Er, sorry for not posting for a couple of weeks. Anyways I was jotting this idea in a notepad earlier today and thought I'd share with the blog-o-sphere.
We must reuse old books and objects like maps and movies and content. There will always be copies, but we need to reuse the actual objects. Old books, reels and records are just wasting away because they’ve been antiqued and archived. They fall into disuse and disrepair increasing the rate of aging. The use of copies of these works promotes simulation which accelerates not only the physical but conceptual death of the work. It sits as a referent that serves in theory to verify a copy as valid. The copy is never really checked. And in fact the work is “improved” over time to follow the political and moral fashions of the day as well as contemporary visual and aural aesthetics. The physical object then becomes a distortion to itself. It becomes a shadow that no longer contains or reflects the transient and contemporary meaning that are the work “today.” Its original meanings get lost and new ones are created. Since no one uses the original context of the work, that context gets lost, and so does its connection to history. A piece then becomes a “timeless” work. This is actually preferred by the longwinded thinkers (Am I one of these? Hmm probably, but just b/c I am in academia doesn't mean I won't deconstruct it. Oh yes, I will rip you a new one!), because the work can then be continuously re-evaluated through a huge variety of new contexts (Marxist, feminist, socio-economic, gay, psycho-analytical, Freudian, Jungian, post-colonial, etc, etc…). Each study verifying the “timeless”-ness of the “work” by creating a new meaning and destroying or devaluing the original in the process. Our notions of the permanency of meaning are illusory. We need to face this. In doing this we could drop a lot of needless struggle over intangibles like validation and authority (Which post-modernism was supposed to get rid of by denying grand-narrative, but in my opinion, it just created new alternate ones to replace the old. So much for PoMo)
And yes. That is picture of a flattened frog. I'm not anti-french or anything, I just collect images of squashed animals. Cheers!
