarc. Cic. 8.

1064
.

Cic. in Verr., A. S., I, 19, 51.

1065
.

Plin. N. H., 34, 3, 6.

1066
.

Senec. Suasor., 6, 24, ed. Kiessling.

1067
.

Lactanct. Instit. div., 2, 4, ed. Fritsche.

1068
.

l. c.
 Nota del Trascrittore

Ortografia e punteggiatura originali sono state

mantenute, correggendo senza annotazione minimi
errori tipografici. Le correzioni elencate a pag. 236
(Errata Corrige) sono state riportate nel testo.
Copertina creata dal trascrittore e posta nel pubblico
dominio.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IL PROCESSO
DI VERRE ***

Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions

will be renamed.

Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S.

copyright law means that no one owns a United States copyright
in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and
distribute it in the United States without permission and without
paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General
Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and
distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the
PROJECT GUTENBERG™ concept and trademark. Project
Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if
you charge for an eBook, except by following the terms of the
trademark license, including paying royalties for use of the
Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is
very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such
as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
research. Project Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and
printed and given away—you may do practically ANYTHING in
the United States with eBooks not protected by U.S. copyright
law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially
commercial redistribution.

START: FULL LICENSE

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
 PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK

To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the

free distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this
work (or any other work associated in any way with the phrase
“Project Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of
the Full Project Gutenberg™ License available with this file or
online at www.gutenberg.org/license.

Section 1. General Terms of Use and

Redistributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand,
agree to and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual
property (trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to
abide by all the terms of this agreement, you must cease using
and return or destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works in your possession. If you paid a fee for
obtaining a copy of or access to a Project Gutenberg™
electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the terms
of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.

1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only

be used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by
people who agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.
There are a few things that you can do with most Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works even without complying with the
full terms of this agreement. See paragraph 1.C below. There
are a lot of things you can do with Project Gutenberg™
electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement and
help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg™
electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the
Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the
collection of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. Nearly all the
individual works in the collection are in the public domain in the
United States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright
law in the United States and you are located in the United
States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from copying,
distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative works
based on the work as long as all references to Project
Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope that you will
support the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting free
access to electronic works by freely sharing Project
Gutenberg™ works in compliance with the terms of this
agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg™ name
associated with the work. You can easily comply with the terms
of this agreement by keeping this work in the same format with
its attached full Project Gutenberg™ License when you share it
without charge with others.

1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also
govern what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most
countries are in a constant state of change. If you are outside
the United States, check the laws of your country in addition to
the terms of this agreement before downloading, copying,
displaying, performing, distributing or creating derivative works
based on this work or any other Project Gutenberg™ work. The
Foundation makes no representations concerning the copyright
status of any work in any country other than the United States.

1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project

Gutenberg:

1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other

immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg™ License must
appear prominently whenever any copy of a Project
Gutenberg™ work (any work on which the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” appears, or with which the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed,
viewed, copied or distributed:

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United

States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it
away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg
License included with this eBook or online at
www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United
States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
you are located before using this eBook.

1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is

derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to
anyone in the United States without paying any fees or charges.
If you are redistributing or providing access to a work with the
phrase “Project Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the
work, you must comply either with the requirements of
paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use
of the work and the Project Gutenberg™ trademark as set forth
in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is

posted with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and
distribution must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through
1.E.7 and any additional terms imposed by the copyright holder.
Additional terms will be linked to the Project Gutenberg™
License for all works posted with the permission of the copyright
holder found at the beginning of this work.

1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project

Gutenberg™ License terms from this work, or any files
containing a part of this work or any other work associated with
Project Gutenberg™.
 1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute
this electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1
with active links or immediate access to the full terms of the
Project Gutenberg™ License.

1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form,
including any word processing or hypertext form. However, if
you provide access to or distribute copies of a Project
Gutenberg™ work in a format other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or
other format used in the official version posted on the official
Project Gutenberg™ website (www.gutenberg.org), you must, at
no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a copy, a
means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
request, of the work in its original “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other
form. Any alternate format must include the full Project
Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.

1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,

performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg™
works unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or

providing access to or distributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works provided that:

• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
the use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the
method you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The
fee is owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark,
but he has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to
the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty
payments must be paid within 60 days following each date on
which you prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your
periodic tax returns. Royalty payments should be clearly marked
as such and sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation at the address specified in Section 4, “Information
 about donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation.”

• You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who

notifies you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that
s/he does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™
License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and
discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of Project
Gutenberg™ works.

• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of

any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in
the electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90
days of receipt of the work.

• You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.

1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project

Gutenberg™ electronic work or group of works on different
terms than are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain
permission in writing from the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, the manager of the Project Gutenberg™
trademark. Contact the Foundation as set forth in Section 3
below.

1.F.

1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend

considerable effort to identify, do copyright research on,
transcribe and proofread works not protected by U.S. copyright
law in creating the Project Gutenberg™ collection. Despite
these efforts, Project Gutenberg™ electronic works, and the
medium on which they may be stored, may contain “Defects,”
such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or corrupt
data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other
medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
cannot be read by your equipment.

1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES -

Except for the “Right of Replacement or Refund” described in
paragraph 1.F.3, the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation, the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark,
and any other party distributing a Project Gutenberg™ electronic
work under this agreement, disclaim all liability to you for
damages, costs and expenses, including legal fees. YOU
AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE,
STRICT LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH
OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH
1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER
THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR
ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF
THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If

you discover a defect in this electronic work within 90 days of
receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any) you
paid for it by sending a written explanation to the person you
received the work from. If you received the work on a physical
medium, you must return the medium with your written
explanation. The person or entity that provided you with the
defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu
of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person or
entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.
If the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund
in writing without further opportunities to fix the problem.

1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set

forth in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’,
WITH NO OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS
OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR
ANY PURPOSE.

1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied

warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this
agreement violates the law of the state applicable to this
agreement, the agreement shall be interpreted to make the
maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by the applicable
state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any provision of
this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.

1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the

Foundation, the trademark owner, any agent or employee of the
Foundation, anyone providing copies of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works in accordance with this agreement, and any
volunteers associated with the production, promotion and
distribution of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works, harmless
from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees, that
arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project
Gutenberg™ work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or
deletions to any Project Gutenberg™ work, and (c) any Defect
you cause.

Section 2. Information about the Mission of

Project Gutenberg™
Project Gutenberg™ is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new
computers. It exists because of the efforts of hundreds of
volunteers and donations from people in all walks of life.

Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the

assistance they need are critical to reaching Project
Gutenberg™’s goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg™
collection will remain freely available for generations to come. In
2001, the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was
created to provide a secure and permanent future for Project
Gutenberg™ and future generations. To learn more about the
Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and how your
efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4 and the
Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org.

Section 3. Information about the Project

Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-
profit 501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the
laws of the state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by
the Internal Revenue Service. The Foundation’s EIN or federal
tax identification number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the
Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation are tax
deductible to the full extent permitted by U.S. federal laws and
your state’s laws.

The Foundation’s business office is located at 809 North 1500

West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact
links and up to date contact information can be found at the
Foundation’s website and official page at
www.gutenberg.org/contact

Section 4. Information about Donations to

the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation
Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without
widespread public support and donations to carry out its mission
of increasing the number of public domain and licensed works
that can be freely distributed in machine-readable form
accessible by the widest array of equipment including outdated
equipment. Many small donations ($1 to $5,000) are particularly
important to maintaining tax exempt status with the IRS.

The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws

regulating charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of
the United States. Compliance requirements are not uniform
and it takes a considerable effort, much paperwork and many
fees to meet and keep up with these requirements. We do not
solicit donations in locations where we have not received written
confirmation of compliance. To SEND DONATIONS or
determine the status of compliance for any particular state visit
www.gutenberg.org/donate.

While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states

where we have not met the solicitation requirements, we know
of no prohibition against accepting unsolicited donations from
donors in such states who approach us with offers to donate.

International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot

make any statements concerning tax treatment of donations
received from outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp
our small staff.

Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current

donation methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a
number of other ways including checks, online payments and
credit card donations. To donate, please visit:
www.gutenberg.org/donate.

Section 5. General Information About Project

Gutenberg™ electronic works
Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
Gutenberg™ concept of a library of electronic works that could
be freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
distributed Project Gutenberg™ eBooks with only a loose
network of volunteer support.

Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several

printed editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by
copyright in the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus,
we do not necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any
particular paper edition.

Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
facility: www.gutenberg.org.

This website includes information about Project Gutenberg™,

including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new
eBooks, and how to subscribe to our email newsletter to hear
about new eBooks.