Rain, snow or apocalypse; the US Mail Delivers

There is a secondary aesthetic issue that precedes this writing, the dialectical reversal of the promise of technological utopia. Writing the distopia is presented as a particular strategy designed to counter the pernicious effects of a simulacrum. My argument is not that the two are not opposed, but that they truly are two sides of the same coin. Both modes of writing are predicated on the Sublime. Niko might speak more to the background here, but briefly the sublime for Kant a like a force of nature that is beyond the limit of comprehension as a thing in itself. My argument here will roll this way: the Sublime character of the fictions keeps the narrative away from the body and the lived experience there to.

The easy answer to this characterization is to handle the articulation of the utopian vision of the status quo as sublime. There is no fundamental difference here except the willingness of individuals in media studies to be earlier adopters of technology. This is an even easier answer. Hard answer follows: The power of terrible nanobots, surveillance technology run amok or the matrix are just as much fiction as the story of the end of privilege. At the end of the technological utopia story a great force somehow erases the history of the characters in that very story. Similarities between the stories outweigh the differences; particularly the crux of both stories is the flattening of identity. Interesting that the end of the excerpted work seems to find escape in an attempt to flood the channel with data, a highly personal liberation, a parallel to the highly personal practice of the self that Foucault described?

The rapid movement from Foucault to Baudrillard covers some of the detail we could get from the former. Although the Foucault cited in the opening paragraph uses writing as a technique of self-discovery if not creation. Baudrillard and Virillo come in to answer the simple question, to what end? The skepticism of the death built into the accelerating structure of modernity is clearly a core focus for Virillo at least. The task for the writer of a social science fiction then is to present a particular fictional text for oppositional deployment. Balance would be achieved in a juxtaposition of the utopia of the status quo with the distopian fictions crafted by the authors. Truth as such is not the goal here, but the creation of a polemic. I will/am brining Virillio’s Unknown Quantity for a more graphic display of the argument. The real robust part of this reading is the defense of writing polemic fictions, as a technology of the self these would create the contrast that would distinguish dangerous forms of social control from those that are fundamentally less important. In regular space/time there isn’t a good way to make arguments predicated on the slippery slope fallacy fly. All too often, the banality of reality intervenes as the reality as such has far fewer interesting characters.

Since I am obligated to answer all rhetorical questions and explain my jokes, the title of the post was a tip off to the multiplicity of things that could be characterized as sublime, mainly natural disasters, then I thought, even in the result of nanobot attack, the mail will still come. That will be totally boss.

--dan