Fashionable current-events commentary now dictates how cultures relate

Evidence

What we call actuality or current events in part is none other than this transience offashions, taken to the utmost degree of exasperation by an infinite number of agents of commotion, flash agents. What is a flash agent? To conceive the question we must first consider the age-old ways in which cultures have interacted each time they have been in contact. Notjust the interaction of their tendencies tO\vard attraction or repulsion but the workings of their inner structures that become modified each time-the network of similarity or osmosis, or rjection 01’ renaturing, that fonned, manifested itself, canceled itself out, sirnply because of what could have been called rc1ay agents. Formerly (and by agreement), these relay agents needed relative obscurity, like a latency period, in relation to their perception of the results of their action-to really work. The relay agent was active because, tirst of a11, he went unnoticed. Today flash agents are the relay agents who are in tune with the irnplicit violence of contacts between cultures and the lightning speed of techniques of relation. They send consciousness hllrtling into the sudden certainty that it is in possession of the obvious keys of interaction or, usually, into the assurance that it does not need such keys. They dictate flsh­ ion and commonplace-these two modern embodiments of interrelation. — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 838

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the flash agent against the older relay agent who worked by going unnoticed; the latency period concept is central.
• XREF: The flash agent who forecloses the need for ‘keys of interaction’ is a strong candidate mechanism for the reader’s problem: a manufactured ironic/fixed identity pushed instantly by media agents would collapse into essentialism precisely because it skips the latency period Glissant says real cultural work requires.