Kevin Murray on Thu, 7 Feb 2002 22:16:02 +0100 (CET) |
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[Nettime-bold] FW: ::fibreculture:: RE: Variations on Wark in B Minor |
Forwarded from Ken: From: McKenzie Wark [mailto:mckenziewark@hotmail.com] Sent: Friday, 8 February 2002 2:52 am To: kmurray@mira.net Subject: Re: ::fibreculture:: RE: Variations on Wark in B Minor >Kath: > > > Today we no longer have roots, because the bonds of shared reading > > material, sitcoms, movies, sporting events, and the like, _are_ > >today?s roots. Kevin: >This is going somewhere, I think. It gives a dialectical flesh to Ken's > >trope. It begins to sound more like a McLuhan position about the future > >restoring a lost tribalism. I'm happy to see people play with the aphorism, but these are possibilities I already included in its formulation. And as the K-Tel ads say: "but wait, there's more!" The appearance of having 'roots' may always be a back formation, a secondary cultural moment produced by having a present, made out of 'aerials', which may stand for whatever the technical means of producing culture in a given historical period may be. If one is to be a materialist in cultural studies, it means treating culture as produced in real relations, not as some sort of floating ideal. At moments in which the technical form changes (vector...) there tends to be a heightened anxiety about the transparency of culture as process. The myth of tradition seems to lose its power, if only temporarily. It's no accident there was all that kerfuffle about 'great books' right at the same time as the leap into cyberspace. As the tecnical infrastructure of culture changes, an ever more vigorous assertion of a cultural identity occurs, one which claims to exist independently of its means of production. The intellectual's role in relation to 'roots' has always i think to be an ambivalent one. As Benjamin warns in 'Critique of Violence', as soon as fidelity to an origin becomes the mark of belonging, *violence is inevitable*. The violence that polices the relation between the sign and its precursor. This is where one turns materialist: signs don't have precursors, they produce them. Roots are always an illusion. But perhaps a necessary one. To be handled with care. So long as intellectuals cling to 'culture', God has not made his exit. It becomes a repository (again) for a lost longing. The fearlessness of theory is passing. We are all Kantians now -- using the most advanced techniques to shore up beliefs of the most traditional kind. k _________________________________________________________________ Send and receive Hotmail on your mobile device: http://mobile.msn.com _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://amsterdam.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold