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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

signs proliferating; referents retreating « Previous | |Next »
September 28, 2010

In The Future is an Open Future: Cultural Studies a the End of the 'Long Twentieth Century' and the Beginning of the 'Chinese Century' in Cultural Science John Hartley says that cultural studies was caught up in a crisis not so much of knowledge as of representation, which was also entering the period of ‘creative destruction’ known as postmodernism.

Here the legitimacy of both political and semiotic representation, as inherited from nineteenth century philosophy, was challenged. Commentators became interested in the productivity of signs, and in particular the excess of mediation in contemporary societies, whereby signs – often entirely detached from any plausible referent – suffused the public and private domains. Although they were often criticised for turning the world into a text, the postmodernists were among the first to see clearly, right across the domains of politics, culture and the economy, that representation had been emancipated from reality, and that the process of abstracting textuality, signification, meaning and value from situated context or referential causation was a phenomenon of the system, not of their own fantasies. Everywhere, signs were proliferating; referents retreating. Excessive media signification, in movies, advertisements, TV and the arts, was only the most visible form. Easily observed and readily taught, media studies ‘caught’ postmodernism early and popularised it widely, to the dismay of the nineteenth-century disciplines.

He adds that abstraction and the detachment of the sign characterised even economics, where capital itself was ‘textualised’ in the form of financial markets, releasing unprecedented energy into the global financial system. Work was abstracted from the labourer in automated factory systems. The wide distribution of personal computers detached words from pages, allowing ‘text’ to become mobile in ways that would have astonished typewriter-bashing journalists of the modern era, but they too were busy textualising the world in order to know it.

Recipes were abstracted from food, allowing celebrity chefs to prosper even as cooking declined as a social practice. In short, ‘the economy’ shifted decisively from manufacturing to information. Politics shifted from representative to mediated forms, in which class, party or ethno-territorial loyalty gave way to a system where politicians auctioned promises for votes and events mattered in direct proportion to their visibility on network TV. Culture became the site for the tensions, struggles and ‘affordances’ associated with these changes to be worked through at the local, contextual and experiential levels.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:28 AM | | Comments (2)
Comments

Comments

so are we post-dialectic? can't the ostensibly garish baudrillardean nightmare of the ubiquity of signs actually degenerate into the real once again, into something worse?

"...the detachment of the sign characterised even economics, where capital itself was ‘textualised’ in the form of financial markets, releasing unprecedented energy into the global financial system."

How would 'textualization' of capital release energy into financial systems? What's wrong with explaining the energies of markets during this period as excessive speculation?