Читать книгу Neomedievalism. Reflections on the Post-Enlightenment Era онлайн

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Nothing in history happens by chance, even though causes are located more in the future than in the past. It is not by accident that today we are entering into a new era of written culture that is, in great measure, the main instrument of intellectual disobedience of the nations. Two centuries ago reading meant a lecture or sermon from the pulpit; today it is the opposite: to read means an effort at interpretation, and a text is no longer only a piece of writing but any symbolic organization of reality that transmits and conceals values and meanings.

One of the principal physical platforms for that new attitude is the Internet, and its procedure consists of beginning to rewrite history at the margins of the traditional media of visual imposition. Its chaos is only apparent. Although the Intenet also includes images and sounds, these are no longer products that are received but symbols that are searched for and produced in an exercise of reading.

In the measure that the economic powers that be, corporations of all kinds, lose their monopoly on the production of works of art—like film—or the production of that other genre of school desk fiction, the daily sermon where the meaning of reality is managed—the so-called news media—individuals and nations begin to develop a more critical awareness, which naturally is a disobedient state of mind. Perhaps in the future, we might even be speaking of the end of national empires and the inefficacy of military force. This new culture leads to a progressive inversion of social control: top-down control is converted to the more democratic control from the bottom up. The so-called democratic governments and the old style dictatorships do not tolerate this because they are democratic or benevolent but because direct censorship of a process that is unstoppable is not convenient to them. They can only limit themselves to reacting and delaying as long as possible, by recourse to the old tool of physical violence, the downfall of their sectarian empires.