Forget logic for a moment. Think about two words: “Technological Ethos.” Imagine what that might mean. Here’s a clue: It penetrates every contemporary theory going, from modernism to postmodernism to anti-postmodernism and the future which, for lack of anything yet universally accepted, has been dubbed post-postmodernism.

I’m experimenting a little here, practicing some of the methodologies of Toronto psychoanalyst, psychiatrist, reluctant Freudian, and cultural theorist Dr. Jeanne Randolph. She coined the term and uses it freely in her second collection of writings, Symbolization and its Discontents. Technological ethos is a term that comfortably digests just about everything in current cultural discourse, including visual, verbal and written free association; something Randolph uses in her lectures and writings almost constantly. It is her way of letting her brilliant thought processes grasp concepts found primarily in art and psychoanalysis and applying them elsewhere.

Her writing is in tidy bundles (chapters); her work often reads more as creative prose than as theories aiming to prove an absolute. Randolph’s ability to free associate – what she describes as setting up situations that encourage blunders, being underprepared for a lecture, for instance – is what makes her writing so uninhibiting. Ideas slip and slide and often end without conclusions. This is not meant as a criticism.

Free association is connected to Technological Ethos.Here is Randolph’s explanation of the term: Imagine a baby being tossed into the air by a loving parent. Up and down. Always safe, but also within the realm of potential danger. It’s a place that is exhilarating, a place Randolph believes – and she has convinced me – where creativity is found, that very point of being airborne, before gravity takes hold. That is the ethos part of Technological Ethos.

The technological part is not objects – the VCR, the TV, the Net – but what those objects do to our way of thinking. The combination is Technological Ethos, and she applies the term to her loosely scripted lectures (where her slide presentations have no literal relationship to what she says), her theoretical essays on artists like Israeli Zvi Goldstein, her “ficto-criticisms” (writings on artists with very little or no reference to actual art works), and to her fiction.

Symbolization and Its Discontents is not a book for everyone. In fact, it is for those very few who are into the extremes of cultural theory. For those readers, this is a gem, a surprisingly undense, hilarious, and incredibly poignant read.