A Parallel World- Notes from Norman

1. Two worlds and times—and matter-- that don’t meet, simply coexist.

2. Sensory deprivation, or spatial alienation, as a result

3. No dialectical process will cross the two, to generate an evolutionary third

4. The worlds can infect each other

5. One might be able to multi-task, but remain disengaged, in a strange way

6. Suggests the end of social Darwinist models of time and change. No longer a survival of the fittest. The end of the political enlightenment in the West…

7. A few examples of such tales before 1960’s (particularly as theological, about heaven and hell and angels, etc.); but mostly after 1970… Why, one might ask

8. Are we now in a crisis where parallel worlds will have to somehow be re-imaged as dialectical? But dialectical in what sense, in a media-driven, horizontal (flat) world like this?

9. Also suggests a crossover between fact and fiction, where neither is necessary. For example, the facts of the future are a fiction, but can generate action. However, a surplus of imaginary future remains; and finds its way through the culture somehow. Also, the future only resembles the predictions—at best, like a plastic surgery where you resemble yourself (both as you wished you might be; and as you actually were).

The Histories of the Future

A. The future is always about the present; based on a past that is complete enough to be a possible future

B. Surplus imagery: The future arrives but barely recognizable from its earlier modeling. The unbuilt future becomes a pool that is collectively remastered, reappears as parallel or fantasy

C. Media becomes a reliquary of sorts for older imaginary futures

D. Many stages of Modernism as the future, from 1780’s on.

E. The future is also archeological, as in the discovery of Troy, or of Teoteohuacan. Lost worlds, south poles, outer spaces, underwater worlds, Atlantis as a lost future. The moon as African’s interior. The hollow of the earth

F. The future is a place where fact and fiction cohabit, almost reverse places

G. The future is foreboding and premonition turned into a peculiar language of its own

H. Master planning and the future…

I. Myths of decay and future…

1. Transition toward an industrial economy: 1870-1914

a. Sovereign nation state

b. Emerging capitalism

c. Political enlightenment

d. Obsession after 1850 with gothic revival

e. Fear of legalizing socialist parties

f. Anxiety over democratic institutions (schools, etc.). The rise of the proletariat. “We must educate our masters.” (Disraeli)

g. Economic takeoff, forcing new places to take this surplus capital. Imperialism.

h. Arms race starting in 1890

i. Colossal cities, with intense oral cultures, sudden investments in new museums, the semi-public institutions, from circuses to dime museums to amusement parks to bookstores, live theater (on a scale beyond what we see today); street performers (saltimbanques)

j. Electric lighting of the city; gas lighting of houses

k. Railroad economy

l. Golden age for the design and unique language of mass publishing—without competition… a different mode of narrative and illustration

m. Nineteenth Century modernism—very little modern architecture, early skyscrapers in Chicago and NY, art nouveau and historicism, imploded inner cities, depletion of many country towns, NO AUTOMATION IN THE CURRENT SENSE, the early examples of buying on credit, the department stores in Paris, London, NY, Chicago…

n. Arcades and panoramas, magic lanterns, early cinema

o. World’s fairs, 1851, 1855, 1867, 1876, 1893, 1900

2. 1914- 1930; 1930-40. Two stages within a single epoch, from WWI to the Great Depression;

The thirties to the Second World War

a. Automobile and oil

b. Coming of age of cinema (cross-embedding)

c. Analog forms: thus, two models of media culture (tactile/hands-on pre-analog; and electrical copies that have now evolved unique forms of narrative, are very much their own). Electrically reproduced sound. The microphone. Talkies. Radio.

d. The saturation of the telephone line

e. Haudraulic mail delivery

f. The Moderne version of modernist design

g. Graphic design

h. The first step in the self-destruction of Europe

i. The next stage of corporate structure: stock markets far more integrated worldwide…

j. The overwhelming growth of the sovereign nation state: Soviet versions, European versions, Japanese versions, Fascist and Nazi versions

k. Automation, robots, the existential control of nature by machines. Blitzkrieg, aerial bombing.

l. Abstract systems applied to material culture (not yet what we find in the fifties); Coldspot refrigerator.

m. World’s fairs, 1915, 1935, 1939

Parallel Worlds and the Dismantling of the American Psyche

1. The zone between fact and fiction widening… How did that take place?

2. Imagining a new history of the present, of events that continue to haunt our present…

3. 1973 forward…

4. To be in violet

5. The dismantling: the end of the political enlightenment; the horizontal culture, not simply by way of the internet, etc. The end of dialectical models, of the parallel worlds colliding—a myth. Now since 2008 utterly impossible to sustain.

6. The two years after a Crash…

7. The medication of the American psyche, the pharmacology…