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~David Cecchetto~ on Ted Hiebert’s _In Praise of Nonsense: Aesthetics, Uncertainty, and Postmodern Identity_

Hiebert argues that the postmodern self is technologized along a combination of three vectors. The first of these are technologies of disappearance, which Hiebert describes as “intellectual and psychological devices that one can use to construct a plausible picture of not-being, progressively writing out the residual elements of self and identity in such a way as to re-open the questions of possibility.” [10] Included in this category — this aesthetics of living — are the technologies of reflection, perception, and autopoiesis, all of which are implicated in subject-formation and each of which occasion engagement by Hiebert with prominent theorists. [11] Crucially, Hiebert’s understanding of disappearance in general recalls McLuhan’s notion of obsolescence: just as an obsolesced technology doesn’t cease to exist but rather persists in new forms — and hence obsolescence is “the beginning of aesthetics, the cradle of taste, of art, of eloquence, and of slang” [12] — the disappearance of knowledge is not an absence but a mode of living, a “lived disappearance.” [13] Thus, “what remains when knowledge disappears is an experience without knowledge [that] nevertheless takes form, […] paradoxical though it might be” [14]

– from here

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