6.10.05

Buen ensayo. Transcribo los últimos dos párrafos.

Stripped of aura, of mystery, of distance, we are known today as mapped elements in a database. Surveilled, recorded, and marked, we are becoming the function of our components -- our decoded genes, the number of hits (hourly, daily, monthly) on our websites, our on-line purchasing histories. It is perhaps ironic that it is in the very forms of authorship that post-humanist critics strove to erase that we find our best chance of theorizing -- and resisting -- our own disappearance. Donna Haraway's ironic prediction -- "By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs" [14] -- has assumed the shape of everyday social reality. Is it any surprise that for every technological advancement that renders a more perfect, flawless reality -- whether it be classical Hollywood's invisible style, or new film stocks and lenses that offer a cleaner and sharper image, or the hyperrealism of high definition, or the clean, hiss-less ring of the digital code -- is it any surprise that these are always accompanied by countermeasures that preserve and introduce errors, mistakes, degradations of the pristine image? Whether it be Italian neorealism, or ~cinema verite~, or experimental films by the likes of Stan Brakhage, or the rough, "amateur" look of the Dogma 95 films, or even the blurred, miniature movies of web cinema -- all these serve as an antidote to the very forms of perfection that we seek. The author is stronger than ever today because she reminds us of an identity memorable for its utter failures. And to be reminded of our failures is to be reminded that we are human.
Perhaps it was easy to dismiss the Author when there was so little at stake. But now, as we approach the time when it will be possible to lift the veil on our very own codes, we find that it is precisely in human authorship -- with its mistakes, its errors, its slippages, its ambiguities, its reversals and contradictions, its irrationalities, its surprises -- where we can reassert ourselves against the very destruction that once, because it was myth, we so eagerly desired.

No comments: