e-Subjectivity, as a Professional Agent of and for Change:
Let me rebegin with one simple point that often gets lost: The new media do not make our lives--professional lives--easier; they make them softer. Yet Harder, brutally harder in many ways.
Softer, in that we have to live Beta-lives, forever in transition to the next, yet ever newer version of applications that will be the means of getting to the "newer" writing.
No , I am not talking about word-processing applications, but those applications such as Macromedia Flash that provide us with the means of "writing" as writing has never yet been done by larger and larger groups of people.
And yet , who needs these applications!
Harder , in that, at first, technology is a monstrous, twisted beast that would make us as beastly as it is itself. At least, until we make adjustments. Not just bodily readjustments--ergonomic adjustments after paying for a team of chiropractors and osteopathic soft-tissue massagers!--but agential readjustments as well. That is, adjustments that require us to rethink who and what we are as subjects in what we insist on calling a discipline, yet in a post-disciplinary world. Subjects in relation to objects in post-critical conditions, yet remaining subjects thinking in critical conditions.
Disciplinary <--> Post-disciplinary!
Objects in Critical Times <--> Objects in Post-Critical Times
These are not binaries but the ever-emerging presence of a wrenching and ex-im-ploding paradox that I will be speaking out of in terms of my discussion on the shaping forces of electronic texts.
Our notion of post-disciplinary subjectivity remains (in) the language of disciplinary thinking and action (whether implementation or praxis).
Our "sitting" in front of a computer screen remains (in) the posture of typing as if at a typewriter.
Our sitting on tenure and promotion committees assessing our colleagues in computers and writing remains (in) the language of the criteria of literacy. ("Well, you know, s/he did not publish a book and what s/he has done is ... after all, just collaborative work!")
Even in the late age of print we--too many of us--are still subjects determined by literacy alone though we appear to be nodding toward the electronic. Toward e-subjectivities.
Perhaps we are not paradoxes, but amphibologies. Or as many of us are saying, Amphibians, trying to crawl out of one environment into the other, feeling our bodies and minds being wrenched as we casuistically stretch from one place to the other and then to where?! And yet, we ... no matter how far we get, as workers, into electracy ... will remain exclusively in literacy. At least, for a long while! ... We keep resurrecting our home no matter how we try to get it to the other side of the tracks. We save our HOME of literacy, though it is forever being blasted away by the forces of technology around us, ... we save our HOME by way of a palindrome, which as you can see here in this Keaton film is a loop that allows for a reversal that takes us back, instead of forward ... instead of allowing for a re(thinking)- building, for a habitus, an ethos, with newer technologies as Potentiality would desire of and for us.
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