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Tuesday, 10 December 2002
A politics of time ::
I clicked on my link from About Sonosphere to a review of Peter Sloterdijk’s Medien-Zeit, Drei gegenwartsdiagnostische Versuche. ("Media-time, three present-diagnostic attempts” ?) I hadn’t read the review in quite some time. I’d read the book if I could read German. Excerpts from the review:
“He introduces the post-modern condition as a sort of addiction to process.” Been there.
“The summarising catchphrase for this book is: a politics of time.”
“A society is the effect of the internalisation of the voices which have been put into writing, which guarantees a sonospheric coherence.”
“The United States, in particular, has succeeded in making use of the media so that this sonosphere is dissociated from territory, in order to create a world sound and a world imaginary by means of popular music.”
“The instantaneousness of global news reporting detaches the masses from tradition and places them in a world characterised by synchronicity.”
“All challenges to information technology presently focus on the question of whether the world society will be able to produce good news in sufficient measure.” Instead of drugging us with fear.
“In this sense, then, against his own better judgement, Sloterdijk continues to believe in the salvation of the world by the acting subject.”
The review (which includes many references to Gnosis) ties in strongly with Umberto Eco’s Baudalino, which I just finished and enjoyed a lot.
On Sunday I’d read a friend’s poem, whose last lines had stayed with me: “...but do not see: the end has come and gone.”
The webmaster at the book review site appears to have made a mistake; the book cover at the top left of the Sloterdijk review is Jean Baudrillard’s L’illusion de la fin ("The illusion of the end”). But its review connects further:
“Baudrillard gives us a positive outline of the poetic reversibility of events. This gives insight into the radical illusion of the world, which he presents as a magical alternative to the linearity of history, the disenchanting confusion and the chaotic profusion of current events.”
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