NOW | SCHOOL OF NO MEDIA: Beyond the Described & the Prescribed

Reality is a cliché. — Wallace Stevens
A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light. — Kafka
Words impose their own world the way dictators dictate. — PM
Technology… the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it. — Max Frisch
In my view, writing and communicating is about being able to make anyone believe anything. — J. M .G. Le Clézio
They have eyes but cannot see. — Tehilim

If I were to try to alert you by saying or shouting “NOTHING,” you would not notice… Even the multitude of words and images present here will be unable to shake up our current tautological system of denial.

The reigning hoax assumes its legitimacy while topics like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the prophet Mohamed are deemed controversial… but what about reality?!

At our very core, we are delusional beings.
While perceiving ourselves to be timelessly on top of a wave, “our lives,” we delight in that which may be just-around-the-corner and will at long last liberate us.

We surround ourselves with solutions and theories; they titillate and buffer us from reality, and thus we “manage our problems.” Such railings are a lure.

As early as possible in our lives, our self-serving educational system sets up the paradigm that posits that words stand for things, and that the more we learn, the more we will know.

Knowledge is the opposite of stupidity and that’s all there is to it.

What to know, what it is to know… these key questions are not to be addressed.

Through its pervasiveness, education has us assume that most of what we do is absolutely natural: the central process of naming ourselves and whatever surrounds us ignores its inherent violence.

What we know is choking us: our need for comfort fosters predictability and redundancy. As humanizing as its diverse ramifications may be, culture primarily mirrors, glorifies and perpetuates its existing value system.

We love what we love because we are reflected in it.

The very same elements that were meant to liberate us – words, concepts, and media – regurgitate “what-is-known” into worn-out concepts. Caught up in a monkey-see-monkey-do cycle, reality is off limits and immediacy has gone. Our universe is built up to the extent that alienation, separation, isolation – and for some of us, exile – have become the very fabric of our existence, our playpen.

Like some kind of self-gratificating monstrosity, we have become so full of ourselves, we are falling victims to our own centrality.

Centrality, normalcy, and certainty, three of our major hoaxes, have us cornered. With the fact that experience is not transmissible, our planet is seriously endangered.

Doing something, anything, has to be better than doing nothing – since we cannot imagine anything else, we would rather keep everything in place.

Wishful thinking permeates our lives… we continue to believe, and nothing is ever a surprise anymore.

In a digital age when everything is conveyed through 1’s and 0’s… we avoid anything resembling a zero.

By ignoring that imminent oblivion, the one that awaits us all, “tomorrow” has become our most significant taboo… and being lost has become a long lost art. We cannot be present, and crimes take place all around us.

Kupferberg’s “Is there life after birth?” and Kabat-Zinn’s “Is there life before death?” should remain our critical points of departure.

Images and words – not just the internet – keep us isolated within a bubble, a form of mass solitary confinement, exchanging looks and commenting on what has already been thought, said and lived.
It is conceivable that after the fluid wisdom of the Pre-Socratic thinkers and the Taoists, the cycle that defined knowledge/culture as being fixed and separate from living may finally be coming to an end.
Our digital realm, like a form of contemporary Ying/Yang dialectic, could constantly remind us of the relevance of the zeros (the void).

Can our lives consist primarily of reshuffling the prescribed and the described? Of course… that is how societies survive, but no more sacrifice is needed!

When all has been said and done, we seek a particular silence. When the noise has ceased.
The floor below us has dropped a long time ago, we just have been too busy to notice what lies beyond “the stuff.”

Provocation is a way of putting reality back on its feet. — Bertolt Brecht

1 of 3. Knowing what we know, we know nothing: we believe our eyes (and ears, and words) but they are too busy verifying what has been stored in our cataloged universe.