Response email to Mackenzie Wark's chart

After class last week when we tried to figure out how to read the chart, (chart before paragraph 53) I thought I might shoot Mr. Wark an email asking him how to read the shot just for the heck of it. I just explained that we were reading "Gamer Theory" in class and I just asked him if he could givie us some direction or explanation of how to read the chart. Here was his reponse:

The time axis runs left to right; the vertical axis has things that are more like forms or processes at the bottom and more subjective or cultural things at the top. The left hand column gives the case, and -- reading left to right -- three instances of that case which come one after the other. The topical becomes the topographic becomes the topological. That's the essential thesis of the chapter. To each stage corresponds an ethos. Myth is the ethos of the topical (think ancient greeks). Storyline is the ethos of the topographic (the example is Cooper's Last of the Mohicans). Each topos as a line of increasing complexity, from the trails of Cooper's novel to the telegraph to the internet. Which makes action of increasing scale possible. Then the top half is more about a succession of aesthetic forms, subjective experiences, etc. The time frames are actually quite different for each series so they don't necessarily coincide. Lukacs and Cooper are not contemporaries, for example. Almost everything on Fig. C gets a mention in the chapter. Its really just a diagram what's going on in the writing. You could read it as a parody of the charts in textbooks, and as such a provocation to thought.

k