Page 157 - Culture Technology Communication

140 Herbert Hrachovec

specific expectations. Typing at her keyboard, a person can reach a
global audience. I am not denigrating this hybrid form. It seems to
me that, on the contrary, its power has to be acknowledged and its
presuppositions have to be scrutinised.
One might, tentatively, say that an imaginatory cross-fertilisation
is at issue here. The rules of SMTP contain nothing to inspire wide-
spread phantasies, whereas the phantasy of all the inhabitants of the
planet communicating unrestrictedly has probably been around for as
long as humanity itself. Inconspicuous moments like making an ap-
pointment at the computer lab, determining the parameters of a mail-
ing list’s configuration files, etc., can, surprisingly, acquire pivotal
importance by short-circuiting technological capacity and an external
content that is imaginatively superimposed upon the working of the
machinery. This is not, to repeat my point, meant to be a deconstruc-
tion of such incidents. Rather, examining their inherent structure we
learn about the force and the limits of attempts to install a computer-
mediated space of Reason.
It is tempting to put the point in Hegelian terms: mailing lists
exhibit the principle of widely-distributed, democratic, simultaneous
discourse an sich, i.e., formally, by virtue of their technical defini-
tion. The corresponding philosophical notions remain, on the other
hand, für sich, confined within the realm of theoretical design. In
order for the promise to work itself out, both sides would have to be
mediated, exploring the power of operational, but abstract proce-
dures to shape and transform imagination via actual discourse.
This, of course, is where the hybrid construction is put to a test it
cannot possibly pass. Philosophical talk of rationality, generality and
social symmetry is not meant to be taken in the literal sense a mail-
ing list exemplifies. Some enthusiasts, it is true, start off with a sim-
plistic understanding of terms like “universality” and “immaterial”;
their punishment consists in having to deliver papers tracing their
disenchantment. Yet, as Wolf Biermann, a German songwriter, put it
in a different context: “Wer sich nicht in Gefahr begibt, der kommt
drin um.” Not taking risks is living dangerously.
To mention a similar dilemma, it is, at a first glance, a very plau-
sible proposition that Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida (among
others) are prophets of digitalised hypertext which neatly materi-
alises their conceptual design (Landow 1994). But, taking a closer
look, it becomes obvious that the architecture of a book like Roland
Barthes’ S/Z is completely foreign to the current realities of hyper-
text. Writing about “nodes” and “networks” in a traditional context is
importantly different from designing HTML pages and similarities