Nevertheless I'd be greatly assisted by your interpretation. I particularly am concerned with this separation of language and body, language and desire:
The end of modernity arrived with the
collapse of the future, as Johnny Rotten
signaled. But postmodernism, as far as we can
tell, has only produced a techno-linguistic
machine permeating every recess of daily life,
every space of the social brain. In a 1977 book by
American anthropologist Rose Goldsen entitled
The Show and Tell Machine, Goldsen wrote that a
new generation of human beings will gain its
primal impressions from a machine rather than
from the mother.
3
That generation is here. This
generation, which experiences a problematic
relationship between language and the body,
between words and affection, separates
language from the body of the mother, and from
the body in general Ð for language in human
history has always been connected to a fear of
trusting the body. In this situation, we need to
reactivate our ability to connect language and
desire, or the situation will become extremely
bad. If the relationship between the signifier and
the signified can no longer be guaranteed by the
presence of the body, we lose our relationship to
the world. Our relationship to the world will
become purely functional, operational Ð
probably faster, but precarious.
You might be interested in article I wrote, "Memories of the Future," on a time when there actually was still a future. Engages with a number of recent writings on the subject by Franco "Bifo" Berardi, Slavoj Žižek, T.J. Clark, Owen Hatherley, Chris Cutrone, Max Ajl, Asad Haider, Salar Mohandesi, Ben Lear, and Malcolm Harris, which have been published by AK PRess, Zero Books, Jacobin, New Left Review, and others. Just thought you might want to check it out.
ReplyDelete