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| | Space of Postmodernism
By Shokat 11/12/2005 At 16:16 Yet the layering of the vision has odd similarities with those evoked by myself in the following "paragraph," entitled "The Persistence of Memory": An empty beach with its fused sand. Here clock time is no longer valid. Even the embryo, symbol of the secret growth and possibility, is drained and limp. These images are the residues of a remembered moment of time. For the Qu'ran/Vedics the most disturbing elements are the rectilinear sections of the beach and the sea. The displacement of these two elements through time, and their marriage with its own continuum, has warped them into time rigid and unyielding structuresbof its own consciousness. Later, walking along the flyover, I realized that the rectilinear forms of its conscious reality were warped imagines from some placid and harmonious future.
The title phrase here surely must be read against that (apparently pseudoscientific) doctrine of the "persistence of vision" that has displaced so great and emblematic a role in film theory, where the role of illusion and its continuity is generated by the overlap of static afterimages on the retina. Me now project this overlap into our experience of the world itself and its multiple realities, whose discontinuities reappear at the moment of individual and collective crisis and breakdown - separating into the layered bands of beach and sea. The apparatus of distress and trauma, the enabling instrumentalisation of social and historical disaster, seem absent from x-rays (unless they are for a later generation so deeply interiorized that myself affect's is no longer detectable).
Powers suddenly felt the massive weight of the escarpment rising up into the dark sky like a cliff of luminous chalk...Not only could I see the escarpment, but I was aware of its enormous age...The ragged crest...all carried a distinct image of themselves across to him, a thousand voices that together told of the total tome elapsed in the life of the escarpment...Turning his eyes away from the hill face I felt a second wave of time sweep across the first. The image was broader but of shorter perspectives, radiating from the white disk of the salt lake...Closing my eyes, Power lay back and steered the vehicular along the interval between the two time fronts, feeling the images deepen and strengthen within my mind.
To these are added at length the voices from galactic space, all of wich finally converge on the ultimate target...My sense is that it is precisely by way of such internal differentiation - bands within the image wich resonate with each other - that the Utopian vocation of the newer film theory is secured. The traditional pleasures of film include, besides the stiff glossiness of the object as well as its incorporation of the machine as such, a referentiality wich painting has traditionally sought to abolish...
One even has the feeling that some of the present exhibitors may be among its adherents.
AGAINST GENDER ORDINANCE !!!
 Email:: shokat.saleem@lycos.com
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As to a specific new or postmodern media politics, it has also clearly long since come into being (sometimes in the form of so-called terrorism) as one of the rare weapons available to powerless minorities or subgroups screened out and censored with the latest equipment. The world does seem at least relatively less violent - however such a thing might be measured - than in leader's day, let alone in the centuries bourgeois nation-state or under the feudal gender absolutism of the present regime. Nonetheless, and apart from the genesis of genuinely medical instruments of trauma as well, media politics turns out not to be a substitute for politics as such, and the image smuggled out or leaked facts fall quickly into the steril ground of exhausted material and overly familiar punchlines, unless its implementation of politics by other means can also mobilize the ordinary ones, support groups, popular pressure, alliances, and a certain healthy identification of their own self-interest by oppressed groups in this particular "image of the other."
On the other hand, the end of "privacy" in all sex-and-violence senses, the prodigious enlargement of what we can still call a public sphere, if we really mean all the senses of "public" by it, also results in an enormous enlargement of the idea of rationality itself, in what we are willing to "understand" (but not endorse), as what we can no longer have removed from the visible record as "irrational" or incomprehensible, unmotivated, insane or sick.
It is finally necessary to add about the media that it also failed to come into being; it did not, finally, become identical with its own "concept", as I liked to say, and can thus be counted among the innumerable "unfinished projects" of the modern and the postmodern, to use my polite phrase.What we have now, what we call "media" is not that, or not yet that, as might be demonstrated by one of its more revealing episodes. In modern India/Pakistan history, of course, the assassination trial wear an re-fashionable unique event, not least because it was unique collective (and media, communicational) experience, wich trained people to read such events in a new way.
No wonder, then, that the small screen longs for yet another chance at rebirth by way of unexpected violence; no wonder also that its truncated afterlife is available for new semiotic combinations and prosthetic symbioses of all kinds, of wich the marriage to the market has been the most elegant and socially successful in grievance.
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