Posted by geoffcox timbrennan on December 28, 1999 at 22:21:07:
In Reply to: manifesto posted by geoff cox tim brennan on December 28, 1999 at 22:15:52:
Manifest™ README
www.46LiverpoolSt.org
'Historians have shown that there were at least two Industrial Revolutions:
the first started in the last third of the eighteenth century, characterized
by new technologies such as the steam engine, the spinning jenny, the Cort's
process in metallurgy, and more broadly, by the replacement of hand-tools by
machines; the second one, about 100 years later, featured the development of
of electricity, the internal combustion engine, science-based chemicals,
efficient steel casting, and the beginning of communication technologies,
with the diffusion of the telegraph and the invention of the telephone.'
Manuel Castells The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture Vol 1:
The Rise of the Network Society Blackwells, 1996.
'During the last 250 years five great new prime movers have produced what is
often called the Machine Age. The eighteenth century brought the
steam-engine; the nineteenth century the water-turbine, the internal
combustion engine and the steam-turbine; and the twentieth the gas-turbine.
Historians have often coined catch-phrases to denote movements or currents
in history. Such is 'The Industrial revolution,' the title for a development
often described as starting in the early eighteenth century and extending
through much of the nineteenth. It was a slow movement, but wrought changes
so profound in their combination of material progress and social dislocation
that collectively they may well be described as revolutionary if we
considerthese extreme dates.'
R.J. Forbes 'Power to 1850' in C. Singer (ed.), A History of Technology Vol
4: the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1850 Oxford University Press, 1958.
'The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible
from its beginning, ranging from its sunstantive duration to its testimony
to the history which it has experienced.'
Walter Benjamin 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' in
Illuminations Fontana, 1992.
'History... in different hands, 'teaches' or 'shows' us most kinds of
knowable past and almost every kind of imaginable future.'
Raymond Williams Keywords Fontana, 1976.
'In the face of the question 'why totalize history?', three kinds of
response stand out as distinctively 'modern', post-theological philosophical
forms. One might respond transcendentally, one might respond immanently, or
one might respond in what some would consider a more philosophically
fundamental manner, within the terms of some kind of phenomenological
ontology of temporal experience. thus the notion of a collective singular
'history' might be defended as a limit or regulative idea implicit within
the claim to objectivity of the historian's craft, as the unstated object
unifying historians' activities and providing them with the horizon of their
intelligibility. It might be justified as the historically emergent product
of deep-seated social processes on a global scale. Or it might be expounded
as a part of the existential structure of human being, as revealed by a
phenomenological analysis of the constitution of experience in, through, and
as time.'
Peter Osborne The Politics of Time, Modernity and the Avant Garde Verso,
1995.
'To articulate the past historically doesnot mean to recognise it 'the way
it really was' (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up
at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of
the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out only by history at a
moment of danger. The danger affects both the content of the tradition and
its receivers. The same threat hangs over both; that of becoming a tool of
the ruling class.'
Walter Benjamin 'Thesis on the Philosophy of History' in
Illuminations Fontana, 1992.
'The everyday is situated at the intersection of two modes of repetition:
the cyclical, which dominates in nature, and the linear, which dominates in
processes known as 'rational'. The everyday implies on the one hand cycles,
nights and days, seasons and harvests, activity and rest, hunger and
satisfaction, desire and fulfilment, life and death, and it implies on the
other hand the repetitive gestures of work and consumption.'
Henri Lefebvre 'The Everyday and Everydayness' Yale French Studies 73,
1987.
'Anyone who investigates the past according to recognized criteria of
scholarship is a historian...'
Eric Hobsbawm On History Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1997.
'The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an
image which flashes up at an instant when it can be recognised and never
seen again. (Every) image of the past which is not recognised by the present
as one of its own concerns, threatens to disappear irretrievably.'
Walter Benjamin 'Thesis on the Philosophy of History' in
Illuminations Fontana, 1992.
'This networking capability only became possible, naturally, because of
major developments both in telecommunication and computer networking
technologies during the 1970s. But, at the same time, such changes were only
made possible by new microelectronic devices and stepped-up computing
capacity, in a striking illustration of the synergistic relationships in the
Information Technology Revolution."
Manuel Castells The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture Vol 1:
The Rise of the Network Society Blackwells, 1996.
'[...] universal language operates, like universal space and time, by exclusion.... Ironically, it is the very people whose labour is so carefully hidden inside the hygienic white boxes on the desks on the wired world... who will be left outside in the world their work creates. In this way, the production of the material infrastructure for the internet is itself erased under the sign of the universality of its language, its claim to speak for all and with every voice.... representation, in both the democratic and the semiotic senses, is in question in cybernetic technologies of communication.'
Sean Cubitt (1999), 'Orbis Tertius', in Third Text 47, Summer, p.6.