6 april 2000

What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.

Wittgenstein understood the fact that the world that is created by its representation within the imagination will have in it very troubling mistakes of vision. His point is that when there arises a point which cannot be deduced logically, through propositional logic or calculus, then a person must leave it alone, let it be a problem. He also went on to point out that not all problems are meant to be answered; some must be dissolved and destroyed within its own complex of motives and countermotives. The problems that cannot be answered must be passed over and thought less of. Thus we do not have to deal with problems that do not present logical conclusions or problems that are non-sense, shouldn't have been asked in the first place.

California, as an entity, as a machine itself, exemplifies the efforts of Wittgestein to dissolve problems and allow for faith to conquer the notion that the horizon is unlimited. California, in its "hyperreality" as Baurillard argues, is the zone of contact that melts with one look towards its de-centralized center. It has no center that one can perceive readily. It is territorially expaned, in the West , out over the Pacific--the Californian lake. The societies of the East Asiatic nations are nothing but combinations of techno-capitalism that has evolved in California. It is the production zone for the ideas that arise in California. The traditions, centuries old, of the East Asiatic nations dissolve like the problems of Wittgenstein, into a mix of sushi, Hello Kitty, rave culture, Buddhism, Confucianism, neo-Christianity, Chinese cuisine, and the urban detritus of Tokyo--the seeping feeling of demise that these peoples feel when they themselves look out towards the East and recognize the technopoly that California has produced and the whole world has consumed with equal vigor.

California is often called "ahead of its time"--it is a state of mind, of being. The dogma has it that what California is doing today, the United States will be doing tomorrow through the transfer of information, and the rest of the world will be doing the day after. According to the devotees of California's massive electronic cults, it is the seminal ground for new ideas, one vast laboratory of the human spirit. Californians are the ultimate pioneers, whose precious self-consciousness makes them more than ordinary humans. It is not merely a matter of adventurousness fueled by great wealth, of people playing with privilege. Land and man, we are further invited to believe, are bonded together in a mystical unity. California is uniquely what it is because the land itself is magical. Its vibrations enter into the soul and irrevocably alter it.

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