excerpt from "Dreams in Rebellion: The Battle of Seattle"

by Daniel White Friday, Mar. 29, 2002 at 5:53 PM

Anthony Wilden quote in Daniel White's essay that blew my mind.

"Anthony Wilden argues: "...analog coding and digital coding are fundamentally different in form. Whereas a digital code lies 'outside' the sender and the receiver and depends on an 'objective' repertoire of discrete elements (distinctions) for the selective and combinatory choices that are made, the analog code is neither 'outside' nor composed of discrete elements. The analog code is nothing more or less than the very relationship between sender and receiver, hence its primacy. It is thus available for digitization, via the Imaginary, for example, but it is not digital in itself." (System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange, 2nd Edition, London: Tavistock, 1980, pp. 455-456). The point is that what Baudrillard points to as the 'bar' separating use from exchange value and creating the structure of political economy under capitalism is, in Wilden's terms, the digital logic of reference and reification characteristic of the Cartesian consciousness currently self-entrusted with planetary managment. Now, however, the 'unconscious' ana-logical coding of the un-conscious is surfacing -- as masked anarchists, human amphibians and other stage metaphors -- in a radical return of the repressed.. These new hybrid forms have no originals: they are simulacra in a 'communication revolution' of what Douglas Coupland calls 'microserfs' in his novel by that name. The result is reverberating through Cyberspace and prodding the WTO toward a nervous breakdown: the necessary entropic forerunner to the generation of new cultural-political forms."

Original: excerpt from "Dreams in Rebellion: The Battle of Seattle"