<nettime> brief note

[Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>]

-


brief note

in alphaville, it is the inertness of contemporary space. in blade runner,
the inertness ties to the interiority of the biological: replicants, like
humans, die. it is this parallel trajectory which defines the issues of
identity; if alphaville's paris is a displacement of the real, blade
runner's replicants carry the virus of the real's grain. they are just as
constituted, constructed, as the humans on the hunt - no more or less. i
want to emphasize this granularity or substance as fundamental to culture
and organism; origin and speciation in this regard are secondary.

this is the movement from modern to postmodern: the displacement of alpha-
ville tending towards the pervasive identities of blade runner's inhabita-
tions. neither are productions of terminal identity - both are character-
ized by alterities which are both familiar and absorbed as the same.

_

#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net