Subject: Happy New Year
From: fred isseks (fisseks@warwick.net )
Date: Thu Jan 13 2000 - 08:27:11 CST
Even though I haven't finished Sandy's book yet, I figured that was no
reason not to enter a comment.
I'm enjoying the book. So far it has helped me make some sense out of
this year 2000 business, a phenomenon about which I have more than a little
ambivalence. Forget about Y2K. My concern is not about computers crashing
or the power grid snapping off. Rather it is all the hype and solemnity
about the changing of the millennium: all those nines turning into zeroes -
the great odometer roll over of the ages. From the big digital clock in
our local post office - that began telling us how many seconds were left in
the 20th century beginning sometime last July - to the countless articles
about the greatest song, human, book, movie, sitcom, invention, or war of
the last 1000 years, we have been slipped the message that midnight
December 31, 1999 was a most significant moment.
On the one hand, I am suspicious. These are only arbitrary numbers. Day
follows night follows day in endless succession, regardless of the numbers
that we assign them. Morning in January 2000 is not much different from
what we experienced a couple of weeks ago. What do a series of little
numbered boxes, row after row, lined up in our collective rear view mirror,
2000 years back to the birth of Jesus have to do with reality anyway?
And yet...haven't we crossed a line of some significance? These numbers
of the years and months are written on us as surely as our names. What
Sandy says about names on page 46, could be said about the calendar, too.
The calendar provides one of the means by which we name each other and our
selves. Like a name, the calendar implies continuity and permanence, up to
a point. The measure of our days and years is a measure of our lives, the
coordinates of birth and death, plotted on the same graph that all humans
use. Is not the calendar one of the virtual elements that make up the
fiduciary subject?
I became aware of the year 2000 a long time ago, maybe at nine or ten,
when I first marveled at the zeroes and did the math and computed that I
would be old the day the next century arrived. Since then, when I have
thought of the turning of the century, I have thought of it in personal
terms, that is, in terms of my own mortality. The calendar props up my
sense of a continuous self. Now that the millennium has arrived, I am
connected to those conceptions that I had so many years ago of what and
where I would be now. Am I old? I must be, for in my youthful
imagination, any age with a five in front of it had to be old, and that
time - those years - have come round at last. My internalization of the
calendar accompanies me into the next millennium with its script of my
life-time. (But with plenty of editing and revisions. 51 doesn't seem
that old now.)
It works both ways. Not only does the calendar allow me to project into
the future and anticipate where I will be, it also defines for me where
(or, more precisely, when) I have been. Growing up in the fifties, coming
of age in the sixties - the decades of our lives describe for us who we are
and what shaped our formation. This may sound like I am stating the
obvious, but I am trying to imagine life without the time grid and all that
it does in the production of the "legible body." Page 41: "The legible
body is the social, rather than the physical, body; the legible body
displays the social meaning of 'body' on its surface, presenting a set of
cultural codes that organize ways the body is apprehended and that
determine the range of socially appropriate responses."
I don't think it is just the physical aging process that displays meaning
on our bodies. The aging process works in tandem with the discursive grid
which locates us in our "generational time" in the 20th or 21st century.
Our legible bodies bear the markings of our times. Without a calendar, our
lives would still be linked with events, but would we still be as "socially
apprehensible" as denizens of an era?
Sandy writes about "political entities" that are fixed in "place" by a
"hypertrophy of location technologies." I am thinking that we are held in
place also by "time technologies" which function to locate us along
coordinates of a temporal geography.
Since I have admitted my ambivalence about the turning of the millennium,
I can admit also that our celebration on New Year's Eve was somewhat low
key, affording me some time to watch on TV the spectacle of fireworks in
major cities around the world as the clock struck twelve. Like clockwork,
we all responded to an arbitrary number, a reified moment of reckoning, on
cue, in all corners of the globe, even though the next day was pretty much
like the last.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2a24 : Thu Jan 13 2000 - 08:22:38 CST