Moving through the usual suspects: Warhol and his fifteen minutes of fame remark, the Empire State film, Warhol watching Taxi, the woman: “this is Warhol voyeurism at its creepiest; Borges “The world, unfortunately, is real”; George Berkeley, a favorite of Borges; Phillip K. Dick novels; conceptual art installations such as Prosthetic and Dancing with the Virtual Dervish, Bjork, etc., Shaviro maps the postmodern and virtual world. He explains this world in relation to finances, global economy, money, memory, the mind, and the body. He does this by discussing philosophy, art, science, mathematics, and the working of the finance world. He is trying to connect every possible world in order to explain the posthuman and the world that according to singularity will one day take over the human race. He writes about how a corporation creates an elite, and how they maintain the employees under control by building dependency. He then moves to film noir (my favorite part) to explain how today’s reality is just an echo of fiction. “I am totally screwed, therefore I am.”
Then there’s the “proximity no longer determined by geographical location” which I immediately relate to my experience in SL.
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1 comment:
Juan,
Cortazar is one of my favorite authors and interestingly enough, his book Hopscotch was not easy for me to read. It's a good suggestion to follow Shaviro as one would do Hopscotch. Maybe with that mindset, Connected wouldn't have been as overwhelming.
I still consider though Shaviro's excess of information and lack of structure a bit daunting. But as you mention in your response to the reading, this probably was just a sincere attempt on his part to link everything and anything possible, in order to give us a better notion of the possible reaches and implications of posthumanity.
The question then is does he succeed?
T
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