Techno-Prosthetic Romantic Futurism

Two Turntables and a Microphone

Hip Hop has its constitutive technologies. As a cultural practice it's inconceivable without turntables, microphones, faders, loudspeakers, circuits, silicon, electricity. Romanticism has its constitutive technologies too. A twenty-first-century scholarship should accept, even exaggerate their effects. [1]   As the book quietly obsolesces, replaced by data banks and digital scans, our practice as critics retechnologizes. Can we forge a scholarship commensurate with the laptop I am using (a Macintosh PowerBook G4), with the URL you are visiting (http://www.a23.com/RON/300.html), with the Internet as a dispersed network of information redundancy and preservation? [2]  

Notes

1. See Jerome McGann, Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web (New York: Palgrave, 2001).

2. For a concrete discussion of the effects of this technology on the working lives of intellectuals, see Pierre Levy, Cyberculture (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001).

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