there is no longer a phenomenologically perceived connection between signification and an "original" or "real," when, as Guy Debord tells us, "everything that was lived directly has moved away into a representation," referentiality becomes intertextuality. [32]Living in a schematized and intertextual metaworld far removed from reference to a real world liberates the spectator/user from what might be termed the latter's moral and physical gravity. The materiality of the electronic digitizes dure and situation so that narrative, history, and a centered (and central) investment in the human lived-body become atomized and dispersed across a system that constitutes temporality not as the flow of conscious experience, but as a transmission of random information. The primary value of electronic temporality is the bit or instant --which (thanks to television and videotape) can be selected, combined, and instantly replayed and rerun to such a degree that the previously irreversible direction and stream of objective time seems overcome in the creation of a recursive temporal network. On the one hand, the temporal cohesion of history and narrative gives way to the temporal discretion of chronicle and episode, to music videos, to the kinds of narratives that find both causality and intentional agency incomprehensible and comic. On the other hand, temporality is dispersed and finds resolution as part of a recursive, if chaotic, structure of coincidence. Indeed, objective time in postmodern electronic culture is perceived as phenomenologically discontinuous as was subjective time in modernist cinematic culture. Temporality is constituted paradoxically as a homogeneous experience of discontinuity in which the temporal distinctions between objective and subjective experience (marked by the cinematic) disappear and time seems to turn back in on itself recursively in a structure of equivalence and reversibility. The temporal move is from Remembrance of ...
