TRANSCENDENCE: Being on the Edge of Meaning
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Date
2024-05-13
Authors
Crowder, Jordan
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Waterloo
Abstract
The erosion of the body, the other, and the tangible world now permeate all facets of contemporary existence, extending beyond the confines of a debilitating disease—a mode of non-existence until death. We are separating ourselves from the human condition, encapsulated within a server; we are no longer present, instead existing in a palliative state where information proliferates, yet being diminishes. Servers, both physical and digital, become central to our existence, embodying non-real forms that collapse into one another, displacing both the real and us with it. Our existence becomes inauthentic, with no alternative to exist outside of it. Without presence in the server, one does not exist at all. Man is enslaved in this state, celebrated as progress erasing him from the picture, until there is no longer a picture to erase. Instead, a virtue signaling for more control, sedated from a disease that is life, until disappearing entirely. Greater anesthesia is induced, keeping him in a coma, only to need more.
When an individual is presented with his own condition and a series of unavoidable losses, he is compelled to ask and reflect – to fight an incurable condition; one akin to the server that alienates one from the body, the other and reality. Man however finds himself searching for meaning in a world devoid of it. To embrace one’s pain and suffering where the other has removed it entirely; here one brings man towards death and the other hides it away, both however pull towards disability. This frustration, born from the desire for freedom only to be constrained by his condition, signifies a descent into non-being, lacking both a functioning body and, potentially, mind. Conversely, a mode of existence the world too becomes, that a collective complies towards. For man however, falling into both results in a double disappearance.
The condition, while physically and mentally debilitating, serves as an opportunity to confront more clearly the realities of life and death, independent from the server’s palliation of it. The server’s nature offers an escape to realms beyond, liberated from a hyperreal and disabled existence. The rooftop, both metaphorically and physically, connects to reality, offering a liminal vantage to reflect on the essence of being one is increasingly pulled away from. Here, man transcends the body’s limitations, the notion of access, and the reality of disability. He surpasses the server’s digital and physical confines and his condition, reconnecting with the remnants of the real world and its corporeal existence. The rooftop clarifies his condition and the underlying loss of being. Although man’s fate remains inescapable, this distancing from non-existence rekindles his freedom to that when he was a child, while drawing him as close to heaven as possible, so that when death does occur, he is already there.
In this realm, man falls in love with being in the very places he should not.
Description
Keywords
adrenoleukodystrophy, adrenomyeloneuropathy, alienation, anomic society, architecture as commodity, architecture as simulation, authenticity, auto-ethnography, being as machine, being towards death, body as machine, burnout society, the city is a machine, the city is a server, consumer society, crisis of meaning, death and being, desert of the real, dwelling disabled, existential phenomenology, flatness of experience, freedom, human condition, idea of progress, junkspace, loneliness, loss of body, loss of meaning, loss of memory, loss of time, map precedes the territory, meaning in life, meaning through suffering, memoir, narcissistic society, non-place, obsession with experience, obsession with image, palliative society, pending disability, philosophy of technology, photobook, photography, post-human condition, reclamation of the body, rethinking the body, rethinking the city, architecture and representation, being and represenation, rooftop, rooftop to transcend disability, rooftop to transcend server, rooftopping, role of body, role of death in life, role of the image, server as disability, server city, server farm, simulated cities, simulacra and simulation, society of the spectacle, sociology, philosophy, technological slavery, the body is a machine, the city is a server, the server as disability, the decline of the west, transparency society, transcending access and ability, urban-exploration, violence of the image, what it means to be human, Albert Camus, Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Byung-Chul Han, Ernest Becker, Friedrich Nietzsche, Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard, Juhani Pallasmaa, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Oswald Spengler, David Leatherbarrow