Today we are reduced to filters through necessity, in spite of ourselves.
We are particulars. Have always been, but even more so now, ever more specialized,
limited to one segment of human experience.
You cannot watch it all. You cannot hear it all. You cannot read it all.
This feeling is nothing new.
Whitman understood this, Whitman who contained multitudes, who promised that if you stopped one day and night with him he would give you the origin of all poems.
What sublime seduction.
Emerson as well. "Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all." Division upon division and we command only our small segments of experience while over under and across us wash unrelenting streams of information.
Jameson argues that in the postmodern era information approaches "total flow" and we no longer can process it before the next wave hits. According to his argument, it diminishes or destroys critical distance, making it ever more difficult to produce value judgements or sound analysis.
It happens. We register it. Next.
It is the format of television. It is the format of consumer society, where we are overwhelmed by choices. Choice in fact becomes us: are you a coke drinker or part of the Pepsi generation? Do you Do the Dew? You are more and more what you consume.
And so it goes.
2 comments:
"You cannot watch it all. You cannot hear it all. You cannot read it all."
I thought that perhaps, you were writing about Saturday and college football.
I think we're in the midst of an evolutionary jump which is why we're fracturing our attention spans, etc. We can no longer depend on our evolutionary strategy of expanding our brain size - if it gets any bigger, we will no longer be able to be born - so we have to learn how to use what we have. Of course there will be a period of chaos, of course ... but then something new will emerge from all this "total flow." At least that's my theory.
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