logic identified as "postmodernism" begins to dominate modernism, and to alter our sense of existential presence. A function of technological pervasion and dispersion, this new electronic sense of presence is intimately bound up in a centerless, network-like structure of instant stimulation and desire, rather than in a nostalgia for the past or anticipation of a future. Television, video cassettes, video tape recorder/players, video games, and personal computers all form an encompassing electronic representational system whose various forms "interface" to constitute an alternative and absolute world that uniquely incorporates the spectator/user in a spatially decentered, weakly temporalized, and quasi-disembodied state. Digital electronic technology atomizes and abstractly schematizes the analogic quality of the photographic and cinematic into discrete pixels and bits of information that are then transmitted serially, each bit discontinuous, discontiguous, and absolute--each bit being-in-itself even as it is part of a system.[30]Once again we can turn to Blade Runner to provide illustration of how the electronic is neither photographic nor cinematic. Tracking Leon, one of the rebellious replicants, the human protagonist Deckard finds his empty rooms and discovers a photograph that seems, itself, to reveal nothing but an empty room. Using a science fictional device, Deckard directs its electronic eye to zoom in, close up, isolate, and enlarge to impossible detail various portions of the photograph. On the one hand, it might seem that Deckard is functioning like a photographer working in his darkroom to make, through optical discovery, past experience significantly visible. (Indeed, this sequence of the film recalls the photographic blow-ups of an ambiguously "revealed" murder in Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 classic, Blow-Up.) On the other hand, Deckard can be and has also been likened to a film director, using the electronic eye to pro...
