Since Sputnik and the satellites, the planet is enclosed in a manmade environment that ends "Nature" and turns the globe into a repertory theater to be programmed. Shakespeare at the Globe mentioning "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players" (As You Like It, Act II, Scene 7) has been justified by recent events in ways that would have struck him as entirely paradoxical. The resunium arch of satellites is that the young now accept the public spaces of the earth as as role-playing areas. Sensing this, they adopt costumes and roles and are ready to "do their thing" everywhere.
Another theme of [Finnegans] Wake that helps in the understanding of the paradoxical shift from cliché to archetype is "past time are pastimes." The dominant technologies of one age become the games and pastimes of a later age. In the 20th century, the number of "past times" that are simultaneously available is so vast as to create cultural anarchy. When all the cultures of the world are simultaneously present, the work of the artist in the elucidation of form takes on new scope and new urgency. Most men are pushed into the artist's role. The artist cannot dispense with the principle of "doubleness" or "interplay" because this type of hendiadys dialogue is essential to the very structure of consciousness, awareness, and autonomy.
(Marshall McLuhan, From cliché to archetype)
The medium is the message - "A formalism which ceases to be external since the form is the innate development of the concrete content itself."
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The medium is the message - "A formalism which ceases to be external since the form is the innate development of the concrete content itself."
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Now the end of history does not mark the end of all sudden and new appearances. The moment of Absolute Knowledge only causes the dialectical suppression of one certain time, one specific temporality. From this moment on, far from closing all horizons, Absolute Knowledge announces in fact a new temporality, one born from the synthesis of two temporalities, the Greek and the Christian. The moment which dialectically gives rise to the two temporalities marks the emergence of a new era of plasticity in which subjectivity gives itself the form which at the same time it receives.
