McKenzie Wark on Sun, 22 Jun 1997 16:21:19 +0200 (MET DST) |
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<nettime> What is a belief? |
I'm still working through Erik Davis' fascinating post about religion, nettime and the net. Its an exemplary nettime post, for one thing. Thoughtful, discursive, (mostly) polite, altho' Richard may not agree in that last quality. Some questions so far: is there really any value in the periodisation of cultural contents as premodern, modern and postmodern? It seems to me that if we accept this as a chronological series, that its really impossible to assign any cultural artefact or mode to any particular category. If these categories have meaning, i think it as at the level of the relations according to which the production and distribution of social life is organised. I think i'm with Richard on this: History really isn't transitive. It goes in one direction. But the dimension of it that can be characterised thus is restricted to the form of relations. Its not possible to categorise cultural contents with any certainty. For example: 'enlightenment' appears at first sight to be modern. BUt what do we mean by enlightenment? If by that we mean a structure of belief, then we find that belief of a premodern religious kind may have quite a lot in common with belief of a modern enlightened kind. The objects, signs and practices may have changed, but its still a structure of belief. What i find curious is the way technological change in the form of media relations can assist formerly 'atavistic' modes of belief in recirculating and reproducing themselves all over again. The way radio and then 'tele-evangelism' seemed to strengthen certain patterns of religious belief in the United States, for example. Or the way the cassette tape fascilitated the circulation of the word of the mullahs in the middle east. Perhaps theres a distinctive and anomalous moment in the breakup of mass broadcasting, which was quite a unique moment in the history of media. As i'm inclined to see it, we're coming out of that anomaly and heading back to something like a more familiar pattern. The mass broadcast era made possible a certain dominance of patterns of belief by secular modern discourses. This took state and market forms, in various mixes in different parts of the west. The form of the media relation had as one of its possibilities the creation of temporally unified spaces of state and market rationality, and belief in the efficacy of state and market rationality. There's a great deal of huffing and puffing about the passing of this -- both state and corporate entities worry about the break up of zones of belief in the necessity for such administrative entities. Various 'decline of the public sphere' rhetorics are mobilised here, but usually in the defence of administrative self interest. Out of the breach in the rhythms of adminstrative discourse arises various 'untimely' patterns of cultural distribution and structural formation. THis stuff never went away under the broadcast regime, but were merely pushed to very marginal vectors of distribution. The reconfiguring of media vectors undermines the apparent triumph of the rational enlightened modern public sphere -- the dominance of which was secured by fiat rather than by the unforced force of the better argument. Or in sum: the only history is the history of the vector -- what it carries may vary in its scope of distribution and effect, but will tend to persist. Belief, after all, is something that doesn't go away. But the redistriubution of patterns of belief can be an opportunity for reconfiguring the relation between the possibilities of the vector and the institutional forms that capture and limit those possibilities. McKenzie Wark Netletter 12.12AM Eastern Standard Time 23-06-97 Sydney, Australia __________________________________________ "We no longer have roots, we have aerials." http://www.mcs.mq.edu.au/~mwark -- McKenzie Wark --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@icf.de and "info nettime" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner@icf.de