nettime: TODOROV'S file world

["THOMAS BASS" <basstom {AT} sirius.ceu.hu>]

THE NEW AUTHENTICITY: JUSTICE OF SCISSORS

the FACTORY OF FACTS.

Filming facts. Sorting facts.  Disseminating facts.  Agitating with 
facts.  Propaganda with facts.  Fists made with facts.
-Dziga Vertov-


The modern age establishes a brand new motion of "fact," 
"objectivity," "authenticity," "documentation" and "technical 
reproduction of facts." The transmission of information becomes a 
problem of the media, not of personae. The principle of reporting and 
documenting events is completely mechanized: machine voices, 
microphones, sequential views, wave transmission. The collage 
principle of broadcasting reports induces the impression of their 
autonomy and causal independence. They coexist, concur and associate 
in the flux of information disregarding any speculative holistic 
picture of the world.

The classical intuition of the organic integrity of the world is 
abolished by the vision of the objective-collage structure of the 
world and its political design as the motor of progress. The 
intuitions of sacral continuity and immanent providence are replaced 
by visions of collage discreteness and political plannings.  
Authenticity is supplanted by the media.

"They" see design rather than providence, facts rather than truth, 
objects rather than organs of the infinite world body.

The mammoth archive of the world swells every minute: facts, 
evidence, reports. What testifies and verifies the actual picture of 
the world is its File.  We dwell in it: a File-World with perfectly 
developed media of tracking, deletion, documentation, registration, 
and cataloguing.



from 
Vladislav Todorov, _Red Square, Black Square: Organon for 
Revolutionary Imagination,_ State University of New York Press, 
Albany, 1995.  pp. 23-24.
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