Nausea? What nausea?

In Levinas, Law, and Politics (2007) Marinos Diamantides describes a curious situation that almost seems like the normative condition of an 'idiot':

Speaking -- as if one had voice -- feels like ventriloquism. Can the sensibility of such nausea be transformed into enjoyment and play? In fact the post-modern subject still has pretensions of innocent playfulness -- it does 'spend time' playing those mindless computer games but, at the end of each satisfying game the 'player' is reduced to an extension of the game and the time of 'playing the game' is indistinguishable from the monotonous, synchronic, time of the inauthentic, pseudo-work of performing one's functions. Nausea returns. Caught between being a cyborg and the persistent feeling that one has to be a cyborg, the Beckettian post-modern being seems, therefore, neither individual nor (yet?) a fully desubjectified existence, but an existent who still suffers alone the nausea attached to having to perform its abstract functions within the impersonal processes of our technological universe.

The problem with theorising a situation like this is that it entails an ontology of the subject, a certain psychical disposition that allows the specific social link entailed to function within a symbolic economy of desires, meanings, etc. Clearly though, what Diamantides is elaborating here is not a social relation but a naïvely mystical experience, searching for some Good at one remove which structurally entails the running together of 'meaning' and 'nonsense' such that nonsense itself becomes meaningful. The problem with evoking Beckett is that you are always going to be between mysticism and psychoses when you present a human subject. And this is a lesson that commits a delicate, but nonetheless important, revision of Diamantides' position: the exteriorisation of my 'inner states' (subjectivity) so that the discourse of technology can articulate my 'self' for all to see is my subjectivisation -- the subjectification of a subject relies on this subjectivisation to first 'dot the I' of the subject, but because this introduces a minimum of symbolic content the disintegration of discursive relations (the conflation of in/authentic time) necessarily entails a mystical experience. Were there no symbolic content, then the 'subject' would not exist (by the rules of the discourse) and technically stands outside being. When one has a claim to some minimum of symbolic structure that defines them, e.g. identification, then the abstraction of 'technology' rely just seems like an inability to cope with being actively engaged with oneself.

Streetwise

This Google Street View thingy is getting more and more Gibsonian by the minute. And by 'Gibsonian' I don't mean that protean novel Neuromancer either. It's much more of an Idoru, Pattern Recognition, and Spook Country sort of an affair; an unseemly artificiality that seems like a natural technological innovation. But what are we seeing on 'street view' exactly? I'm not sure. It makes me think of the way the top-down satellite imagery is always out of sync with the present in which you view it. This means, for example, that the dead can walk again!

What I find curious about this are the parallel events, like the guy who got arrested for using a free wi-fi network because a self-absorbed hairdresser suspected him of stalking her when he parked outside the café across the street offering free wi-fi and pulled out his laptop. So on the one hand we have a weird nexus of surveillance culture 'innocently' parading under Google's banners where at the same time we have people becoming suspicious of those who are not equally nervous of surveillance.

Obviously we are simply not alienated enough from each other... Bring back that polite edifice of congenial civility!