Comments on: Words That Shimmer in Ink and Then Evaporate into Pixels

By: Tim

Tim — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 04:21:35 +0000

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.

By: Melissa

Melissa — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 22:44:43 +0000

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.

By: Nav

Nav — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 21:17:37 +0000

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?

By: Tim

Tim — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 19:08:26 +0000

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.

By: Melissa

Melissa — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 16:51:01 +0000

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!

By: Nav

Nav — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 03:53:09 +0000

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.