The All-Trite fondness for the “strangling sphere of 19th-century ideas”, as you put it, as well as preventing others from breathing, is merely the nostalgia for a chapter of explicitly imperial power that they wish to reassert, whose hidden habits and practices never went away, merely transforming and dispersing its mechanisms of exploitative collection and delivery, beyond the range of both implicit and explicit strategies of All-Trite groups. They can no longer recover former advantages, in the same ways, the detours have gotten too complex for them. The powers of hidden and hypocritical networking are suffering erosion, through hypervisibility of communication networks.
This leaves only the desire to exit from the exposures of habitual hypocrisy by hypervisibility; the desire to destroy institutions and nations promoting hypervisibility; the desire to escape into new fantasy kingdoms, into virtualised safe havens of encryption and networked exploitation.
Contemporary cultural and political events are merely following the agenda of such a nostalgic desire, as the coercive rereading of that chapter of explicitly imperial power, whose configuration and understandings that nostalgic desire is simply trying to repeat, in new conditions.
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“A place is made, in that essay, by all rights, for such a positive inquiry into the current upheavals in the forms of communication, the new structures emerging in all the formal practices, and also in the domains of the archive and the treatment of information, that massively and systematically reduce the role of speech, of phonetic writing, and of the book. But one would be mistaken in coming to the conclusion of a death of the book and a birth of writing from that which is entitled “The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing.” One page before the chapter which bears this title a distinction is proposed between closure and end. What is held within the demarcated closure may continue indefinitely. If one does not simply read the title, it announces precisely that there is no end of the book and no beginning of writing. The chapter shows just that: writing does not begin. It is even on the basis of writing, if it can be put this way,
that one can put into question the search for an archie, an absolute beginning, an origin. Writing can no more begin, therefore, than the book can end”
[From, “Positions”, Jacques Derrida ]