Goldsmiths: The First Fortnight
At the end of September, I left rural Sussex for the bright lights and concrete decay of southeast London – where I’ve just finished my first fortnight at Goldsmiths, University of London, where I’m studying for an awesome Masters degree in new technologies and digital-type-things. To balance the relatively hardcore heart of the programme, I’ve also picked some contrasting (slightly “lighter”?) option modules, which I’m hoping will help me slant the degree towards something a bit more engaged with issues of representation, narrative and political economy …
Assuming I’m not distracted by something shinier along the way.
Here’s some spiel about the courses I’m taking this term, and what we’ve looked at so far. I hope it’s of some interest …
Digital Media – Critical Perspectives
“Drawing on the history, sociological and anthropology of the media … [for] a fully contextualised analysis of media technologies such as the internet, the mobile phone, television, photography and film …”
We’ve demolished the techno-progressive teleologies of mainstream (corporate?) futurist discourse, talked remediation, and zoomed in on Victorian-era telegraphy as a potential precursor to the internet. Key conclusion: it’s important to historicise notions of novelty as integral to our understanding of so-called ‘new media’. Always remember: all technologies were once new.
21st Century American Fiction
Does the twenty-first century mark a shift or departure from the preoccupations of late twentieth-century American fiction? If so, what’s new? Are we looking at globalisation, racial identity, terrorism and all that jazz?
As a course, this is forcing me to confront novels from outside the genre ghetto, and some of the later weeks should fit nicely with my undergraduate dissertation on Guantánamo Bay and the “war on terror”.
So far, I’ve read Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (accomplished, but incredibly depressing) and Percival Everett’s Erasure (darkly humorous, with a note of optimism) – there was some really interesting stuff about the performativity of racial identity; the extent to which race is embodied in substance / enacted through behaviour – and whether either or both of these perspectives essentialise race to something it isn’t.
Anthropology & Representation
Taught by David Graeber, this course focuses on ‘representation’ in both the artistic and political senses. Consumption, fetishism and material culture; “theories of narrative and their relation to political action, the nature of hierarchy, magic, labour, and the imagination.”
Most of the ‘Western’ social sciences are derived from the theological writings of St. Augustine, with contemporary mainstream economics based on his theories of scarcity derived from the infinite desire of a (flawed) humanity. Ideas of ‘the West’ are utterly meaningless; a floating signifier used to represent whatever the hell you want it to, and paper over any cracks or weaknesses in your argument. It’s a way of avoiding having to grapple with history; a mythological narrative emphasising continuity (“Contemporary America stands as the heir to Roman civilisation”) over the disjunctures and revolutions of European and American history. Far better, then, to locate ourselves in this wider social world through the lenses of something like Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory … in which everything is determined by the societal and economic analogues of cybernetic feedback loops. Or is it? How desirable is something like environmental determinism as an intellectual foundation?