CTheory.net visits the smoking postmodern wreckage of Digital Detroit

(((Okay, maybe CTHEORY is not for everybody, but if you can't parse text like this stuff, me 'n' Walter Benjamin both think you are sissies.)))

http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=586

Link: CTheory.net.

"When the annual Computers and Writing conference descended upon Detroit City, the theme for the event, borrowed from an article by Geoffrey Sirc, was "Virtual Urbanism." [3]

As the conference web site promised, "Detroit, Michigan offers a unique opportunity to consider the effects of rhetoric and writing on the urban experience, an experience constantly shaped and reshaped by emerging and existing technological issues, from the birth of the assembly line at the Ford Motor Company to the introduction of techno music." [4]

"The rhetorical strain of this urban seduction, which links writing to techno music and automotive manufacturing, raises some questions. What exactly does it mean to write a city like Detroit, where rates of adult illiteracy are among the highest in the nation? Who will read this writing? The question becomes all the more poignant when computers are added to the mix. What does it mean to write Detroit as electronic text?

" Such questions haunted me as I made my way through the dark, mile-long tunnel that links Windsor, Ontario with Detroit, a city to which I was returning as a mere tourist. This Stygian tale begins here, on the border. I am the First Tourist of the Apocalypse, in search of a body and a city.

"When I was a kid, growing up in Windsor, my parents forbade me from going to Detroit. It was the dark continent, a place to be repressed. Watching Detroit (d)evolve from across the river was like watching a slow-motion Hurricane Katrina. The waves kept rolling in, but there were no rescue 'copters in sight – not even police choppers. Attendees of the Computers and Writing Conference seemed intrigued, and perhaps excited, by the city's burnt-out aura. For visitors, Detroit is a sort of mysterious archaeological site...."

(((Take it away, Walter:)))

"This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."

– Walter Benjamin, "On the Concept of History"