Date: Sun, 20 May 2001 20:12:02 +0100
From: "steve.devos" <steve.devos-AT-krokodile.com>
Subject: death and the mobile phone


I am still bemused by the story of the Romanian who killed itself
(himself seems) because someone stole his Nokia 3110 mobile phone… Or I
was until I began to read Tanizaki’s In praise of shadows (which I
bought yesterday in Blackwells on the Charing Cross Road a good bookshop
with a pretty good philosophy/culture section). To read the text is to
perceive the centrality of aesthetics and objects in our dominant
western culture. Tanizaki defines his relationship to the Japanese
Architectronics in diametrically opposing lines to those which I would
consider as normal – shadows rather than light, tarnish rather than
shining metal, laquer rather than silver.  “A Japanese room might be
likened to an inkwash painting, the paper-paneled shoji being the
expanse where the ink is thinnest, and the alcove where it is darkest.
Whenever I see the alcove of a tastefully built Japanese room, I marvel
at our comprehension of the secrets of shadows, our sensitive use of
shadow and light. For the beauty of the alcove is not the work of some
clever device. An empty space is marked off with plain wood and plain
walls, so that the light drawn into the dim shadows within emptiness.
There is nothing more….” Where this is going is that I was struck by my
immediate response to the Romanian suicide. Which was bemusement over
the idea of committing suicide over the absence of what I take to be a
trivial piece of technology, except the idea of the technology may be of
the same basic social structure as the Japanese room.

Is it possible for the absence of the mobile phone to be such a
disruption of the sublime that death is preferable to absence or is it
that in the poverty stricken symbolic of late capitalism...and so on.

I of course believe the answer is yes, I’d probly have to completely
restucture my life without this laptop I type endlessly on….

I’ll think

Best

sdv