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Subject: [CTHEORY] Article 146 - A Utopia Realized
_____________________________________________________________________
CTHEORY THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL 27, NO 3
*** Visit CTHEORY Online: http://www.ctheory.net ***
Article 146 04/11/10 Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
_____________________________________________________________________
A Utopia Realized: Cyber For All
==========================================
~Thierry Bardini~
I like to think (it has to be) of a cybernetic ecology where we
are free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to
our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by
machines of loving grace.
-- Richard Brautigan
Here, ONE will perhaps read that Kublai Khan dreamed of the Internet,
or that the computer was at first a ~calculationes~ machine and
therefore found its origins in the scholastics! Indeed, why not the
~radical~ anachronism? ONE also says, and from authorized sources it
would seem, that the Internet was invented for/by the American
military to protect against the possibility of nuclear attack on
their territory. It is a subtle anachronism, because packet
switching, ARPANET's operating principle -- the Internet's precursor
-- was invented in 1962 by Paul Baran at RAND, the Pentagon's think
tank. It was invented for reasons such as: a ~sputnik~ in orbit, a
pylon or two exploding in Utah, the threat of a glacial war and the
first terrorist attack on US soil. But the Internet came ten years
later; ARPANET, seven years later... A small anachronism becomes
History, subtlety grounds interpretation, compromising the
chronology, oh just a little, just an extrapolation.
And yet, that is exactly the point. What if this extrapolation was
the foundation, what if the anachronism was the most fundamental
source of this historic discourse? Michel de Certeau is not so
radical, but just the same he says that the "relation of the present
to the past is the specialty of historiography." [1] De Certeau
recalls Raymond Aron's theses and concludes that "a first critique of
'scientism' revealed in 'objective' history its relation to one
place, that of the subject." [2] So I will jump into this first
inversion, from time to place:
Political in its essence, historic discourse supposes a ~reason
of place~. It legitimizes a place, that of its production, by
"understanding" others through a rapport of filiation or
exteriority. It ~takes its own authorization from the place~
that allows it to explain what is different as "foreign" and
what is interior as "unique." [3]
By resolutely following the method of the absolute structure [4], I
suggest even inversing this inversion by intensifying it, by passing
from place to utopia, and by strangely locating utopia in
cyberspace, this place of all places. Hence, I propose to you a
fiction, a short wander through the land of communication's utopia.
To speak of a current utopia, I chose the cybernetic utopia in its
current form, cyberspace. For this, I indulge in a double journey to
the land of utopia. Why not spin out the metaphor and realize all
these non-places in one journey?
Cyberspace is (also) a political and demiurgic project, a projection
space of ~n~ dimensions, one that comes closer and closer to the
ephemeral sphere of infinite range centred on each of its points
(Pascal, following Alain de Lille). Here, everyone will project their
anguish and dreams, according to their own private ambitions and
nightmares. I don't want to speak of utopia with a capital U (or
capital with a K, as in Kultur or Kapital). Allow me to speak to you
only of utopia realized and of its inversed image in the looking
glass, the dream's resistance.
Hence, I have chosen to situate utopia in two places, following the
lead of two certified guides. For utopia realized, who other than
Jean Baudrillard, the extreme occidental, the master of simulacra, to
point me to Salt Lake City? For the dream's resistance, who other
than Jorge Luis Borges, the blind librarian, another extreme
occidental, to show me the emptiness of Patagonia?
Erewhyna, U.S.A. [5]
--------------------
In 1986, Jean Baudrillard told us that America is the homeland of
utopia realized, and Salt Lake City is its vanishing point in
hyperspace: *voila*, the concept of Salt Lake City, this vortex in
the Desert of Salt. Erik Davis has since confirmed for me, in an
article for the excellent magazine, ~21C~ [6]: the Mormon arches
describe the vanishing point of the American realization of
cyberspace. The Mormons populate these arches, which are at the same
time concrete and virtual, with dead souls often freshly baptized,
and also with avatars (such as Joan of Arc, who might have fourteen
of them). And all this under the desert of salt's intense light that
said to Jean Baudrillard, "The whole city has the superhuman,
extraterrestrial transparence and cleanliness of an object from
elsewhere." [7]
The space to conquer at the beginning of this agitated millennium
could not be other than symbolic space, anchored in the political
economy of the sign. From the Alpha of the Centaur to the Omega of
the Noosphere, by way of the talmudic aleph. In the shadow of the
arms race to the first steps towards the heavens, stumbling for a
while on a desolate satellite and measuring the possible by the
rhythm of the planets, hot or cold, in a glacial war climate that,
all things considered, released only sterilizing atomic rains, we
were given to dreaming of a pure construct of our consciousnesses,
which was also quickly transformed into a war machine. Let's be more
clear. Let's quickly attempt the autopsy.
Cyberspace is born at the beginning of the 1980s. In 1984, which
hardly resembles the Orwellian 1984, William Gibson invents the word
~Cyberspace~, "a collective and consensual hallucination." [8]
1984 -- Cyberspace is thus born in the hour of the American Star Wars
(the Hollywood and thus already global version), whose shortness of
breath it anticipates, to some extent. America, homeland of utopia
realized, its native land, is thus (almost) triumphant. She, America,
smiles from ear to ear the grins of her actor presidents (Reagan or a
Walt Disney clone?) and of her visionary directors (Lucas and
Spielberg). The neo/ex-League of Nations had only to cling to its
ejector seat. So for more than 15 years, the resistance has been
established in a constellation of three-piece suits, ties and all.
The convincing ideals of 1968 are stained with green realism spouting
IN GOD WE TRUST, New Age pyramids ever adorning the unitary currency,
but no one reads these ideals anymore; they're too busy renegotiating
frontier history in a delirium of self-help/personal development.
It's the minute of the ego, the hour of galloping inflation.
Counter-culture settles down with ready-to-consume substitutes; among
the figurines of the epoch, Gandhi and Ronald McDonald harmoniously
rub elbows and Saint Kerouac takes on the false airs of a
door-to-door salesman. Apple computers are sold as if they were
oranges. There's a good living to be made from virtual income, in the
space of copyright ~opera mundi~. ET phones home.
(c) All reproduction rights prohibited.
Reaction: cyber takes on an attitude of the era, PUNK. Yes, Punk. The
resistance to the resistance breaks down, it is chaos at last. AIDS
rears its horrendous head, the vomit on ~My Way~ -- Sex Pistols style
-- has dried solid, we have all heard the calls from London, the
first City to fall into in the post-second oil trauma riots. The
cobblestones that ought to have hidden the beach lay silent at the
end of their parabolic trajectories, it's crisis, once and for all.
There is no one left to find them another meaning that would not be a
simulacra, can ONE throw a cobblestone out of boredom? And still no
beach. Everyone lives in the suburbs, refrigerators incessantly
humming OOOOm, Japanese VCRs stopped at Poitiers, microwaves have
just landed, just like the TGV in France, inaugurated with media pomp
and circumstance, and the compact disc sells like hotcakes. It's the
era of the void, and nobody gives a damn.
1989 -- Cyberspace diffuses at the exact moment when the Wall
crumbles, a wall too cumbersome for globalizing expansions. The Wall
falls at the hour of the commemoration of a revolution that
authorized global expansionism under the enlightened banner of
capitalistic progress. Paris commemorates its revolution in the form
of a parade, *un defile de mode*, a cosmetic spectacle, a fashionable
extravaganza. *Liberte-Egalite-Haute-Couture.* From Ulrich, the
protagonist of Musil's _Man without Qualities_ (MwQ, as in "BwO"),
and his function of organizer of the celebration of the Emperor's
party, disappearance, eclipse, until his reappearance as Jean-Paul
Gaultier, Emperor Mitterand's own Ulrich for his commemoration:
revolution in power, a historical hole. Ulrich metamorphoses into an
Internet surfer, an *internaute*. The cash machine understood this
well, punk [TM] starts being sold in drugstores. It falls a bit short
once in a while, but don't worry, we're starting to master the
intermediary conflicts. Ideology [TM] flourishes on the backdrop of
the "Death of Ideology," a commercial backdrop like any other. It
reeks of demagogic hyperbole: hey tourists, what would you say to a
small taste of global village? CNN won't charge you, don't change the
channel, stay warm in front of the tube. Virtual glasses enrich the
display to help you see into the corners better, it's cool for
disguising the kids who will play Doom, and it's really efficient,
it'll soon be a big commercial success. But above all, it's in the
connection: plug in, the poster says, it's in pixels. ~Everybody is a
user~.
1997 -- The prophets proliferate, binging gurus recruiting practices
that are on the edge of extinction, recruiting them from university
ranks that are practically restructured as intellectual eco-museums.
Experimentation focuses now on the human aspects of technology,
incorporating with all its strength, communities are back,
communitarianism lurks in the ether. From one circle to another, we
find our cousins, and some strangers too. Matter invades the
ethereal, utopia splinters under the weight of merchandizing, and the
Internet surfer, cramped over his console, starts dreaming again that
he's become part of the machine: cyborg [TM] is in style. Or at least
his image is...
The spectacular machine materialized cyberspace before it even
existed, oversaturated it with images, leaving to the founding utopia
only scraps of the consciousnesses that created it. It is the
question of this triumphant materialism that ironically drives me to
place [TM] alongside every once-respectable concept, even that which
indifferently translates its fascination for the next level in the
same blissful spectre of catastrophe, everywhere present in
advertising slogans for video games, messianic/suicidal messages, or
cyber-democratic projects: Sega [TM] and Heaven's Gate, same combat!
~Welcome to the next level!~
Because the materiality of things, of course, is their
cinematography.[9]
Hollywood productions of cyberspace: ~Total Recall~ (1990), ~Until
the End of the World~ (1991), ~Lawnmower Man~ (1992), ~Wild Palms~
(1993), ~Disclosure~ (1994), ~Hackers~ (1995), ~Johnny Mnemonic
~(1995), ~Lawnmower Man II~ (1995), ~Strange Days~ (1995) and
~Virtuosity~ (1995).
Will the cybernetic utopia definitively die (without hope of
resurrection) from this spectacular materialization? [10]
EreNowH: The First Prohibition
------------------------------
From 1948, in his first edition of _Cybernetics or Control and
Communication in the Animal and the Machine_, Norbert Wiener already
rebelled against the vain hopes held by some of his friends who
thought they could derive some sort of social efficacy from the
theses of his work. According to Wiener, their reasoning was based on
the observation of a growing differential between human control of
material and social environments: where natural science allowed the
former, social science ought to allow the latter. "From believing
this necessary, they come to believe it possible." "In this,"
retorted Wiener, "they show an excessive optimism, and a
misunderstanding of the nature of all scientific achievement."[11]
In short, Wiener accused his sociologist, anthropologist and
economist friends of utopianism.
With these few words, Weiner invoked the very spirit of utopian
thought, which implies that because something is deemed necessary, it
must be possible: optimism plus ignorance, to summarize his equation.
It is this fundamental cybernetic utopia, which added "human" to
Wiener's "animal and machine," that I would like to discuss. But I
would also like to oppose this utopia to the now widespread idea of
another cybernetic utopia, a non-place where super-humanity in its
dawn would have stored fantasies of its machinistic evolution to come
(the famous cyborg [TM]). In my opinion, this cyborg utopia is quite
secondary, historically derived [12]. I would like to take up here,
despite Wiener's condemnation, the original bet of his anthropologist
friends, and reinstitute the founding cybernetic non-place.
Gregory Bateson, the most eminent of the "friends of Norbert Wiener,"
was perhaps the last great priest of this heresy. In his view, the
very idea of an evolving ~telos~, of a "conscious plan" has no
meaning outside of the realm of ideas: the only salvation of
Darwinism, "this climax of the modern obsession for design," is
outside of materialism [13].
To all vendors and door-to-door salesmen of Cyberspace in a kit, it
is time, I think, to recall the only founding cybernetic utopia, the
one which Norbert Wiener rejected at its inception, the one which
Gregory Bateson put back in its place: an idea that would not be
practical (and hence not political either), that would be rather
immaterial and without future, in short, an idea plain and simple,
not an ideology. What does this tell us, this idea, this initial
dream of founding a synthesis, a ~Sacred Unity~ that rests on an
empirical science of knowledge, an epistemology that would become a
~Natural and Normative History~? Cybernetic utopia, if such a thing
still exists, ought to remind us that if we are now in a position to
become the engineers of our own evolving destiny, it is above all a
function of the rapport that we concretely develop with the world to
which we belong -- be it ethereal or not. On this subject, my second
guide had a surprise in store for me...
Erewhon, Patagonia: The Place of the Dream
------------------------------------------
Patagonia will here serve as a non-place par excellence, the place of
emptiness or of nothing; another surface of projection. Bruce Chatwin
and Paul Theroux, two of my travel mates, devoted a superb book to
Patagonia under the prophetic title, _Nowhere is a Place_: "So
Patagonia was the promise of an unknown landscape, the experience of
freedom, the most Southerly part of my own country, the perfect
destination... I thought: Nowhere is a place." [14] In the same
book, Bruce Chatwin took up the words of my second guide, Jorge Luis
Borges, on the subject: "You will find nothing there. There is
nothing in Patagonia." [15] This could be (also) expressed by
"nothing is in Patagonia," in the sense that the "absence of things
[no-thing] exists in Patagonia." Or maybe even "the absence of things
materializes in Patagonia," in the sense of Baudrillard's
filmographic materiality. Because, you see, Patagonia, this other
desert, also leaves its mark on visitors by the richness of the
images it encrypts in them. Witness the words of Charles Darwin, one
of the first visitors to Patagonia, and certainly among the most
illustrious (in the last chapter of _Voyage of the Beagle_):
In calling up images of the past, I find that the plains of
Patagonia frequently cross before my eyes; yet these plains are
pronounced by all wretched and useless. They can be described
only by negative characters; without habitations, without water,
without trees, without mountains, they only support a few dwarf
plants. Why then, and the case is not peculiar to myself, have
these arid wastes taken so firm a hold of my memory? [...] I can
scarcely analyze these feelings; but it must be partly owing to
the free scope given to the imagination.[16]
Paul Theroux seems to concur with my hazardous translation when he
opposes Darwin's vision with the vision of one of his successors,
William Hudson, in _Idle Days in Patagonia_ (1893). In Theroux's
view, for Hudson, "the experience of Patagonia is a journey to a
higher plane of existence, to a kind of harmony with nature which is
the absence of thought [...] Darwin's mistake was that he was looking
for something in Patagonia [...] it is better, Hudson says, to look
for nothing at all. Feel it and let yourself be moved by it." [17]
"It = nothing"
--------------
Let's accept, if you will, this translation (Treason? Betrayal?) as
our premise, and starting from this premise, let's construct a
paradoxical scenery, Erehwon reviewed and corrected. [18] Patagonia
as the site of suspended thought, as the desolate door to a sacred
unity, empirically felt rather than thought, this harmony to which
Gregory Bateson (may have) alluded. Hudson confirms it: "my mind was
suddenly transformed from a thinking machine into a machine for some
unknown goal. Thinking was like starting a noisy motor in my head."
It's in the silence of this paradoxical scenery that I intend to
place my second guide, trusting in his scholarly blindness to raise
this evocation of the famous superior plane of existence. [19]
At the heart of this evocative silence, Jorge Luis Borges will
provide the key, I think, to the resistance to realization, this slow
death of cybernetic utopia as it is put into place, as it is
spatialized -- and, who knows, the slow death of every utopia as it
is realized? This filmed and photographed cyberspace, object of all
the images I strive to critique. For you see, I do indeed need the
non-place of Patagonia so that what Borges tells us will be apparent
in its full strength, in the strength of the eternity of suspended
thought...
But thought suspended, what remains for us to know, poor Cartesian
animals that we are, poor thinking machines? I could certainly refer,
as is so much the fashion these days, to certain more or less
esoteric practices from faraway civilizations: whirling dervishes,
Buddhist monks, Japanese gardeners...But that would be asking you, my
Cartesian readers, to suspend your way of relating with the world to
imagine the practice of someone else, someone who is foreign to you.
It seems absurd, doesn't it? Rather than ask the help of these more
or less extreme-orientals, I suggest instead to portray my guide as a
hermit in his desert: this image will speak more to us, I believe. So
there we have the backdrop.
Now for the text, where the question will focus on the dream's
resistance... For if cyberspace is the creation of a cybernetic
utopia, the paradoxical spatialization of the original prohibition,
the fact remains that the initial dream can make utopia endure. If up
until now I have played with the question of space (going so far as
to locate the utopia realized), I must now attack its temporality:
from u-topic to u-chronic. From the archeology of Salt Lake City,
let's now turn to the Patagonian genealogy. For this, I propose to
come back to the antecedents of William Gibson's vision, this
"consensual and collective hallucination." As a good science fiction
novelist, Gibson obviously didn't start from scratch, but rather from
the layers of practice and representation that are already more or
less fossilized.
At least in this sense, cyberspace existed before it was given a
name. When Gibson published _Neuromancer_ in 1984, networked computer
information had already been in existence for at least 15 years. Even
before the Internet, with its ancestor ARPANET, computer scientists
had been communicating online for ages... But, you might retort, real
cyberspace is the Web, which didn't arrive on the scene until 1989.
To which I would reply: Exactly! That is precisely what our question
is here: if the Web is the consensual and collective hallucination
which Gibson speaks of, we must insist above all else on its
qualifiers, because this hallucination wasn't invented yesterday...
This hallucination has already been treated by Theodore Holm Nelson,
an expert in "vaporware" (as the Americans say), who, in the
mid-1960s, invented another word that is now widespread: "hypertext."
The Web is first and foremost a hypermedium: hypertext embellished
with graphics, images, videos, etc. It was precisely this dream, this
hallucination that agitated Ted Nelson, the d(R)eam of the
e-encyclopedia, of a computerized literary system where everyone's
contributions could be stored and catalogued, connected to and
visited over and over again, in short, a sort of ideal library... Not
unrelated to the Borges' "Library of Babel"! But rather than focusing
on this conceptual coincidence, I would like to use my second guide
to ponder names. Ted Nelson chose a very curious name for his system,
a name that resonates with wordsmiths and that evokes a thousand
exotic delights: Xanadu. Better yet, Xanadu qualifies Nelson's dream
itself since the system has not yet seen the light of day...Xanadu,
the name of all of Ted Nelson's projects:
For 25 years, I've worked on different projects, all based on
the principle of hypertext and all called Xanadu. It was the
name of one of the palaces of Mongol emperor Kublai Khan, near
Peking. English poet Samuel Coleridge used the name Xanadu in
one of his works as the symbol of creativity and romantic
inspiration. But Coleridge also said that he forgot that part of
the history. So Xanadu becomes the symbol of conflict between
the artist's mind and the problems brought in from the world
outside, which makes him forget his work. For me, Xanadu is the
place ~par excellence~ of artistic creation and the magic palace
of memory, where nothing is ever forgotten. [20]
Hence, Xanadu is clearly a place for Nelson, the place of infallible
memory and thus necessarily a palace, as the art of memory goes.
Xanadu is thus the name of Ted Nelson's dream, of Coleridge's poem
and of Kublai Khan's palace. And it's at this point that Borge's
clarifications come into play: to spin these coincidences into one
single thread -- a rainbow, according to Keats -- and thus
concretize the dream's resistance.
In a short text entitled "Le reve de Coleridge" (Coleridge's Dream),
published in his collection _Autres inquisitions_ (1952), Borges
reminds us that indeed Coleridge first "dreamed" his poem, but also,
and this is his most remarkable contribution, that Kublao Khan had
also dreamed his palace... According to Borges indeed, we can find in
a book from the XIII century entitled _History of Persia and the
Mongols_, the following lines penned by Rashid-ed-Din, vizier to
Ghazan Mahmoud and descendent of Kublai Khan: "To the East of Shang
Tu, Kublai Khan built a palace, according to a plan he had seen in a
dream and which he kept in his memory." Borges concludes:
If the diagram was verified during one night from which we are
separated by centuries, someone will dream the same dream,
without suspecting that others have already dreamed it, and he
will shape it from marble or from music. Perhaps the series of
dreams has no end, perhaps the key is in the last.
After having written the preceding, I glimpse or I believe I
glimpsed another explanation. Who knows if an archetype not yet
revealed to man, an eternal object (to use Whitehead's
nomenclature) does not slowly penetrate the world. Its first
manifestation was the palace; its second, the poem. Whoever
compares them will see that they are essentially identical.[21]
The dream's third manifestation was Nelson's system, and the last
version (to date), Gibson's cyberspace. Borges was right: Nelson
didn't remember Coleridge's dream (he simply said that he must have
"forgotten a part of history") and ignored the dream of Kublai Khan.
Thus the dream resists, it remains in the oversights and the
omissions, and an eternal object [22] takes on multiple forms in the
world following these dreams: palace, poem, unrealized yet
influential proposition, cyberpunk novel, communication space. But
the final point has not yet been made...
Coda: The Space-time of Suspended Thought
-----------------------------------------
There is but one detail that Borges omitted and that makes complete
sense to me. In his story, Coleridge, suffering from an "illness,"
had to take a "sleeping aid" that gave him respite from the sleep in
which he dreamt his poem. When he awoke, he remembered this with a
"singular clarity" that allowed him to write down for the richness of
"one page of undisputed splendor." Borges' euphemism is revealed to
us in this singular clarity which we now know corresponds to the
awakening from a particular sleep, a "holiday rest" where "the
majestic antagonism of equal and powerful forces [are expressed];
infinite activities, infinite rest!" (Baudelaire, "translating" De
Quincey). A "sleep," if we can use such a word, where, in his "slow
speed" the dreamer becomes the "place of phenomena that art brings to
us from outside." (Cocteau) To put it plainly, perhaps an awakened
dream would suspend thought...
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-burning tree;
And where forests ancient as the hills
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery...
Let's stop crying for the utopia lost in its realization and instead
let's rejoice in its infinite indulgence in giving everafter into our
dreams and fantasies... And if at times an eternal object comes to
fertilize them, let's reflect on it and, unflinching, daring, let's
continue to be dreamed! Because, after all, as Coleridge said in
another of "his" dreams,
If while dreaming a man traverses paradise,
that he receive a flower as proof of passage,
And upon wakening, he find this flower in his hands...
What is one to say?
After a visit to Prague and Rabbi Loew's tombstone, I would dare to
add a few words, a cryptic answer from the apocryphal legends
surrounding the father of the golem: "death in a rose, alas, death in
a rose."
Notes:
------
* words denoted with asterisks contain accents not compatible with
the ascii version of the text.
[1] De Certeau, M., _L'ecriture de l'histoire_, Paris: Gallimard,
1975, p. 353.
[2] Ibid. p. 65.
[3] Ibid. p. 354.
[4] See Abellio, R., _La structure absolue, Esssai de phenomenology_,
Paris: Guillard, 1965.
[5] I thank Samuel Butler for having invented this pig-latin-like
form of slang and for having thus provided my titles (see Butler,
S., _Erewhon_, London: Penguin Books, 1985 [1872]).
[6] Davis, Erik, "Neuromancer Database of the Dead," ~21C~, No. 1
(1997), p. 44-49.
[7] Baudrillard, Jean, _Amerique_, Paris: Grasset et Fasquelle
(Biblio "essais"), 1986, p. 8.
[8] Gibson, William, _Neuromancer_, New York: Berkley, 1984.
[9] Baudrilard, _Amerique_, op. cit. n. 7, p. 83.
[10] Guy Debord said "spectacle is the material reconstruction of the
religious illusion." in _La societe du spectacle_, Paris: Gallimard
(Folio), 1992.
[11] Wiener, Norbert, _Cybernetics or Control and Communications in
the Animal and the Machine_, 2nd edition, Cambridge (MA): MIT Press,
1965 [1948], p. 162.
[12] I can even date this second utopia with some precision to the
appearance and development of the first generation of computer
scientists in the 1960s in the United States. I consider the famous
article by JCR Licklider, first head of ARPA's Information Processing
Technology Office of the American Department of Defense, as the first
manifestation of this second utopia; the article entitled
"Man-Computer Symbiosis" was published in 1960 (_IRE Transactions on
Human Factors in Electronics_, March 1960, p. 4-11): here the cyborg
took over for the golem.
[13] Bateson, Gregory, _A Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology
of Mind_, under the direction of Rodney E. Donaldson, New York:
Cornelia and Michael Bessie, 1991.
[14] Chatwin, B. and P. Theroux, _Nowhere is a Place: Travels in
Patagonia_, San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 199, p. 29.
[15] Ibid. p. 36.
[16] Darwin, Charles, _Journal of Researches into the Natural History
and Geology of Countries Visited during the Voyage round the World of
H.M.S. Beagle_, London, 1902, quoted in Theroux and Chatwin, _Nowhere
Is a Place_, op. cit. n. 14, p. 39.
[17] Ibid. p. 36-39.
[18] But perhaps scarcely corrected, after all. Because Butler's
"wastelands," this fictionalization of the Canterbury Settlement (New
Zealand) where he stayed between 1860 and 1864, seems to have been
mistaken, through their effect on the solitary soul, for the
Patagonia that Darwin evoked.
[19] Chatwin, B. and P. Theroux, _Nowhere is a Place: Travels in
Patagonia_, San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 199, p. 41.
[20] Ted Nelson, remark noted by Yves Eudes (Multimedia section of
~Monde~, week of April 1, 1996).
[21] Borges, J. L., _Oeuvres completes_, Paris: Gallimard
(Bibliotheque de la Pleiade), 1993, p. 685, my translation.
[22] "The two conspicuous examples of the truth-relation in human
experience are afforded by propositions and by sense-perception. A
proposition is the abstract possibility of some specified nexus of
actualities realizing some eternal object, which may either be
simple, or may be a complex pattern of simpler objects." Whitehead,
Alfred North, _Adventures of Ideas_, New York: Free Press, 1967
[1933], p. 243.
--------------------
* This is the English version of a text that appeared previously in
French at http://post-scriptum.org/ issue 2003, 2 : "Anachronisme et
intempestivite". I thank Stephanie Fox for her help with the
translation.
* in memoriam, Ev Rogers.
--------------------
Thierry Bardini is associate professor in the department of
communication at the Universite de Montreal. He holds a masters in
agronomy and a Ph.D. in sociology (and often feels about letting them
drop). He dreamed for a long time about "writing in a different way"
and now feels that he has started doing it. He is currently working
on his second book, entitled _Junk_Log_.
_____________________________________________________________________
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