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"The Resurrection of
the Colossal"*
(*see next page)
(ok, so I lied about the `theory' part--but if it makes you feel any
better you can think of this as `anti-theory' or theory in tatters...rc)
Critic Walter Benjamin puts us in something of a quandry when he writes
(in "The Storyteller") that "...by now almost nothing that
happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information."
I say quandry because in these personal journals we certainly seem to be
confronted with the telling of stories, of various shades of intimacy and
various degress of interaction with an historical world. (To be sure, the
latter is not the prime aspect of these writings: after all they are PERSONAL
journals, not meant as accounts of state or as chronicles of the times per
se.)
However, Benjamin tells us that storytelling is in decline and has been
for many years, a decline presumably in direct proportion to the implacement
and acceleration of a technical, global culture; that, in fact, part of
storytelling is a giving of counsel, a certain kind of wisdom even. It would
be the ability to take one's own experience and then subtly generalize it
so that others might take something from the story. But he says that "communicability
of experience is decreasing." Perhaps even that experience itself is
undergoing an alteration, even abrasion, in its ability to fit into an ongoing,
trans-temporal community of concerns. (certain French theoreticians have
announced this as the `Inoperative Community').
So while these are personal journals they are laid out on the wide boulevards
of the internet, available for perusal by all and sundry. In making that
statement I am also reminded of John Durham Peters' statement that, "The
mark of an intimate message is the exclusiveness if its address." If
that is true, and it is certainly the benchmark of a form of intimacy that
is quite old and well established as the truth, then what can be said about
the completely open addresses of these journals? And the arena of experience
we call `intimacy' now? The personal and the private begin to take on an
equivalence with the most theoretical and general, with each tendency migrating
chiasmatically to the other side.
The possibilites of a `one to many' broadcasting whether through writing
or video opens up a fractillated scattering and immediacy which is perhaps
unique to the world wide web. The global apparatus itself comes to appear
as a vast Turing test
composed of largely disembodied references appearing in the privacy of one's
own living area, the tip of the tenacle of a global civilization. Much like
the early machinic psychoanalytic program Eliza, the web itself can take
on certain projective components either subtly, a `rorschaching' which few can escape, or more aggressively, as with those
who, albeit without recourse to a computer, claim to be setting up websites
for witches or that they are being harrassed and threatened by email.
So is storytelling dead, succumbing to a dearth of `experience' as Benjamin
thought, giving way to an informing of one sort or another? `Common sense'
would tell us that `experience' is a constant, that we are always experiencing
SOMETHING ... but what if even the nature of `common sense,' that is, sense
held in common, is changing?
(For an exhilerating and vertiginous, if exhausting, take on the sense of
this contemporary `sense,' see "The Sense of the World,"
Jean-Luc Nancy:
"Not long ago, it was still possible to speak of a `crisis of sense'
[....]. But a crisis can alwasy be analyzed or surmounted. One can rediscover
sense that is lost, or one can at least indicate approximately the direction
in whch it is to be sought. Alternatively, One can still play with the fragmentary
remains or bubbles of a sense adrift. Today, we are beyond this: all sense
has been abandoned.
This makes us feel a little faint, but still we sense [we have the sense]
that it is precisely this expostion to the abandonment of sense that makes
up our lives.
The women and men of our time have, indeed, a rather sovereign way of losing
their footing without anxiety, of walking on the waters of the drowning
of sense. A way of knowing precisely that sovereignty is nothing, that it
is this nothing in which sense always exceeds itself. That which resists
everything -- and perhaps always, in every epoch -- is not a mediocre species
instinct or survival instinct, but this very sense..")
I sometimes have the uncanny sense that these journals, not only these of
course but also no less these among the thousands of others, bear the brunt
of this re-fashioning of sense in however stumbling, inchoate or contradictory
manner -- precisely the ways in which `sense' exceeds itself and gives itself
to others. (Perhaps, indeed, they are in the vanguard of a new Gesamt-
kunstwerke, the outline of which we can just barely make out now, where
the art work is the LIFE of the artist, across a range of disciplines and
styles, all integrated by the net....which would not necessarily vitiate
Bejamin's thesis, might even broaden further.)
If we are indeed undergoing an `evacuation of experience' in some fashion,
as Benjamin surmised, basing his conclusions on the first impact and trauma
of a global tech and conflict, (and I will be the first to admit to such
feelings more than I would like to admit), then that must also constitute
an `openness' to events, the world, the non-human, which, as Nancy puts
it, is neither "a nihilistic nonsense or a `madness' that would oscillate
between debauchery and mysticism."
It is up to us, only us, here and now, to find that other ground, which
is also a shore and a point of departure onto much wider and wilder seas
of sense, communion, and identity.
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