The variety of texts this week imply, at least to me, that direct interaction and texts that ‘make sense’ are on their way out. The postmodern world is rather a frenzy of machines, machinema, and hypertexts, in no particular order, that require rapid association, or disassociation, a celebration of disorientation, and complete abandonment of time and contemplation. Apparently, the digital take over of film, industry, and personal existence is inevitable, and if we aren’t lost yet, we will be, that is if we don’t welcome an intellectual divorce from narrative theme, history, and depth.
In the instance of Mouthrop’s Hejirascope, the poems, narratives, letters, and seemingly absurd personal accounts of characters like H. Marshall MuLuhan appear to be incongruous. The "hyper-hypertext" is categorically calculated and fitted to some indiscernable scheme and meaning and there is obviously some method to the madness. The rapid succession of the stories and poems, however, makes it difficult if not impossible to discover the overall text’s meanings. But perhaps I’m missing the point. Perhaps, the discernable meaning is what the witness perceives. Perhaps, like in many postmodern texts, there is no objective reality. "Truth is in the eye of the beholder." Truth is relative, relegated to a nonexistent status(postmodern condition), or maybe it is what one makes it (existentialist).
Despite the disillusionment of Moulthrop’s website, there were some notably clever insights on the matter of the postmodern technology, which is supposedly replacing the physical reality that is not cyberspace according. "The internet is the reversal of the bomb," insofar as it propagates a multiplicity of alternative universes, however shallow, miguided, and factually incorrect some of these alternative realities may be. The cyrogenically preserved H. Marshall MuLuhan, a benefactor of innovative technologies, in relation to the subcategory, "Irrelevant," claims that we’re all foreigners in America and the world of globalization. Since America was built on the backs and by the hands of "others," or laborers, the issue of the preservation of a national/cultural identity is irrelevant. We were all immigrants once, a beacon of truth despite the absurd context in which MuLuhan says it. Though the overall objective to the website may be a representation of one’s struggle for meaning amid utter chaos, the momentary insights and outwardly absurd humor are creative. However, they are rapidly replaced with new, seemingly disconnected images or poetic fragments, and establishes a reality in which one can hardly process the moment and the epiphanies and significance that accompany it. The profundity of such momentary insight with regards to art and philosophy is sidestepped by an entirely new set of images that overtake the last as if it never existed.
Hejirascope, Pax, the state of the art of machinema for the masses, and the internet are living organisms. They are the creators and simultaneously the posterity of a new human existence, one which transcends traditional limits and boundaries pertaining to how one defines himself within a culture, within a nation, within the world. It seems that globalization and technology define the postmodern era so much that are relationship to the state as "subjects," to our communities, to our friends (internet and "real"), and to our core self-image is no longer definable by the simplicity of a master narrative or a unitary dialectic of signification. We are all living hypertexts that create and recreate ourselves in the comtemporary technological organisms of cyberspace that inevitably, and frighteningly, will eliminate our roots in history and direct interaction.
