• Intro: Radical Occasionality
• February 1995: @Rhetnet
• March 1995: Washington D.C.
• May 1995: El Paso, Texas
• July 1995: Somewhere in Michigan
• August 1995: I-90 Eastbound
• August-September 1995: Troy, New York
• September 1995: @MediaMOO
• October 1995: Troy, New York
• June 1997: Honolulu, Hawaii
• November 2001: Dallas, Texas
• Further Reading
• Salvo Responds: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6

Kairos logo circa 1996.

Here is an interesting case of print's effects, of the power of authorship — something that I do not think is likely to disappear any time soon. Foucault is credited with all sorts of peculiar foresight, like forecasting the multiple or corporate authorship of online documentation in his essay "What is an Author?"

Rather, in recognizing many of the fault lines surrounding this cultural formation — by analyzing the authority of authorship — Foucault made possible many inventive re-articulations of authorship.

However, the strategy of authorship is alive and well: when we reference an author of authority, we simultaneously put on that author's authority but the words that come through the mask are as much our own as the referenced author. We speak in tongues, in the words of others, yet somehow assert our "own" perspective through taking the voice and words of an Other.

Marvelous. Whoever started spreading the rumor of the end of irony spoke too soon: the twin towers are more orbital (Baudrilliard) now than when they existed, somehow become the Christ-symbol of late capitalism, sacrificed for the re-discovery of nationalism in a post-nationalistic age and creating an historical marker after the end of history.

And yet the strategy of authorship may have to work within an entirely new vision of the future of writing.