Goldsmiths: The Fifth Week
Fifth Week (26/10 – 30/10)
I’ve fallen a bit behind with these, but this week is reading week (half-term), which gives me a bit of a window to catch up. In retrospect, I seemed to spend a significant chunk of week five in pubs and flat kitchens, hanging out with other MA students. Great fun, but – outside of timetabled workshops & seminars – not particularly conducive to productivity. Also managed to fit in a couple of trips to London town, and an aborted attempt at research training.
Ooh, look – it’s Canary Wharf:
Digital Media – Critical Perspectives
In the mid-90s, our understanding of ‘the virtual’ could be boiled down to one object: the Nintendo Virtual Boy. According to Katherine Hayles, our current understanding of virtuality rests on ‘the cultural perception that material objects are interpenetrated by information patterns’. In the wings, there lurk plans for something that we’ve begun to call augmented reality. How does this all fit together? How did we get from a world of branded gaming headsets to virtuality as an outright condition of being?
Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.
- William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)
Yup – that’s cyberspace as a consensual hallucination. Illusions, delusions of transcending the limitations of the flesh. Here, the (military) origins of virtual technologies are obscured by the more celebratory, techno-utopian discourse.
It starts with flight simulators, and spreads through the military-industrial complex like a fungus. Right up to the point where, by the early 90s, Jean Baudrillard could claim that America’s reliance on technologies of mediation & simulation meant The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Claims that human agency was ceded to machines; self-guilded missiles and targeted ’smart bombs’ – positing the virtual geographies of cyberspace as a distinct, autonomous sphere.
At which point, we must call bullshit. There’s nothing preordained about the forms of technology, which emerge embedded and mutually constituted with and within the wider social and political world. We need to break down the binary oppositions & Cartesian splits:
Virtual / Real
Disembodied / Embodied
Immaterial / Material
Machine / Human
Technology / Biology
Instead, how about the following:
Cyborg theory! Humans and machines in mutually constituted, non-linear systems. In this reading, it’d be impossible to cede agency to a machine, because you’re part of the machine … and the machine is part of you. We’re talking interpenetration. To return to the writings of Hayles, it’s all relational. And here we return to the core preoccupation of this MA degree – the remediation of life with (digital) information technologies. The condition of virtuality (if such a thing can be said to exist) is based on coexistance, a hybridity of information and materiality – in which neither can be seperated from, or reduced to, the other.
As it stand, I’d argue that the best examples of a Haylesian (?) understanding of virtuality can be found in the work of Usman Haque – particularly the data management platform Pachube – and some of the stranger, Heath Robinson devices people have rigged up with Arduino:
21st Century American Fiction
Continuing last week’s seminar on No Country for Old Men and representations of the borderlands, our novel for this week was Ana Castillo’s The Guardians. Told in a shifting first-person narrative, covering a cast of characters entangled in the politics and history of the US-Mexico border. Strong characterisation of sympathetic, if passive, characters. Questions as to the utility of including words from the Spanish, and the notion of vocality, oral language, and the representation of lived (embodied) experience. Hybrid vocalities as the most interesting part of a novel which – at times – reads less like a story, more as a collection of random, loosely-linked incidents.
“So, it’s either an arbitary narrative, or … just arbitrary?”
- RC
As an aside, the last couple of weeks have thrown additional light on a couple of interesting examples of design fiction and SF film – Richie Gelles’ ¡SUPER NAFTA LAND! (as covered on BLDGBLOG) and Alex Rivera’s 2008 film, Sleep Dealer.
Anthropology & Representation
Desire, Consumption, Fetishism and the Object. With the death (radical reconfiguration?) of kinship, Daniel Miller has argued that consumption should be taken up as anthropology’s new schtick. But what exactly is consumption?
Consumption – to lay waste to; to eat; to destroy? It is with destruction that we create meaning. The only way you can prove that you have total mastery over / ownership of an object is to destroy or utterly negate it; to stop anyone else from being able to use it. But destruction for it’s own sake doesn’t help you, the possessor. Unless the act of destruction can somehow be said to absorb the ’substance’ of the object into yourself, as with the eating of food. Using it up.
With consumer capitalism, we can see the birth of, and I quote, ‘modern self-illusory hedonism’:
“Traditional hedonism…was based on the direct experience of pleasure: wine, women and song; sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll; or whatever the local variant. The problem, from a capitalist perspective, is that there are inherent limits to all this. People become sated, bored … Modern self-illusory hedonism solves this dilemma because here, what one is really consuming are fantasies and day-dreams about what having a certain product would be like.”
- D. Graeber, Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire (2007)
Fetishism? Something to which we attach too much importance (measured how?) – a confusion of means with ends, the peripheral with the heart of a matter. A surfeit of value? Or something about the arbitrary nature of our understandings of value? Irrationality?
Gold as a fetish of early modern Europe? African religious fetishes as a physical embodiment of agreements, oaths and social relations – direct opposites of the dissimulation of market economics – which uses the abstraction of money (gold?) to create a veil of ignorance, erasing the history and meanings of the processes behind production & consumption.
Fetishism as an essentially creative act … in art, culture? Etymologically, ‘fetish’ = from the Portugese verb, ‘to make’. But it’s also a destructive act, as in neoliberal capitalism’s fetishisation of the market (which, as we’ve already seen, stands as an abstracted version of Augustinian conceptions of providence and desire … and doesn’t even really work).
There’s definitely something here about the interstitial status of contemporary ‘participatory’ culture (c.f. Henry Jenkins), as a form of radical social creativity under neoliberal, market conditions. Video mash-ups and fan fiction = the fetishism(s) of the new media bricoleur?
More next week!