To the poster (Alex) I say: Gee, “Caleb” — you also use the Alaskan company GCI for your internet access? Interestingly enough, one of the many useless pieces of information that I the Internet has given me is a simple method to check an IP address of the sender when a comment is submitted. Perhaps if you had any understanding of the technology you rant about in such a shallow manner you would be able to do a bit better.
The difficulties with “Caleb’s” argument are many:
First, my little weblog claims to be nothing but my opinion. Most novels should be better than 99% of the information that’s here, at least for artistic purposes (and I exclude my serious reviews and poetry, which I think withstand scrutiny), since that is not their point. Too bad Killing Time is not.
Second, you are confused about the nature of the problems we face when it comes to information overload, confusion, and mass media. I attribute this to the kind of shallow reasoning represented by the shallow book in question. That the erstwhile Mr. Carr would bring up similarly superficial attempts at profundity such as those by Steven Spielberg (stick with the Dick, I say, when it comes to Minority Report… Philip K. did it better), almost makes my own point for me.
Finally, if Carr intends to try to find his way back to writing works with any artistic merit, he would do well to go back to Whitman, Dostoevsky, and others, who had (and continue to have) a sharpness of intellect that makes them even more relevant today. Perhaps some Dickens too, while you are at it– that is even more obvious.
The real problem here, as I see it, is that dull arguments like those forwarded by Carr are only good for as long as their apparent novelty can be maintained. When one realizes that it has ever been thus, and that the fundamental issues under discussion really haven’t changed in the past fifty years, just their guises… well, they become distinctions comprising no difference. And boring. Like the book was.
But then, this was never about the book, right? I suspect it was just Alex’s (though whoever it was, at least they are allowing me to make up for the time I wasted reading the book!) attempt to “elevate” this weblog. An effort no less ironic than it would have been if Carr really had defended himself on the Internet regarding his book that maintains how evil the medium is…
Well its nice to see that your usually ennervated website finally got a pulse. Can the web occasionally rise above its operational banality? Perhaps you are becoming less of the crotchety old man you claim to be. Maybe evil, in all its degrees, is underrated. The more you run from it, the more you run into it.
“Finally, if Carr intends to try to find his way back to writing works with any artistic merit, he would do well to go back to Whitman, Dostoevsky, and others, who had (and continue to have) a sharpness of intellect that makes them even more relevant today. Perhaps some Dickens too, while you are at it– that is even more obvious.”
This only demonstrates to me a form of necrophilia-because our society is at a late historical stage then it must be worth something, it must have a canon of dead white men that is worth something. You can’t just state things without demonstrating them in some concise and coherent manner(unlike hollow statements like “that makes them even more relevant today” or “that is even more obvious”)A society’s literary works, like the society, could be all smoke and mirrors, totally worthless. Is there a there there?
Which brings up a good point. I am only trying to write things which are relevant to the current age(and things have gotten much different in the last 50 years, not to mention the last few thousand). Where are the Whitmans and Dostoyevskys, or even the Beatles, of the internet age?
And why do you presume Caleb Carr is not using GCI?
Perhaps I need Phillip Petit and Jean Baudrillard from “Paroxysm” to explain where we are all coming from in a substantive way.
What’s going on in the world today is, sadly, globalized, and the principle of the globalization of information runs against the
universal principle of solidarity. It does so because information exhausts itself within itself, and absorbs its own ends. Television
says nothing but: I’m an image, everything’s image. The internet and computers say nothing but: I’m information, everything’s information.It’s the sign making itself sign, the medium doing its own advertising. The message is immaterial: this is the zero degree, the pure form of communication. All this assumes current political significance, for it’s on the basis of the message, content, meaning and value that the universal is built. Globalization is built on the basis of the supremacy of the medium and the neutralization of the message. “There is no alternative” is media-thinking: the market, the Internet, the information superhighways uninterrupted circulation. Global integration is achieved on the basis of nullity, of the lowest definition of the message (of meanings, of ideas, of ideology). It’s the medium which says least, signifies least; it’s the medium which is coextensive with insignificance, with the banality of the operational world. Thus, the media and information broke the neither true nor false barrier long ago, since everything in them depends on instant credibility, with passage into the media itself canceling the index of reference and truth. This lack of discrimination between the true and the false moves out from there to invade all registers: the aesthetic register of the artwork, the historical register of objectivity, of memory, the political register of opinion, and even the scientific register of proof (the undecidability of an experiment like Jacques Benveniste’s on the memory of water).
If there’s no longer either true or false, lying becomes impossible and, with it, all theartifices of perversion and seduction. We are- like it or not- in the position of agnostics, where it’s not a question of believing or not believing, since everything is in the making-believe, and is wholly consumed in this credibility effect. Opinion polls and advertising are neither true nor false, just as fashion is neither beautiful nor ugly. Truth-effects, beauty-effects, etc., have slipped their moorings and become statistical, random. In fractal space (but equally today in historical space) thingsare no longer one-, two- or three-dimensional; they float in an interstitial dimension. You launch a news item. So long as it has not been denied, it is plausible. Barring accidents, it will never be denied in real time. Even if it is denied later, it will never again be absolutely false, since it has once enjoyed credibility. Unlike truth, credibility cannot be refuted, since it is virtual. We are in a kind of fractal truth: just as a fractal object no longer has one or two dimensions, but 1:2 or 2:3 dimensions, so an event is no longer true or false, but oscillates between 1:2 and 2:3 octaves of truth. The space between the true and the false is no longer a relational space, but a space of random distribution.
PP: Where is this fractal truth leading us?
JB: This shift of dimensions leads to a shift in responsibility. Responsibility is not dead: it has become viral. Truth is not dead: it has become viral and elusive- disease itself has become viral. Even sexuality, which floats today in a strange interstitial dimension that is neither masculine nor feminine, but somewhere between the two: 1:2-1:7. There’s no sexual definition any longer; hence no longer, strictly
speaking, any sexual difference. The uncertainty principle is at the very heart of sexual life, as it is at the heart of all value systems.Free now of their polar opposites, everyone can ratchet up
their own powers and multiply their effects. The true becomes truer than true. The false becomes falser than false. Even the neither-true-
nor-false- the zero degree, insignificance- can be raised to the higher power in a kind of Dutch auction of nullity, a sort of raising of
banality to the power of x, as can be verified every day in art, political discourse, the exacerbation of kitsch and nonsense, the
logical non-differentiation between opposing value-terms being reflected in our own indifference, our emotional, psychological,
political indifference- an indifference intensified by being caught up in its own game, culminating in a kind of fever of indifference- an indifference that has become a kind of collective virus, a kind of fanatical behaviour which can lead to violent effects such as are
usually the effects of passion, so true is it that insignificance can become aggravated, that the nothing can get carried away with itself
and that things can intensify in the void; this might even be said to be what drives our banality.
Information, for example, is truer than true, it’s true in real time; that’s why it is fundamentally uncertain. In that uncertainty,
which is the product of an excess of positivity, the only vital reaction is rejection. As a result of the excess of information, the excess of moralizing, the excess of rationalization of the world, only evil is certain; good is never certain. Only the false is certain; the true is never certain. In the ambiguity of values, it’s always the false that wins out. It’s our only recourse against undecidability, against the disappearance of truth-criteria. When, for example, criteria of aesthetic distinction disappear (as in the appreciation of current art), everything shifts on to the question of authenticity or falsehood. Authenticity, the signature of a work, wins out over its value; everything becomes centered on the expert appraisal and, naturally, this superstitious pursuit of authenticity becomes the basis of market value, the basis of an unlimited speculation. The laws of the market totter at the same time as the criteria of aesthetic value. When we speak of authenticity, the false has virtually won out. When we speak of morality (of the truth of products, etc.), immorality has
virtually won out. When we speak of human rights, etc.
PP: Destabilization doesn’t necessarily mean renunciation. The denunciation of the belief in the possibility of a “final solution” of
all human problems has- as P.-A. Taguieff suggests in Les Fins de l’anti-racisme also been a constant of our political culture since
Herzen.
JB: This infiltration, this contamination of all values, is universal. Even in the historical field, objectivity can be contaminated by a kind
of virus which today makes it possible to express doubt over the reality of the gas chambers. Even when it is violently denied, this doubt impacts upon minds, which is something previously unthinkable. Computer viruses prefigure a virtual destabilization of all information , just as other viruses prefigure a destabilization of
sexual life. The destabilization of political life: in the absence of criteria of choice and opinion, imaginations (or, rather the probability screens which stand in for political imaginations) are captivated by opinion poll figures. Economic destabilization: the unreal economy of speculation overlays and debases real economies by substituting for them an exacerbated simulation- the simulation of capital flows. Here again, this virtual economy is neither true nor
false; there is nothing to set against it. It is by denial of its own rules, its own purposes, that it becomes invulnerable, dissuasive of
the real economy, and perfectly autonomous. But it isn’t invulnerable to the viruses it engenders as a consequence of its very autarky, its trans-economic immunity; it is becoming autoimmune and,
consequently, prey to a different pathology.
One makes every effort to protect oneself from this triumph of undecidability, which ushers in the transparence of falsehood, just as the permeability of good and evil ushers in the transparence of evil by resuscitating by all available means the paradigm of the authenticity
of the fact, the evidence, the origin, the reference. If what is at stake in thought disappears, it becomes crucial to fall back upon
objectivity, upon a paternity suit. Hence the compulsive pursuit of veracity, verification, documentation, clarification and objective
rehabilitation which grips every field, quite clearly as a result of thought’s weakness in confronting that undecidability in any other way
than through a history. Sadly, even history plays us false, even history today is party to the uncertainty. Uncertainty brings with it a
mad race, a pursuit-race, between means of detection and means of falsification, between viruses and protective measures (in art, in
credit cards, in computing, in the protection of ideas, but also in sex, where we are all now liable to AIDS testing- an expansion of the
general test of authenticity). This is our new original sin, which is exactly the opposite of the other, the knowledge of good and evil. That
was, ultimately, a blessing from heaven which made us human. The curse which is upon us lies in the impossibility of distinguishing between
good and evil, true and false. Adam and Eve had fallen into the moral anxiety of distinction; we have fallen into the immoral panic of
indistinction, or the confusion of all criteria. Of the contamination of good by evil, and vice versa. And the virus is the symptom of this.
Our entry into the age of the virus through our inability to distinguish between values is equivalent to the expulsion of our ancestors from the earthly paradise for the opposite reason of knowledge of good and evil.
And, given that loss of immunity, all the lethal infections are lying in wait for us, all the sins from the primal scene are resurfacing, all viruses dormant in our cells are reawakened as the crisis takes hold! Our impotence in the face of of the dispersion of values, their fractal dissemination, is much worse than the ancient
moral responsibility which weighed on our consciences.
Sorry, this is too boring even for me. You have a strange idea of what constitutes having a pulse when you add to the site a particularly excruciating example of Baudrillard, one of the worst perpetrators of modern “philosophy” you could think of. You really should look closer even at what you quote– the attempt to bring scientific theory to bear is particularly funny when you really examine it. But then I am sure that when Zerzan’s muddling is held up as a fount of profundity, my able correspondent is coming from a position that I have already considered and found severely wanting. Never the twain shall meet, as they say.
Please, don’t worry yourself about my lifeless website. Perhaps you should make some stellar contributions of your own? It can’t be difficult to top Carr’s novel. I think my 11 year old daughter has done so numerous times already.
The fact that you really think we are in the midst of a revolution that has no comparison in history and that things have, after thousands of years, now really gotten “different” only tells me that you understand neither history or the nature of progress. That you can’t see past your own ego to understand the contribution of artists and thinkers who are no longer with us, dead and white or not (and that you adopt the reactionary pose regarding the construct of a canon), shows only your own short-sightedness. You don’t see the irony in Camus, who should be your ally?
And, if you consider it, what are YOU doing here in the first place, patronizing the cyber-club of which you claim you’d hate to be a member?
In short, you probably need to grow up and out of the Chicken Little phase and into one of serious thought and consideration that goes beyond the adolescent-style contrariness. Then you stop being one of those who thinks they are saying something new only to discover, upon reflection, that they were acting just like everyone else.
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