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| Feb 04, 2006 3:28 am |
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re: Public toilets in Chennai |
Govind Srinivasan
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Soeb,
When I opened this network "WE CARE FOR CHENNAI", I was fully aware that it would be very difficult to convert online enthusiasm into real time,practical,community-beneficial service-oriented accomplishments.
The discussion of "Public toilets in Chennai" has
I am going to bore you with my back-and-forth thoughts now, since this is the most "constructive" work that is going on in WE CARE FOR CHENNAI since long.
Soeb, as I have been telling, time and again, there is a peculiar "feel-good-factor" that the internet oozes out just by coverting hopes, despairs, ideas, etc. into words that are readable by known and unknown people. The mere action of posting a message alone probably gives some satisfaction and this is what I call "net-psychology". You might have known something called "phantom-effect". I compare the online commitments and sharing of ideas almost to this "phantom effect", while there are exceptions to it. To bore you further on this, here is something that can explain what is this "phantom effect", though I guess that you should have already read a lot on this.
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Our civilization is quickly losing many of the paradoxes that characterized the industrial culture of 1860-1960. Through the entertainment economy, we are increasingly becoming tourists in our own cities, and even in our own bodies. It is a vast hollowing out, a horizontalizing of power and “presence.”
In that cybernetic, neutralized condition, we must learn to study degrees of desensitivity much more carefully. We must learn to emphasize the power of absence as presence. As part of my newest project, on how the twentieth century was imagined before it happened (to be completed by November, 2006), I am studying the world as clinic circa 1900. I am trying to locate what absence and presence meant to the industrial Euro-American culture, under the fantasies about x-rays, electrical therapies, and particularly the fascination with synesthesia, how one sense was a phantom for another.
It is clear that phantom limb is essentially a narrative pleasure (an ache can be a pleasure as well). It is the Rembrandt effect within the body itself; and within collective memory as well. The polish of newly minted bedroom downtowns throughout Europe and the US leave us fewer tools for noticing this pleasure. So I try to archive absences within cities, within collective misremembering of the future, within narrative traditions like film noir.
Imagine a DNA molecule that has gone slightly bald. Locating that spot becomes the event of the season among scientists. Researchers try to imagine what the lost gene might have meant. It is a story in absence, an archeological pleasure, a science fiction; and very quickly leads to a rash of novels and movies, even a term used by political analysts; finally, a slang word, and a sexual entendre.
Source:
http://www.artbrain.org/phantomlimb/klein.html
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Who knows? I may also be one such person suffering or enjoying from the "phantom pleasure" of whining and telling that nothing happens.
Well, having shared my usual rantings, I still have a faint hope of finding a few people, who could energize WCFC. I have a strong hunch that most of such people are probably outside the internet. A lot of community-oriented actions take place and the internet (at least in India) is still a damp squib, I think. (Pure Pleasure activities, even sometimes in the garb of "networking" sells, of course). I have to be proved wrong.
I am open to the idea of somebody else coming forward to carry on the WCFC mission, if I can get that subjective satisfaction that she or he would be able to run the show. I am getting a kind of "itching" that I should find greeny pastures elsewhere to whet my appetite.
Hmm......
Govind Srinivasan
Private Reply to Govind Srinivasan (new win) |
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