All the works of art, culture and science, all writings, all codes, all images, all
become an echo that radiates through time only for a moment after the last human is gone.
A voice runs through a church, or a song runs through a marketplace.
Let them be even voices and songs replayed by radio, a half-immortal life of sounds - how long after the last human is removed, how long this waves will last? A week, a month? If perhaps a giant solar power plant was to be made to provide energy for a single transmitter which sole purpose would be to repeat a playlist of sounds as long as the physics allow, what really would be repeated?
We all know about sounds of trees falling in forests. We know.
There are sounds and sounds, there is information and information.
When Deleuze is defining information as a "order words" isn't he through this definition summoning a certain future? Or is he trying to prepare us for future where information should be resisted?
What is information, what are images, what is art, what is communication. Art, says Deleuze, does not communicate.
What happens when we remove human from a theory of art? When we discover "blocks of movement" in cinema. The balance is lost.
Every activity in human life has a source in a human body, in his mind.
There is no art without human, the eternity of art is not eternity of object, of books, but eternity of shared experience. experience is neither a block or a movement.
Experience is resisting the senses.
Image appears when the flow of energy from senses to the brain and back into the muscles (the sensual information) gets withheld, delayed, the current gets opposed, redirected, detoured.
Experience is the resistance to information. In that sense it does not exist without information.
A conscious mind is like Laookon managing the snake. The human form managing the river of energy.
Art is thus truly living through the experience of art, and thus through resistance to art, resistance to the object, the information of art.
A soul of art object is an act of resistance to object of art.
In our lives we become reservoir of souls of the objects of art. They deposit their soul in our minds, it is an informatic symbiosis. We only perhaps posses our soul , as a soul of an object of art we see ourselves as. So in that sense we deposit our soul in our own mind, as we deposit it in minds of others.
When it comes to our soul, our immortality, it lives through many minds, and we are possesing only a fragment of our soul, the one we accepted as a deposit.
It is thus easier for other people to see us as objects of art and thus deposit our soul, then for us who are botht he object and depositor.
A person can absolutely live his entire life without experiencing his own soul, which he did not accepted into his mind, a soul which only lives through others. A man who renounces his soul is not a soulless man. He is a man who does not know his soul, and thus himself as an object of art.
Such man is either absolutely incapable of receiving soul of things, or had forbidden himself to look at himself as object of art, but still looks at others as objects of art, and at the plain art objects, depositing every soul but his own.
But what does it mean not to see oneself as an object of art? It does not mean not to receive the idea about being an object of art. Well, reception is an ambiguous word. Precisely it means not to resist this idea, this reception, to allow it to function autonomously, without our control, to completely lose control over oneself as an object of art. To have no consciousness of oneself as object of art, means to really become an object of art - completely submitted, unaware, of the objectification, of being involved - in what? In a life of object of art, a life of commodity.
Thus a person who does not understand that he/she operates with subconscious submission to idea he/she is an object rather then a subject, a person entirely feeling this objectification as their pure subjectivity, a person who claims - "no, I'm not an object in any way, but a pure soul, a pure presence, a pure consciousness, my body is not an object, it is only a manifestation of my will" - this person is precisely fully objectified, an unaware object living by the laws of objects, by the laws of commodity, this person has no experience of himself, only a feeling of himself, which is exactly a need to follow from one internal movement to the other, and remains an unbroken moment of immediate action, performance.
Only through resistance to this immediacy, this purity of consciousness, by realising one is an object of art, one can really experience his own soul, that is meet his soul, meet himself as a soul, as a aspect of himself resistant to death. He no longer then is an information about himself, a purely automatic process, but gives himself a step "out of time" into a virtual perspective from which the time can be perceived as a process, instead of being felt, being one with the time, the process.
Perhaps from that angle the "soulless" personality of a performer, a "pop star" becomes more clear.
As we can see the objects of art are eternal only if their soul is deposited in humans. Otherwise they become just plain objects, at best information.
What is human then if not an object of art called humanism? The humanist ideal is equally something which, like olimpic fire, gets deposited in human minds.
The problem of knowing ones soul is truly a problem of humanist community. How do we organise it - do we trust each other with deposition of our souls?
The first example - of a man who does not know his own soul - to build and prolong the humanist ideal requires a honesty in interractions. Because the person who does not know his/her soul has to be formed through others, he/she becomes object of humanist art created in the hands of community.
With that the humanist ideal becomes mitigated through community dynamics, the logic of the crowd.
The benefit of this situation however is that the man who does not know his soul is a perfect image of his soul deposited in others, a perfect image of current state of humanist ideal.
The second example is the man who knows his soul - this man has two lives (La Double vie de Véronique?) - one is life of an object, the other life of an creator, sculptor of this object.
He can, just as any other depositor of his soul, have a word(although still singular against the entire community) - about "what kind of human he is".
This situation has two outplays - either we have a man who is a complete individualist - he claims only his own observations of himself as an art object are the most important ones, and that others are simply too dilletante to handle his soul correctly.
Or we have a man who is in a constant state of pertractations with the community about what is his true identity(soul). In that sense he gives himself to the community, but also participates in the judgement.
He is capable of both defending himself, and understanding the point of view of community.
The key thing to remember here is that the evaluation of human soul is made always in the light of ideal (predominantly the humanist ideal), and thus is not entirely up to the individuals.
The ideal is the constituent of community, and ideal of man is a constituent of each personality rising in this community.
Therefore the most important thing to discuss is - what is this ideal of man. How do we define the universal aspects. What are the necessary constituents, and where each person has freedom of improvisation. Without clear definition of this (and other) ideals, community can not exist.
But we must remember this definition is equally about what should be defined, and what should be left undefined. Ideal is not a platonic figure. It must in it's definition have openings, and thus constraints on definition. Ideals are not about creating an image of a perfect citizen, but about creating a medium for transfer of community, a transfer protocol, a shared space of regulated interaction.
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