Goldsmiths: The Fourth Week

Fourth Week (19/10 – 23/10)

First tentative forays in student radio. 15 minutes of cheese. Nic Clear (of The Bartlett) talking about his ‘Architectures of the Near Future‘ project. Insomnia. Successful NHS registration. Mouse in the Matrix. My continuing inability to buy a winter jacket. How Like a Leaf, an excellent book-length interview with Donna Haraway.

Photo of the Richard Hoggart Quad:

photo credit: jfpickard

Digital Media – Critical Perspectives

Convergence – something purely technological, or more of a cultural shift in the way people produce & consume media? In the US, impacts of the Telecommunication Act of 1996? Rapid proliferation of a ‘long tail‘ approach to media content provision; an unlikely ‘surface’ companion to the consolidation of power in the hands of an ever-decreasing number of media conglomerates. An iceberg of dissimulation. Think Silvio Berlusconi, the Murdochs, and Elliot Carver in the first half of this clip from Tomorrow Never Dies (1997):

Simultaneity of the ability to access the same content through different platforms (Facebook, iPhone, TVoD), and to bring together different content (TV series, movies, news) on a single platform. Whatever you want, wherever you want it. Consumer empowerment? Hmm.

*puts on tinfoil hat*

Transmedia storytelling and fandom might suggest that yes, this can be empowering. But even here, there’s a wide-eyed need for narrative completeness (collect the comics, buy the games, watch the webisodes) which reminds me of the sinister behaviour manipulation of Toxoplasma gondii, the overriding biological drive which forces salmon upstream, and the self-destructive feedback loops born of the Skinner Box.

Then again, while we can see these deregulated media markets as bordering on the Darwinian, the shift from technological to economic determinism doesn’t exactly bring us any closer to the truth. Politics cannot be reducible to economics, nor economics to politics. There’s always more at play, as we can see in Stephen Fry’s heartfelt defence of public service broadcasting in the face of challenges from Big Media:

21st Century American Fiction

Watched The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005). Read the first half of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. Survived seminar by blathering on about Derrida’s theories of autoimmunity.

So, let’s look at Chigurh as an entity of the auto-immune reponse … less human subject than agent of history … coming from the nation’s borders, it’s epidermis. Essentially, he’s skin cancer: born of US corporate capitalism, but unable to distinguish between the alien Other and the US body politic.

Thoughts about genre, frontier consciousness, and the ‘Western’ in the twenty-first century. Hmm. Let’s see what Tommy Lee Jones and the Coens have to say:

Anthropology & Representation

“This week is about narrative. I’m in one, so we’ll be starting late …”

- David Graeber

Politics is about declaring victory, regardless of what happens. There’s a power in having the (cap)ability to seize control of the narrative. Perhaps politics is simply a circulation of stories?

Every author has an imagined audience, and the more highbrow or intellectual you are as a reader/consumer, the more you identify with the author over the characters. The hermeneutic circle as construction of a ‘ghost author’ from their body of work. An interesting parallel with the Philip K Dick android, which draws on the author’s writings to simulate (relatively) coherent conversations with members of the public:

The morality of fairy tales. Joseph Campbell and Star Wars … monomythic narratives, in which an inadequate, incomplete hero ‘liquidates their lack’. The importance of suspense. The parallels between games and narrative:

Game / Narrative

Field / Chronotope

Players / Characters

Rules / Actions

Stakes / Telos or Goals

Empathy or identification? Violence as a metaphor for action – in stories, it’s difficult and cumbersome to represent more subtle manifestations of agency (to tell a story about telling stories) … so we turn to violence.

In Madagascar, there’s what Graeber describes as an ‘anti-heroic’ narrative politics. People tend to represent themselves as passive – “everyone else is crazy, we just stood there and watched.” Intentional projects are viewed with suspicion, as mad ideas and obsessions that people get in their head and are subsequently incapable of dislodging.

The monomyth is culturally and historically located. Far from universal. If we’re on a quest for universalism, we’d be better off with a typology of these three basic narrative structures: suspense (can they do it?), mystery (who did it? why?) and reversal (joke punchlines, gothic horror).

The suspense narrative is the only one where you care about the characters and whether they achieve their goals – the whole thing is rooted in EMPATHY. Narratives of mystery & reversal, on the other hand, are about (the lack of) knowledge. You’re already in the same position as the characters, so they tend to be more about IDENTIFICATION.

Metanarratives … about the future, the world, other people. They themselves are a form of knowledge, so can only ever be suspense narratives? Hmm. Different kinds of power from creating narratives and from interrupting (hijacking?) narratives. Think culture jamming and the Yes Men.

So, politics comes from a radical entanglement of physical force (violence), material resources (base) and narrative? Sounds about right. Narrative is part of it, but politics cannot be reduced to narrative alone.

Here endeth the lesson.