Lighten up so you can get serious.
Get serious so you can lighten up.
Communicative Practices [CP]
CP2 -- What our age needs is communicative intellect. For intellect to be communicative, it must be active, practical, engaged. In a culture of the simulacrum, the site of communicative is electronic media. In the mediatrix, praxis precedes theory, which always arrives too late. The communicative intellect forgets the theory of communicative praxis in order to create a practice of communication.
CP3 -- Where would Socrates hold his dialogues today? In the media and on the net.
CP4 -- In simcult, the responsible writer must be an imagologist. Since image has displaced print as the primary medium for discourse, the public use of reason can no longer be limited to print culture. To be effective, writing must become imagoscription that is available to everyone.
CP6 -- [overlap of letters (Chang/Esa): striking typographical effect] ...I have a suggestion for a totally different kind of media event.
CP7 -- I suspect academics realize that the changes already under way call into question the very foundation upon which the university is built -- print culture and everything that goes with it. To make matters worse, the general public is largely unaware of what is at stake in recent technological developments.
CP8 -- In simcult, print accomplishes less and less. Effective publication requires electronic amplification on a network that knows no bounds. The mediatrix allows high voltage communication-at-a-distance.
CP9 -- Expert language is a prison for knowledge and understanding. A prison for intellectually significant relationships. It is time to move beyond the institutional practices of triviledge, toward networks and surfaces, toward the play of superficiality, toward interstanding.
CP10 -- Responsible thought cannot remain confined within the walls of the academy but must take to the street. In simcult, the street is the media. There is no reasonable alternative to electronic discourse.
CP10 -- Media and the net form a matrix of non-linear thinking and communication.
CP12 -- In some circumstances, it is even necessary to use media against media to do what a given medium does not usually allow.
CP13 -- The only responsible intellectual is one who is wired.
CP13 -- The return of figure disfigures the disfiguration of concepts by reinscribing the imago in the midst of the logos.
CP13 -- A paradox of the imaginary register: the proliferation of images is iconoclastic.
Simcult [SC]
SC1 -- Postmodern society is radically decentered and thoroughly disseminated...
SC2 -- In simcult, excess becomes excessive.
SC3 -- For Hegel, it is concept all the way down. In the twentieth century, the Hegelian concept becomes real in electronic telecommunications. The net wires the world for Hegelian Geist.
SC4 -- Power becomes imaginary.
SC4 -- To survive in simcult, one must learn to live the impossibility of dis-illusionment.
SC4 -- The threat of simcult is that outrage becomes unfashionable.
SC5 -- [Taylor to Saarinen] What we need, I explained, is not money but help in finding potential sponsors. [Opposite this on the page: "I am what I buy."]
SC6 -- Simcult is a culture of instrumentality and nothing but instrumentality. Precisely the lack of any end-in-itself makes it all the more urgent to fabricate ends carefully. Instead of proclaiming the end of technology, we need to refashion the management of ends. End-production is not a terminal condition but is a creative beginning.
SC6 -- The play of the simulacrum creates a lite culture.
SC6-7 -- Two lines of text broken across the page fold -- hard to figure out
SC8 -- Postmodernism marks the end of liberalism... [because (1) there is no more individual subject to redeem; and (2) the opposition between public and private collapses] -- And yet, you must still face others.
SC8 -- Simcult is fandom.
SC9 -- Postmodern capitalism involves processes of decentralization that presuppose diverse modes of production and pluralized forms of consumption.... From hypertexts to e-mail to video and virtual reality, economic processes are regulated by creating multiple codes for local interests.
SC9 -- Postmodernism does not, however, simply negate modernism. To the contrary, the universality and homogeneity of modernism constitute the mediatrix that creates the possibility of articulating the singularity and heterogeneity of postmodernism. Universality engenders singularity even as heterogeneity presupposes homogeneity.
SC9 -- Images proliferate, the net spreads, the volume rises. No one is in control.
SC9 -- Can the energy of modernism be regenerated in the midst of postmodern irony and cynicism? Can art become life become art in more revolutionary and productive ways than modernism ever dreamed?
Styles ["ST"]
ST2 -- If we pull it off, they will be the first to try to cash in on it.
ST4 -- [On fragments]
ST4 -- Whether intended or unintended, the postmodern fragment calls into question the metaphysics of the modern fragment. And yet, can postmodern fragmentary styles elude the structures of metaphysics? To elude is not to escape. Even though there is no exit from metaphysics, the metaphysical is not necessarily all-encompassing, totalizing, or exhaustive. To write fragments that are not modern would be to remain forever elusive.
ST5 -- What comes after deconstruction? Imagology. To realize what deconstruction has made possible, it is necessary to move into the world of telecommunications technology. The notion of textuality cannot be radicalized until it is transformed from print to other media. To perform dissemination is to electrify the signifier.
ST7 -- Hypertexts free the play of signs that has always constituted writing. This play is both trivial and deadly serious.
Lighten up so you can get serious.
Get serious so you can lighten up.
ST7 -- Styles are not only written; they must also be lived. [Saarinen's polka-dot shoes.]
ST8 -- The imagologist can only figure through figures. Images are not merely the object of study but are also the medium of thought, action, and communication. [This statement is set in two ellipses around the word object, forming the design of an eye.]
ST9 -- The disappearance of the signified in the endless field of signifiers is embraced as an unavoidable cultural condition. This destiny should not be suffered with a heavy heart but affirmed in all its creative richness.
ST9 -- The imagologist suffers from the mania for signifying.
ST9 -- In the post-age, all writing is post-script.
Naivete ["N"]
N3 -- Media philosophy is philosophy for children.
N5 -- In a culture of potential ecotastrophe, academic neutrality paves the way for a polite, silent rape. What is needed is the strength of vision for the obvious.
N5 -- Except you become as little children, you cannot enter the kingdom of the simulacrum. [Set vertically, with the T in NAIVETE falling after the comma]
Media Philosophy ["MP"]
MP2 -- For philosophy, technology is the return of the repressed.
MP2 -- Public use of reason in the age of media is MEDIA PHILOSOPHY.
MP3 -- The text publicizes the global classroom, which, in turn, publicizes the text.
MP5 -- Why imagologies? Why media philosophy? Because even in a postmodern age, we must continue to speak and act in an effort to make a difference. An adequate philosophy for the postmodern age will refuse to endure the status quo -- the cool postmodern cynicism with its history-has-ended and agony-in-indifference.
MP5 -- In the media, one-liners are everything. Impressions are everything. Style, personality, and a [sense of?] timing are everything. There is no possibility -- and this cannot be emphasized too much -- of ruling out the scholar's nightmare of ambiguity and, even more shocking, radical, outraged, emotionally charged misunderstanding. For those who still believe in the dream of transparent intersubjectivity or an ideal speech community of the experts who trade clear and distinct ideas, essences, and concepts, misunderstanding constitutes an abiding fear. But misunderstanding can release energy. The law of the media is the law of dirty hands; you cannot be understood if you are not misunderstood.
MP5 -- Those one meets in the media are not the abstract others of elegant, highbrow philosophy but the farting others of the supermarkets and public toilets -- the unheroic and intellectually distasteful taxpaying masses. To be at the mercy of customers, consumers -- that's the horrid part of media philosophy. To be subjected to unavoidable misunderstandings, formed by the ridiculous, laughable, unlettered and unsophisticated rednecks, most of whom have never read one single page of any groundbreaking volume of this century or any other century -- that's the condition of media philosophy. In this context, our most developed and esteemed cognitive machinery suddenly seems hopelessly outdated. The more sophisticated the tactical arsenal, the less useful it becomes. The more it draws from history, from classics, the less force and creative energy it has.
MP7 -- I may have to do some lectures for them but that's OK, I like these guys.
MP8 -- [Digression on Petra Kelly. Her tragedy being the resistance to personality cult among the German Greens. Oh for a philosopher-superstar!]
MP9 -- Media philosophy rejects analytics in favor of communication. Explosive, outrageous communication is the lifeblood of hope in the world of simulacra, bureaucracy and collapsing ecosystems.
MP10 -- The imagologist must not fear banality but exploit it.
MP10 -- When a traditional philosopher observes the performance of a media philosopher he sighs: "Fashion, mere fashion. It will pass. Better to avoid the fleeting and devote oneself to the abiding." But while he waits, what passes is the fashion of the abiding.
MP11 -- In the age of the fragmentary, with its exponentially increasing administrative and technical structures, the synthetic function of philosophy must loom large. This is not a call for totalizing discourse of the kind criticized by leading theorists of the postmodern, but is an appeal to undertake the effort to discern connections and interrelations for the purpose of evaluation and intervention.
MP11 -- The colonization of the critical, synthetic and articulative by scholarly and abstracto-expertized ways of constituting a 'serious' subject matter is what media philosophy sets out to fight. To pursue this course means opening the door to radically local, transient, and idiosyncratic philosophical strategies.
MP11 -- The erotics of media philosophy are predominantly female, having to do with sensualities, impressions, continuities, subtleties and dispersed orgasms. Such polymorphous perversity is, nonetheless, made possible by an infrastructure of aggressive and goal-directed male erotics with ultra-speedy transmissions and sudden climaxes.
MP12 -- Media philosophy must be mobile, manipulative, manic.
MP13 -- [Esa and Pipsa in the gossip columns]
MP14 -- Madonna is one of the foremost imagologists in the world today. [The idea of "posing-for"]
MP15 -- In the media, it is essential to keep fresh. Reading the newspapers in the taxi on the way to the studio, I carry forward the project of dynamic superficialities. [Yes, and so did the media philosopher (king) named Ronald Reagan...]
MP15 -- In media philosophy, impressions count more than intelligence.
MP17 -- Literate reason and the literary critic have become relics of the past.
MP17 -- With the collapse of the literary as a powerhouse, the postmodern situation becomes torture for the class of intellectual elites. As dynamics change in favor of praxis and the instrumental, the engineers of academic find themselves running out of business. An age that is not centered around the idea is no longer willing to pay the price for concept-mongering. Realizing their waning power, conceptualists and idealists desperately try to produce theories of the non-conceptual, often invoking specially developed 'anti-concepts.' By so doing, they prove what they attempt to disprove -- their own growing irrelevance.
The business of self-respecting philosophy at this turn of history is not to crate or analyze conceptual abstractions. To the contrary, philosophers in the twenty-first century must create images of responsibility, vision and critical force.
MP17-18 -- Media philosophy is kitsch.
MP20 -- [To move from philosophy to literature was already a terrifying leap for the Anglo-Saxons (case of Kierkegaard cited). To move to imagology will be absolutely impossible for them.]
MP21 -- To be a media philosopher is to be a sign painter.
MP21 -- Media philosophy forms social sculptures rather than theories or textual products.
Ending the Academy ["EA"]
EA1 -- In a hypertextual environment, all philosophy must be interactive. Monologue becomes dialogue or, more precisely, polylogue. The disappearance of the monological voice is a radical revolution in the history of philosophy. What usually goes unnoticed is that what has traditionally passed for dialogue is actually monologue. When monologue (even in its dialogical form) becomes impossible, classical philosophy comes to an end.... Professional philosophers remain committed to an elitist culture, which dismisses low or popular culture as insignificant. ...The media philosopher, by contrast, is committed to smuggling shit back into the house of thought.
EA5 -- The imagination must be undisciplined. That is why the university cannot bear it.
EA5 -- To argue for maintaining the canon in the age of telewriting is like demanding truth from television.
EA6 -- [On American philosophy and its European imports]
EA7 -- The triviledge that legitimizes the academic critic renders him impotent. Merely a Peeping Tom who gazes from afar but refuses to enter the fray, he becomes nothing more than a limp dick.
EA8 -- [Philosophy does not yield a marketable product.]
EA9 -- ...the critical theory in which these notions are articulated is not advanced but is really behind the times. In cyberspace, theory is practice before it is theory: God is gone, history is over, the self is scattered and the book is exploded. The nostalgia of the conservatives is reactionary, their struggle futile. Theory must become even more radical than I ever imagined or they ever feared.
Education ["ED"]
ED1 -- The global classroom explodes the foundations of educational institutions by restructuring the space and transforming the time of teaching and learning. The master teacher is no longer a 'man of letters' but becomes a purveyor of images who steals the show. The best students know how to trade purloined images.
ED3 -- [Story about finding Marx's thesis on Feuerbach in East Berlin: "Philosophers have interpreted the world, the point is to change it" -- and then being arrested for trying to photograph this sentiment.]
ED3 -- Marx was right, the point is to change the world. And the part of today's world that most needs changing is the university. [Opinions on the transformation of universities to multiversities.]
ED3 -- While the modern university transforms students into passive consumers who have no choice other than to accept or reject the product offered in the lecture hall, the postmodern multiversity changes students into consumers who are producers.
ED4-5 -- [Death of Taylor's father; anecdote of the virtual money]
Pedagogies ["PE"]
PE6 -- If the global classroom simply replicates the structures of power that have made it possible and provides no critique of contemporary socio-political configurations, it is a failure.
PE7 -- One important aspect of the conclusion of the seminar was unsatisfactory. The students resisted, even resented writing term papers. Frank and stupid story about this. Reflection that maybe hypertext would have been a better idea, as this would draw upon the logic of interstanding.
PE8 -- Line gives way to network to create texts whose logic is different from that of the printed page. To leave the printed page and enter the space of telewriting is to enjoy something like the return of the repressed.
PE9 -- [Spontaneous appearance of first names in the seminar]
Videovision ["V"]
V1 -- [Taylor's (?) father recorded first encounter with TV in the family]
V2 -- My father recorded my brother's first encounter with television. His reaction was extraordinary. Jumping up and down in front of the TV, he repeatedly tried to stick his finger in the mouth of the person who was singing on the screen. Though there was no sound for the movies, you could 'hear' his shrieks of delight as he 'touched' the 'person' in front of him. In this moment, the culture of the simulacrum was born.
[Compare this moment to the incident in DeLillo's White Noise when Babette appears on local TV.]
V3 -- The televisual reflects the presence of absence that is the absence of presence.
V4 -- [Claiming to be "wired to the net" -- when in fact all they're doing is sending video through phone lines. Hmm.]
V6 -- [Boys, girls, and video games.]
V7 -- [Some actual Finnish here.]
V8-9 -- [Syllabus for the seminar.]
Televangelism ["TE"]
TE1 -- [Irony of conservatives being more advanced with the technology than liberals. A familiar story.]
TE5 -- [Jaron Lanier.]
TE6 -- [Fax instead of e-mail.]
TE7 -- [An interlineated page. Matrix and mater.]
Superficiality ["SU"]
SU1 -- To attempt to escape the play of surfaces is to continue the dream of western philosophy and religion. To awaken from this dream is not to suffer disillusionment but is to appreciate, perhaps for the first time, the endless potential of superficiality.
SU2 -- [Esa's hit rock album (in Finland).]
SU4 -- [Windows and the principle of replacement in cyberspace.]
SU5 -- One must look at not through teletexts.
SU5 -- Imagology is a throw-away philosophy.
SU7 -- You might say that skipping through a book is as important an aspect of 'creative reading' as the cumbersome, clumsy process of actually going through a sentence. You might say that part of professionalism is one's ability to sense intuitively those parts of the textmass that are not really worth reading, together with an ability to concentrate on the so-called essential. All this is true but does not conceal the scandal of reading: the fact is that the culture of books, printing and reading remain overwhelmingly defined by the micropowers of non-reading. For no one reads that much. A superb bestseller might sometime win the moment but mostly both thick and thin books go to the bookshelf untouched.
SU6 -- Personally, I seldom read books. [Though we don't know which "I" this is.]
SU7 -- In academia, the culture of articles, reports and other least publishable units will thus necessarily strengthen itself, and fragmentary textures will become still more fragmentary.
SU8 -- In late capitalism, we have entered a culture of excessive refusal, a turn-channel society, in which categories like choice, positive will and prioritization lose their force and become constituted through a light-minded negativity. I.e., we don't vote for a candidate anymore, we vote against the other guy.
SU8 -- Shock-effect reading -- that is what I would recommend. Hypertextual reading, in the sense in which you jump around at will in a given textmass, not necessarily intending to grasp the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Instead, you just pump gas into your engine.
SU10 -- [Critique of Derrida's afflatus as super-reader.]
SU10 -- Thus, in praxis-oriented media philosophy, writing and reading lose their unquestioned status as signposts and operational forces. The stronger the urge to act, the lighter the command to follow conventional routes, even routes of capital victories in the days past. This means, among other things, that in your strategies of reading, the shock-effect approach is more acceptable than cumbersome, conventional methods.
SU11 -- [The smell of babies versus the dignity of books.] Love is commitment, and commitment is your urge. Who cares if you don't read all the books, most of the books, none of the books completely: the praxis of reading is but one means among others; this is an age that calls for instrumentalities to step down from their commanding status to mere means.
SU11 -- [Enclosed in a black circle]: If you read books, justify it.
SU13 -- [Argument for critical superficiality.]
SU14 -- [E-mail header.]
SU15 -- Ours is the age of post-literacy. How does one write for a post-literate age? This question will remain unanswerable as long as we do not distinguish post-literacy from illiteracy. To be post-literate is not necessarily to be illiterate. The illiterate cannot read while the post-literate read otherwise.
Telewriting ["TW"]
TW2 -- Perhaps if we were to write televisually, kids would want to read more.
TW3 -- [Evanscence of electronic writing.]
TW5 -- If an electronic text can be published in printed form, is it really electronic? The alternative would be to give up print and publish an electronic text. But the technology necessary for accessing electronic texts is still rather limited. Furthermore, most of the people we want to reach remain committed to print. There is no sense preaching to the converted. Our dilemma is that we are living at the moment of transition from print to electronic culture. It is too late for printed books and too early for electronic texts. Along this boundary we must write our work.
TW6 -- In the worlds of hypertexts, art forms are not autonomous but overlap without end. Word, image and sound intersect in the bowels of the machine and are projected in such a way that one must read, look and hear simultaneously.
TW6 -- Technology never catches up with itself. [The word "hypertext" is not in the spell-checker dictionary.]
TW7 -- Baudrillard treats America like America treats everything, yet for many of your students the book seemed like an offense.
TW9 -- Does deconstruction theorize hypertext or hypertext literalize deconstruction? [Discussion of Derrida and Glas.]
TW10 -- Writing, therefore, must become sampling and reading lip-syncing.
TW11 -- [Posited essay on the technology of erasing.]
Ad-diction
[No entries for this chapter]
Interstanding ["IS"]
IS1 -- When depth gives way to surface, under-standing becomes inter-standing. To comprehend is no longer to grasp what lies beneath but to glimpse what lies between.
IS2 -- Understanding has become impossible because nothing stands under. Interstanding has become unavoidable because everything stands between.
IS9 -- When truth dies, a new realm of creative expression opens for those who refuse to believe in ghosts.
IS13 -- Interstanding is the last hope for simcult.
Netropolis ["NT"]
NT1 -- I have now two phone lines coming to my house, two coming to my studio, a fax, a university number and an email address, a pocket-size portable phone and a mobile phone in my car. Everyone says it's impossible to get hold of me.
NT2 -- It is not enough to say that modernism is an urban phenomenon and postmodernism is a suburban phenomenon. What emerges with the spread of cyberspace is a social construction that is neither urban nor suburban. The mediatrix creates a simcit in which the very conditions of spatiality and temporality are transformed.
NT3 -- The netropolis: decentralized, non-hierarchical, locally empowered -- if you can pay for the juice.
NT3 -- Is the net a city without walls or do walls merely take new forms?
NT4 -- In the simcit, smaller (not bigger) is better. The grand dream is to miniaturize until you are able to hold the world in the palm of your hand.
NT4 -- Though homecoming no longer seems possible, homelessness is not inescapable.
NT4 -- [Electrotects]
NT6 -- As the reflection and embodiment of the simcult, the simcit will be neither the utopia of modernists or postmodernists nor the dystopia of their critics but will be something else, something other, something as yet incomprehensible and unknown. The impossible task of electrotecture is welcome to this disruptive other by sponsoring endless construction, deconstruction and reconstruction.
NT7 -- While the space-time of the grid is a representation of the typographic space of the book, the space-time of the network is the reinscription of the spacing of the hypertext.
NT8 -- [Esa notes (apropos of what?) that he and his wife are subjects of magazine gossip, and that news of their twin sons' birth was national splash.]
NT8 -- [Saarinen's engagement with Finnish business culture -- compare McLuhan's.]
NT9 -- There are no citizens in the simcit -- only passengers. Everyone is in transit without a final destination. Life becomes leben ohne warum.
NT9 -- In simcit, the public square reappears on the private screen.
Electronomics ["EL"]
EL3 -- Instead of keeping up with the Joneses, it now becomes necessary to be different from the Joneses. In this cultural situation, the only thing that seems to unite people is the desire to be different. When heterogeneity displaces homogeneity, postmodernism is born.
EL4 -- [Death of god, death of gold]
EL5 -- [Business into art into business: "the aestheticization of the commodity."]
EL7-- ...while Marx's claim that socio-politico-cultural transformation requires assuming control of the means of production might be correct for industrial society, in post-industrial society, transformation must come about through intervention in the reproductive processes of the imaginary.... It is... possible to intervene in the system of the imaginary in such a way that one can use structures with and against themselves to create possibilities that were previously unavailable or repressed.
EL7 -- [Tension between Taylor and Saarinen over the latter's naivete and anti-intellectualism: "...you must rethink your disposition as an impossible dis-position."]
EL9-- In simcult, all economics is voodoo economics.
EL10 -- [Stock market continues to boom even with economy in decline (witness 1987); hyperreality of markets.]
EL10 -- Debt is unreal if we do not have to pay it back today.
Postmodern art makes the disappearance of money appear.
EL11 -- [If human blood can be contaminated, can't the cyber-money also be vulnerable?]
Telepolitics ["TP"]
TP1 -- We desperately need a political economy of the image.
TP5 -- [Saarinen's paean to love beyond theory:] I refuse to step into the trap set by the intelligence of our times that says: "Anything you say can be used against you -- so better be careful in your wordings." I don't want to be conceptually cautious and argumentatively careful -- that's simply not on the top of my agenda. I have better and, I think, more significant, things to do. For me media philosophy, as a form of life in the media age, injects an element of sanity and hope in the midst of all-encompassing mechanisms of conceptual clarity and institutions of triviledge.
TP7 -- [Teledemocracy and its discontents: ] the "leader" becomes the recording surface for the will of the people.
TP10 -- If environmental catastrophe can be delayed by the institution of rigorous recycling programs, then perhaps postmodernism is the only responsible aesthetic practice.
Speed ["SP"]
SP1 -- On the net there is no speed limit. [Really?]
SP2 -- To think at the speed of light -- this is the impossible challenge! The way we were educated in print culture does not prepare us to communicate in that urgent instant. We must start to think, perceive, criticize and synthesize in new ways that make communication in the various media both possible and profitable.
SP4 -- [Needed: the rockstar philosopher (Warhol, Madonna); Esa as American philosopher.]
SP6 -- Speed privileges certainty and assertion. When there is never enough time, it is necessary to make your point quickly and concisely. It is not possible to slow down long enough to allow time for uncertainty and questions. But when there is not enough time for uncertainty, certainty becomes destructive -- of others and eventually of ourselves.
SP9 -- For the past several decades, philosophers and critics have been arguing about the end of history and the closure of the book. But these debates consistently miss the crucial point. The issue is neither philosophical nor literary but technological. History ends and the book disappears when narrative continuity collapses in the instant. Speed is the agent of this collapse. To attempt to resurrect history or reopen the book is to try to put the brakes on the speed that has become our milieu.
SP9 -- An axiom of the hypertextual environment: the speed of information processing is inversely proportional to the rate of retention of the information processed.
SP9 -- Speed, speed and more speed. Would it be possible for a revolution to occur so quickly that no one even noticed it?
Telerotics ["TR"]
TR3 -- Conventional erotics is a longing for that from which we have been separated; but erotics in the net is all about connection.
TR10 -- The mediatrix is a pacifier for adults. That is why we suck on it so long and hard.
Cyberwar ["CY"]
CY2 -- [One of the students presented an image collage in lieu of an essay.]
Virtuality ["VY"]
VY1 -- [Dialogue of signified and signifier; parting of the ways.]
VY4 -- [Treatment of MUSEs]
VY7 -- [The Grand Canyon and the recalcitrant daughter: "I've already seen pictures of it."]
Body Snatching ["BS"]
BS2 -- [Story about Taylor's father and the unwatchable video; but is an unwatchable video truly a record?]
BS3 -- From one point of view, it seems that, in spite of radical technological developments, there has been no substantial change that makes our world qualitatively different from previous worlds. Accordingly, an ontological shift does not seem to have taken place and the changes we have undergone appear to be epistemological. If this is so, we would have to claim something like a universal truth: every notion of truth, reality, etc., has always been mistaken, for the true and the real are always already simulacra. But the culture of the simulacrum makes it impossible to establish universal claims of any kind. Epistemological or ontological? The question remains undecidable.
BS4 -- ...the history of the twentieth century is the story of the progressive dematerialization of culture.
BS7 -- [Actually watching a video tape of the dead father: image is part of reality; disembodiment. And on the same page, a note that women students are more skeptical about disembodiment than men.]
BS8 -- Where do I meet my body in the net?
Cyborgs ["CB"]
CB4 -- [Taylor is diabetic, hence couldn't survive without artificial insulin. Who ain't a cyborg?]
CB4 -- [The sugar substitute EQUAL as the consummate postmodern product, because it claims that the artifact is the equivalent of the natural object.]
CB5 -- In the age of cyborgs, do people evolve into machines, or do machines evolve into people?
Shifting Subjects ["SS"]
SS3 -- [Saarinen's sex fantasy: the televised kiss:] Very funny, corny, but above all, cheap. I can understand why not all professors of philosophy want to find themselves in situations like this. ...Fortunately, I did wear my golden brown silk suit, matching tie, and my famous polka-dot shoes.
SS8 -- From Augustine to Hegel to Husserl, the notion of an integrated subject is bound to coherent narrative structures. Narrativity joins past and future in a present where recollection and anticipation intersect. Video shatters subjectivity by launching an assault on narrativity from two directions. On the one hand, video can speed up events until narrative sequence collapses into a high velocity flux. On the other hand, video can slow down events until the snap the line of narrative by its infinite extension. When experience is videoized, patterns of cohesion shift; line becomes montage.
Net Effect ["NE"]
NE1 -- To resist electronic technology is as futile as trying to turn back the tides. It has already swept over us in ways we have yet to realize. It is not a question of whether to accept or reject this new world but of who is going to use it and how. To resist the possibilities opened by the mediatrix is to leave this extraordinary technology in the hands of others.
NE5 -- Simcult seems to be hopelessly anti-intellectual. But what appears to be anti-intellectualism is actually a call for alternative intellectual practices. ...On the assembly line of knowledge, the intellectual produces print, which, in turn, produces the intellectual. Networking unravels these cycles of production and reproduction to create new intellectual instrumentalities. The intellectual who remains devoted to print culture becomes a vestigial organ that gradually withers away without leaving a trace.
NE6 -- The reason that the theoreticians of the postmodern remain imprisoned in the realm of the textual is that they are looking for potential narratives in the shelters of written culture. Noticing that nobody has published a grandiose large-scale religion textbook on ecotastropic-techno-administrative-production systematics, which is endorsed by millions and carried out in the realm of actual praxis by the mighty, our postmodern literary aces brilliantly conclude that "metanarratives are dead."
NE8 -- The rhythm of datawaves marks an oscillation that has become unavoidable. To surf these waves is to realize that erring never ends.
NE10 -- A revolution in the making: On the net, authors become propertyless.
Gaping ["GP"]
GP3 -- The imagologist is a spacemaker whose task is to create a gap where others can write. For there to be such an opening, everything must remain inconclusive. The absence of answers creates the opening of the media philosopher's quest-ion. The only writing worth reading today is spacey. Turn on, tune in, space out.
GP11 -- There is an urgent need for an electronic environmentalism. Our responsibility to our children and future generations must include not only the preservation of the so-called natural environment but also the responsible enrichment of the electronic environment. The living space that is becoming our world is as much electronic as natural. The matrix in all of its embodiments must be cultivated.
GP13 -- Our "book" will, in a certain sense, be a non-book. It should not be limited by the linear logic of the past, which urges the reader to proceed from the first page to the second, and then continue in the order marked buy page numbering, from left to right, down and up, following page-turning conventions all the way to the end. Like a hypertext, the reader should be free to chart alternative courses through the wordmass we fabricate. The work must also be riddled with gaps, spaces and openings that invite the reader to write.
Endpaper: ad for a collection of fabrics by the book's designer, marketed by Marimekko.