A review of Imagologies: Media Philosophy, an un-book by Taylor & Saarinen

Date: Sat, 16 Jul 94 18:17 BST
From: ronc@cogs.susx.ac.uk (Ron Chrisley)
To: cog-phil@cogs.susx.ac.uk
Note: Cool MIT distribution list recipient deleted so rif-raff
Like: you don't invade it and cause it to lose its "coolness" (i.e. dormancy)
Cc: cussins@ucsd.edu
Subject: Self-deprecating thought for the day

From Taylor & Saarinen, "Imagologies: Media Philosophy" (an iconoclastic un-book purporting to herald [and, of course, be an instance of] the new post-modern techno-philosophy of image and media):

"With the collapse of the literary as a powerbase, the postmodern situation becomes torture for the class of intellectual elites. As dynamics change in favor of praxis and the instrumental, the engineers of academia find themselves running out of business. An age that is not centered around the idea is no longer willing to pay the price for concept-mongering. Realizing their waning power, conceptualists and idealists desperately try to produce theories of the non-conceptual, often invoking specially developed "anti-concepts." By so doing, they prove what they attempt to disprove -- their own growing irrelevance."

Uh-oh.

But: would someone be being hyper PoMo if she accepted this as applying to herself, and yet didn't find that to be undesirable?

We interrupt this outmoded, western mode of discourse to bring you the following message, a review using "ad-diction":

[WE HAVE COMMERCIAL SIGN]

Have you ever...

YOU WILL.

And the new buzzword that will bring it to you?

Media Philosophy (TM; patent pend.)

With apologies to AT&T. As Brian pointed out, at least they, unlike Taylor & Saarinen, explicitly acknowledge that the technology they are talking about doesn't yet exist.
OK, then how about a review that takes the form of a dynamic "telewriting" interchange between Brian Keeley and me?

Keeley's review is here.

Note: Keeley's review is reproduced here, as a way of matching form and content, in its "situated" manifestation as an email dialogue with me; This is the form that much of the Taylor & Saarinen book takes. Yawn.

Also, in the spirit of the new "telepolitics" of "interstanding" in the "netropolis", Keeley's ideas are used here without any permission from him, and out of the context of his original message to me (which was actually in response to my answer to a question on supra-luminal speeds in The Guardian).

Isn't it fun to use form/content affinities as a rationalization for laziness and unoriginality?

Keeley reacts to this document here.

So now I guess I'll have to ask him how he reacts to his reaction as presented here ("and she tells two friends, and so on, and so on..."). Seems kinda like the joke I read today on rec.humor.funny, about the net being its own means of reproduction. Kinda.
Ron Chrisley, ronc@cogs.susx.ac.uk