[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> [ot]FW.:.the era of postmodernism ended:.:

["Wilkerson, Richard" <rcwilk@dreamgate.com>]

Re: use of illegitimate processes to return us to the middle ages:


> >you know, i read someone saying that with the fall of the twin towers
> >which were a perfectly postmodernist piece of architecture -- reflections
> >of each other without an original -- the era of postmodernism ended.
> >self-reference, irony, repetition, etc., all the attributes of
> >postmodernism which basically devoid creation of reality, authenticity
> >will be now void as reality came down crashing a hundred stories and
> >rendered things meaningful.
>
>if that is true, & seeing how things are looking now, it seems we have
>finally found the answer as to WHAT comes after post-modernism:
>
>** the middle ages **
>
>coming up: a few hundred years of trusting the authority of your
>senses.  e.g. "yech, d0od, the plague REALLY hurt!!!"

I agree that regression seems quite possible right now.  But....

  The Middle Ages is one of the possibilities. But so is post-modern 
inclusiveness.
   Running these events through post-structuralist theory of Deleuze and 
Guattari   suggests that this is a time we *are* vulnerable to the 
appropriation and narrow channelling of meaning and value as the bodies of 
the wtc fall back upon the society and pull the rest of us down with them, 
yet we also have the chance to manifest other possibilities by distributing 
the possible connections and multiplying their relations to infinity.

How?  Some ideas have been emerging lately, such as cultural aikido rather 
than re-establishing the same fantasy of balance,  and such as this being 
an opportunity to re-think and re-work social relations on a global scale.

  Part of this is how we handle this period which might be called 
"Passage."   We haven't fully left, we haven't fully arrived. We we in 
transit.   By saying its over, by closing down the possible exits and 
ignoring that big, big changes occur through ruptures (note the loss of the 
dinosaurs and emergence of mammals) rather than re-establishing old 
regimes, we will introduce as dominate only the ideas thus far actualizing 
across the social landscape. By recognizing the transition flux and 
tolerating its indeterminateness, there is a chance to generate more forms 
of novelty which can legitimize inclusive social structures that can 
survive the 21st century and themselves be productive.

  I keep getting posts of people very frustrated with all the thinking 
rather than acting online.  But this is exactly the part of the process we 
are in. After the conductive connections are made, there is a moment of 
anti-production, a moment where the plane of consistency that has been 
produced by the connections suddenly throws them off.  (we pull back in 
horror, for example).  These are like nodes of the network. During this 
disjunctive synthesis all production stops, but in each rejected  node, 
potential connections are registered and their relations are multiplied to 
infinity, (thanks to Holland for that analogy).

  If this process is appropriated by restrictions on thinking, on clamping 
down on networking relations, on censorship or reactive rage and mob rule, 
the network is collapsed into just a few possible connections that become 
the virtual world through which the society travels.

In a Lacanian sense,  I might say that the flaw in center of the universe 
(may sarton phrase)  is the great signifier, and the WTC plays out this 
absent center that signifies everything at the moment.   But this is only 
so when real relations and networks break down, when one link in the 
semotic chain is removed and set up against the rest as its determining 
interpreter.  If a society or network cannot hold the tension between its 
extreems, then it will collapse into one or the other.  Keeping the free 
flow of relations open during this passage seems crucial to maintaining a 
strong network and avoiding returning to the middle ages where the events 
are immediately appropriated by the sign the despot and made to point only 
to him.

As Susan Sontag has recently said, "Let's suffer together, but let's not be 
stupid together"

  - Richard Wilkerson
     


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