Double Exposure

So I been out to lunch, or at least out to conference in Pasadena. EdTech 2010, a compact and energetic academic enterprise. Probably I obsessed, and KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) didn't entirely apply, but education should be a learning experience.



The quest for blogistic legitimacy goes on. I connected with the academic blog of Amit Rai at FSU,
http://www.english.fsu.edu/faculty/arai.htm
who seems to share some common interests (or at least the effects of imperial and colonial modernity interest me) and concern for information fluency, but my brilliant critical comments aren't showing up anymore. I don't know what that means, whether I am technically incapable of posting, or whether I'm just annoying, but it occurred to me that I can put them on my own blog. In cyberspace there's no escape from the critically inconsequential or inadequate. Like George Bush and Al Queda, the intellectual proletariat will hunt you down and find you.

We are neither post-colonial nor postmodern. Neither the colonial nor the modern are ready to concede power or accept responsibility. There are dangerous misconceptions in the implication that we have gotten past either one. Liscensing and the game world are extensions of Fordist factory mentality, incorporation of the individual into the enterprise. According to Donna Haraway, the problem with organic concepts of technology and relations to the body, of becoming, is that integration, or the lack of duality, requires acknowledgement of responsibility, of power-sharing. Duality is necessary to assign responsibility for technology somewhere else. In Benjamin’s case, to something resembling the “inauthentic” or “mechanically reproduced” artifact. In Nietszche’s case, to the rational man, the inherent subordinate to the natural or intuitive man. Perhaps a definitive example, like Don Quixote and the windmill, Heidigger wanted to distinguish technology from more personal industry, invoking an existence for technology independent of individual industry, for the simple reason that accepting the equivalence of technology and personal industry cripples the critical social distinction between the individual and the machine and robs the intellectual activist of the cause. We cannot resist the machine with conviction that transcends human banality if we are the machine. In that case we have to account for our own limitations in the machine. Essentially, technology derives from the personal in the same way Nietszche’s leaves derive from the particular, and like Haraway, we should desire reconciliation with technology, not mastery. We are cyborg, although that also does not mean there is no enemy. The enemy is capital, the mentality that converts a perceived lack of resistance into domination, the mentality that converts needs into subordination, the mentality that appropriates the body as a component of industrial production (Google, for example), and capital is not us. We participate to a nominal extent allowed for purposes of propaganda, but there is no real universal participation in capital. It is an exclusive community. Modernity lives.

Consider Train to Virar, first in the sense of underlying Western European enlightenment language that determines both the hierarchy and programming of the “top” of the page. What it represents to me, is merged views of a train track and a passenger car interior. Which is on “top” isn’t totally apparent, although there is some sense from the intensity of forms that the car interior is probably in the foreground. Eisenstein, Barthes, Burnett, and Manovich suggest that the power of combining images is such that it cannot be ignored, that we will attempt to make connections between images in proximity, so that making meaning without reference to sources is essentially impossible. To that extent, Stengers’ irrelevance of production is in itself irrelevant, and that's that.

Here's Thinking for You
Iffy