Words That Shimmer in Ink and Then Evaporate into Pixels
At the beginning, let’s do two things: first, we start the circle here in Toronto, with my pal Melissa’s smart, precise post about what physical books do, can have done to them, and do to us; and secondly, we look at each other and remember: it is a circle.
Then we move to Brooklyn where we wonder about the upside of the fetish, the future of publishing and why books will become like vinyl, rare, precious and filled to the brim with aura.
Then we put on our Marxist caps and wonder about the future of the production of books and the networks and economies that sustain them. (Are we yet to seriously contemplate how the mode of production is changing? I think so. More on this later). Also, part 2.
Then we move into the ether to think about – well no, wait, before we think, we languish in the prose, in the aching spaces of what cannot be said, in the fluid of fiction. But once we are done, then we can think again: what does fiction look like when it both is and is not formally altered by the web, when its content is and is not web-ish, its understated, literary style cut through with fragmentation, a flickering screen and casual talk of different ways of fucking?
We end in San Francisco, 30 years from now, to imagine what the world will look like when, like the personalities that create them, books flicker in and out of existence, like time-lapse photography when the film and projector are on fire.
The book that effaces its history, the text that looks like it is made of ink, but then, shimmering, hovering before our eyes, disintegrates, and fades into a faint, diaphanous mist.
It occurs to me: I sorta’ gestured toward the idea that the web is producing fragmented ficiton. I think that gets the equation the wrong way round. More interesting is the notion that the tenets of postmodernism – fragmentation, multiple selves, pastiche, the ‘network preceding the individual instantiation’ – in fact laid the epistemological groundwork that rendered a concept like ‘the web’ comprehensible.
I’m with you on with your second iteration of the equation, although I wonder if we can determine with enough precision which came first–the way of thinking that led to the comprehensibility of the web, or the web itself. Any thoughts? And thanks for linking to me!
There’s a third term here — all of the media networks that fragment language, narrative, etc., that predate both the web AND postmodernism. Postcards, the telegraph and telephone, the card index, the latent potential of print… Postmodernism and the web share the same metaphors because they share the same history.
Okay, I phrased that badly. If we talk about what came first, then we’ll get into the messy business of trying to determine origins, thereby prioritising a particular ideology etc etc blah blah. It seems more accurate to say that there was a symbiotic epistemological relationship between the advent of both the web and post-structuralism/post-modernism. They are mutual manifestations of each other.
But I guess what I was wondering about was the performative effect of those metaphors that you spoke of, Tim – of whether we would have slipped so easily into the web and our ‘new’ (and yet not entirely new) thinking were it not for these visions of matrices, rhizomes and fractured, kaleidoscopic selves floating in our heads i.e. was a comfort with a kind of ideological or epistemological plurality, the split of both subjectivity and truth, necessary or part of or connected to the development of ‘the network’?
Or is this an attempt to prioritise academics and the linguistic turn over and above the material, technological change?
I’m thinking about your question, Nav, and I haven’t adequately formulated an answer yet. However, I think that there are going to be two answers, possibly quite different, for those of us who grew up/remember a pre-web world, and those who don’t.
Well, this is my hobbyhorse, trying to think about the prehistory of both poststructuralism and web culture through art, literature, philosophy, film, and media before 1950.
The biggest point I wanted to make is that poststructuralist critics, philosophers, etc., aren’t just prophesying contemporary digital culture in a vacuum. Their language, arguments, categories, metaphors are always about something prior and coexistent, not just the future. So it’s always worth keeping something of that in mind – oh, Heidegger’s thinking about the radio here, and Benjamin, he’s thinking about newsreels and street signs, and Barthes, glossy illustrated magazines…
As for the symbiosis, I think: There’s a language that grows out of practical experience that winds up getting enshrined in technical language of one kind or another, whether it’s science or industry or philosophy, that in turn opens up some possibilities for thinking and practice and forecloses some others. This, anyways, is what I think part of what Heidegger is saying, for example.
So you get these multiple genealogies. Some of them, through art, philosophy, or whatever, or going to influence behavior, or especially ways of talking about behavior — which is one thing you notice when somebody starts talking about the same phenomena who doesn’t have the same vocabulary and doesn’t valorize the same things. Fragmentation, decentralization, multiple registers competing for authority – this all sounds terrible!
So would the internet itself, or the experience of it, be vastly different if we didn’t have postmodernism as a lens through which to see it? Maybe. We definitely wouldn’t be able to have the same discussions about it – to see the same things as good or bad, without having to invent the new language on the fly.
And, since 85% of the Internet is still discussion about the Internet, then yes, it’s clear that the Internet would be completely different.