Pac46
From Metapedia
To contact author, email: pac46@georgetown.edu.
Contents |
Narrative Code-Switching in The Apollo Prophecies
Abstract
The objective of this essay is to describe how specific narrative codes—primarily historic, ethnographic and fictitious—are visually and textually hybridized in the art project known as The Apollo Prophecies. The brainchild of New York-based installation artists Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick, the project, a multi-media tableau of hand-made artifacts, drawings, written text, staged digital-portrait photographs, and elaborately designed celestial, terrestrial- and lunar-landscape prop panoramas, is so profoundly rich in metaphor, so ambitious in its socio-historical exegesis, that the following essay won’t advance a singular argument, but convey a series of critical reflections on the project’s overarching narrative themes. I will substantiate observations with visual and textual references where appropriate, and identify thematic correlations between the project’s storyline and the critical commentary of Mark Taylor [1], Vaclav Havel [2], and Edward Said[3].
For purposes of clarity, throughout the remainder of this essay, Kahn & Selesnick (creative collaborators who jointly function as author, photographer, wardrobe producer, set designer, graphic designer, painter, sculptor, and researcher of the historical record) will be referred to simply as “the scripter.”[4]
By Way of an Introduction: Thoughts on the First Two Sentences
Narrative Coding, Templates of the Grand Narrative
The opening sentence of The Apollo Prophecies imparts an explicit paradox: the instantaneous fusion of past and future.
"The first (space program) civilization built great ruins; impressive for their size, ambition, and the promise of what-had-been before the decay."[5]
Beyond evincing the narrative tone of an archeological treatise (upon re-reading, the authorial tenor is nearly reminiscent of the voice-over introduction to a televised documentary on, say, Stonehenge[6]), the statement also advances an absurd proposition: the factual documentation of a long-extinct lunar civilization that existed “before the decay.” Before we entertain questions of what “the decay” might signify, it is helpful to note that the scripter, by way of syntax, has already given us a hint: “…the promise of what-had-been before the decay.” Rendered consecutively but discretely—for example, “it was the end of what had been a long day”—the three words are innocuous; presented as a contraction—“it evoked our fondest memories of what-had-been"—the expression is parlance for a Miltonian “lost paradise," perhaps an edenic time that preceded “the decay,” or, by metaphorical association, The Fall of Man.[7]
Sentence two: “Twelve civilizations gloried MARE TRANQUILITAS.”
Immediately after the opening sentence, we mark the first in an endless series of hybridized narrative codes. We now know that twelve civilizations evolved from “The first (space program) civilization” which, of course, “built great ruins.” We also know they gloried “MARE TRANQUILITAS,” a Latin approximation of The Sea of Tranquility[8], which, according to the contemporary historical record, was the landing spot of NASA’s[9] first Lunar Landing Mission [Apollo 11, 1969][10], the singular crowning achievement of the very first “(space program)” indeed. (Considered by many the technological zenith of western civilization, the "one giant leap for mankind," The Sea of Tranquility touchdown represents the instantiation of physical contact between the most advanced—nay “space-aged”—technology known to humankind, and the most ancient rock known to humankind.) The scripter fuses historical facts of the moonshot with the fictitious, mythic lore of its twelve subsequent lunar civilizations by chronically codifying that lore in the all-upper-case jargon of NASA culture. For example, compare the following NASA acronyms—LM: Landing Modules; EVA: Extra Vehicular Activity; UFO: Unidentified Flying Objects—with the following excerpt:
"The ancient command module pilot lift-off-mongers: SCHMITT, ARMSTRONG, SHEPARD, and GAGARIN; these were the ALDRIN-Men. Their power was very great, and they did split the world into four: MERCURY, GEMINI, SOYUZ, and APOLLO. The world was crocodiles, boars, and LOVELLs."
The scripter’s appropriation of Latin invokes narrative codes of the ancient past. The dialect of any civilization is its primary record of historical data and cultural heritage (its histo-cultural DNA [11], as it were), and, regardless of temporal context, central to the concept of civilization itself is the question of its own origin, growth, and trajectory, its instinctive spawning of successive generations in its own image—its actual, physical geographic expansion, the chief prize of which, historically, is the exploration and conquest of new frontiers. [12][13] With but two short sentences, then, the scripter has forced our hand, luring us into a tightly-woven matrix of intertwined narrative codes that, as the story evolves through various media, conflate ancient and contemporary history, ethnography[14], biography[15], science fiction[16], space travel, Biblical literature[17], mythology[18], imperialism, colonial-era classic adventure fiction[19], and all of the baggage of critical discourse these genres entail. Indeed, the scripter’s cognizance of cultural “baggage” (ie. historic debates of critical discourse activated by the employment of each particular narrative code) is not unlike the Wachowski brothers’[20] explicit (and veiled) references to Baudrillard’s[21] Simulacrum and Simulation[22] in The Matrix[23]; even a brief consideration of The Apollo Prophecies as a work dealing in frontier colonization (a phenomenon arguably defined as one civilization's triumph at the expense of another), forces us to reconcile conflicting narrative histories of empire, conquest, and cultural hegemony[24], and the complex, long-term socio-cultural assimilation and dissension that evolves therefrom. In doing so, we identify one of the project’s key features: an enclosed, recursive narrative that constantly (self-reflexively) refers back to itself. Via narrative code-switching[25] and the manipulation of temporal context, the project frames the historical record itself as an inherently hybridized, recursive narrative, one subject to the scrutiny of successive generations; open to revision; prone to misstatements of fact; abounding in texts that blur traditional binaries of fact and fiction[26], real and counterfeit, pure and impure.
Ironically, The Apollo Prophecies is simultaneously filtered through the framework of the existing historical record; perhaps similar to the grid techniques of the painter Chuck Close[27][28], it’s as though the scripter has constructed a grid-like framework of historical detail within which an endless array of micro-narratives[29][30]—historic, mythic, and fictive—are innovated. The result, on absorbing the totality of the scripter’s project, on “stepping back from the canvas” as it were, is the emergence of a coherent, hyper-hybridized metanarrative[31] on the age of space-exploration, Biblical in its cadence, that continues to unfold in the present [32][33], and therein implicates the viewer in their co-contemporaneity.
The idea of “the past” as a narrative co-existing with the present has been accounted for in the works of poet T. S. Eliot, and American Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson.
“Tradition,” says Eliot, “involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a [scripter] beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence … this historical sense, which is a sense of timeless as well as of the temporal together, is what makes a [scripter] traditional … what makes a [scripter] most acutely conscious of his place in time” (Said, 12).
As literary critic Edward Said argues, our collective perception of the past, of humanity's "historical sense ... of the timeless as well as of the temporal together," is a recurring narrative of imperial exploration and conquest.
“Appeals to the past are among commonest strategies in interpretations of the present,” he writes in chapter one of Culture and Imperialism. “What animates such appeals is not only disagreement about what happened in the past and what the past was, but uncertainty about whether the past really is past, over and concluded, or whether it continues, albeit in different forms, perhaps. This problem animates all sorts of discussions—about influence, about blame and judgment, about present actualities and future priorities” (Said, 17).
So perhaps the scripter’s very use of parentheses—“(space program)”—is an assertion that traditional narratives of the past are mere textual templates (frameworks) within which new histories are invented, an idea that echoes Said’s suggestion that traditional narratives of the past “continue, albeit in different forms.” By this logic, the scripter’s first sentence could be almost be re-read as, “The first (FILL IN THE BLANK) civilization built great ruins; impressive for their size, ambition, and the promise of what-had-been before the (FILL IN THE BLANK)."
The Apollo Prophecies, then, in its subversion of the laws of linear time, its conflated narrative of recent and ancient history (one that slyly plays on dystopian anxieties of the present: [34][35] [36][37]), seems to quote Said’s basic contention that “there is no just way in which the past can be quarantined from the present … past and present inform each other, each implies the other and, in the totally ideal sense intended by Eliot, each co-exists with the other.”
As chapter one of The Apollo Prophecies unfolds, we learn that, beyond the simple fact (fiction?) of its existence outside the context of the time-space continuum[38], the story, in its most basic distillation, involves, as Cate McQuaid of The Boston Globe[39] has noted, “travel to the moon, the discovery of an Edwardian[40] colony there, and arcane-sounding text that tells how the ‘ALDRIN-Men’ split the world into four pieces, known as Mercury[41], Gemini[42], Soyuz[43], and Apollo.”
From the outset, then, an auspicious narrative about the birth of the age of space-exploration paradoxically subsumes the narrative of the Edwardian era, an era thought by many to have ended with the singular epic cataclysm of advanced technology on the high seas—an engineering feat of human transportation unsurpassed in its ambition—the maiden-voyage sinking of the unsinkable Titanic.
So our scrutiny of but two sentences, without so much as a basic acknowledgment of the project's visual component, reveals numerous paradoxically conjoined narratives that subvert traditional binaries of past and present, triumph and failure, and birth and death. The effect is a hyper-hybridized multi-medial metanarrative to end all others. What began as mere grammatical paradox carries us into the future only to reveal the ruins of our own civilization, a return to the beginning of humankind. Even a literal return to our opening sentence reveals one last oxymoron[44], that classic literary signature of transcendence[45], of release from reality, “The first (space program) civilization built great ruins…”
“Great ruins.” Nothing of “ruin” is “great” (with the exception, of course, that “great” is intended only to imply “vast”). Still we're compelled to inquire, why not “built great cities,” or “built great temples,” or “built great roads”? Because the scripter, it appears, is fixated on the unyielding repetition of the grand metanarrative: the endless cycle of birth, growth, and inexorable decay. That the greatest achievements of the most advanced civilizations—actual[46] or imagined[47]—are not immortal[48], but doomed, like all that have gone before, to a finite point on the historical record.
Photography and Salvage Ethnography: The Politics of Actuality
At the heart of Kahn & Selesnick’s oeuvre is the creation of visual and textual records for posterity. Despite the foregoing textual deconstruction, superb digital photographs and hand-painted illustrations—or more likely illustrations of photos or photos of illustrations (always the image of the image, the sign within a sign)—constitute the thrust of their genius. The texts, often masquerading as 19th-century field-expedition logs, comprise entries that playfully challenge the veracity of images produced on each imaginary excursion. The search for omniscience[49] is a recurring theme in their work, a clue that each installation is but the mnemonic detritus of comprehensively documented, bizarre quests for satori[50], a near-obsessive charting of landscapes and artifacts encountered along the way (which—here we go again—speaks to the history of the piecemeal aggregation of the global historical record itself, a history of the making of history, a story within a story, Shakespeare's "play within a play," mise en abyme ad infinitum, etc..., etc...). The effect is a meticulously detailed survey of uncharted geographic and psychic frontiers, an exhaustively researched Salvage Ethnography[51] of the imagination.
Salvage Ethnography is a visually-oriented branch of Anthropology that has close ties with the history of Photography[52] itself. According to Cultural Anthropologist[53] Jay Ruby[54], the origins of Visual Anthropology[55] “are located in the invention and application of photographic technologies to the study of human culture and diversity … much of this work [was conducted] in the spirit of Salvage Ethnography, or attempts to record for posterity the ways-of-life of societies assumed doomed to extinction."
Like Kahn & Selesnick’s distinctive multi-media tableaux, a defining trait of salvage ethnography is the scavenge and hoarding of all ethnographically pertinent cultural artifice, the rapid collection and inventory of paraphernalia that, like photographs, allege “proof” of a subject’s existence. What follows is a series of visual juxtapositions, images of Kahn & Selesnick contrasted with those of American late-frontier era photographer Edward Curtis[56], an early pioneer of Salvage Ethnography whose extensive photo-journaling of traditional Native American life has yet to be matched in its voluminousness and aesthetic sensibility.
“He took over 40,000 photographic images from over 80 tribes,” The New York Times[57] reported in his obituary of October 19, 1952. “He recorded tribal lore and history, and he described traditional foods, housing, garments, recreation, ceremonies, and funeral customs … his material, in most cases, is the only recorded history.”
Curtis was also a uniquely prolific writer of Native American sketch biographies, and a scrupulous transcriber of cultural lore. But, like Kahn & Selesnick, his chief function was that of master photographer.
“The primary function of photographs taken in the field,” Ruby reminds us, “is as an aide-de-memoire, similar to written field notes, to help reconstitute events in the mind of the ethnographer.”
If only the "function" of documentary photographs in academic narrative was so easily agreed upon. Visual Anthropologists have long debated what constitutes “documentation" of subjects in "native habitats,” and what constitutes an artful portrayal (an idealized, romanticized, or politicized contextualization) of those subjects in a given space. Thus, a series of ethical fault-lines run deeply throughout the history of Salvage Ethnography and, like the work of Kahn & Selesnick, they disturb the very boundaries of art, ethnography, history, and fiction. So too it comes as no surprise that Salvage Ethnography is itself linked to forces of empire, conquest, and hegemony: “Franz Boas,” the Father of American Anthropology, "had a chance to apply his approach to exhibits when he was hired to assist Frederic Ward Putnam, director and curator of the Peabody Museum at Harvard University ... where he arranged for fourteen Kwakiutl aboriginals from British Columbia to come and reside in a mock Kwakiutl village, where they could perform their daily tasks in context.”[58]
And so we hit upon Kahn & Selesnick's most volatile thematic irony, their powerfully sarcastic subversion of traditional salvage ethnography: the filtering of new fictions through the lens of what some would call a perilously outmoded, hopelessly obscure, morally bankrupt social science.[59]
While viewing the following images, consider the following quote as published by The David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University[60], which hosted an installation entitled False Witness, a collection of early works by Kahn & Selesnick, and Joan Fontcuberta[61].
"In the late twentieth century, postmodernists declared that the ‘end of history’ had arrived. Not literally describing a cessation of events, the theory holds that a true account of facts can no longer be discerned and that history and truth are not a matter of fact, but rather a matter of interpretation. False Witness ... is grounded in the idea of the malleability of history, memory, and fact. Working with photography and texts, they turn our belief in the truthfulness of photographs against us and create elaborate hoaxes that falsify historic events."
Beneath each of the following headers, at least one image is drawn from the Kahn & Selesnick archive, while another is drawn from that of Edward Curtis.
1: NAVAJO INFANT / BABY MONKEY TEST PILOT — Image A: Edward Curtis (c. 1900); Image B: Kahn & Selesnick (c. 2006).
2: LUNAR BALOG / NAVAJOS — Image A: Kahn & Selesnick (c. 2006); Images B and C: Edward Curtis (c. 1900).
3: ARTIFACTS / ILLUSTRATIONS — Image A: Kahn & Selesnick (c. 2006); Image B: Edward Curtis (c. 1900).
4: LANDSCAPES — Image A: Edward Curtis (c. 1900); Image B: Kahn & Selesnick (c. 2006).
5: ENCAMPMENTS — Image A: Edward Curtis (c. 1900); Image B: Kahn & Selesnick (c. 2006).
6: STRUCTURES — Image A: Edward Curtis (c. 1900); Image B: Kahn & Selesnick (c. 2006).
7: STORAGE UNITS — Image A: Kahn & Selesnick (c. 2006); Image B: Edward Curtis (c. 1900).
8: PORTRAITS — Image A: Edward Curtis (c. 1900); Image B: Kahn & Selesnick (c. 2006).
9: GENERAL COMPARISONS — Image A: Edward Curtis (c. 1900); Image B: Kahn & Selesnick (c. 2006).
10: ONE BRIEF SIDE-NOTE: Absurdity is a pronounced and recurring theme in The Apollo Prophecies. Even an extensive essay couldn't explore all of the layered absurdities at play in the project. However, an indication as to why Kahn & Selesnick so strongly emphasize absurdity is revealed by a brief comparison of the following images. Note the profound absurdity of the object pictured in Image A, entitled "Lunar Rover" (c. 2006; Kahn & Selesnick), and then make note of Image B, an actual piece of NASA stock footage. The image is that of an early Lunar Lander anti-gravity flight-simulator prototype that acquired the nickname "The Flying Bedstead," a funny looking contraption that nearly killed astronaut Neil Armstrong in a 1967 training exercise. [62] Upon inspection, it's almost as though Kahn & Selesnick are speaking to the generalized anxieties about aeronautical engineering, but, that said, the art remains wide open to interpretation. (Image B courtesy of NASA.)
Conclusion
The objective of this essay was to describe how specific narrative codes—primarily historic, ethnographic, and fictitious—are visually and textually hybridized in The Apollo Prophecies. In exploring this idea, we repeatedly encountered the presence of paradox, first in the narrator’s subversion of linear time, and again in the invocation of narrative genres that blur traditional binaries of past and present, and fact and fiction.
In appropriating and hybridizing narrative codes of history, fiction, science fiction, and late-frontier era salvage ethnography, the scripter convincingly relayed anxieties and moral complexities of earlier eras while forcing us into reconciliation with the co-existence of past and present narratives in our dialogue of events emerging on the horizon, the ones inexorably driving us toward social and technological breakthroughs, those assorted “moonshoots”[63] that trigger tipping points[64], or singularities [65][66], or “collapsing walls” of the moment of complexity[67][68], which ultimately reconfigure our sense of origin and purpose on earth, and guide us to the brink of new frontiers in the literal or figurative sense.
In his seminal essay, The Need for Transcendence in the Postmodern World, [69] Vaclav Havel [70], first President of the Czech Republic[71] and imprisoned dramatist[72][73] of the Cold War era [74][75][76], locates the birth of our current era at the very moment of our surfacing on the moon.
“There are thinkers who claim that, if the modern age began with the discovery of America [77], it also ended in America,” says Havel. “This is said to have occurred in the year 1969, when America sent the first men to the moon. From this historical moment, they say, a new age in the life of humanity can be dated.
“I think there are good reasons for suggesting that the modern age has ended. Today, many things indicate that we are going through a transitional period, when it seems that something is on the way out[78][79][80] and something else is painfully being born[81]. It is as if something were crumbling, decaying, and exhausting itself, while something else, still indistinct, were arising from the rubble [82]. ... The distinguishing features of such transitional periods are a mixing and blending of cultures and a plurality or parallelism of intellectual and spiritual worlds. These are periods when all consistent value systems collapse, when cultures distant in time and space are discovered or rediscovered. They are periods when there is a tendency to quote, to imitate, and to amplify, rather than to state with authority or integrate. New meaning is gradually born from the encounter, or the intersection, of many different elements.”
a tendency to quote, to imitate ... new meaning born of intersecting elements.
REFERENCES
http://www.metapedia.com/wiki/index.php?title=Code
http://www.kahnselesnick.com/ApolloProphecy/moonmap.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Installation_art
http://www.kahnselesnick.com/ApolloProphecy/moontext.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_C._Taylor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Milton
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_Lost
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Said
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_the_author
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonehenge
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_of_Eden
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fall_of_Man
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_of_Tranquility
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11
http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/geotime/age.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnography
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biography
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_fiction
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_literature
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules_Verne
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wachowski_brothers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudrillard
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Matrix
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_hegemony
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-reflexivity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_switching
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_close
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mytheme
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metanarrative
http://edition.cnn.com/2006/TECH/space/12/04/moon.base/
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1061218/asp/opinion/story_7102785.asp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TS_Eliot
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Inconvenient_Truth
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6959575/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolly_the_sheep
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1061218/asp/opinion/story_7102785.asp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-time_continuum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boston_Globe
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwardian
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_Seven
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gemini
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_spacecraft
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RMS_Titanic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxymoron
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendence_%28philosophy%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_civilization
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immortality
http://kahnselesnick.com/ApolloProphecy/moonbeak.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omniscience
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvage_ethnography
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_photography
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_anthropology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Ruby
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_anthropology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Boas
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples_of_the_Americas
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Curtis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times
http://www.brown.edu/Facilities/David_Winton_Bell_Gallery/
http://www.gallery51.com/html51/artists/joan_fontcuberta_iframe.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Bedstead
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quack_medicine
http://kahnselesnick.com/ApolloProphecy/moonpatnixon.htm
http://kahnselesnick.com/ApolloProphecy/moonladybird.htm
http://kahnselesnick.com/ApolloProphecy/moonkruschev.htm
http://kahnselesnick.com/ApolloProphecy/moonbeak.htm http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/05/opinion/05friedman.html?ei=5090&en=455de4fc32026da1&ex=1259989200&partner=rssuserland&pagewanted=all&position=
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipping_point
http://www.instapundit.com/archives/025289.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/791173.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complexity
http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2006/s1802648.htm
http://www.worldtrans.org/whole/havelspeech.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaclav_Havel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague_Spring
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velvet_Revolution
http://www.artofeurope.com/yeats/yea11.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Revelation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocolypse
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_W._Bush
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rennaissance
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metanarrative
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_Destiny
http://www.metapedia.com/wiki/index.php?title=Cultural_Encyclopedia
http://www.cs.washington.edu/building/art/ChuckClose/big-emma
http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/oralhistories/transcripts/close87.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TS_Eliot
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Play_within_a_play#Play_within_a_play
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mise_en_abyme
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinity
Bibliography
Ruby, Jay. Visual Anthropology. In Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology, David Levinson and Melvin Ember, editors. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Vol. 4:1345-1351; 1996.
Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf—Distributed by Random House, 1993.
Taylor, Mark. The Moment of Complexity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
--- NOTES: - - Close with review of Becker's chapter on Kierkegaard and the cost/and (cultural) irrationality of self-consciousness. - For conclusion: review McLuhan's main essay on Rimbaud, and Taylor's arguments on Grids to Networks.
