- what and/or who is reproduced by this or that act?

Here, the real is defined by what is possible to be represented. In seeking the perfect recording of sound, the performance that the consumer hears when the recording is played is not a copy of an original but is a simulacrum, a copy that has no original existing only as reproduction.

Everything is converted to data as an ever increasing vocabulary of a new language.

And other languages have interpenetrated each other; other cultures have overlapped and justly infected each other; with images licentiously affiliating themselves to any and every word of any and every language, betraying earlier meanings for massive significations. The world is only context now, with each utterance and each image-sign a nodal point in a network of related relays of meaning. As JB says, every word gives off the scent of a profession, a genre, a current, a party, a particular work, a particular man, a generation, an era, a day and an hour. Every word smells of the context and contexts in which it has lived its intense social life; all words and all forms are inhabited by intentions!

- what is sustained by this reproduction?

'When old technologies were new': along with textual competence, other gross indicators of technological literacy included skill in operating electrical machinery and, always, sensitivity to the social conditions and constraints surrounding the exercise of those skills, including unhesitating appreciation of the virtues of new electrical technologies and the experts who oversaw them. In the realm of electrical communication, this last condition implied an absolute belief in its uniqueness, and the refusal to entertain any notion that electric communication merely extended or speeded up oral and written communication, or was an equivalent substitute. By its very nature, in other words, it was not subject to existing social rules. It was truly new, and the rules for using it owed nothing to the past, but only to the engineers bent on creating the future. It was a short step from perceptions of electrical communication as a phenomenon outside the realm of personal or cultural values to the conclusion that expert-prescribed instructions for its use were not the mutable product of human custom, but given in nature.(CM)

comments cam@camwork.demon.co.uk