Re: [-empyre-] text, criticism + geography

Sean Cubitt <seanc@waikato.ac.nz> · Wed Jul 31 12:10:02 2002

On Reiner and Melinda's posts: there's a risk in valorising sensation 
over (verbal) rationalism: it tends to reinforce the binary 
reason/irrational. The point is to get out the far side. Eg sensation 
is valueless; it suffers the historica malformation of use-value when 
sensation is analysed into subject-object relations; it becomes even 
more curiously dialectical when in a third movement it begins to 
reconstiture subject-object as causality, logic, empiricsm, rhetoric, 
legal discourse andsoforth.
The problem with 'verbal' in this sense (as with 'reason') is that it 
is all on the subject's side, "what distinguishes us from the dumb 
beasts" or nature generally. Oh, and what distinguishes us (human 
beings endowed with speech and raionality) from the machines
A purpose of net.art might then be to dis-establish the distinction, 
between subjects and machines.
And to reorient the priorities of thinking through communication, no 
longer as representation (subject represents object, perpetually 
inadequately), but as subject-subject (a subject represents a subject 
to another subject; a person is a medium)
 - - in such a way that the category 'subject' is no longer distinct 
from the category 'object' (a person is also an animal and a machine, 
an animal is also a machine and a person . . . the universe is 
communicative, informational rather than a colocation of objects)
The network antedates its termini. Before TCP/IP there was the telecom network.
s

Reiner Said
HTML is text based because the programming language was created (at first)
to work with "text". Every macro-programming language is based on verbal
language to be more easy to handle and understood.

melinda Said
 >

 which makes net.art a sort of chaotic anti heirarchical collage of
 sensation, totally unrelated to any language or geographical structure,
 without the necessitry to define values of form content , without value

 judgements of good and bad etc....

--

Sean Cubitt * Screen and Media Studies * University of Waikato * 
Private Bag 3105 * Hamilton * New Zealand * seanc@waikato.ac.nz * T: 
+64 (0)7 838 4543 * F: +64 (0)7 838 4767
http://www.waikato.ac.nz/film