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From the corner of my eye, I could see the Man's subtle but no less insidious form of American imperi- alism, the rise of global popular culture need not reflection in a mirror just beyond me. I then decided that no longer was this journey neces- impose hegemonic codes of regulation but can open channels of communication that allow the articula- sary -- no more must my goal be to reach a desti- nation; for indeed, I now knew my own pres- tion of social differences. ~ In the global compu- telecommunications network, the real is digitized ence. Or so I thought. I approached the mirror, looking into it. There was no image of my reflec- and the digital is the real. Along the channels of the fiber optic network, disembodied minds travel at the speed tion -- only that of the Woman whom I had so long sought. I turned to see where she stood, but of light. As speed increases, distance decreases. Space seems to collapse into a presence that knows could not. Looking upon the mirror again, the image of the Woman clouded. Then the image no absence and time seems to be condensed in a present undisturbed by past or future. If ever achieved returned, sharply, though no longer of only the Woman -- the image of the Man's reflection faded such enjoyment of presence in the present would be the fulfillment of the deepest and most ancient in-to and out-from hers. I stepped nearer for a closer look: there, before me, it grew stranger dreams of the western religio-philosophical imagina- tion. ~ A centripedal compulsion coexists with a still. The images of Man and Woman reflected now merged with my own; I stood watching decenteredness of all systems, an internal metasta- sis or fevered endogenic virulence which creates a ten- myself through the eyes of another. |
to override their own logic -- not in the sense of creat- Personae eXalt characters within factional re- presentation. ~ Personae eXact images of virtual ing sheer redundancy, but in the sense of an increase in power, a fantastic potentialization whereby their personality. Personae eXhibit interwoven, interdependent relationships. ~ Personae own very existence is put at risk. ~ The imaginary register transforms roots into rhizomes. A rhizomic eXamine the affects and effects of mediation. ~ Pesonae eXaggerate truth. ~ Personae eXceed culture is neither rooted nor unrooted. One can never be sure where rhizomes will break new ground. ~ the exponentially multiplicative. ~ Personae eXist in re-generations between interactions. ~ Unlike dialectics, which works by confrontation, opposition and assimilation, galactics functions as a Personae eXasperate the naturally artificial. ~ Personae eXchange the personification of the kind of metamorphosis, generating and changing sig- nification not by synthesis but by dissemination of desire-to-know. ~ Personae eXcite the infinitely malleable. ~ Personae eXpand the horizons of levels of both the signifier and the signified. The unity of a signified is dissolved into its component practical experience. ~ Personae eXpatriate know- ledge. ~ Personae eXpect compensation within usages. ~ We live amid the interminable reproduc- tion of ideals, phantasies, images and dreams which gratification. ~ Personae eXpedite conceptual articulation. ~ Personae eXplain non-sense. ~ are now behind us, yet which we must continue to reproduce in a sort of inescapable indifference. ~ if to Personae eXploit Meaning. ~ Personae eXpose dis-covery. ~ Personae eXpres sensual messages. desubstantialize is to deindividualize, the advent of the media age marks the disappearance of the sub- Personae eXtricate assumptions and biases. ~ Personae eXude seduction. ~ Personae eXcuse ject. ~ Expressing his most profound hope for the technology he fathered, Jaron Lanier predicts that vir- the techno-masquerade of Generation eXtreme. |
cal altered states of reality that is so important in Personae are worn to be dis-played -- as the actor's mask. It is in the position of the final outcome, basically every other civilization and culture prior to big patriarchical power." Can technology allow in completion of the reading, and in culmination with Destiny; for the decad is the number of Fate. us to escape time? The secret order of catastrophe resides in the affinity between all these processes, as |
in their homology with the system as a whole. Order within disorder: all extreme phenomena are consis- characters to be presented, or masks that actors may wear playing the roles of those characters. It tent both with respect to each other and with respect to the whole that they constitute. This means that it was used by Jung to describe a role that an individual may play in life, or a social fasçade. is useless to appeal to some supposed rationality of the system against that system's outgrowths. The I have teamed this term up with the symbol 'X' for several reasons; specifically, it is used to refer to vanity of seeking to abolish these extreme phenome- na is absolute. Chaos imposes a limit upon what an unknown quantity, or simply the unknown. Additionally, it refers to cancellation or oblitera- would otherwise hurtle into an absolute void. The secret disorder of extreme phenomena, then, plays a tion. Finally, it is also the roman numeral for 10, corresponding to this work's own chronologistics. prophylactic role by opposing its chaos to any escala- tion of order and transparency to their extremes. In terms of its relationship to online technology and developing and mediated learning environ- In every compulsion to resemlance, every extradition of difference, in al contiguity of things and their own ment, Pesonae X represents more than the eva- sion of revelation via anonymity (though the image, all conflation of beings and their own code, lies the threat of an incestuous virulence, a diabolical technology does -- inherently and functionally -- support anonymity, for both synchronous and otherness boding the breakdown of all humming machinery. This is the reappearance of the prnciple asynchronous interaction). Serving as the media- trix, it guides the learner through an innovative of Evil in a new guise. No morality or guilt is implied, however: the principle of Evil is simply synonymous approach to reading what exists between mean- ing and truth -- from imagination to myth. In with the principle of reversal, with the turns of fate. In systems undergoing total positivization -- and artificial life, one necessarily imprints, encodes -- that which one touches. Therefore, developers hence desmbolization -- evil is equivalent, in all its forms, to the fundamental rule of reversability. of postmodern techno-pedagogy may employ the ambiguity of personae to counter Meaning It is not in fact the fate of every sign, every signifying and reproductive agency, to abolish its natural ref- and Truth by none other than themselves. First, the assignment of the developer's sense of mean- erent? The subject, too, is gone because identical duplication ends the division that constitutes him. ing, or perspective, is necessarily imparted in the environment he or she generates, though not The mirror stage is abolished by the cloning process -- or, perhaps more accurately, is monstrously parodied overtly, perhaps. Second, developers may inter- weave hypernarratives -- the telling-of-the-known therein. For the same reason cloning keeps nothing of the narcisststic dream of the subject's projection into told within multiple ways of knowing. That is, a transparent layering of meanings and methods an ideal alter ego, for this priojection too works by means of an image - the image in the mirror, in of interpretation. Exploring the reading/writing-between, hypernarratives do not abandon the linguistic logic which the subject becomes alienated to re-discover himself, or that seductive and mortal image in which of grammatical structure, but rather, annihilate the idea of its necessity. the subject recognizes himself as a prelude to his death...No more mediations -- no more images: an Developing virtual technology as hypernarrative incites a paradigmatic shift in reading; techno- individual product on the conveyor belt is in no sense a reflection of the next (albeit identical) product in pedagogy subsequently constitutes a relational re-ordering of signifiers. The subject -- a persona line. The one is never a mirage, whether ideal or mor- tal, of the other: they can only accumulate, and if between personae and hence, the learner -- is no longer. Yet, we cannot speak of the death of the that is so it is precisely because they have not been sexually engendered and unacquainted with death. subject -- for the death of the subject is actually the death of death, since the fate of the subject Not only is otherness absent everywhere in this arti- ficial dramaturgy, but the subject has also quietly is not disappearance, nor disembodiment, but dispersal: the mythical one-to-many. In this become indifferent to his own subjectivity, to his own alienation...The subject becomes transparent, way, we should develop our social constructions of knowledge, as perhaps one such reading will spectral...and hence interactive. For in interactivity the subject is other to no one...The interactive inspire abundance in applications of differance. |
exchange but through the disappearance of the social, Probing Meanings amid meanings, in A search for the truth of Truth, the disappearance of otherness. This being is the other after the death of the Other -- not the same No one formulated solution exists. Death of naievete other at all: the other that results from the denial of the Other...Man and machine have become isomor- Openly welcomes, not the ordering, but Re-ordering -- dis-ordering -- in phic and indifferent to each other: neither is the other to the other. Identity becomes infinitely plastic in a Appearances of betweenness. pla of images that knows no end. We lived once in a world where the realm of the imaginary was Instinct, inspiration -- guided by Star of hope. governed by the mirror, by dividing one into two, by theatre, by otherness and alienation. Today that Intuition, imagination -- flickers so Small agains the black night. realm is the realm of the screen, of interfaces and duplication, of contiguity and networks...Nothing Time and space artificially dismember inscribed on these screens is ever intended to be de- ciphered in any depth: rather it is supposed to be ex- Reality in virtuality: plored instantaneously, in an abreaction immediate to meaning, a short circuiting of the poles of representation. Orchestrating readings between (T)ruth amid (M)eaning. from (collectively) Baudrillard; Taylor/Saarinen; Ulmer. See Mediagraphy. |