[lbo-talk] media

Eric Beck ersatzdog at gmail.com
Wed Aug 4 06:34:14 PDT 2010


On Tue, Aug 3, 2010 at 6:59 PM, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu> wrote:
> Doug, you (and the rest of us) are emerging from the Gutenberg Parenthesis:
>
> "the post-Gutenberg era — the period from, roughly, the 15th century to the
> 20th, an age defined by textuality — was essentially an interruption in the
> broader arc of human communication ... we are now, via the discursive
> architecture of the web, slowly returning to a state in which orality —
> conversation, gossip, the ephemeral — defines our media culture."

I blame capitalism:

Writing has never been capitalism's thing. Capitalism is profoundly illiterate. The death of writing is like the death of God or the death of the father: the thing was settled a long time ago, although the news of the event is slow to reach us, and there survives in us the memory of extinct signs with which we still write. The reason for this is simple: writing implies a use of language in general according to which graphism becomes aligned on the voice, but also overcodes it and induces a fictitious voice from on high that functions as a signifier. The arbitrary nature of the thing designated, the subordination of the signified, the transcendence of the despotic signifier, and finally, its consecutive decomposition into minimal elements within a field of immanence uncovered by the withdrawal of the despot--all this is evidence that writing belongs to imperial despotic representation. Once this is said, what exactly is meant when someone announces the collapse of the "Gutenberg galaxy"? Of course capitalism has made and continues to make use of writing; not only is writing adapted to money as the general equivalent, but the specific functions of money in capitalism went by way of writing and printing, and in some measure continue to do so. The fact nonetheless remains that writing typically plays the role of an archaism in capitalism, the Gutenberg press being the element that confers on the archaism a current function. But the capitalist use of language is different in nature; it is realized or becomes concrete within the field of immanence peculiar to capitalism itself, with the appearance of the technical means of expression that correspond to the generalized decoding of flows, instead of still referring, in a direct or indirect form, to despotic overcoding. (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 240)



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list