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VUNW: Reproductions

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Reproductions

 

The scribe and „master thinker“ of the town of the dead in the play “Vineta” by Jura Soyfer presents his standard work with the title „Forgetting as the principle of the thinking of nations of an advanced culture“. Memories, reproductions, on the other hand, keep persons as well as virtualities and their changing and multifarious identities alive, and it is only they who make innovation thrusts possible. With the pictures, signs, languages came the knowledge revolutions, because what had been already thought could be criticised again and again. The greater the mass of the participants became, the greater became the wealth of a society.

The ability to reproduce is also the basic principle of the "exact sciences" in their form of argumentation. In this way they stand in the tradition of agrarian thinking (that has also stamped the European concept of culture). The knowledge of these traditions consisted in the essence in the ability to bring about repetitions (sowing, harvesting etc.) and to pay attention to repetitions (farmers' almanacs). The present cyberspace (virtuality in the narrow sense) is also based on the use of possibilities of repetition, in the sense of an identity of the identity. The faster and more exact the reproduction the better.

Against that the formation of concepts and their traditions have changed. Through new methods and the crossing over of worlds the history of the human race in the last decades has acquired completely new dimensions. Through the determination of the age of bones and objects the history of the human race expanded from 10.000, 15.0000 years (the age of writing) to millions of years. The "spirits" or the "psyche" had to transfer their role as agents of sickness largely to bacteria, viruses, messenger substances, for example. They paled as rulers of the history and stepped as ghosts into the age of industry as signs of human crimes (Heiner Müller) or as metaphors for consumer goods (e.g. the Korean God Mazda as a name for cars). The cooling of the foods opened entirely new dimensions of forms of life and referred to other possibilities to discover the history of the earth and the human race. The quantity of information increased, but the audiences changed, too, which used, analyzed, evaluated it.

In contrast to (material and virtual) reproduction innovation, which is always virtual, creates new identities, whose value is determined by the meaning of the innovation, but also by the kind of its reproduction.

Fundamentally the beginning knowledge society underestimates in this development the ability to interpretate, for knowledge, for thinking, for creativity, for representation. This is a problem of a society, which is limited to a few images and slogans and on the whole is not conscious of its history. Even the languages of science are characterised by power symbolism and forgetting, while one tries to translate into writing the oral testimonies in the courtroom.

There exists therefore even in the area of the reproductions the necessity for a new infrastructure - from the archiving to the interpretations to the stories. The central demand is, to make internal contradictions recognizable, so as to make the necessities for change obvious. The attempt, to ignore necessities of cultural and educational policy in this context, to reduce them to the reproduction of the identity of identities, can be seen to be attempts to hand on old power structures, which, however, block the solution of such problems as poverty and mass unemployment.

 


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Adresse (URL): http://www.inst.at/vunw/reproduktionen.htm  2006-11-14
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