so here we are. half-conscious slaves to images we have constructed of ourselves. disciples to a god created in the image of man. stone-cutters for the tower of babel constructed of language, a network of information. pilots within an effectively limitless objectification (effectively because we are still limited to objectification, to communication while absent from the present).
what would a history of objectification include? we must trace a line through the history of language, of art, of building, of god. objectification can not be removed from its context. (if only foucault wrote a book on the history of god) i think that if we traced a history of god, we would find it to be a history of our objectification. since god represents our highest ideals of our selves, since god is an image of our self, our greatest objectification. perhaps primitive images of gods involved golden cows and wooden statues and what not, but this was to limit god, to physically objectify him. the physical forced god into a limit which was external to language and change. god became dynamic, imbedded into and available through language. as we freed god from his body, we simultaneously freed our selves from our body, to give our selves a soul. god was proposed to be beyond limits, beyond objectification, yet god remained a series of exclusions based on a binary language. god was good not evil. perhaps beyond this god became more inclusive. a part of everything. one god, one world, one soul. without definition, without existence, the void. god evolves simultaneously with language, since god is based on language. god becomes language. and it is this point that the tower of babel is struck down by fission. it is at the point when man becomes god, through his self-objectification – language. and it is only by destroying language that we can move off the tower of babel. the completion of the modern project was the equivalent of the last stone on the tower of babel. the completion of self-objectification. our selves made into a giant stone image. beyond the tower of babel? babel. beyond an all-inclusive image? beyond something that means everything? beyond definition? beyond belief? beyond meaning? sitting atop the tower of babel, we have conquered it all, constructed a language which includes everything and is therefore meaningless, a language which is equivalent in meaning to babel. the final stone of babel gave the realization that there was no more. every stone had been included and there was no more. every word meant every thing. upon completion of the circle there is no circle. this is the realization of our ascent to god. that we have included god in our selves and therefore there is no god. that we have included meaning in our language in our language and therefore it has no meaning. we climbed above the clouds, beyond our ascent, beyond our ability for meaning, beyond our ability for belief. only a beautiful blue void at the top of a meaningless tower. (it is only a labyrinth if you are looking for a way out.)
“There is no more hope for meaning. And without a doubt this is a good thing: meaning is mortal. But that on which it has imposed its ephemeral reign, what it hoped to liquidate in order to impose the reign of the Enlightenment, that is, appearances, they are immortal, invulnerable to the nihilism of meaning or of non-meaning itself…. This is where seduction begins.” (Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation 164)