The Suspended World
This project starts from a simple premise: a modern world comes to itself by staging its own conditions. A modern world is a self-conditioning one. If, prior to the nineteenth century, society could not describe itself, now it cannot stop describing itself—in an attempt to catch up with what it is generating. Or, as the great science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem neatly put it: »In the Eolithic age there were no seminars on whether to invent the Paleolithic.« A modern society—which is to say, a continuously self-monitoring, auto-updating, and modernizing one—is what Durkheim (inaugurating modern sociology, and so indicating a society on the way to self-description) described as an »almost sui generis« society. The autotropic character of that world makes up what Durkheim also would call a social fact.
