Re: <nettime> more on Kittler

[John Hopkins <jhopkins@neoscenes.net>]

Hi Margaret -

> I think your point is well taken.  Nettime--and I may instantly be proven wrong--has not attracted that many posts on the "embodied, anthropological experience of another person."

Somewhere in the nettime archive this can be 'disproven' at least in some 
occasional posts that I have made on the subject, calling for writers to relate 
lived, embodied experience at least on occasion rather than constant theoretical 
fulminations, but you are totally correct.  A few folks here do this, most don't.

It is easy to completely separate the lived meat-space experience (of human 
encounters) from the bland text of academia, and most academics do exactly that. 
 If you look at the actualities of how people live from moment-to-moment, and 
day-to-day, most are living cookie-cutter-stamped pathways rather the same 
(perhaps this is merely what 'participation' in the institution of academia 
requires -- if you DON'T follow that bland work-a-day existence, you won't last 
too long in the job!).  But the fact that most succumb to this is imho what 
brings our system to brink of where it is now: a long-unquestioned 
relinquishment of obligations to each other.  The localized and personal  gets 
lost in the dictates and institutional structures of state and other phat social 
entities who tell us how to be.

As I've made my nomadic way across the meat-space of 'new media arts' in 30 
countries over the last (almost 20 years), I've noted this 'schizophrenia' 
between the public self (in text, in presentations, in art works), and the human 
'real' 'private' self.  Many times these images deeply contradict each other! 
At one level, of course, this is to be human, but when you can measure the 
qualia of encounter on a scale of open or closed, I find it very disturbing when 
someone is writing about 'political' freedom whilst having a very rigid and 
closed mind when encountered as the Other.

Honestly I think it's still the complete garbage foisted on humans who 
(unconsciously) subscribe to Descartes split & sundered worldview -- where there 
is a break between the world and the self -- IMHO, a completely false assertion 
to the ample evidence that the cosmos is completely connected, continuous, and 
(all!) our 'selves' are seamlessly part of that energized continuity...

cheers,
John


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