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Comments, Comments, Please give me a Comment...
There cannot be an end to this paper, as the discussion still
goes on. If you want to be part of it, please send a comment to:
stefan[at]cyberhobbit.de
With your permission I may add it to this comment-site here!
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The ongoing discussion to a prerelease version so far:
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Comment by Paul Haynes (Sociologist, Lancaster University)
"To Stefan,
[..] Stefan produces a hyper-relation, collapsing the future into
a sub-set of history's time-machine, which itself, in turn is
a sub-set of the future; the mirror of the machine catches its
own reflection. The originality of the piece is indeed a lack
of reading, a lack of reading a specific ending to any of the
contributing voices that form its micro-ambulante Wissenschaft.
Take me, simulation or mediation, or none of the above. The dissolution
of time is the unwriting of our own autobiography. We erase ourselves
in our reading. Manthefactfinder is a phenomenon that is not an
appearance, or even an apparition, but a sign, a symptom which
finds its meaning in an existing force. All parallel events belong
to this sign. They happened, they are the worlds behind us, undeferred.
The world is a collection of facts not things. A fact collects
worlds at a tangent in a point or a moment of phase-space. Paradigms
do not shift, worlds do. Who can anticipate Cyberia rushing though
the body, creating unprecedented space? This other medium is an
unexplored attachment to the message. To report that Stefan offers
the reader a further level of simulation in which the key thinkers
are allowed to wander without losing sight of themselves would
be to be decontextualised. Stefan is merely the product of a hyper-relation.
Nice pictures, though. Paul Haynes, Pa Hay, P.H." |
And the answer:
"To Paul
Paul Haynes just tries to reduplicate his initials P.H. to PostHumanist
and materialising them in a PHD. So the constructed deconstruction
of mediatheory is followed by the deconstruction of a PostHumanist-type,
writing beyond clarity to bring a critique forward, a collection
of ideas simulating knowledge about unobserved hyper-relations.
Though fundamental in his critique, Paul Haynes offers possilities
for the ambulante Wissenschaft to travel on and avoid the destroying
fire of cyborgs who feel revealed and dissolved as mere fiction
agonizing for their reality-status while they are floating around
the 'nice pictures' universe. The virtual reality of cyborgs gets
trapped by mediatheory, following the trail of the objects in
their fatal strategies. And that's what it is all about: mediatheory
is fatal for the media and their products. But deconstructing
deconstruction means nothing else than -undelete-, a hopeless
try to avoid the nirvana of its own mediated being. Nice words,
though.
Stefan " |
| Comment by Tom Cahill (Lancaster University):
"First a few detailed remarks. I think the English was not a problem,
even though in many respects it was badly written. At least one
of the links was dead, which is always a disappointment (3D total
surround sounded very tempting, but dead). I felt the political
implications of his work, while flagged in the last screenful
or two, should have been discussed. One cannot do everything,
but leaving it to the end, and then backing out does not add to
the power of the essay. There also might have been a slightly
higher density of links in some of the sections where footnotes
took precedence. Oddly, for me, the paper on the screen lacked
the vibrancy and connection of a proper WWW site, for example.
There was not enough use of the possible links.
Having said that, and adding that I fundamentally disagree with
the entire thrust of the schools he deals with, I thought it was
a very good paper indeed. While the journey began, for me, at
the wrong fork in the path, its was an intelligent, succinct story
of the various theorists he referred to and to Bilwet (of whom
I have never heard!). Despite my own ignorance of the details
of the terrain, I thought his understanding was excellent, at
least as he communicated to the reader. Jaeger’s short, but dense
outlines of the various theorists was not flawed to any significant
degree. I think he knows what he is talking about. While the genuine
links to the WWW might have been a bit denser, the use of reference
to side essays and to the links that were there was quite good.
The soundfiles were excellent, although it took me over an hour
to download the software to my computer. I think the use of these
snippets and side links added to the clear flow of the essay.
I rather liked the notion of time-travelling, although I can’t
tell if it is ‘original’ as Jaeger claims.
In short this is a slightly unpolished, slightly awkward piece
of work which has quality, originality of form and content and
which was also a pleasure to read. Or to look at on the screen
anyway. I have posted a set of these comments on a WWW site.
Tom Cahill |
| Well, let's keep it with Salvador Dali then: 'Originality is just
a lack of reading.' Stefan |
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