Book contents
Chapter 5 - The Shared Object
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2021
Summary
COLLABORATOR. Historical situations, always new, unveil man's constant possibilities and allow us to name them. Thus, in the course of the war against Nazism, the word “collaboration” took on a new meaning: putting oneself voluntarily at the service of a vile power. What a fundamental notion! However did humanity do without it until 1944? Now that the word has been found, we realize more and more that man's activity is by nature a collaboration.
MILAN KUNDERAIll-communication
As the social theorist Niklas Luhmann once remarked, “today will be yesterday tomorrow”. Logically irrefutable, this little aphorism also effectively summons up and summarizes those uncanny aspects of postmodern life – “insecure security”, “uncertain certainty” and “unsafe safety” – that beset everyone. Wherever you are, you hear new news every day, of war, terrorism, unemployment, earthquakes and typhoons, murders, more murders, fluctuating exchange- and interest-rates, lowtech genocide, global instability in the economic system, the resilient fragility of the environment, secret state organizations, and the banning of smoking from establishments where food is sold. Decisions concerning the future are made elsewhere, by others, most probably malignant toward, or, at the very least, indifferent to, your continued existence, whose values and knowledges and interests and powers and whatever are absolutely beyond your personal control (and probably beyond theirs as well). It's no wonder that, statistically speaking, you’re more than likely to be depressed, enraged, panicked or fearful. Postmodern life is hard on the psyche.
But it's tempting to overstate the novelty of the present: after all, a sense of impending catastrophe has always been a temptation for human beings. As Robert Burton wrote almost four hundred years ago, positioned on the threshold of modernity, and at the center of a radical media explosion:
I hear new news every day, and those ordinary rumours of war, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions, of towns taken, cities besieged in France, Germany, Turkey, Persia, Poland, etc., daily musters and preparations, and such-like, which these tempestuous times afford, battles fought, so many men slain, monomachies, shipwrecks, piracies, and sea-fights, peace, leagues, stratagems, and fresh alarums.
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- Avoiding the SubjectMedia, Culture and the Object, pp. 93 - 108Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2004