From: steve.devos-AT-krokodile.com
Date: Fri, 12 Oct 2001 22:22:08 +0100
Subject: Re: Lyotard on the "here-and-now".


Hugh and All

Found the quote end of "something like: communication without 
communication" (Text 8).


My own feeling about the inhuman remains that it needs to be read 
through the two codas at the beginning of the text the one on page 4 
where he writes about rejecting 'haste' (introduction) and the whole of 
section 1 "can thought go on without a body?". Where Lyotard begins the 
discussion of the end of humanity (in any sense) and its supplanting by 
the inhuman, in these texts the 'fear' even 'terror' of the possibility 
of the inhuman artificial intelligence is written between and on the 
lines.) Lyotard's desire is for a slowing of the velocity which we exist 
at, a slowing of the processes...

The quotes below refer directly to the initial statements relating to 
the industrialisation of the media of communication, in truth we should 
speak of the informationisation of the media but still, for this reason 
I believe this refers back to the final critique placed by Lyotard on 
the society of development, but also to the question of 'haste' and 
'speed' already touched on. But still beyond even this the inhuman 
waits,  (post-solar thought he calls it at one point significantly 
through the voice of the gendered other, the woman...) the ungendered 
inhuman communications which the computer constructs and directs to me, 
which plainly do not function in the same spatial and temporal world as 
the human one I usually exist within. There are a number of  paragraphs 
in '8' which confirm this confused and incomplete line of thought. For 
example the second paragraph on page 116  which begins ' Is it the case 
that in this crisis...' Which is the crisis of the post-modern, the 
collapse of space and time, the end of the prior symbolic orders, the 
covering of the entire world with the society of development...

(Perhaps if we are fortunate we'll follow sun-ra to Saturn and beyond, 
bet the pilots a russian...)

regards

sdv


hbone wrote:

>Dear All,
>
>In nt notes on "The Inhuman", I found the following quote:
>
>"The question raised by the new technologies in connection with their
>relation to art is that of the "here-and-now".  What does 'here' mean on the
>phone, on television, at the receiver of an electronic telescope?  And the
>'now'?  Does not the 'tele'-element necessarily destroy presence, the
>'here-and-now' of the forms and their 'carnal' reception?  What is a place,
>a moment, not anchored in the immediate 'passion' of what happens?  Is a
>computer in any way here and now?  Can anything  _happen_ with it?  Can
>anything happen  _to_  it?"
>
>I read "The Inhuman" sometime ago, but the above never grabbed my attention.
>Now, I find it intriguing, for I don't understand it.
>
>Since it is one of the works most quoted on the List, I'm sure some of you
>have studied this passage, and would appreciate comments.
>
>Thanks,
>Hugh
>
>
>
>
>