Page 18 - Cyberculture and New Media

Francisco J. Ricardo 9
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for Duchamp, as for Debord, the image serves as the target for merely
probing what it is not. Duchamp points that absence back to art’s repressive
retinal obsessions, while Debord, refracting Walter Benjamin’s elegy for an
erstwhile aura, assumes that some iconic enzyme motors a primal code of
order historically functioning through progressively autonomous art whose
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very independence now paradoxically threatens it .
The progressive degradation of ceremonial image into serviceable
spectacle that Debord’s Society of the Spectacle relates is, of course, too
extensive for explication through the exclusively visual. But, however
intractable within the constraints of modernism’s value system of commodity
exchange, only art has effectively assimilated all the contradictory tendrils
that modernism’s social, economic, and epistemic crises has spawned. It has
accomplished this multiple adoption by the exchange of one kind of defining
structure for another: the transmutation of form into mode. Old distinctions of
knowledge, culture, and social stratification, wholly indispensable until the
th
Victorian era, encounter abrupt and sustained challenges in the 20 century,
which in fact undermines the stability and merits of category. Intimations of
categorical collapse first take root in the intermingling problematisation of
form and concept; montage, collage, bricolage, a steady profusion of
appropriations, synergies and syntheses construct a model of experience that
denies the separateness of observation and context. As the established
impressions of form become incrementally replaced by acts of transformation
centering on the interpermeation of conceptual constructs, epistemic and
expressive emphasis accrues to the manner of construction, which shifts what
we might call the enunciative rationale of disciplines toward new conventions
of doing, that is, toward new modes of perception that transcend formal
opacities.
In prevailing over the individuality of form, this preference for the
modal, comprised within the larger overlay to which I alluded earlier,
registers in several directions, of which two interest us here. These might be
called transhistorical and transformal. While in disciplinary appearance,
history is framed as a paradigm of continuity such that the idea of “human
history” is phrased as a single object, it is in contemporary thinking that
historical moments assume incommensurable separateness from each other,
and this separateness is marked by distinctions not in time but in cultural
thinking. Hence the Victorian era authenticates as historically distinct from
the Edwardian, although temporally these periods are of course directly
continuous, and it makes sense to assume that it is by an overlap of cultural
markers such as this that we might locate that I mean by transhistorical.
Restating Tönnies, Debord’s anchorless Gesellschaft longs for the vital
sufficiency of a bygone Gemeinschaft, an autonomy of historical moments
that wants cybercultural resolution in the overlay, the simultaneity of two
ages sharing signs at a temporal junction. Philosophy and art were the first to