Brett Stalbaum: ..."increased speed of transfer toward frictionless and the
dissolution of physical barriers to the mediation of the capitalist subject,
by now a subject in space." Yes. Except that the subject is by now - writ
large - a subject in time: - I was pointing to a reading of Paul Virilio: a
chronopolitical lapsus [sic]:
since I was preparing an answer - by way of some questions - to certain
points raised Marina Vishmidt, Brett's timely intervention calls for a leap
on from - forgive me if I am wrongly characterising the deja vu, Brett - I
would like to insert this here, however fragmentary and out of order:
Marina Vishmidt:
" Analysing technologies by their intrinsic properties or as conducive to
certain types of social experience is called commodity fetishism, e.g. the
conceptual switch whereby relations between people are transmuted into
relations between things, and vice versa (things acquire social and
spiritual properties)."
In light of the preceding question Marina Vishmidt raises in her post -
"what does it
mean that everyone has a mobile phone?" - is it not necessary to acknowledge
and examine "commodity fetishism" as it relates to a certain system of
fetish - fetishisation and fetishism - wherein 'commodities' - mobile
phones, exemplarily - are feted and fated (insofar as their fetish status is
a foregone conclusion) as the preferred nodes for convergence and
concentration of information technologies? Isn't the feedback between the
thing itself, the phone, and its symbolic investment - personal(ised),
fashion(able) - what Herbert Blau calls the "nothing in itself" of a dress
until
addressed to the wearer's body - negotiated via a collapse onto the plane of
aesthetics? Is it possible therefore to fix any, even trans-, valorising
bets on a fluctuation occuring in the social/personal arena, mediated by an
aesthetics - a fluctuation of which its extra-rapidity seems oscillative -
without regard for fetish-value and fashion-function? Where is there then a
place for a normative/normalising social politics? - in the fetish or in the
system managing its imagination?
Marina Vishmidt writes of the normalisation of the mobile phone - perhaps
also its administered ubiquity - in its mediation of social relationships -
and maybe then its production of connectivity - as being like money: "a
total abstraction and concreteness at the same time". But isn't there in the
myth of the phone's alleged convenience already a relation to the capital of
time? I think the mediation at work entirely abstract - and that inclusive
of communication - since the communicative interaction assumed
de-concretises social relationship, digitising it and acting upon it
according to flows of money, power, managed and accelerated in the fetish
system ... - of late capitalism (which as it turns on Brett's deja vu always
runs ahead of time: -
(That said, this rhetoric got out of the way, there is the transparency of
the technology, the credulity with which it is approached, as unleashing a
constant stream of proleptic ventriloquisms - wholeheartedly embraced by
advertiser and consumer: "I'm going to be there in..." add temporal
coordinate; "I will be there"... assuming shared knowledge of temporal
coordinate... Yes, Virilio's compression - dromological - of timespace but
another effect: a talking forward and talking up of being ahead of oneself -
or acting out of a talking up, outsourced to the tech, rather than
mediated... a staking out - territorially - of an imagined time, projected
onto the screen of a second-guessed futurity; that futurity in turn, over
time, staked against the present's renunciation - the compacted - under
dromospheric pressure, Virilio - present-future amalgam exeperienced as a
reactime vindicated by willing-complicity... as it were, unfolded from its
enfolding, because impossible to hide...)
Please forgive the running-on of these thoughts, possibly mushed (re form)
into undifferentiability - but let that also stand by way of critique to -
G.H. Hovagimyan's "Let me say that again, THE TOOL DID NOT CREATE THE
MEANING." - when art is this toolbased thing, although there are those who
think it suspended in the sphere of communicative transparency; the age of
cybernetic art is also the age of thinking machines; the mobile media are
not options for art, they are already artistic media the instantaneity, the
speed of which is critical and integral: -(Virilio:
advertising is the censorship of the negative viewpoint)
so the interrogation/critique of the tool of mobile media versus its
implications pro forma (per forma): the project I'm working to gain support
to realise - a theatre piece (Sweetheart, over____) inside a graff-art
exhibition early '07 (Common Sense) - if it is supported by Vodaphone, in
the end - turns on a critique of the tools (in this case 3G cellphone tech)
by opening it to the delay of rehearsed performance. The content, here at
play with Marcel Duchamp, fronts up to the accelerated form prefigured in
the allegory of mechanised warfare (including an erotics, its sublimation),
that of Duchamp's milieu... about which
there would be more to say if I hadn't taken up so much time with air...
Yours,
Simon Taylor
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