photo credit: jfpickard

Notes, as ever, under the cut.

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Digital Media – Critical Perspectives, Part 1

The Uses and Meanings of ‘Technological Objects’, a guest lecture by Prof. David Morley. If the two ‘pure’ approaches to digital media are (1) technological determinism and (2) cultural constructivism, Morley was all about the constructivism.

Unfortunately, this equating to a two-hour session of him tilting at illusory windmills, for – however determinist we may appear – ‘pure’ technological determinism died with McLuhan. Equally, ‘pure’ constructivism can no longer be held as a tenable position, as it tends to radically underemphasise the novelty of new media’s technical affordances.

Technological objects as symbolic, as well as functional (Silverstone). Barthes’ notion of ‘the superlative object of [its] time” – car, washing machine, mobile phone, USB memory stick. A specific artefact which becomes metonymic of technology as a whole (see: Anth & Representation, Wk 3: marked vs. unmarked terms). The technocultural transubstantiation of consumer appliances, fuelled by ubiquity. It’s why this works:

Audience studies? Morley’s accusation is that much of new technology studies operates with old models of media effects. It’s important to recognise that people use media in different ways; audiences bring their own cultural baggage to the … home entertainment centre.

No television? “So what does your furniture point at?” (Friends)

Take the mobile phone. The single most frequently lost item on the London Underground. And that’s a place with no mobile connectivity. What are people doing, without connectivity, that means they can leave their phone on the tube? Seriously. Mobile as security blanket, as social barrier, as portable private space, as identity vector, as St. Christopher Medallion …

So, the important question: how much determinacy do you want to give the object? How much agency can you cede? Think of our discussion of virtuality and cybernetics in the Cold War, and the abstraction of human responsibility (see Digital Media #5). What is technology, even? Language, sanitation, cartography? I’m thinking Civilization II (1996), and the tech-tree:

Technology – neither good nor bad, but intensely political in its affordances and capabilities. Important discourse-clusters (memeplexes?) relating to novelty, upgrade, innovation, and hacking.

“I’m a PC, I’m a Mac” as symbolic warfare (see Anth & Rep #8). A semiotic tennis of campaigns and counter-campaigns:

Morley >> “It’s about the non-material meanings we attach to technology, as much as its capabilities and affordances.”

Us >> “Well, yes. We thought that was the point.”

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21st Century American Fiction

Two weeks worth of seminars, amalgamated into a four-hour LitFest. The novels: Edward P. Jones’ The Known World, and Philipp Meyer’s American Rust. Finding the former a work of baffling scale, and far too diffuse to absorb properly, my surrender followed with relative speed. On the Meyer, however, I was doing my presentation …

Presentation notes, as a .pdf:

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Anthropology & Representation

A time-shifted seminar, with footage of a lecture from the reading week shown in the room where it was initially filmed – a phenomenon both recursive and faintly unsettling.

Economic anthropology. Gifts. Colonialism as an economic exercise. Debt as a moral excuse. The infinite desire of the conquistador. Economics as justice, as “common sense”. Communism – not as totality, but economic mode within capitalism (open source software vs. Apple / Microsoft). The breakdown of market economics in times of natural disaster, or when the cost is sufficiently low (asking for a light, for directions, for the time). Societies in which you cannot eat your own pigs, but must eat the pigs of your neighbour – permanent artificial dependencies. Contrast with: commercial exchange as a relationship that cancels itself.

The man in action. Well, not “the man”, but this man. We are all already communists (reconsidered). Yes:

The reciprocal act of taking-out-for-dinner only works when the two parties are assumed to be equal. Questions of hierarchical debt, or precedent. A continuum between theft and charity, with neither extreme implying an ongoing relationship.

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Digital Media – Critical Perspectives, Part 2

Technoscience, and how to do it!

Watch as new media slides peculiarly into science & technology studies, with a convergence/remediation of information, communication, and … biotechnology. Wait, what?

Evolutionary psychology, artificial life, genomics >> hegemonic discourses, based on information, and much more conservative than they initially appear.

Media about science, questions of content & form. We’re talking embodiment, affective computing, intelligent media. It’s all made of the same stuff – the same technobabble, the same framings. The so-called ‘science wars‘ have broken down, giving way to wetware, synthetic biology (see: ‘At home with the DNA hackers‘), and the rapid proliferation of biologic metaphors pretty much everywhere.

Hmm.

photo credit: shareski

We’re left with McLuhan as revenant. Scrapping the determinism in his work, Kember reckons we may yet need his physicalism and notions of embodiment. In 2010, let us talk of media not as agent, but prosthesis.

END OF {AUTUMN TERM}

PLEASE REBOOT

In the Ninth Week (23/11 – 27/11), I ventured out into London, with events at the RSA and Hackney’s SPACE. As the week drew to a close, attempts to pull myself back into some kind of life structure & emotion balance were destabilised by a (as it turned out, relatively minor) health issue … which I dramatically overanalysed, sending my mind spiralling inwards … leading to my abandonment of Friday’s classes in favour of a flight back to rural Sussex & the solace of family.

From before then, though, a photo of the most enjoyable part of the week – the epic quest to Hackney for Usman Haque & Adam Greenfield (on which, more below), and the surreal return via Canary Wharf. It’s always good to get out of New Cross, and check out different bits of London – keeps me sane!

photo credit: jfpickard

This week’s notes follow, under the cut.

Digital Media – Critical Perspectives

Lev Manovich argues that the cinema has profoundly influenced the development of the computer (the notion of the frame, the narrative as loop, editing and montage).

- Goldsmiths Course Syllabus

But, according to pretty much everyone else in the field, he’s wrong. Poor chap.

photo credit: Anne Helmond

Steering away from the relatively clear and concise definitions of new media in Lister et. al., Manovich argues that there are five characteristics that constitute new media –> [numerical representation / automation / transcoding / variability / modularity].

As a heuristic, we might be able to retrieve something of value … but as a definition, Manovich somehow manages to be obtuse, vague and unnecessarily technicist. This is echoed in his piece on ‘The New Language of Cinema’, in which he reduces the new digital cinema (?) to six areas, which distinguish it from its analogue predecessors –> [simulation / the loop / montage / information space / cinema as a code / narrative].

But this move of ‘rendering innocent’ (Haraway) the analogue is more a rhetorical tactic than anything substantive. It overemphasises the purely indexical, representative qualities of old media – diverting attention from historical manifestations of the experimental and avant-garde. Take Man With a Movie Camera (1929), which pursues indexicality within the form of the montage (database?):

Seduced by the logic of the computer, Manovich heralds novelty wherever he sees it – reducing media to its technical properties, he suggests that technological convergence (c.f. Week 4) is not only real, but a fait accompli.

For us, the reality is a question of hybridity, remediation and exchange. Convergence is never a finished product, and its not enough to say that because computer and cinema now exist in a relationship of remediation, they are now necessarily the same thing. Rooted in apophenia, Manovich’s arguments are seductive but (for our purposes) far too simplistic.

Slavoj Žižek @ the RSA

In a time of ever-increasing economic inequality, Žižek pointed to Venture Philanthropy and the Guaranteed Minimum Income as two reletavely novel approaches to the issue of charity, which – pitted against each other in some kind of … dialogue? contest? – he uses to illustrate many of the assumptions and biases which underlie our current moral/political/economic landscape.

21st Century American Fiction

Two novels, both supposed to shed light on the ways in which fiction of 2000s has dealt (is dealing?) with the darker moments of American history. The books: Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, and Sherman Alexie’s Flight. The former is a sober, relatively grim look at the earliest days of American colonialism, telling the story of a Dutch man (Jason Vaark) who accidentally drifts into the slave trade, primarily from the perspective of the women of his household (wife, slaves, etc.). The latter is the Native American equivalent of something somewhere between Audrey Niffinger’s The Time Traveller’s Wife and Quantum Leap.

Both were well written and had their (powerful, affective) moments. That said, the Alexie did – at times – slide toward the facile and the  emotionally manipulative, while much of the Morrison relied on the reader’s willingness to immerse themselves in the world and cosmology of a specific place and time far removed from contemporary experience.

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((There’s a separate piece to come on the Usman Haque & Adam Greenfield event, as my notes were sufficiently sprawling & meandering to deserve some serious post-Christmas analysis. Plus, I’ve just laid my hands on an Arduino starter kit & an RFID reader. Watch this space))

This week, one of my friends from undergrad was down in London. She’s studying for a PhD on the mating behaviour of massive scary ants, and was learning how to radio-tag insects as a guest of ZSL. Having been woken by the fire alarm test an hour after the start of my Wednesday morning American Lit seminar, I needed exciting animals and zoological facts to cheer me up – so legged it across town to meet her at London Zoo. Hence the photo, which is sufficiently odd to stand as an illustration of Week 8:

photo credit: jfpickard

Course notes follow, below the cut.

Digital Media – Critical Perspectives

Photography, digital and otherwise. Working from the introductory essay in Lister’s The Photographic Image in Digital Culture (1995), we zoomed in on the celebratory discourses of digital photography … in which the change from analogue to digital is posited as ‘startling’, ‘powerful’ and ‘epochal’ … a paradigm shift.

Here, it’s all too easy to read the digital image as an unprecedented fusion of the imagined and the real, but really there’s nothing particularly new about all this. Yes, we’ve shifted our attention from the camera-as-prosthetic eye to ‘the small grey, plastic box of the personal computer’ (p. 3) and we might be living under Sontag’s image-based economy. But this is all linguistic/discursive!

Digital photography is still photography; part of an 150-year old photographic culture. Lister comments on the way in which digital photography has become entangled with ‘a heady mixture of millenarian futurology, the visionary excesses of postmodern thought, and of utopian premise and cultural pessimism.’ (p. 5) Supposedly ‘traditional’ (analogue) photographic images are cast as indexical; slavish (subordinate) mirrors/copies of the Real. With analogue edits, there’ll always be a trace or stain – some evidence of tampering with the indexicality of the image.

Semiotics: links between signifier and signified are arbitrary … culturally constructed! Notions of indexicality serve to naturalise the cultural connotations (meaning) of the photo; the illusion of immediacy can be used to conceal the tacit assumptions and ideology of the image. Historically, photography has held a powerful position as an evidential practice. Think of photographs in the legal, medical, and photojournalistic realms. John Tagg’s Burden of Representation (1993).

Barthes’ Camera Lucida (1980) talks about photography as an affective (emotional-physiological) medium. What does my body know of photography? Punctum (detail) – the emotive immediacy of a photographical detail. The power of something that resonates, or ‘leaps out at you’. Think of the girl in the red coat in Schindler’s List (1993).

Digital photography parcelled with postmodernism – a collapsed sense of temporality; an emergent schizophrenia. The spatio-temporal manipulations of the digital, of images that no longer function in relation to science … abstracted from light, film, chemistry – are we looking at the death of optics? Remediation! It’s not as if analogue photography has disappeared. Plus, digital photography is still informed by the legacies of the analogue – there continues to be a language, a grammar of (effective/good) photography.

Mechanical/optical media were a historical phase in visual media. Perhaps the analogue photograph was an anomaly; a ‘raw’ indexicality sandwiched between the oil painting and the photo-manipulation? Yet the metadata of digital photography stands as an extended (and more powerful) form of indexicality. From a Flickr photo, you can deduce the camera make, date taken, and (sometimes) even the geographical location: it’s all embedded in the image-as-data.

Peripheral to, but illustrative of, the shift from analogue –> digital, we have Foucauldian interpretations of  Jeremy Bentham’s notion of the panopticon. Photography & the lens, the gaze … as an instrument of power, of science, in criminology, medicine, psychiatry … a way of making truth claims (Gunning). Relationships between the observer and the object of scrutiny?

((ASIDE: In one of the Anth & Representation seminars, Graeber raised an interesting and … surprisingly local line of enquiry – springing from the fact that the earliest manifestation (inspiration?) of the panopticon concept was in the schemes of the philosopher’s brother, Sir Samuel Bentham, who’d commissioned the construction of a prototypical ‘Inspection House’ on Prince Potemkin’s estate in Russia. Later, Sir Samuel was also in charge of improvements made to the docks at Deptford in 1799 – a short walk from the current location of Goldsmiths College. There’s probably some kind of alternate history here, where a better-funded Bentham turns Deptford & Greenwich into a pre-steampunk, pseudo-totalitarian naval/mercantile super-panopticon … Say, that’d be pretty good fun to write about. Hold that thought!

Oh, and for another alternate history of panopticism, check out Tony Jones’ exemplary exercise in world-building; Cliveless World))

Following the shift to digital, Cascio’s notion of the participatory panopticon. When photos can be faked, the best measure of veracity is through plurality – if an Event (with-a-capital-E) occurs, there will be multiple photos, from the camera phones of participants and observers (participant observation?). Think Eyeborg …

… that photo from the London bombings, and – perhaps most strikingly – the human wall of camera screens at Obama’s inaugural Youth Ball …

image provenance hard to find, due to the crazy Sontagian circulation & reproduction of images – but I’m inclined to credit Reuters staff photographer Kevin Lamarque

21st Century American Fiction

Security, by Stephen Amidon. Not great literature, nor particularly original – but interesting, likeable and skillfuly written. From the Washington Post review -

“What a freak show,” a character in Stephen Amidon’s Security remarks of another’s unstable father after a humiliating scene. Although the speaker herself is detestable, an irredeemable villain, her comment lays bare the deepest fears of Amidon’s people: that their messy private lives will burst into public view. But because the author is a nimble satirist, we can count on such disruptions, as readers of his fine Human Capital already know.

On the surface, these characters aren’t remarkable or odd, and neither is the setting, the quiet Berkshire town of Stoneleigh, but the major players are in crisis: Edward Inman, proprietor of a home security firm, hasn’t slept in weeks and roams the night rather than share a bed with his wife, Meg. Kathryn, his old flame, is trying to reconnect with her college dropout son, Conor. And Walt Steckl, formerly a master electrician, takes painkillers and drinks to quiet his nerves, which were fried in a workplace accident.

(…)

Despite the improbable endgame and an over-reliance on types among his supporting cast — the preoccupied wife, the creepy snob, the sullen teen — the novel succeeds as an entertainment. It’s well-paced and always engaging, if occasionally broad. Thematically, like any good satire, it presents a cautionary tale and dares us to find ourselves in it, and because Amidon is such a fine writer, we do. As in Human Capital, he once again displays his unerring facility for sniffing out the shaky foundations of our lives, showing us what we will selfishly renounce — trust, intimacy, integrity, reality — to achieve what we believe is an impregnable security.

Taken alongside Ellis’ Lunar Park (see previous week), Amidon’s novel sheds light on a very specific current within 21st century American fiction – something related to the spatialities of suburbia, focusing in on the unstable and arbitrary foundations of our domesticity, and containing some (limited?) form of social critique. It’s probably too early to see quite how this’ll develop, but I think we can also see something similar in American TV dramas like Desperate Housewives, Weeds, and architectural competitions such as Reburbia. There’s an anxiety here; a precariousness which seems worthy of further investigation.

Anthropology & Representation

As far as I can make out, something to do with the phenomenology of giant puppets? Violence, myth, and narrative in the (alter-)globalisation movement. We’re talking Battle of Seattle, protests against the Iraq War, and – slightly more jovially – the Burning Man Festival and the Paperhand Puppet Intervention. The puppets really annoy the police, but why?

We need to think about the relationship between puppets and monuments. Questions of memory, identity and permanence/transience. Perhaps they stand as a pastiche or parody of the monumental; something to do with totems, fetishes and the carnivalesque; boundaries between the sacred and the profane; or the uncanny valley? How about conspiracy theories – puppets mirror the relations of power; it’s an appropriate deployment because we (they?) are the puppets? The processes of puppet-construction as an act of community-formation. A literal embodiment of the man-made-of-many-men of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan … the body politic.

Urban protests as a manifestation of symbolic (asymmetric) warfare. The media as a platform for a conflict of symbolic systems. Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (1967). The violence of representation? Denigration of enemies (of the state?) as ‘trust fund kids’. A Black Bloc ethics, rooted in concepts of value – where it’s verboten to attack family-owned stores, but the symbols of transnational capitalism (McDonalds, Starbucks) are fair game. Rules of engagement, different for the cops (do anything necessary to contain the chaos, but don’t kill people) and the protesters (violence against capital, against property … harm everything but people). Carl Schmitt & post-Westphalian, urban warfare.

Narrative frames lifted from Hollywood, mass media, fiction – protest as an orgy of destruction. Replicated in music festivals, public holidays, Guy Fawkes’ Night … as a sublimation of the carnivalesque into popular culture(s) of destruction.

photo credit: BellaBim

“… I walked off stage and immediately went to Brady and asked what on earth was happening. And he gave me a brief rundown. The Twitter stream was initially upset that I was talking too fast. My first response to this was: OMG, seriously? That was it? Cuz that’s not how I read the situation on stage. So rather than getting through to me that I should slow down, I was hearing the audience as saying that I sucked. And responding the exact opposite way the audience wanted me to. This pushed the audience to actually start critiquing me in the way that I was imagining it was …”

An interesting discussion of the way an audience can rapidly become a mob, in all it’s pitchfork-waving, windmill-burning glory – full kudos to danah for being so open and honest about the whole thing. There’s also something interesting (and faintly disturbing) about the journalistic/political side of this.

See: Trafigura & Carter-Ruck, Stephen Fry.

And then there’s this from Chairman Bruce, in conversation with Dunne & Raby (and courtesy of of Icon 078) :

“If you were a science fiction writer and you were reading, say, Scientific American you would have at least an 18-month lead over the general population in which you could write a story about something in a laboratory and it would appear in a pulp magazine and people would read it and they’d be surprised by it because they’d never heard of it. That is not possible [any more], the sluggishness that allowed that particular set of reactions is just not there. I mean now if I blog something that’s going on in somebody’s lab I’m going to get an email from the guy: “Ah, Mr Sterling, thank you for putting my photon experiment on wired.com, would you like to meet my photon friends? I see you’re in London today, how about dropping by the pub.” This is a small foretaste of the kind of trouble we’re getting into.”

At this point, some appropriate footage from the BBC Digital Revolution rushes, from (the newly en-PhDed) Aleks Krotoski‘s ‘virtual communities’ interview with Howard Rheingold:

I’m (always) on Twitter, and – as a medium – it’s made my experience of the world a lot ‘thinner’, for want of a better word. It’s given me partial access to lots of people and areas of interest that would have otherwise remained strictly off-limits. This might be because I got in early, at the point where a relatively small, tech-literate user base were more willing to engage with strangers, and the ‘thinness’ phenomena is something I’ve also experienced (though to a far lesser extent) with other media and social networks – bulletin boards, newsgroups, email, Facebook.

But is Twitter a Rheingoldian (?) ‘virtual community‘ in the same way as something like the WELL or a World of Warcraft guild? I’m not really sure – the affordances of the technology seem to favour the individual at the expense of any kind of inchoate collective. It’s lots of relationships happening simultaneously in the same space, but there’s no real distinct group identity. Here, a logic of radical individualism combines with a sense of transience to encourage behaviours that – as with the boyd case – simply wouldn’t wash elsewhere. There’s an acceleration of discourse; a qualitative, structural change which Sterling sees as a major challenge to science fiction authors attempting to evoke a sense of wonder from an audience of readers who will have read the same things, and may even be able to reverse-engineer the initial ingredients from the final published work. And that’s after the writing (authoring?) process is complete!

See: Node Magazine, a hypertext annotation of William Gibson’s 2007 novel Spook Country.

As a Twitter user, it’s easy to feel abstracted from your words: words which either fade to dust or take on a life of their own, re-tweeted by others. A slip of the tongue, an impulsive comment, and – like Fry – you find yourself as the prisoner of your own (digitised) tongue.

Week Six (2/11 – 6/11) was a reading week, so no timetabled classes. Instead, a bit of frolicking in London, a trip back to the Sussex countryside to see the parents, the peculiar voyeurism of watching novels being penned (keyboarded?) in real-time on Google Wave, and a concerted effort to finish the bulk of a diagnostic essay for my Digital Media course.

M&M at the Tate Modern, with Joseph Beuys‘ installation, (The Pack):

photo credit: jfpickard

Two thirds of an extremely left-field essay on Katherine Hayles‘ theories of virtuality, giving far too much detail in my case studies of (1) Nintendo’s Virtual Boy console and (2) Princeton’s experiments with mice and the Quake III engine:

The Seventh Week (9/11 – 13/11) sees me handing in said essay, and giving a presentation on the utility of Barthes and Foucault when considering hypertext, which is the subject of our workshop in …

Digital Media – Critical Perspectives

Memex; a 1940s thought-experiment in surrogate (prosthetic?) memory. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman as a meta-text (hypermediacy!) … a precursor to hypertext?

Structuralist theories of text:

author –> language –> meaning = coherent –> book

Poststructuralist theories of text, following Death of the Author? The author (god) is supplanted by the reader, with semiotics highlighting the rupture between language and its (deferred) meaning.

Language is not nomenclature, but a system of signifiers. Writing as technology (Derrida) … as performative of the text (Barthes) … as code.

21st Century American Fiction

Lunar Park, by Bret Easton Ellis – a brilliant book, which somehow combines Gothic horror and the self-indulgence of postmodernism. Here’s the blurb:

“Imagine becoming a bestselling novelist while still in college, and then seeing your insufferable father reduced to a bag of ashes in a safety-deposit box. Imagine drowning in a sea of booze, drugs and vilification before being given a second chance, as the Bret Easton Ellis of this remarkable novel, married to the mother of his previously unacknowledged son and living in the suburban hinterlands, is given. Imagine the unravelling of that new life. And remember as you hold this book in your hands: all of it really happened, every word is true.”

Suburbia as a refuge of the affluent. Insecurity, the uncanny, and the grotesque. Redemption through fatherhood? Self-medication, masks, the docile (domestic) subject. McMansions and the spatialities of late capitalism. Loss (historical, subjective) and absence.

The author/writer persona as a means to mount a claim on authorial knowledge (verisimilitude) and narrative control. A search for causal origins; anything to explain the current condition (regime?) of insecurity. Imminent threats, incursions of History and ‘the real’. A mise en abyme, in which the fiction gives way … but the ‘external’ world (external to suburbia) is not ‘reality’, but another, distorted (counter-factual) history:

“Miles of major cities had been cordoned off behind barbed wire, and morning newspapers ran aerial photographs of bombed-out buildings on the front page, showing piles of tangled bodies in the shadow of the crane lifting slabs of scorched concrete.”

(Easton Ellis, 2005: p.40)

Questions of form. Hybridities of genre; pastiche & parody. An uncanny return of the authors’ creations, given substance. The ghost of Stephen King.

Seventeen questions released; titles for the final assessed essay, due sometime in February. Nowhere near as bad as I was expecting, with a couple standing out as particularly feasible. Bodes well.

Anthropology & Representation

Skip class for a delayed bonfire night celebration with schoolmates back in Sussex, deftly avoiding the guilt of failing to submit an essay (unfinished, unassessed) on politics & narrative.

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:

photo credit: jfpickard

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:

CYB / ORG

Cyborg

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.

photo credit: Julius!

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!

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.

There’s a need to trace the trajectories of meaning, the superimposition of ideas, as you can mark the trail of a star in long exposure photography. Highlighting the unexpected links and parallels, I can hope to trace the genealogies of resonance // the ideas I find myself returning to (unconsciously), time after time … invariably, the things in which I’m most interested.

Strong with the photography metaphors, this week. As a loosely linked aside, here’s a photo of Deptford Town Hall, from my increasingly temperamental Nikon camera:

photo credit: jfpickard

Ace. So, what happened in this, the third week (12/10 – 16/10)?

Digital Media – Critical Perspectives

The Information Society. What is it? Something substantive and meaningful, or a projection of our own hopes and desires? Is it “real”?

In the workshop, we watched an excerpt from weird 90s television documentary Visions of Heaven and Hell (1994), in which Tilda Swinton (doing her best impression of HAL 9000) drawls hypnotically about how technology will save us from ourselves. Her pseudo-millennial spiel is occasionally interrupted by interviews with BT “futurologist” Ian Pearson (still can’t believe he’s holding a crystal ball in his profile picture!), a disconcertingly young William Gibson, and a whole conveyor belt of boffins responsible for the smart houses and proto-iPhones of the big tech companies. At one point, there was a mock-up of an arm-mounted mobile phone in the background of one of the interviews, all moulded plastic and 90s aesthetics. Simultaneously hilariously outdated and deeply, deeply sinister.

Some stuff about the analogous role of genes and computer code, in the aftermath of Watson and Crick (1953), Dolly the Sheep (1996), and the Human Genome Project (2000/03). Information-as-data? Information-as-signal. A message without content, standing out against the noise. Think digital radio. Think SETI.

photo credit: frseti

And the “information society”?

“The most common definition of the ‘information society’ lay emphasis upon spectacular technological innovation. The key idea is that breakthroughs in information processing, storage and transmission have led to the application of information technologies (IT) in virtually all corners of society. The major concern here is the astonishing reductions in the cost of computers, their prodigious increases in power, and their consequent application any and everywhere.”

- Frank Webster, Theories of the Information Society (2002)

Of course, there are all kinds of questions about what constitutes “spectacular” innovation, and the expectation gap between qualitative and quantitative societal change. Chris May is highly sceptical of Webster and his ilk, while David Lyon gives a perspective which attempts to steer between the “oooh, isn’t it shiny?” utopians and the more sceptical, constructivist grumps.

Information society as post-industrial or New Economy? In a general sense, all these different terms refer to the same broad bundle of phenomena – stuff like globalisation, networked organisations, “on demand”, and mass privatisation (though lists vary). The important thing is to realise that there’s a great deal of dispute as to whether or not these phenomena have come together in any meaningful way, and – if they have – whether it’s worth getting excited about.

21st Century American Fiction

As windows into the representation of 9/11 in American fiction, this week’s novels were Don Dellilo’s Falling Man and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. I thought the former – though far from perfect – was one of the better “realist” novels I’ve read recently, while the latter was trite, oddly-paced, and incredibly annoying.

In the seminar, we talked about the retreat to domesticity in the wake of 9/11, the tensile relationship between trauma and representation, whether 9/11 represented a ‘cultural break’ in American fiction and popular culture. There was also some stuff about feelings of vertigo (and how that links to trauma … cultural/societal or personal), attempts to master memory and the past through narrative, and the rhetorics of foreign policy. Spirited debate all round, with some interesting differences of opinion.

I may have started off taking this course as something of a wild card, but – although it’s a lot of work – I’m seriously enjoying it. Quite how I’m going to manage writing a Masters-level English essay remains to be seen …

Performing Media (Creative Media Lecture)

This was an additional event, built around a lecture by UCIrvine Professor Annette Schlichter. “Sounds of Gender: Voices Bodies and Gender Performativity”. It had some good bits, but was a little too vague and exploratory for my liking. There wasn’t enough of an argument or thesis to it – the subject matter was far too dispersed, with little to latch onto.

The framing of the lecture, however, was really useful – with the two convenors of my MA explaining the ways in which they’re attempting to integrate their theoretical, academic work with creative practice (photography and fiction, respectively). Creative interventions, cross-disciplinarity, hybridity. Donna Haraway barking like a dog. Once again, Goldsmiths proves the place to be.

Anthropology & Representation

Representation (in art and politics) and hierarchies (of authority, of taxonomy). Marked and unmarked terms, in which ‘man’ can stand for man vs. beast, and man vs. woman. Thinking about culture and society, what does it mean to ask “When did man come to Madagascar?” Human activity doesn’t necessarily constitute the existence of a rooted society (think trading posts vs. colonies). Perhaps the question should be “When did woman come to Madagascar?” With women come children, and the basis for a tenable society.

Shift in European conceptions of manners, from the relative laxity of medieval times (places perhaps not to vomit) to the highly codified etiquette and protocol of the Victorian era (trousers for table legs). We’re talking about a reformation (and structuring) of social behaviour, in which the Catholic calendar of saints is trampled underfoot by the march of the Protestant work ethic.

We end up with a situation where people who are of a higher rank have the freedom to be more relaxed about manners and protocol. A purity of informality, springing from one’s status as the embodiment of an abstract, or a role. So, you can only talk to the Queen about a very limited list of things (probably provided to you before the encounter), but the Queen can talk to you about whatever the fuck she wants. She probably won’t, but she could.

photo credit: a.drian

So then we have this notion of the Queen as a big man. Despite the fact she doesn’t really do anything, and her political role could be performed by a stuffed sturgeon, she represents the United Kingdom, stands in the place of “her” citizens. Like the big man made out of lots of little people on the cover of Hobbes’ Leviathan.

In a similar way, a Maori conception of the self will (normally) include certain items of property, family members, and livestock. If you want to insult a Maori, kick his pig.

In a legal sense, property is based on a logic of exclusion. The act of ownership excludes everyone equally. Owning a car means your brother can’t use it (without permission), but it also means that people in China can’t use it either. And the fact that both your hypothetical brother and, yes, the whole of China relate to this car in exactly the same way, well, that’s kind of weird.

Returning to the beginning, the notions of political representation and artistic representation are a lot more entangled than they initially appear. Examining speech and writing, there’s an interesting question about who is allowed (ethically?) to speak for another. Is there a difference between authentic (embedded) and credible (authoritative) voices?

Picking up on last week’s analysis of “The West” as a cultural term, we start to focus in on “The West” as a weasel word. Like the need to re-evaluate after catching a reflection of the photographer in the subject’s aviator shades, we need to zoom in on the way “The West” is used to obscure the act of representation, denying the existence of a subjective author, and naturalising the representation as “truth”. Who gets to decide what’s worth commenting on?

The West is that guy, you don’t know who he is, saying: “that’s weird.”

- David Graeber

Assuming I’m not distracted by something shinier along the way.

photo credit: jfpickard

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?

Through communicating & mediating my experiences of the game to the other conference attendees (representatives of some of the big organizations in the economy and public sphere), in an environment heavy and humid with ambient information, I was able to link up some ideas that have been floating in the recesses of my consciousness, assembling and superstructing them in interesting ways.

Before the event in question, I was in San Francisco for a good 6-7 days – immersing myself in the city, and scoping out the lay of the land.  At once strange and familiar (embodied above and beyond my experience of the city through film and the media), the real San Francisco threw my mediated experiences into focus – the American sitcoms syndicated endlessly on British TV are now five, ten years out of date. This, then, is an emerging social imaginary; a land of corporate bail-outs, green-collar jobs and (as @mathpunk was later to tell me) hybrid hypermiling – in which we can see the overwhelming drive of the competitive, of the concrete challenge … even when it risks endangering the self.

In this light, the ad pictured (CC Jason Tester) threw the reason for my trip into sharp focus.  Damn near ubiquitious in the urban landscape, this ad functions perfectly adequately on the business level.  Stripped of context, however, “I want my future back” is a curious comment, prompting discomfort and unease.  It doesn’t sit right.  Can you be deprived of something that has only ever existed in a nascent / spectral form?

In an age of instability and #collapsonomics, the “I want my future back” is an act of denial – rejecting the world at hand for the attachments and psychological crutches of neoliberalism’s legacy future.  So we watch as the flying cars and dogmas of unending growth evaporate into mist; dispersed as droplets dispersed on the breeze.  And it’s good riddance to bad rubbish … the cancerous … the autoimmunity writ large (pdf).  Let it fail.  Rip it out and start over.  Pessimism is a luxury of good times, and we can do better.

If there’s one thing I took away from the Ten-Year Forecast, it was a reinforced sense of optimism.  What follows is a series of notes taken from the retreat, superstructed with additional links and ideas I’ve been gestating since the game’s conclusion last November.  Sharing a common theme (“superstructing“), they aren’t in any particular order, and stand as part of a larger (and perpetually unfinished) work.  Still, I’m starting to get a sense of forward momentum … and that’s awesome.

NOTES & THOUGHTS:

• With access to ideas from education and positive psychology, we can visualize the ways it’s possible to get the biggest bang for your buck.  If alternative currencies can achieve this, multiplying the velocity of exchange by experimenting with optimal limits for the field of action – the same should be possible for social, societal and organizational efforts … regardless of the scale or nature of agents involved.

• With an increasing emphasis on the importance of playtests and rapid prototyping for organization, we should be looking to master the formerly inconcievable – transplanting the scientific method to the social sciences.  Lessons to be taken from behavioural economics, simulation and LARP .  As ideas of experimentation and the perpetual Beta seep into the mainstream, “economies of agility” are likely to replace “economies of scale”.  Unfinished is good, as long as it’s also quick and relatively open.

• Self-sufficient and atomistic forms of organisation enable the maximum possibility for combination and recombination … think Lego [CC Don Solo] … or the “Orange” scenario from this PWC publication (pdf) about the future of work & HR.  Here, “cells” come together to fulfil missions / complete work contracts, and then disperse back into the cloud.  Of course, if changes of corporate culture are poorly managed, this could have its downsides … and is open to manipulation by entrenched interests and the risk-averse.  Could poorly-managed change be worse than no change?

• “Stigmergy” as a structural enabler for extreme-scale collaboration, as in GroundCrew … with its effectiveness multiplied by the abundance of iPhones and Androids … hyperlocal volunteering?  An emerging gift economy of the act?  Archetypes of collaboration  (underground railroad, pony express).  Growing importance of symbolic and social capital for quickly emerging communities.  Notions of affiliation and the formation of collective identities.  As one example, see The Quest for the Flag – a ralleying point for the online community around upcoming Funcom MMORPG The Secret World.

• Increasingly, the dominant metaphors will no longer be  digital or mechanical, but biological.  Instead of the brain being described in relations to a computer, we’ll be looking to liken computers to brains (neural networks, artificial intelligence), and organisations to organisms.  Indeed, we could also be looking at cross-species politics and the posthumanities.  What happens when society incorporates cable-laying ferrets, termite architecture, biomimetics, cetaceans as data-gatherers, social networks for dogs, monkey labour, cyborg insects and the Center for Post-Natural History.  Growth in “soft” cyborgs, and the definition of citizenship and humanity is stretched from every direction.  Questions of empathy, symbiosis, parasitism and exploitation?  Meanwhile, what can the natural world teach us about superstructing?  With the coral reef as a model, we can start to get a handle on what cross-species politics might actually look like:

• Minimalist (economic, social) narratives recast people as raw infrastructure, rather than raw labour.  How will traditionally-minded Marxists  deal with a world of decentralised production (“home fabrication“) and radically networked citizenship?  How will the ability to “grow our own everything” clash with forms of proprietry ownership and rights management (digital and otherwise)?  Emergence and development of alternative property regimes, from p2p blueprint networks to viral sovereignty and overt infosocialism.

• Growing likelihood of a “generational reality gap” – with millennials leveraging augmented & superstructed realities, leaving their parents and grandparents unable to make the necessary mental leap?  New and different “digital divides“, as the technologies become increasingly diverse and niche-ified.  Problems of standards and interoperability?  How does living in an echo chamber effect sociability / communication?  Simulations, datamancy, information visualization as part of the SEHI‘s toolbox.  For a better grasp on what this means, check out the Signtific video:

• Corporate concerns increasingly influenced by notions of risk and precariousness.  What role is there for the firm in #collapsonomics?  How should be preparing our young people for a world of uncertainty and instability?  Within our organisations, should be pursuing gradual, organic reform or revolutionary transformation?  How can we tackle the entrenched power and influence of the risk averse?  Perhaps the black swans and black elephants of our current moment are as pinatas – we have to break them into pieces small enough to work with; to reassemble / assimilate into the superstructed organizations of the next decade.

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‘Stateside Superstructing, Some Notes’ by Justin Pickard is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

(Images by jfpickard, Jason Tester, and Don Solo)