Date: Thu, 13 Feb 1997 13:32:28 -0600 (CST)
From: jelly-AT-mail.utexas.edu (Jessica and Sterling's Mail)
Subject: a few new direction's


Ostrow seems to be concerned...
> with world view, the will to power and its economy-- in other
>words how will we and to what end  form our symbollic reality.
>...Part of the problem at present is that there is a real desire (
fabricated or induced) >not to miss out on the new... an industry that is
characterized by producing a need for >the very products it produces.

a concern that I would share as well... however

>why is so much of this premised on an  ideal of a world of representations
>available only to the mind in which all  other sensory data is made
>subordinant?

Right before this Saul mentions Adorno; perhaps this is where the answer
lies; that all sensory data is, once language is in place, subordinate to
gestalt- ie, subordinate to greater matrixes of knowing- to thoughts
(apperception perhaps; probably presuming too much, but basically the
process of thinking concepts as a mechanism, not a product; there is only
sense observation, and our idea of its (collective; gestalt) meaning (we
have no thoughts, only organization of sense perceptions)... 

this "digital culture" (I like information culture better) may perhaps be
only more reductionist, if you treat it all as simply sign and signified...
if, of course...

>I would suppose this only because the aesthetic is an appeal to the senses
and the digital >has no such appeal as of yet given that in the main its
continues to exist either behind >the glass of my screen or dressed up in
the borrowed appearences of other
>mediums (predominantly film, photography and that of printing) .

I must confess, being a painter, I occassionally skirts the edge of
sculpture to appeal to the tactile, which is a better descriptive than
sensual, I think, since we have nothing but sensory data; perhaps best to
reference Twombly, ie, "sculputre" as an extension of painting

have to agree with the digital though, even if I think that any old
psychoanalysts who are hanging around are going to have a literary hoopty-do
with what the computer will shortly do to the cinema, and, consequently, to
the reality we will form, as Ostrow puts it... though I think that the
"reality" of this reality is only going to lead us into a semantic
briarpatch, though, I must admit, I had fun...

as to Michael's comments on the act of "re-creating" a sense of history for
his clients... well, again, this becomes a question of where our reality is
formed.

gotta say I think that the former realities were just as unreal; ie, they
were only intellectual materialism (the nouvea riche yuppie owns an antiqued
ceiling, which represents prestige, etc, in the same way Louis XIII did;
faue (sp?) finishing is just as "real" as the other stuff, semiotically
speaking (?); if we are considering the political aspects of resulting world
veiws, then I'd have to say that these issues of posession are simply the
American extension of the rise of bourgesiose culture, the power lust of a
culture that has readily available mobility (ie, it is, and I'm sure
psychoanalysis would surrender proof, a will to political power, just as
what these yuppie fucks do is an economic will to power)

best
sterling




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