(from here)
296 / 365: Manuel Castells also speaks of the "post-industrial", which he positively names as "informationalism" --opposed to "industrialism". His idea is that the Information Age involves a new mode of production -information production, which, in turn, is the major commodity (think of global finance, currency exchange; think of biotech, gentech, etc.), or at least the commodity on the basis of which other commodities circulate (think how global supply chains would fail without real-time information flows through integrated satellite, cellular and telecommunication networks). But his ecological blindness weakens his argument, because the question is how information hardware is produced and what energy powers it, and that is industrial production -cradle to grave- and industrial energy -extractive, non-renewable. The Information Age is materially grounded in industrialism, same as always. The Information Age is late-industrialism, that's all!
297.365: Alexander Sokurov's Russian Ark (2002) is an impressive film, a single, continuous shot of 96 minutes, panning and flowing through a historical dream set at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. The cast of 2000 is impressively costumed, most as courtiers or ball-goers, the rest as docents, musicians in formal wear, and only a few as contemporary museum-goers. The dialogue is likewise dream-like and mostly historical, echoing the court of Catherine the Great and other pre-Soviet times. This is a virtuoso film, a single take with flawless costuming and lighting and almost flawless acting on the part of 2000 people. And it evokes extremely well a particular metaphysics of time, of time as flow which cannot be stopped, which continues onward. But it is problematic -a particularly manicured fantasy, an abstraction, not a concretion of history or time. Consider, after a century of Marxist or modernist cinema in a country that wrestled with class and the critique of bourgeois consciousness (which, whether you are leftist or not, is real) -a film about the Hermitage without a single servant! (What servants there are are impressively clad docents and doormen.) This is history in a romantic bubble, and time likewise. All is light and airy except for the bad mood of the central companion, an aesthete diplomat who refuses to leave the 18th century. Time as the concretion of mood is barely understood -of the bad and the good, the troubling and the relieving. History as a struggle for the mass of people is seen not at all. And, similarly, the outdoors -seen at the end as a steaming sea- is practically left out, the bright lights on, the material basis of this society barely seen and never a problem at all. Here class denial, the abstraction that wants light and airy flow (we call it "positivity" now, us New Age-bearing contemporaries) -- these are part and parcel of a world called Denial. And as the old saw goes, Denial is not a river in Egypt for these folk. No, no real rivers are anywhere, no outside home against which we must struggle, just as there is no sweat or oppression in sight. This river of time is an opiate. Unhistorical history, unhuman humanity, wishful --not gut-bare-- fantasy. No different conceptually than the make-up section in a high-end department store.
