Re: [-empyre-] Mobile territory

[Simon Taylor <swht@clear.net.nz>]

I have trouble with your English, Aliette, but - to pardon - my French would
give you more trouble. Your post, handling as it does of 'condiments'
offered in mine, requires an answer from me equally as generous as yours.

Yes, I am making sauce - without atttribution of sources - and to cook a
goose I have not yet caught. But I've seen it in the wild: we _are_
phenomenologists as witnesses of emergent and fugitive actual 'ingredients'.

The spice I added, the space of a New Babylon - Constant Nieuwenhuis - I
imagined, I thought usefully, as a turning inside-out , as the result of
dromospheric pressure, of a decisively urban field of media mobility - which
Constant prefigures in these terms: "Distance covered, speed, are no longer
the yardsticks of movement; and space, lived more intensely, seems to
dilate. But this intensification of space is only possible due to the
creative use of technical means." (Constant: 1974) Perhaps this is a nasty
admixture - Constant read through Virilio - but the latter has been
available - as I think a critically piquant addition - in an earlier post -
on my shelf.

My point is simply that the intensified relation to space ought not to be
denied the temporal implications of an accelerated realtime such as that
presented by mobile media as _the_ "technical means" referred to by
Constant. Virilio shows very well - while talking up intercession in the
(digital) code but depending on the essayistic and pictorial force of the
analogon - the timeliness, the (strategic) priority of an accelerated
reality over a reality _augmented_ by technical means. But I take your
point: separate code from culture.

Culture, however, I understand, without at all wanting to underwrite;
whereas code I don't. But when I say 'understand', I mean in the fugitive
form of a colonial promised the dish but denied the taste - which is in
theory delivered by postcolonialism - which divorces exactly the code from
the culture by the intervention of globalisation/endocolonial
experimentation.

The coincidence of moves towards privatisation - proprietary 'bubbles' - of
the internet with increased mobilisation - in the military sense as well -
of mediatech, is this the defining moment of mobile telephony? its
distinction? and the banner and tribune to point to as evidence of its
allegiance, to whom it owes tribute?

I ask this not out of facetiousness but to admit to misgivings - and these
possibly only about the answers I am giving - about serving the discussion
by pursuing further issues which I nonetheless regard as important and would
like to think I could enjoy time to contemplate.

It seems tonight you have offered a far more tantalising dish than I can
offer in return. Indeed, I've served sauce sans gander or goose.

Yours,
Simon Taylor