<nettime> bla bla bla digest [laguda, miller]

["nettime's_chatterbox" <nettime@bbs.thing.net>]

lagadu@altern.org
     Re: words,words,words; what use are words without people?
"Paul D. Miller" <anansi1@earthlink.net>
     Re: no people.

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From: lagadu@altern.org
Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 11:00:43 +0200
Subject: Re: <nettime> words,words,words; what use are words without people?

Hand made/french brain deconstruction

my spill, your sleep
if ever meant would
connect annoyingly
power the brain
from words post would quiet
meaning hell isn't yours
it is the anger and author
how light since Alan
has in heaven been

Chris

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Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 05:33:31 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Paul D. Miller" <anansi1@earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: <nettime> no people.

a brief flurry of correspondences... ironic... I'm in Dresden a city bombed
by the Allies right at the end of WWII... new city>old city.... and an
e-mail about no people from Mark Dery crosses my screen.... 

I Be Chillin'....

Ken - the idea of nature, language and of course, permutations/involutions
of the two have been really well explored in many non European cultures,
there's a great series of books that a really interesting anthropologist,
Michael Taussig, has explored in detail. One of the better book length
essays, "Mimesis and Alterity," he wrote on how recording devices altered
the way people perceive their environment might be a good start. It focuses
on European compression of identity, language, and the loss of magic in the
everyday affected the post-colonial (re)formation of language, art, and
yes! even science. Most of the cultures the book explores, alas, are almost
extinct. The funny thing is that, as folks as diverse as Amos Tutuola (My
Life in the Bush of Ghosts/The Palm Wine Drinker), Rupert Sheldrake, Amitav
Ghosh (The Calcutta Chromosome), Mcluhan, Erik Davis, Vernor Vinge, Sherry
Turkle, Neal Stepheson, and Ishmael Reed (to name a few) point out, because
of information technologies impact on how people respond to the
environment, the post-industrial European scene is finally catching up to
the way language worked in many of the cultures Taussig describes. Linux,
ASCII, HTML etc etc become the equivalent of the shamans chant perhaps, and
the screen mediates the codified ideals - maybe that's the new thing - the
TCP/IP environment of the info saturated present. Dialectical triangulation
meets the Flip Mode Squad or something like that... Given a choice between
incantation, invocation, and reading critics I wish were extinct, like
Mark, I think I'd take the former over the latter any day of the year.
Regretfully, the cultures are gone, but the critics remain. I guess its all
about the ectoplasm, eh? The pendulum swings a strange path between stuff
like the Matrix and The Blair Witch Project... with stuff like Vernor
Vinge's "True Names" or Tim Burners Lee, Kool Keith a.k.a. Dr. Octagon
a.k.a. Black Elvis thrown in for for good measure.... 

Paul
kold chillin' in
Dresden on the way to Moscow... transfer path>MAN>TRANSFORMS


------Original Message------
From: Mark Dery <markdery@mindspring.com>
To: nettime-l@bbs.thing.net
Sent: May 22, 2001 4:17:31 PM GMT
Subject: Re: <nettime> no people.

McKenzie Wark wrote:

>>Those 'nature' documentaries annoy the hell out of me. They are part of
 <...>

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