{"id":152,"date":"2005-11-08T08:52:58","date_gmt":"2005-11-08T12:52:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/2005\/11\/08\/pessimism-and-death\/"},"modified":"2005-11-08T11:56:59","modified_gmt":"2005-11-08T15:56:59","slug":"pessimism-and-death","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/2005\/11\/08\/pessimism-and-death\/","title":{"rendered":"Pessimism and death"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hmmm. As I read these hypertexts, I was actually most struck not by their structure, but by their content. In “The Mode of Information and Postmodernity” Poster claims that “[l]anguage no longer represents a reality, no longer is a neutral tool to enhance the subject’s instrumental rationality: language becomes or better reconfigures reality” (60). The disappearance of reality is also what Baudrillard deals with in “Simulacra and Simulations”. But the ‘disappearance of the real’ is not necessarily connected to the disappearance of life, although in Hegirascope <\/em>and Pax<\/em> I got the sense that this was the case. The subject matter of these works (at least the ‘paths’ I found myself on) seemed to be communication (naturally), quirky relationships (love?), life and death, and the ultimate loss of reality. With Hegirascope<\/em> I constantly felt like I was reading an updated re-writing of Beckett’s Endgame<\/em>. There are poems(?) about the bomb, about a de-personalized ‘subject’ waking up in a place where he searches in vain for other people, about death and bones and Viking funerals. Others overtly position themselves within the postmodernist discussion of signs and reality, like the ones that talk about simulacra and those that mention Walt Disney and his frozen state of non-death. My question thus becomes: Why the pessimism? As the introduction to Pax<\/em> points out, these hypertexts possess an inherently playful structure. This makes the hypertext become alive as you read it, which makes moving through it a fun and pleasurable experience. The feeling of pleasure, unfortunately, is destroyed by the darkness of its subject matter, which to me resembles a more modernist sense of alienation and paranoia. It does not matter that Hegirascope<\/em> asserts that the electronic network (was it the internet? I don’t remember) will survive any cataclysm; that it in this sense is larger than life itself. To me, this only makes the whole project seem more depressing. Why do these texts have such a negative attitude towards the technology that ‘gives them life’? Why does their subject matter connect this technology with death by the bomb? (And aren’t these modernist themes?) There have to be (there are) more optimistic ways of linking the new possibilities of technology to the human experience. The fragmentation of the subject in the hands of technology leads to infinite possibilities, at least some of which should be joyful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hmmm. As I read these hypertexts, I was actually most struck not by their structure, but by their content. In “The Mode of Information and Postmodernity” Poster claims that “[l]anguage no longer represents a reality, no longer is a neutral tool to enhance the subject’s instrumental rationality: language becomes or better reconfigures reality” (60). The … Continue reading Pessimism and death<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-152","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reflections"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=152"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}