- Absolute Incommunication
Another way of conceptualizing the design problematic of this sort of assembly is in symbolic artifacts and how they come to seemingly absorb traces of memory and significance that are imparted to them through use. Whether by genealogical possession or through ritual, repeated use, and iconic significance, simple objects are a repository of intentions and sometimes are thought to be haunted by them. Whole societies organize around pilgrimages to such haunted objects. Deep address might also serve to materialize absorbed traces of emotional baggage as explicit information in and through the objects they mark. The limit of what the thing can “ remember ” about its intersubjective relations with the world (e.g., affective, geochemical, temporal) is also what can be made calculable and sensible for it. Perhaps those memories are part of how searches about searches for something introduce significance through their recursion. As more things, events, and things are addressed, the social relations of mutual interest between haecceities are themselves transposed into addressable clusters and empirically queryable entities; they are addresses about addresses. These may spawn addressable networks of metadata that spawn addressable meta-metadata, all of which require visualization tools to make them sensical to human Users. And so things that materially absorb and communicate the conditions of their appearance, and the installations of people and things along the same plane of such a network, are a challenge to our ethical, political, aesthetic stance toward the dignity of both. Marx famously diagnosed capitalism ’ s confused employment of people as if they were things and the assignment of magical agencies to objects. We know full well that capitalist economic relations drive and are driven by a productive rationality that renders all components according to their most apparently efficient conditions of production and circulation so as to maximize the surplus realized in their transactional intercommunication. Logistics understands flatness quite well, and this is also the good news. <sup>40</sup> The challenge is unwinnable on humanist terms, and I am not convinced that any “ parliament ” of things can govern this maelstrom. <sup>41</sup> Instead I would hope that a strongly ubiquitous computation would help to implode the sentimental parameters of brute humanism toward an alternative and more rigorous materialism that extends ethical programs outward by demanding empathetic recognition of ourselves in networked matter as coaddressees. That said, we do not require anything like deep address to realize that our temporary condition as bags of absolutely secular chemistry is also a seat of empathy and solidarity, but it might help.
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Address Layer