A torrent of oncoming technologies will make possible endless further varieties of para-money. Thus, cards may soon let us decide how much fungibility we want. The Arab Malaysian Bank in Kuala Lampur has offered a card to Muslim customers that disallows use in massage parlors or nightclubs. Before long, activist political movements, for example, may issue millions of “boycott cards” that are fully fungible—except that they cannot be used to buy Nikes, Shell gasoline, clothes from the Gap or products of other companies on their hit list. Wives or husbands might program restrictions on a free-spending spouse’s card. Or parents may give their children cards that cannot be used to buy candy, alcohol, tobacco—of fast food. Above average weight individuals wishing to avoid fast-food fat-food but finding it hard to resist may get help from a pay card they themselves can program to block any payment to Pizza Hut or Taco Bell—or all fast-food vendors. Make a resolution, quit carrying more than a dollar’s worth of cash and let your card help stiffen your resolve. Even newer technologies are making cards themselves obsolete. In many countries, cell phones and watches are already the equivalent of electronic wallets. Containing a chip or a virtual card provided by a participating bank, the phone can authorize the retailer to make a withdrawal from your account. Such phones are already used at high-end clothing stores, restaurants, vending machines, supermarkets, and train stations, among other locations.  No one expects to kill cash anytime soon, but they are hoping to eventually remove paper currency from the market. New technologies pose a parallel death threat to cards as well as cash. Three new converging forces will provide an even greater variety of payment options. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

First are new technologies to verify a user’s identity. A rash of increasingly reliable identification methods are coming into use. In Japan, for example, the largest credit-card issuer, JBC, has introduced a system that identifies individuals by the unique pattern of blood vessels in a finger. Banks and card issuers, using research accelerated by the fight against terrorism, are also exploring other biometric methods, including retinal scanning and voice and face recognition. Second are new wireless technologies, too numerous and rapidly changing to detail here. And third, across the board, are dramatic advances in miniaturization. Drawing on innovations in all three of these fields, many companies, including Sony, Philips, Sun Microsystems and IBM, are working on striking alternative to conventional plastic, and virtual cards seem to be the way to go. Virtual cards are essential the same as debt and credit cards, with the exception that there is no physical card. One just goes to their banking online system, requests a card and the details you need are given to you to make an online transaction or to use your phone as a method of payment in the store. I suppose many stores will eventually allow customers to physical enter their virtual card payment methods manually. Credit cards are just a physical variant of identity, so anyway you can identify someone can be a way to pay for things.  So much technology is coming out that it is hard for retailers to keep up with. Blend these technologies together with the Gage principle, and it is not difficult to imagine the eventual implantation in out pinky, say, of a minute chip that would make it possible to purchase anything at any time from any place by simply activating it. A pinky chip could wirelessly assure a retailer that we are who we claim to be, supply a bank-account number and simultaneously authorize the bank to pay the appropriate amount. The phrase “giving someone the finger” could take on fresh meaning. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

This rapid diversification of both payment methods and degrees of fungibility reflects the advanced economy’s overall move away from the one-size-fits-all mass society of the industrial past. Even more radical possibilities have entered the World’s economy such a Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin. Sony has also been considering creating a currency of its own for use inside the company. That could permit a Sony unit in China, for instance, to do business with sister units in Japan or elsewhere without first exchanging foreign earnings into yen. The main objective would be to reduce currency risk. A further possibility would be to create a joint currency with other companies such as BMW or Chevy. The dollar may not remain a low-risk haven for foreign investors forever. And unlikely as it may seem today, the day could come when one would rather have an electronic pocketful of Microsoft “Gateses” or Sony “Moritas” than euros or dollars. Or a currency collectively backed by the Fortune 500—or, someday, the Xinhua 500. Among their other functions, para-monies are designed to speed up or slow down payment. Thus, credit cards encourage delayed payment (in return for an interest charge, of course). Debit cards, rather than delaying payment, speed it, immediately deducting the purchase price from the cardholder’s bank account. The emerging new wealth system also opens the path to radical changes in how, and especially when, we are paid to work. In the industrial past, workers were typically paid intermittently, at the end of a week or month. Most still are. This means that employers have a week’s or month’s free use of money actually owed to the employees. This “float” is the equivalent of an interest-free loan from workers to their employers. Conversely, utility bills, for example, are usually paid after the customer has already received a month’s worth of electricity or gas. In this case, the customer is the beneficiary of float. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

In the larger economy, some companies and industries—publishers of subscriber magazines, for example—live on float. However, float, regarded by some economists as inefficient for the economy as a whole, may be on its way out. Once companies and customers are all adequately wired up or wirelessly interconnected and we pay pills electronically, we may see utility providers demand streaming payment—a contract to allow their computer to electronically such payments out of our equally electronic bank accounts moment by moment as we use their services. They would get their money sooner, would be able to use or invest it earlier and could—theoretically, at least—reduce the price they charge us. We may also see groups of workers demanding to be paid electronically minute by minute for the work they do, rather than waiting for paydays. Streaming pay and payments are the natural parallel of the move in advanced knowledge-based economies from batch or intermittent production to continuous-flow, 24/7 operations. And the more instantaneous the in-stream of paychecks and the out-stream of payments, the closer the effects are to direct cash transactions. These accelerating innovations have given rise to many forecasts suggesting the “death of money.” At one time, these may have seemed fanciful. However, are they? So many forces are changing power relationships in Japan as well. According to Alex Stewart, author of a definitive report on Japanese distribution systems, “retailers are now the dominant force within the distribution industry,” while “manufacturers have to rely increasingly on retailers to interpret the needs of the marketplace.” George Fields is chairman and CEO of ASI Market Research (Japan). According to Fields, in Japan “distribution no longer means putting something on the self. It is now essentially an information system.” Distribution anywhere, he notes, “will no longer be a chain of inventory points, passing goods along the line, but an information link between the manufacturer and the consumer.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

What Fields is perhaps too police to say, and what the Japanese in particular feel uncomfortable in making explicit, is that this transformation will dethrone many of the “shoguns” of industry in Japan. In Japan, too, power will shift toward those firms or industrial sectors that know best how to win the info-wars. However, the battle between manufacturers and retailers is only beginning, and it is not a two-sided struggle. The real-life tug-of-war has drawn many others into the battle zone—everyone from banks and computer manufacturers to truckers and telephone companies. Squeezed between manufacturers and retailers are wholesalers, warehousers, transport firms, and others, each engaging in a fiercely competitive war-against-all, wielding advanced information and communications technologies at the main weapons. Moreover, what we have seen so far is only the opening skirmish, and manufacturers themselves are mounting important counter-offensives—selling through alternative channels outside the store (direct mail, for example), using computers and telecommunications to set up their own vertically integrated distribution systems, buying up retail stores, and attempting to leapfrog technologically, to get ahead of the retailers. Information flowing from these technologies will transform all our production and distribution systems, creating vast power vacuums that completely new groups and institutions are already racing to fill. Throughout history, people have worked to achieve better control of matter, to convince atoms to do what we want them to do. This has gone on since before people learned that atoms exist, and has accelerate ever since. Although different industries use different materials and different tools and methods, the basic aim is always the same. They seek to make better things, and make them more consistently, and that means better control of the structure of matter. From this perspective, nanotechnology is just the next, natural step in a progression that has been underway for millennia. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

Nano technology is unpredictable and it goes to the heart of important questions: “How will this technology be developed? Who will do it? Where? When? In ten years? Fifty? A hundred? Will this happen in my lifetime?” The answers will depend on what people do with their time and resources, which in turn will depend on what goals they think are most promising. Human attitudes, understanding, and goals will make all the difference. Nanoscience is the study of structures and material on an ultra-small scale. A nanometre is one billionth of a metre. The physical and chemical properties of matter change at the nano level. Nanotechnology has the potential to revolutionize a diverse range of fields, from health care to manufacturing. The safety of nanomaterials and nanotechnology is still being debated, tested, and assessed. Nanoscience is an emerging area of science which involves the study of materials on an ultra-small scale and the novel properties that these materials demonstrate. Nanoscience has the potential to reshape the World around us. It could lead to revolutionary breakthroughs in fields ranging from manufacturing to health care. However, what is nanoscience, how does it work and how could it help change our lives? Nanoscience is the study of structures and materials on an ultra-small scale, and the unique and interesting properties these materials demonstrate. Nanoscience is cross disciplinary, meaning scientists from a range of fields including chemistry, physics, biology, medicine, computing, materials science and engineering are studying it and using it to better understand our World. Nanotechnology (also sometimes called molecular manufacturing), on the other hand, is the design, production and application of structures, devices and systems at the nanoscale. So essentially one is studying nanomaterials and their properties and the other is using those materials and properties to create something new or different. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

The nanoscale is the dimensional range of approximately 1 to 100 naometres. However, what does this really mean? Well, it is so tiny that it might take a moment to get your head around. Take a look at the back of your hand. Using just your eyes you can focus down to a scale of 1 centimetre to 1 millimetre. At this scale the skin looks flat. However, get out a magnifying glass and you can see it is actually wrinkly with cracks and folds. The magnifying glass allows you to study the fine structure of the skin at less than a millimetre (or one-thousandth f a metre). If you were to look more closely with a microscope, you could examine the cells that make up your skin. Now you are working at the scale of micrometres (one-thousandth of a millimetre), sometimes referred to as the microworld. Cells and bacteria are measures in micrometres, and electronic components on a silicon chip are usually around 1 micrometre in size. To reach the nanoworld you have to go smaller again. A nanometre (nm) is 10^-9, which is one-thousandth of a micrometre, or one-billionth of a metre. This is the scale at which we measure atoms and the molecules they make. By manipulating and moving atoms around, we can create new things. Think of nanotechnology, then, as being a bit like construction…only on a tiny scale. Nanotechnology may seem like something out of the future, but in fact, many everyday products are already made using nanotechnology. Sunscreen is a product of nanotechnology. Nanoparticles have been added to sunscreen for years to make them more effective. Two particular types of nanoparticles commonly added to sunscreen are titanium dioxide and zinc oxide. These tiny particles are not only high effective at blocking UV radiation, they also feel lighter on the skin, which is why modern sunscreens are nowhere near as think and gloopy as the sunscreens used in the past. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

Nanotechnology is even used in textiles. Nanoparticles of silica can help to create fabrics that repel water and other liquids. Silica can be added to fabrics either by being incorporated into the fabric’s weave or sprayed onto the surface of the fabric to create a waterproof or stainproof coating. So if you have ever noticed how liquid forms little beads on waterproof clothing-beads that simply roll off the fabric rather than being absorbed—that is thanks to nanotechnology. Carbon nanotubes are close to replacing silicon as a material for making smaller, faster and more efficient microchips and devices, as well as lighter, more conductive and stronger quantum nanowires. Graphene’s properties make it an ideal candidate for the development of flexible touchscreens. A new semiconductor developed by Kyto University makes it possible to manufacture solar panels that double the amount of sunlight converted into electricity. Nanotechnology also lowers costs, produces stronger and lighter wind turbines, improves fuel efficiency and, thanks to the thermal insulation of some nanocomponents, can save energy. The properties of some nanomaterials make them ideal for improving early diagnosis and treatment of neurodegenerative diseases or cancer. They are able to attack cancer cells selectively without harming other healthy cells. Some nanoparticles have also been used to enhance pharmaceutical products such as sunscreen. Air purification with ions, wastewater purification with nanobubbles or nanofiltration systems for heavy metals are some of its environmentally-friendly applications. Nanocatalysts are also available to make chemical reactions more efficient and less polluting. When it comes to food, nanobiosensors could be used to detect the presence of pathogens in food or nanocomposites to improve food production by increasing mechanical and thermal resistance and decreasing oxygen transfer in packed products. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

Researchers play a central role in the development of nanotechnology. They tend to work on what they think is interesting, which depends on what they think is possible, which depends on the tools they have or—among the most creative researchers—on the tools they can see how to make. Our tools shape how we think: as the saying goes, when all you all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. New tools encourage new thoughts and enable new achievements, and decisions about tool development will pace advances in nanotechnology. This field will exceed $125,000,000,000 USD globally by 2024.  Nanotechnology is really a great idea because if you recall, graphene—modified carbon is harder than steel, lighter than aluminum and almost transparent. We tend to focus on money, technology, housing, jobs, and cars so much that this may cause some people to become cold. However, consider the family. As it developed in Europe in the late eighteenth century, its theory included the premise that individuals need emotional protection from a cold and competitive society. The family became, as Christopher Lasch calls it, a haven in a heartless World. Its program included (I quote Lasch here) preserving “separatist religious traditions, alien languages and dialects, local lore and other traditions.” To do this, the family was required to take charge of the socialization of children; the family became a structure, albeit an informal one, for the management of information. It controlled what “secrets” of adult life would be allowed entry and what “secrets” would not. There may be readers who can remember when in the presence of children adults avoided using certain words and did not discuss certain topics whose details and ramifications were considered unsuitable for children to know. A family that does not or cannot control the information environment of its children is barely a family at all, and may lay claim to the name only by virtue of the fact that its members share biological information through DNA. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

In fact, in many societies a family was just that—a group connected by genetic information, itself controlled through the careful planning of marriages. In the West, the family was as an institution for the management of nonbiological information began with the ascendance of print. As books on every conceivable subject becomes available, parents were forced into the roles of guardians, protectors, nurturers, and arbiters of taste and rectitude. Their function was to define what it means to be a child by excluding from the family’s domain information that would undermine its purpose. That the family can no longer do this is, I believe, obvious to everyone. Courts of law, the school, and the family are only three of several control institutions that serve as part of a culture’s information immune system. The political party is another. As a young man growing up in a Democratic household, I was provided with clear instructions on what value to assign to political events and commentary. The instructions did not require explicit statement. They followed logically from theory, which was, as I remember it, as follows: Because people need protection, they must align themselves with a political organization. The Democratic Party was entitled to our loyalty because it represented the social and economic interests of the working class, of which our family, relatives, and neighbors were members (except for one uncle who, though a truck driver, consistently voted Republican Party represented the interests of the rich, who, by definition, had no concern for us. The theory gave clarity to our perceptions and a standard by which to judge the significance of information. The general principle was that information provided by Democrats was always to be taken seriously and, in all probability, was both true and useful (expect if it came from Southern Democrats, who were helpful in electing presidents). #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

Information provided by Republicans was often balderdash to many non-Democrats and was only useful only to the extent that it confirmed how self-serving some Republican were considered to be. The rule of law is an oversimplification. A curriculum is an oversimplification. So is a family’s conception of a child. That is the function of theories—to oversimplifying, and thus to assist believers in organizing, weighting, and excluding information. Therein lies the power of theories. Their weakness is precisely because they oversimplify, they are vulnerable to attack by new information. When there is too much information to sustain any theory, information becomes essentially meaningless. The most imposing institution for the control of information are religion and that state. They do their work in a somewhat more abstract way than do courts, schools, families, or political parties. They manage information through the creation of myths and stories that express theories about fundamental questions: why are we here, where have we come from, and where are we headed? I have already alluded to the comprehensive theological narrative of the medieval European World and how its great explanatory power contributed to a sense of well-being and coherence. Perhaps I have not stressed enough the extent to which the Bible also served as an information control mechanism, especially in the moral domain. The Bible gives manifold instructions on what one must do and must not do, as well as guidance on what language to avoid (on pain of committing blasphemy), what ideas to avoid (on pain of committing idolatry). Necessarily but perhaps unfortunately, the Bible also explained how the World came into being in such literal detail that it could not accommodate new information produced by the telescope and subsequent technologies. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

The trials of Galileo and, three hundred years later, of Scopes were therefore about the admissibility of certain kinds of information. Both Cardinal Bellarmine and William Jennings Bryan were fighting to maintain the authority of the Bible to control information about the profane World as well as the sacred. In their defeat, more was lost than the Bible’s authority in defining and categorizing moral behavior was also weakened. When the World’s population reached five billions the Earth was heavily burdened to support it. However, wars, pestilences and famines brought relief, from time to time, and in some degree reduced the prodigious pressure. The memorable benefaction of the year 508, which was a famine reinforced by a pestilence, swept away sixteen hundred millions of people in nine moths It was not much, but it was something. The same is all that can be said of its successors of later periods: The burden of population grew heavier and heavier and more and more formidable, century by century, and the gravity of the situation created by it was steadily and proportionately increased. After the age of infancy, few died. The average of life was 600 years. The cradles were filling, filling, filling—always, always, always; the cemeteries stood comparatively idle, the undertakers have but little traffic, they could hardly support their families. The death-rate was 2250 in the 1,000,000. To the thoughtful this was portentous; to the light-witted it was matter for brag! These latter were always comparing the population of one decade with that of the previous one and hurrahing over the might increase—as if that were an advantage to the World; a World that could hardly scratch enough out of the Earth to keep itself from starving. And yet, worse was to come! Necessarily our true hope did not and could not lie in spasmodic famine and pestilence, whose effects could be only temporary, but in war and physicians, whose help is consistent. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

Self-perception and self-relationship are the peculiarly human, the irruption of a strange element into nature, the inner lot of man. Here also, then, the demoniac, whose desire is toward us, as a woman’s is towards a man—to arouse this association in the reader, one of the phrases God addressed to Eve is incorporated in His speech to Kain—is first to be encountered directly; from this point too it first become accessible and demonstrable to us in the World. Here, at the inner threshold, there is of course no further room for disposition; the struggle must now be fought out. In contradistinction to the first humans, Kain does not reply to God’s address, He refuses to account to him for this deed. He refuses to fact the demon at the threshold he thus delivers himself up to the latter’s “desire.” Intensification and confirmation of indecision is decision to evil. So Kain murders. He speaks to his brother, we are not told what he says’ he goes with him into the field; he strikes him dead…Why? No motive, not even jealousy, is sufficient to explain the monstrous deed. We must remember that it is the first murder: Kain does not yet know that such a thing exists, that one can murder, that if one strikes a person hard enough one strikes him dead. He does not yet know what death and killing are. It is not a motive that is decisive, but an occasion. In the vortex of indecision Kain strikes out, at the point of greatest provocation and least resistance. He does not murder, he was murdered. When God’s curse—again in words which refer back to the cursing of the first humans and lead over and beyond it—sends him forth from the ploughed fields to be “a fugitive and a vagabond on Earth,” he is allotting him a destiny which is the incarnate representation of what took place within his soul. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

What is so paradoxical is that our language is the product of the extraordinary thought and philosophical greatness at which this cursory and superficial survey has done nothing more than hint. There is a lifetime and more of study here, which would turn out impoverishing certitudes into humanizing doubts. To return to the reasons behind our language and weigh them against the reasons for other language would in itself liberate us. I have tried to provide the outline of an archeology of our souls as they are. We are like unenlightened shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part. All that is necessary is a careful excavation to provide them with life-enhancing models. We need history, not to tell us what happened, or to explain the past, but to make the past alive so that it can explain us and make a future possible. This is our educational crisis and opportunity. Western rationalism had culminated in a rejection of reason. Is this result necessary? Many will say that my reports of the decisive influence of Continental, particularly German, philosophy on us are false or exaggerated and that, even if it were true that all this language comes from the course to which I attribute it, language does not have such effects. However, the language is all around us. Its sources are also undeniable, as is the thought that produced the language. We know how the language was popularized. I need only think of my Amherst students or my Atlanta taxi driver to be persuaded that the categories of the mind determined the perceptions. If we can believe tht Calvinist “worldviews” made capitalism, we can also credit the possibility that overpowering visions of German philosophers are preparing the tyranny of the future. #RandolphHrris 14 of 20

I must reiterate that Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche are thinkers of the very highest order. This is, in fact, precisely my point. We must relearn what this means and also that there are others who belong in the same rank. Nations, businesses, tribes, and birds are examples of individuals which often operate mainly within certain territories. They interact much more with their neighbors than with those who are far away. Hence their success depends in large part on how well they do in their interactions with their neighbors. However, neighbors can serve another function as well. A neighbor can provide a role model. If the neighbor is doing well, the behavior of the neighbor can be imitated. In this way successful strategies can spread throughout a population, from neighbor to neighbor. Territories can be thought of in two completely different ways. One way is in terms of geography and physical space. For example, the live-and-let-live system in trench warfare might have spread from part of the front line to adjacent parts. Another way of thinking about territories is in terms of an abstract space of characteristics. For example, a business might market a soft drink with a certain amount of sugar and a certain amount of caffeine. The “neighbors” of this soft drink are other drinks on the market with a little more or less sugar, or a little more or less caffeine. Similarly, a political candidate might take a position on a liberal/conservative dimension and a position on an internationalism/isolation dimension. If there are many candidates vying with each other in an election, the “neighbors” of the candidate are those with similar positions. Thus territories can be abstract spaces as well as geographic spaces. Colonization provides another mechanism in addition to imitation by which successful strategies can spread from place to place. If the location of a less successful strategy was taken over by an offspring of a more successful neighbor, colonization would occur. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

However, whether strategies spread by imitation or colonization, the idea is the same: neighbors interact and the most successful strategy spreads to bordering locations. The individuals remain fixed in their locations, but their strategies can spread. To make this process amenable to analysis, it must be formalized. For illustrative purposes, consider a simple structure of territories in which the entire territory is divided up so that each individual has four neighbors, one to the north, one to the east, one to the south, and one to the west. In each “generation,” each individual attains a success score measured by its average performance with its four neighbors. Then if an individual has one or more neighbors who are more successful of them (or picks randomly among the best in case of a tie among the most successful neighbors). Territorial social structures have many interesting properties. One of them is that that it is at least as easy for a strategy to protect itself from a takeover by a new strategy in a territorial structure as it is in a nonterritorial structure. If the newcomer does better with a native than a native does with another native, a single individual using a new strategy can invade a population of natives. If no strategy can invade the population of natives, then the native strategy is said to be collectively stable. “And it was by faith that the three disciples obtained a promise that they should not taste death; and they obtained not the promise until after their faith. And neither at any time hath any wrought miracles until after their faith; wherefore they first believed in the Son of God. And there were many whose faith was so exceedingly strong, even before Christ came, who could not be kept from within the veil, but truly saw with their eyes the things which they had beheld with an eye of faith, and were glad,” reports Ether 12.17-19. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

Pop Art demonstrated that the boundaries between art and mass media (exempli gratia ads and comics) are dissolving. Its perfunctory and mass-produced look is that of the whole society and the detached, blank quality of Warhol and his products sum it up. Banal, morally weightless, depersonalized images, cynically manipulated by a fashion-conscious marketing stratagem: the nothingness of modern art and its World revealed. The proliferation of art styles and approaches in the 60s—conceptual, minimalist, performance, et cetera—and the accelerated obsolescence of most art brought the “postmodern” era, a displacement of the formal “purism” of modernism by an electric mix from past stylistic achievements. This is basically a tired, spiritless recycling of used-up fragments, announcing that the development of art is at an end. Against the global devaluing of the symbolic, moreover, it is incapable of generating new symbols and scarcely even makes an effort to do so. Occasional critics, like Thomas Lawson, bemoan art’s current inability “to stimulate the growth of really troubling doubt,” little noticing that a quite noticeable movement of doubt threatens to throw over art itself. Such “critics” cannot grasp that art must remain alienation and as such must be superseded, that art is disappearings because the immemorial separation between nature and art is a death sentence for the World that must be voided. Deconstruction, for its part, announced the project of decoding Literature and indeed the “texts,” or systems of signification, throughout all culture. However, this attempt to reveal supposedly hidden ideology is stymined by its refusal to consider origins or historical causation, an aversion it inherited from structuralism/poststructuralism. Derrida, deconstruction’s seminal figure, deals with language as solipsism, consigned to self-interpretation; he engages not in critical activity but in writing about writing. Rather than a de-constructing of impacted reality, this approach is merely a self-contained academicism, in which Literature, like modern painting before it, never departs from concern with its own surface. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

Meanwhile, since Piero Manzoni canned his own feces and sold them in a gallery and Chris Burden had himself shot in the arm and crucified to a Volkswagen, we see in art ever more fitting parables of its end, such as the self-portraits drawn by Anastasi—with his eyes closed. “Serious” music is long dead and popular music deteriorates; poetry nears collapse and retreats from view; drama, which moved from the Absurd to Silence, is dying; and the novel is eclipsed by non-fiction as the only way to write seriously. In a jaded, enervated age, when it seems to speak is to say less, art is certainly less. Baudelaire was obliged to claim a poet’s dignity in a society which had no more dignity to hand out. A century and more later how inescapable is the truth of that condition and how much more threadbare is the consolation or station of “timeless” art. Adorno began his last book thus: “Today it goes without saying that nothing concerning art goes without saying, much less without thinking. Everything about art has become problematic: its inner life, its relation to society, even its right to exist.” But Aesthetic Theory affirms art, just as Marcuse’s last work did, testifying to despair and to the difficulty of assailing the hermetically sealed ideology of culture. And although other “radicals,” such as Habermas, counsel that the desire to abolish symbolic mediation is irrational, it is becoming clearer that when we really experience with out hearts and hands the sphere of art is shown to be pitiable. In the transfiguration we must enact the symbolic will be left behind and art refused in favor of the real. Play, creativity, self-expression and authentic experience will recommence at that moment. With TV, the Technical Events Test is extremely subversive to television. This is one reason I have asked you to do it. As people become aware of the degree to which technique, rather than anything intrinsically interesting, keeps them fixed to the screen, withdrawal from addiction and immersion can begin. I have seen this happen with my own children. Once I had put them to the task of counting and timing these technical events, their absorption was never the same. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

When viewers become alert to the technology being used upon them, they can separate technique from content. With the effects of technique stripped away, the true content of the program has to stand on its own. In the case of advertising, it falls apart. Regular programming also assumes its true worth and it is often even less than you may have imagines was possible. As you become able to pull back out of the immersion in the TV set, you can widen your perceptual environment to again include the room you are in. Your feelings and personal awareness are rekindled. With self-awareness emerging you can perceive the quality of sensory deadness television induces, the one-dimensionality of its narrowed information field, and arrive at an awareness of boredom. This leads to channel switching at first and eventually to turning off the set. Any act that breaks immersion in the fantastic World of television is subversive to the medium, because without the immersion and addiction, its power is gone. Brainwashing ceases. As you watch advertising, you become enraged. The great German dramatist Bertolt Brecht used the term “alienation” to describe this process of breaking immersion. Writing during the early thirties, Brecht used the term to mean the shattering of theatrical illusion. By breaking immersion in the fantasy the theater-goer becomes self-aware and attains a mental attitude that allows discernment, criticism, thought and political understanding of the material on display. Without “alienation,” involvement is at an unconscious level, the theater-goer absorbing rather than reflecting and reacting. Brecht argued that becoming lost or immersed in the words, fantasies and entertainments of theater was preparation for similar immersion in the words and fantasies of theatrical leadership: Hitler. Brecht, like Walter Benjamin, felt that the entire development of art during the thirties furthered ways of mind suitable for autocracy. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

Brecht developed his concept of “alienation” in order to break the form of the theatrical relationship. To accomplish this, he would interrupt the line of the theatrical action; or have the actors step out of their parts to speak directly to the audience personally or politically; or add such elements as placards. In films, he would put words on the screen to explain the meaning of a scene that might otherwise have been received as “entertainment,” thereby shattering unconscious absorption. In Brechtian terms, if an actor developed a character in such a way that the audience became absorbed in the character rather than the meaning of the character, then the actor would have failed. The goal was that each member of the audience become aware that he or she is in a theater, that actors are performing, that the characters are created on purpose to convey a message, and that the massage applies directly to each person in the audience. In this way, theater had the capacity to become educational in a revolutionary way, capable of moving people to actions. Without this shattering of illusion, Brecht felt, theater remains an example of mindless immersion within an autocratic format. And yet, because theater involves a live public performance, the possibilities for technically created illusion are far fewer than in film of television. It is this very quality of “alienation” from the illusion, the experience of self-awareness, that advertisers and program producers go to such lengths to avoid. They may not actually be thinking to themselves: “I have got to keep these viewers hyped and away from boredom or I’ll lose them.” Instead, they define some production values as “good television” and others as “bad television.” They will do anything they can to develop and keep your fixed gaze and total involvement. They have found that technical tricks do better than content because, as we have seen, the content loses too much in the translation through the medium to be engrossing on its own. However, they do also choose content for its immersive and hyperactive value. In addition to shattering your normal perceptual patterns by artificially unusual imagery, dragging your mind and awareness forward, never allowing stasis or calm or a return to self-awareness, producers must also make program choices that fit the process. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

Cresleigh Homes

“But tomorrow may rain so, I’ll follow the sun” – The Beatles 🎶

We’ll follow the sun through those giant windows at our #CresleighRanch home at #MillsStation – this is Residence 2, Lot #104…and it’s ready for its new owner!

Sunshine yellow footstools aren’t required, but they’re a nice touch – we can’t wait to see how you decorate.

Keep in mind that the primary suite is downstairs and offers a deep soaker up, full sized window, and a shower that provides a spa like retreat.  https://cresleigh.com/mills-station/residence-2/

#CresleighHomes