Oh, hello. I didn't see you sitting over there, poor neglected blogorino.

My mind has been connecting some academic dots for a while, and while I'm not at the point yet to fully elucidate some of my most recent internal discourse, I figured I could at least be less neglectful and give a general idea of some topics I have been mulling over. They're exciting and enticing, for certain. Understand that these are rough sketches that make perfect sense to me. I am, as they say, all about some feedback.

Semiotica-Erotica
Largely, an exploration into the past thirty to forty years of postmodern discourse and field of ideas unveils a bit of heavy-handedness when it comes to transcendental characteristics of closed or open sign-signified systems vis-a-vis Lacan and Derrida, with so much as inspecting the readings done on them by Lyotard and Baudrillard revealing a kind of fetish characteristic over one aspect of this discourse: while not specifically gendered, the deconstructionist (and post-deconstructionist) reading of linguistic symbologies in a sense sexualizes its own content. Disrobing the closed systems and denuding open systems, there has been a slow rise in the approach to deconstructionist philosophy of ritual and sustained academic pleasure in it. So much so that at this stage that Fukuyama (for one) can be completely discredited: neither are we at the end of history, nor are we at the end of semiotics. While I disagree with any eschatological reading of philosophy/history, a pretense of sophistry on the part of structuralist/early-poststructuralist hangers-on can be observed as little more than a repeated act to derive some sort of pleasure.

Liquid Fragmentation
In a less (perhaps) disturbing realm, I turn to the concept of technologically/societally-created/aided social fragmentation. Any volume by Zygmunt Bauman, and select writings of Baudrillard, Kristeva, and Habermas, will speak about, poke and prod at, and engage the concept of modernity being a breaking device, a clever tail-eating serpent that both created and was created by a weakening of the social fabric of humanity and the demise of community. This, of course, has been popularized in such works as Bowling Alone and others, and still more less-technical philosophising has been done in the popular sphere to invoke some sort of awareness and action from its readership in order to restore humanity to a world of connection and unification, less homogeneous heterogeneity and happy-unhappy individual isolationism. While Bauman et al briefly touch on these points, I have only seen any extensive theorizing on the subject in one place (Liquid Modernity) and at that only subdued: the subject I speak of here is a concept of Liquid Fragmentation. Perhaps the moniker Fluid Fragmentation would be more fitting: while sociologically this is not a radical concept, in terms of ontological readings of religious ideologies it has the potential to be galvanizing. The central framework is that societies, groups, clusters, and even individuals suffer from yet perpetually celebrate the notion of fluidity and liquidity, that an identity is a continual, breathing, near-sentient thing: while not pernicious inherently, its application has some room giving us pause: identity creation, symbol creation, and crystallization of the unified are typically things we come to celebrate once those are in place and - barring for the minute any Bagdikian or Adorno reading on mass media being the message rather than the mediums - if we legitimize and non-problematize the notion of morphological identity we allow ourselves a permanent yet constantly shifting form of fragmentation. Marriage name conventions, street addresses, jobs, hair colors, tattoos: these are all small things that point to a permanent flux rather than a permanent break and do indeed become signs for ourselves; yet, each shift becomes a form of fragmentation distancing oneself and (if I can sneak in Adorno) pseudo-individualizing us through marked isolational activities.

Cyber Ecology
While this has probably been writ about before up to this point, I have honestly not read any academic writing about it; my ignorance of such a topic clearly, obviously, does not prevent it from existing. I've just not done any research on this. (NB - this tends to be my MO: I'll think on a subject for a while, and once I've clarified it to some extent, then I start researching to see how behind I am) In 1998, I started my first webpage and got my first (several) email addresses. Where are they now? What happened to them? Who claimed them? Of course, this is analogous to who we are as fluid-identity-permanent-fragmentation humans (see previous topic), but who is cleaning up the messes we made in the early days of the dot-com? What will happen to MySpace five years from now when only "Tom" (who has not apparently logged in for months!) will be remaining? What, if anything, does this say about our predilections as humans, and, perhaps, as Americans (in this instance)? Benign neglect speaks volumes - and for the first time, perhaps we will soon have some sort of permanent graveyard to see our wastes and wanton excess that is consistently viewable from our own homes and bears our identity; landfills, junkyards... these things bear the mark of anonymity: "that could be anyone's trash - not just mine." Paradoxically, what's missing here is an individual responsibility, an existence in isolation of our consumer sins as outlined in the catechism in each one of our guidebooks to planet Earth. (I think now of a website in particular that keeps old, dead pages permanently cached - I think they've collected something in the neighborhood of 2 billion pages up to this point, and counting) What impact will this have on us - if anything! - if we see all our creations and identities laid bare before us? Will it be another long bookshelf of old romance novels or VHS tapes from an elderly, deceased family member? Will we actually pay attention to it?

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Don't worry, I still think / write plenty about music. But analyses of Shostakovich in technical terms and brainstorms about musicological matters seem less sexy...

EDIT: So, Cyber-Ecology exists ("they" added the hyphen, not me) but isn't quite what I had in mind. Casual glances have pointed me to DARPA (shudder), information storage that's "green" (certainly, an important aspect of this in a less sociological-societal realm), and a bunch of articles about art. If I call it something else and tease out some subtleties, this could be something. Or nothing.