Sunday, November 30, 2008

Terranove states in regard to the question of composition and decomposition in the formation of competing beliefs:

"What this ultimately boils down to is a capacity to synthesize not so much a common position (from which to win the masses over), but a common passion giving rise to a distributed movement able to displace the limits and terms within which the political constitution of the future is played out."

Turning away from a modernist avantgarde - masses dichotomy she rejects the idea of the masses which need to be informed, flirting for a moment with Baudrillard feedback-loop idea of how the masses actually demand the information they are shown, while the information passes through them and leaves them unharmed, until they demand something else in a moment of "zero degro", she resumes that we are as much mass, as we are not, since information contextualizes itself for us in a particular meaning at a particular space and time.

I feel that her practical approach towards new media and the question of how it constitutes its agents/subjects/users/networkers is quite appealing. Understanding new media as tools which can and are being put to a political use brightens up my relationship to new information technology again. Furthermore the way in which she emphasizes figuring politics through affects and intensities seems to open up a lot of possibilities for coalition politics in the name of a common cause while refraining from the need for a common identity. Attributing this as a structural feature to new media, was very interesting to me.

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