August 11, 2010

"Dialectical history in its most refined form"

Ben has some more accelerationist reading. (Does anyone read Neuromancer any more? Presumably Christopher Nolan does: consensual hallucinations, catatonic bodies, collapsing virtual worlds, men tempted by the simulated image of their dead lovers ... perhaps Inception was the film that got made instead of the many times stalled Neuromancer project. On which, this is great from Joshua Clover:

    The story’s displacement of crisis and transformation into science-fictional allegory is too visible: not enough blind spot for our moment’s hysterical looking-via-looking away. But more pungently, it’s endlessly telling that the film should founder in this exact moment: when the very developments it required—that is, the dematerializing and virtualizing of the physical movie set, of the scene of real labor—have blown up the economy and worse, pushing us toward another transformation, a far greater crisis. This is dialectical history in its most refined form.

Nice post from Ben on Derrida too. A traversed Derrida, or Derrida as interlocutor and (vanishing) mediator, fine ... Derrida as high priest: no thanks ...

Posted by mark at August 11, 2010 04:20 PM | TrackBack