[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Moreover, Culver s final remarks suggest how thisreconceived notion of the social bond, and the forms of technology andproduction organisation on which it draws, are felt to be bound up with a new andenriching potential for expressivity in work, one which promises to undo thoseoppositions between public and private, material and spiritual, characteristic ofmodern industrial cultures.The Computer Guy confirms the feeling, which we saw was widely held amongData General s engineers, that the new technologies, in fostering such an expressive FAKING IT : TRUE STORIES 75relation to work and in providing the images and means for the decentralisation ofauthority, are rendering the monolithic and strictly rationalised Fordist businessorganisation redundant:It s a lot like music; computers are like that.You can never explain the feeling ofconnections to anyone else.Figuring something out, something that s never beenunderstood before, is a rhythmic experience.You know, some people in thecomputer business can be pretty creative, unlike the traditional businessman.You know, the astronauts didn t read poetry, but that s changing.Computers areas much a means of expression as language.But what I find particularly interesting about these pronouncements is that, behindthe quasi-mystical rhetoric, they betray a concentration of concern upon issues ofcharacter, community and communication which, as we saw was the case with TheSoul of a New Machine, are felt somehow to hinge on the cultural influence ofinformation technologies.In this respect, True Stories, with its determinedly local focus, its narrator s curiousrole as a kind of sociological anthropological field worker, and its subtitle, A FilmAbout a Bunch of People in Virgil, Texas , invites us to read it as some sort ofcommunity study.The film s opening words, This is where the town begins , betrayan interest in the constitutive limits, both spatial and conceptual, of community;and this is especially evident in the camera s repeated gesture of turning outward tosurvey the vast spaces of the empty Texan landscape against which Virgil sboundaries are defined.Such a visual concern with space and the civic dimensionsof collective identity (the camera also repeatedly tracks the streets, residentialdistricts and municipal spaces of the town as if in search of the physical location ofthis identity) seems to point us in the direction of a fairly orthodox territorialconception of community as locality.Yet we should note that Byrne s potted historyof Texas has functioned precisely to undermine locality as a basis for community.Noting ironically that Texas comes from the Caddoan word for friend , Byrne thenrelates how this territory has been a site of continuing violent struggle betweendifferent racial, national and socio-economic groups up to and well beyond itsincorporation into the United States.Therefore, as the film s subtitle suggests,territory or locality alone allows us at best to speak only of a bunch of people ratherthan of community; and we might then understand one of the central questionsposed by True Stories to be this: under contemporary conditions, in what respectscan such a bunch of people be said to constitute a community?By way of response to this question, an initial move might be to reformulatecommunity in terms of a communications model, one which, as we have seen inrelation to The Soul of a New Machine, is bound up with the symbolism and culturalprominence of IT.And indeed, Byrne s comments on the relationship between citiesand highways I suppose these freeways made this town and a lot of others like itpossible suggest how even the mundane transportational aspect ofcommunications must now be regarded as prior to the relations of purely localinterdependence.However, it is upon the notion of communications as thecirculation of signals, messages and codes that True Stories principally seeks to re-establish the basis of community.This is a model to which Virgil as an IT town 76 CAPITAL, CLASS AND TECHNOLOGY IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN CULTUREseems ideally to conform
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]