<nettime> Rota e rete: not modern, but modernization

[Max Herman via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

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Vacationing in one of the hot old cities of Europe, it's easy to feel the world has gone wrong.

Maybe climate breakdown just snuck up on us, through no fault of our own, dooming the planetary system's biological layer as soon as its technology layer finally arrived.  Nothing could have gone, nor could it go from here, any other way.  Perhaps.

But then consider, typing on phone, alternative history fiction, a very popular genre for pay in 2026 China (the year of the fire horse, a year in which it helps very much to have a plan).  Often very pro-regime, such fiction asks what if; and what if?

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Joyce's "Work in Progress," also titled "Finnegans Wake" (no apostrophe), dealt with the ten thunder words or thunder birds of technology's arrival.  Lest we think fiction cannot matter, or must be finished before it can, to our present global collapsing bred of techne just read McLuhan say on the global village, aka War and Peace.

Where did we blunder so badly to get to this darkest possible place?

Maybe not at all, it being inevitable; but maybe in being too literal in our clumsy early steps and making things to mar them.

Modernization started before humans.  It's new or novel adaptation.  It's not a calendar number or a shape on a map.  What is now old was once brand new.  Like a fabric or "rete," which Calvino called the vast novel of humanity, it goes all directions and endlessly yet keeps a shape based on cycle and path, what Wiener called design by either genetic or experienced learning.

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My vacation spot has an old millstone on site, set up on edge for viewing not use, called "rota" or "macina," grinder -- one of the thunder words, you could say, that broke open the deluge of modernization.  It's a lovely thing I shall try to paint, despite not being a painter.  Being more than a garbage implement, it's a vehicle or instrument of contemplation now, of imagination and expression.

There is something in common among say the Buddha, La Joconde, and Luther Standing Bear who wrote "I am going to venture that the man who sat on the ground in his tipi meditating on life and its meaning, accepting the kinship of all creatures, and acknowledging unity with the universe of things was infusing into his being the true essence of civilization."

Akin to Dante's "si come rota ch'igualmente e mossa..." such a text might certainly bring into sufficient conversation the great land masses of Europe, Asia, and North America, if only to kick a ball around, or as Wu Weishan depicted in 2020, "A Dialogue Beyond Time and Space."

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Santillana, friend of both Wiener and Calvino, the cybernetics of machines and human poetry, wrote about this in Reflections and his book about the great millstone of Amlodhi, trying to help us see the ancient and prehistoric roots of modernization gone both right and wrong.  This was done so that we might not blunderforever devoid of dignity and grace into an unnecessary Waste Land of our own ill choice: "a cui esperienza grazia serba."


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