Big Bang Theory
This morning, I woke up thinking about “code” and its relationship to “aura.” Successive technological leaps, big bangs of a sort, have a direct relationship with the nature of the codes used to solve the problems of space and of time.
Writing, I think, was a technology developed to fight the evanescence of time. Memory is imperfect, and it becomes important to have some means to preserve information beyond human limits. Languages are already a compressed shorthand used to relate information about the physical world—we “decode” them based on an uncontrollable social code almost entirely determined by context rather than technological or physical limits. The severance of text and situation is both a feature and a flaw when speech is marked upon a surface.
By disembodying speech, we transcend the physical limits of time, and to a lesser extent, space. Early writing upon stone, as inscriptions on buildings, sculptures and temples seem timeless but they are not portable. “Sense” of these intentional marks is tied to the (cult)ural value of physical objects. But this is a “big bang” which marks an expansion of human cultures—the birth of cultural objects that synthesize both a coded time-conquering function and an uncoded spatial function and the creation of an aura that exists beyond code.
