Re: VMs: Is It Time? (POSTMODERNISM)

[Ronald Lorenzo <rlorenzomba@xxxxxxxxx>]

A solution for everyone


In the neobaroque age of fragmented hyperreality, we
can no longer speak of a reality or an authority.  As
Jean Baudrillard stated, the perfect crime has been
committed: reality has been destroyed and the
perpetrator is still loose.  There is no reality;
there is no authority.  One can only speak of
realities or hyperrealities.  One can only speak of
authorities.  Gone are the days when reality was
constructed from a single source.  Now, the action of
reconstructing the fragments of existence is an
ever-present and constant activity.  In the realm of
television viewing, ?zapping?, or the rapid transition
from one channel to the next is an example.  Detached
from reality, the television viewer moves from channel
to channel, stopping only long enough to reconstruct
the actions or setting of one show and attempting to
reconstruct an existence.  In the past, three
dimensional, stationary icons used to proliferate our
places of sanctuary.  Now, two dimensional, transitory
icons proliferate our homes, defining existence in a
stream of 1s and 0s.  The sanctuary of the ego exists
in the ethereal realm of hyperspace.

Oswald Spengler described the Faustian spirit that
imbues the west as a spirit that has abandoned a
sanctified past for a sacrilegious future.  The
Faustian spirit is the spirit of modernity.  Never
concerned with compassion, the spirit of modernity
only strove to observe, control, and dominate.  Its
primary achievements, the hallmarks of control and
power without compassion, resulted in the deaths of
millions.  From mushroom clouds over Japan, to
fragmented cadavers in trenches, to the infernal
landscapes of Auschwitz and Treblinka, the world has
felt the icy grip of modernity?s invisible hand.  In
the history of philosophy, only when the antimodernist
philosopher Schopenhauer expresses his ideas for
compassion does the subject even enter European
intellectual discourse.  For modernists, compassion
has never been on the agenda.  Hegel states that
history is the slaughterbench of mankind for some
nebulous Utopia that comes ?tomorrow?.  Or as Hegel
would have stated in our age, ?I am going to
Disneyland;?  He would have the unfortunate souls
suffer: ?fuck them.?  Or as Jean Baudrillard noted:
?right lane must exit.?

A facet of modernity that is as faulty as its lack of
compassion, is its oppressive nature.  From Bentham?s
panopticon, devoted to the lasting surveillance of
tortured souls, to the modernist efficiency of the
French guillotine, modernity and its myrmidons have
only been concerned with oppression, never justice. 
Any intellectual viewpoints that challenged a
modernist/Faustian mentality were to be exterminated.

In regard to the Voynich MS, the modernist/Faustian
spirit has failed to make progress in breaking its
code.  Despite its intellectuals and tools
(computers), the manuscript has resisted any attempts
at its gaze, its control, its dominance.  The
observation has been made many times that the spirit
of a culture is transmitted to even its smallest
artifacts.  The Faustian spirit resides in the
microchip of computers.  And this is why a computer
will never break the Voynich code.  A computer will
never break the Voynich code because the manuscript is
host to a different spirit from a different age.  


Assuming or supposing that the code originates from a
different spirit than the modernist spirit,
counter-modernist viewpoints offer new avenues for
resolving Voynich enigma.  Just two weeks ago, the
last writer/reader of Nushu passed away in China. 
Nushu, as a written language created and transmitted
entirely by women, proves that a feminist perspective
is not without its basis in the approach to the VMS
code.  The notion that the Voynich manuscript was
written in a language created and transmitted only by
women in an age when women were not given intellectual
freedom is a valid perspective.  

Ignoring postmodern, feminist, post-feminist, or gay
approaches to cryptology is left to the choice of the
individual.  Banning or censoring those views is
something that cannot be forgiven.  The exclusively
modernist approach to this project has been
detrimental: it has chased away linguists,
medievalists, artists, and others whose viewpoints
could enrich the discourse.  I welcome the viewpoints
expressed on Jung and astrology.  And for those that
don?t there is a simple solution: you may pass over
those threads.  For the modernists who still wish to
reconstruct a reality for themselves, they can select
the channels to ?zap?, just don?t force your
viewpoints on others.  









		

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