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Observing the Observers of Systems and Environments
Linda Brigham reviews the Spring and Fall 1995 issues of Cultural Critique.
Where is the real you? Behind the eyeballs, right; the center of a panoptical cinema, your virtual head spinning around like Linda Blair’s in The Exorcist. Watching the world go by.
tye042 - 05.10.2017 - 13:24
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Ecotourism: Notes on Con-temporary Travel
Thomas Cohen on ecotourism in Bolivia and discovering the post-humans of the past.
What does it mean to tour, today, the outer reaches of the empire - which is an unnamed empire (America will not do, nor the West, and so on - as if some programming encompasses, now, this series of terms and its one-time others) legislating time and fashion as well as economy? When we go, say, as pleasuring witnesses to whatever still bears the trace of a certain otherness: a cultural imprint (Andean natives), the laws of a climate (tundra), a history so marked by recent disfiguration that we, today, seem to find comfort in the commodity of a readable catastrophe. Unlike several decades if not years ago (but what, now, is a “year”?), it is so easy to travel, to transfer oneself for brief episodes to distant points - which, in turn, appear woven, then, more firmly, as the mock-aura of a frontier of any sort recedes. What does it mean to write travel, today - and is not every genre of such invoked, every narrative twitch (anecdote, observation, description, rumination) mobilized, as obstacle, at the first rustling of intent?
tye042 - 05.10.2017 - 13:48
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HYPER-LEX: A Technographical Dictionary
Paul Harris hybridizes the terms of hypertextual discourse and takes it to a higher power.
The spirit or at least pervasive desire of our age revolves around a sort of transparency: a desire to project ourselves as a surface of permeable traces, to exfoliate, let the inside become the outside, to become fully visible like the meat and bones of a Cronenberg character, while remaining invisible like the little hacker ghost (Turing’s Demon?) that tracks text in the Random Access Memory banks of the machine onto whose screen we splash words. In large part, the attractive force that transparency exerts is an effect of media culture; simultaneously, however, transparency marks a limit of im-mediacy - an unmediated, collapsed sensation where we can see the neurophysiology of our brains or the shapes of and linkages among our words. This is an immediacy of the sensory that never shades into the tactile - it is rather the immediacy of sensing the medium itself, of clicking tracks around the computer screen or dredging up hidden treasures on the Netscape of our lives.
tye042 - 05.10.2017 - 13:57
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Anti-Negroponte: Cybernetic Subjectivity in Digital Being and Time
Timothy Luke reviews Nicholas Negroponte and takes a second look at ‘digital subjectivity.’
tye042 - 05.10.2017 - 14:09
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From Virtual Reality to Phantomatics and Back
Paisley Livingston on Stanislaw Lem and the history and philosphy of Virtual Reality.
tye042 - 05.10.2017 - 14:20
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Scared Straight
Carol Stabile reviews Our Stolen Future.
Since the publication of Paul de Kruif’s Microbe Hunters in 1926, the genre of “scientific detective” stories has enjoyed a quiet but consistent level of popularity. Typically, these stories have functioned as celebrations of (or ideological guarantors for) the virtues of the scientific enterprise. This genre, however, properly belongs to an earlier era in the twinned history of science and industrialization: an era armed with certainty, rationality, and faith in scientific progress.
tye042 - 05.10.2017 - 14:50
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Canadian Jeremiad
Andrew McMurry reviews John Livingstone’s Rogue Primate: An exploration of human domestication.
During the central Canadian summer many are drawn to what is known as “cottage country,” a region of lakes and rivers, shield-rock and trees that belts the near-north of the Windsor-Toronto-Montreal corridor. On any July week-end the road- and water-ways of this bucolic district are crammed with eager recreants, speeding toward the natural beauty and repose which, as a result, now exists mostly in memory. In the vicinity of a large provincial “wilderness” area, Algonquin Park, I recently passed some leisurely sunsets observing what has become a rather common sight in those parts: a pair of loons, bobbing and diving in a lake made turbulent by the twilight passages of innumerable jet-skis and power boats. Their haunting calls bounced around the bay, competing with the full-throated roar of outboards and, once, the thunder of a float-plane taking off right over their heads.
tye042 - 05.10.2017 - 14:59
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Post-Wankery: A Review of Infinite Jest
Piotr Siemion discusses Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace’s second but surely not definitive novel, just out in a bulging paperback after its last year’s loud and clear hardback thump, looks very much like a whale. It is immense, awe-inspiring, plus it contains tons of undigested matter. Because few serious novels get written these days, it also looks suspiciously like an elephant, of the white variety. It instantly brings to mind all those mammoth playful novels of the American sixties and seventies. For those of us who were only very tentatively around during the first Woodstock, the “encyclopedic” novels of that time were as thick as Tom Clancy’s current chivalry romances but on the average one billion times more dense than Clancy, and like neutron stars, not much of a company for readers who were not rocket scientists during their business hours.
tye042 - 05.10.2017 - 15:17
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Joseph McElroy: fathoming the field
Toward a definition of a postmodern genre: the field-novel.
“And the field was him,” a sentence in Plus, a novel by Joseph McElroy, warrants an inquiry into field and the novel. The novelty of McElroy’s fiction grows from the attempt to use the structure of a novel as itself a field, presenting actions which occur within fields. He displays field as aesthetic structure, and field as content of aesthetic structure. So within the novel, events which occur within a field can also be seen as themselves constituting a field. In both field as structure and as content, the hero is intelligible as a region of a field, not as a sphere or core of individuality which passes through a field in fulfillment of a destiny.
tye042 - 17.10.2017 - 15:24
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Attractions Around Mount St. Helens
Joseph McElroy shares field notes and reflections from Mount St. Helens.
Nearly two decades after the great eruption of May, 1980, a slow, remarkable regrowth of flora as well as a massive human involvement feed back to me old questions about the ecological order and our place in it. “A mountain bounces back,” I read; Mt. St. Helens has struggled “to be born again.” That’s not it, I think, but I am moved by the reappearance of plants and trees and animals and fish at Mt. St. Helens - the symbiotic reaching out of fungus filaments to plants roots deep beneath the volcanic ash, the herd of Roosevelt’s elk returning to feed on grass sprouting from the earth of an apparently unwelcoming ashy, silica-infused but now media-hyped “miraculous mudslide.” This blast equal to 2500 Hiroshimas the environment did, not us. But what is the environment? I search the abstracts of some of the more than 500 vineyard-laboring, exact, and specialized field studies that have provided “an excellent baseline for tracking ecosystem reassembly here.”
tye042 - 17.10.2017 - 15:37
