Re: [-empyre-] Re: empyre Digest, Vol 33, Issue 11

["Christian McCrea" <christian@wolvesevolve.com>]

> gh comments:
>
> IN THE 1930'S masses of people supported the rise of Fascism. Just
> because a large group of people with the blessings of large
> corporations support an idea, it doesn't mean that it's a good idea.

Godwin's Law notwithstanding, or whether or not Second Life can be said
to be anything, I concur with Chris Dodd's notions of timing. SL is powered
by the elasticity of a generational shift between those who grew up with
television and those who grew up with the internet in the background, who
are now sitting in the lower rungs of newsrooms, being told to 'be the
technology
person', for which SL provides perfect cover for the broader issues of
technology
anxiety, the resurgence in mass scopophilia. Second Life's ability to make news
about itself is symptom of the generation who read it as news. The
most intelligent
summary of these issues is in the fourth issue of the Ludic Society
magazine (not
yet on their website) in which Borges's Orbis Tertium, the conspiracy
of intellectuals
makes the word Tion - and Popper's World3, the artifactual realm
beyond the senses.
We could also add Teilhard de Chardin if need be - all three models of
simulation
place generational timing at the core of the shift between layers, all
three thinkers
deeply aware of the role of the embryonic stages before the imago emerges.

That is not to say Second Life players are any particular age - but
the real users of Second Life, the conspirators at the end of the
rumour or news story, are formed
by the narrative of technology's forceful newness. Second Life
represents; what it
represents barely matters. (except to us perhaps, who must find out
what, to whom, and
for whose benefit - or is that too old-fashioned?).

The fact that it is becoming capitalistically dysfunctional bodes very
well for the
robustness of any serious inquiry there in the future, which is not
something I would
have said in the heyday.

-Christian McCrea



> Addicting the Chinese population to opium was also a strategy of the
> British Empire. That was a great idea from their perspective. Ijust
> finished reading the Calvin Tompkins Biography of Duchamp. This is what
> Duchamp has to say about art.
>
> "Works of art could not be understood by the intellect, he maintained,
> nor could their effect be conveyed in words. The only valid approach to
> them was through an emotion that had " some analogy with a religious
> faith or a sexual attraction---an aesthetic echo." This echo, however,
> was heard and appreciated by very few people. It could not be
> learned---either you had it or you did not---and it had nothing
> whatsoever to do with taste, which was merely a parroting of
> established opinion. "Taste gives a sensuous feeling, not an aesthetic
> emotion," Duchamp said. " Taste presupposes a domineering onlooker who
> dictates what he likes and dislikes, and translates it into beautiful
> and ugly," whereas the 'victim' of an aesthetic echo is in a position
> comparable to that of a man in love or a believer … when touched by
> aesthetic revelation, the same man, in an almost ecstatic mood, becomes
> receptive and humble." pp. 368-369,Duchamp, A Biography by Calvin
> Tompkins, published by Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1996
>
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