10.0808 contexts of mischief

WILLARD MCCARTY (willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk)
Tue, 25 Mar 1997 21:06:22 +0000 (GMT)

Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 10, No. 808.
Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities (Princeton/Rutgers)
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
Information at http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/

[1] From: Michael Guest <guest@ia.inf.shizuoka.ac.jp> (36)
Subject: Re: 10.0806 contexts of mischief

> In any case, the matter does raise
> some interesting questions in part having peripherally to do with the medium
> we use and so may be worth pursuing further.

[...]

> Comments?

The Blisset incident reverberates with the "hyperreal" - representations of
reality that supplant reality itself. The incident ends (begins)
exquisitely with a court case, producing dramatic, political and
philosophical effect and meaning. There's a connection with our e-list: a
Willard-ian "peripheral" perhaps, the relation of the word (and the
electronic word) to reality. As we're distanced from the event, what
connection does what we say have with it? There's a witness there
somewhere, but ... who'll witness the witness? The Guardian Weekly? Ha.

An index to "postmodernism" and at least the possibility of a concomitant
ethic (the police won't tell it from hooliganism, so shh!). Through Deleuze
and Guattari, and stuff like Augusto Boal and Lyotard, clearly referenced
in the fabric of the event (along with Baudrillard and Fluxus and all that
further 20th century art or rubbish whatever you like - although it's not
so hard after all to co-opt and defuse the potency of a Stravinsky or
Schonberg).

So it's rhizomically rather than periphally connected, because some kinds
of acts will not create further reverberations, except through new media
like this. Stemming from a Blisset-seed, the list becomes a kind of
metaphorical or cyber-bus, on which we with our various opinions are
riding, generally uncomfortably as in most buses, construing the
possibilities, some horrified, others outraged, others like me with a
tambourine in one hand and I won't say what in the other, and a few poor
souls trying to keep open minds like Willard, ultimately mince in the
lasagne.

_____
Michael Guest's semiological sound-text experiment is at:
<http://www.ia.inf.shizuoka.ac.jp/guest/expt.html>