| October 1996 | http://www.december.com/cmc/mag/1996/oct/horwor.html |
Coming Out of the Closedt World,
by John Horberg
Closed World Discourse
Surprisingly, one of Edwards1 main themes lies buried in the middle of the book. Edwards hopes to convince readers thatthe Cold War can be best understood in terms of discourses that connect technology, strategy, and culture: it was quite literally fought inside a quintessentially semiotic space, existing in models, language, iconography, and metaphor, embodied in technologies that lent to these semiotic dimensions their heavy inertial mass. In turn, this technological embodiment allowed closed-world discourse to ramify, proliferate, and entwine new strands, in the self-elaborating process Michel Foucault has described.The above passage is about as difficult as the reading of The Closed World gets. If this doesn't bother you too much, you'll have no trouble with the rest of the book.
I must admit that Edwards1 concepts of "closed world discourse" remains unclear to me. Perhaps other
readers will make more sense of this than I managed to.
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