[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> no people.

["Paul D. Miller" <anansi1@earthlink.net>]

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 technolo!
gies 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
an endless reduction of the life of the animal to the human, the measure
of all things, apparently. The whole biological world is read in terms of
its mirroring of our vanity. All of which is much better expressed in Alan
Sondheim's 'no people'. I'm surprised that Mark would take objection to
this, of all the nettime texts. Its better theory than a lot of the
theory on nettime, as well as being better writing. Like a lot of Alan's
writing, its looking at the meshing of writing with other things, the
heterogeneous world in which words partake. Unlike a lot of literary
modernism, his work (to me at least) is not about language. Its to do with
words, and the work they do amongst other orders of things. Codework, i'd
call it. Which might not be a bad thing to be thinking about, in an age
when media make so many more worlds in which words and other codes get to
mess with things.<<

Ken, I almost always come away from your posts enlightened, not to mention
entertained, but in this instance I'm simply baffled. There's no debating
taste, of course; if Sondheim's writing sets your hair on fire, who am I to
disagree? Even so, I have no idea what you mean by the vaporous phrase "its
looking at the meshing of writing with other things." (Why the resistance to
using the correct contraction, rather than the incorrect possessive, by the
way? I don't mean to be catty, but my Inner Safire has always wondered.) What
"other things"? Inarguably, *all* writing, everywhere and always, has something
to do with things other than writing; one needn't be a card-carrying
Foucauldian to believe, as the old, bald devil did, that the "frontiers of a
book are never clear-cut.it is caught up in a system of references.it is a node
within network." In any event, onward: Sondheim's writing is about words, not
language. How does he manage the neat trick of disentangling the two? Last time
I checked, words and language were inextricably intertangled. Nor am I at all
clear on what you mean when you say his writing is about "the work [words] do
amongst other orders of things." *What* sort of work among *what* other orders
of *what* sort of things? Trying to pin down your meaning, here, is like trying
to hit a blob of mercury with a nail gun. I catch your general drift---that
Sondheim's writing considers or critiques words as an instrumental
technology---but beyond that, it's all ectoplasm to me.



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