nettime: Metatron

[Ian Andrews <iana@cream.ebom.org>]

I mentioned the text *Metatron* and have subsequently been asked to 
explain/review it. So here goes.

*Behold Metatron, the Recording Angel,* Sol Yurick, Semiotext(e), 1985.
(Foreign Agents series)

Sol Yurick is a novelist, probably most famous for his book *The 
Warriors* which was made into the film *Warriors.*  In this novel Yurick 
paints a picture of New York which is largely invisible to the average 
city dweller: the world of teenage gangs, their networks, territories, 
invisible boundaries and unmarked frontiers. This work can be seen as 
part of a discourse on the city as machine, or a project of mapping 
invisible urban networks, divisions and abstract spaces, which occured in 
the early eighties, carried out by theorists such as Paul Virilio and 
Manuel De Landa.  Some of this writing was collected together and 
published in *Zone* issue 1/2. This collection of essays by cultural 
theorists,architects, urban planners, economists, historians and linguists,
who take the city as their object, represents a significant 
contribution to the second wave of criticism to do with the so-called 
information society (the first wave being that of the neo-conservatives).

Yurick has a short essay in answer to a series of questions posed to a 
number of authors:

1.Has there been a mutation in the structure or operations of the city?

2. If so...what are the new "lines of force" of this new (postmodern, 
postindustrial, etc.) city?

3. Are these new lines of force affecting your work, and how?


I will quote part of Yurick's answer:

"Cities have sprung up for a variety of reasons, the primary one being 
that they are centres of communication; switching, routing and 
Knowledge/information storage networks....New York is a function of its 
electrical grid system, its transportation system, its food supply 
system, its communication system, its political and financial 
system...all extend far beyond the boudaries of the city itself."

The gist of Yurick's argument, which is elaborated on in *Metatron*, is that 
despite the apparent geographical diffusion of power and capital away from 
central locations, and the sense of vertigo attributed to the speed of 
instantaneous communication, brought on by the advances in telematics, 
physical proximity produces its own power through a complex of social 
rituals and ceremonies which depend on real physical space.  In other 
words, cities have not really changed in a formal sense. "There is a 
delicious resistance built in... one that may at least give us the saving 
grace of social entropy."

*Metatron* is a rambling poetic critique of the information economy, 
encompassing philosophy, technology, quantumn theory, biology, economics, 
ethnography, history of religion, and alchemy, in a style somewhere in 
between Virilio and Hakim Bey. The quote on the back cover reads:

"The old philosopher's stone could convert base metals into gold. Now 
humans, real estate, social relations are converted into electronic signs 
carried in an electronic plasma. The dream of magical control has never 
been exorcised. Perhaps, after all, modern capitalism is a great factory 
for the production of angels."

I feel that this text is pertinent to net criticism as it critiques many 
of the assumptions of of the wired world of the information/knowledge 
economy. Particularly the dream of spiritual or ontological transformation 
through technology and the Kabbalistic or Gnostic obsession with the magic 
word, which permeates much of the current discourse of cyberculture. 

Ian Andrews

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