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June 04, 2009

Love in the Time of Swine Flu

Newsflash: the June 2009 issue of The Brooklyn Rail includes "Love in the Time of Swine Flu," my feature on David Lida, pegged on the softcover release of First Stop in the New World, his addictively readable book about Mexico City.

Teaser:

Now that the epidemic seems to have peaked, with a global body count far lower than the Andromeda Strain horror scripted by the U.S. media, reasonable minds on both sides of the border are taking a hard look at the media etiology of the panic. When American anxiety was at its height, Right Wing frothing heads like Michelle Malkin and Michael Savage helped spread the hate, blaming the Creeping Pig Death on the engulfing tide of "uncontrolled immigration" (Malkin). "Make no mistake about it: illegal aliens are the carriers of the new strain of human-swine avian flu from Mexico," Savage barked.

David Lida's affection for the city remains undiminished. In the new paperback edition of his justifiably acclaimed First Stop in the New World: Mexico City, the Capital of the 21st Century, Lida rips and remixes the 'hypermetropolis, the ur-urb of the American continent' into a fast-moving mashup."

Even so, the book is no Travel Channel puff piece.

In the chapter on crime, 'Who's Afraid of Mexico City?' Lida describes his harrowing hours, in 1996, as the victim of what locals call a secuestro express (express kidnapping), in which a pair of goons held him and his then-wife at knifepoint on a cab ride from hell, trying his credit card at various ATMs.
Two hours is a long time under such circumstances, and we were able to engage in a little Stockholm-syndrome dialogue. The Gorilla was the most voluble. Soon after the joyride began he informed us that what was happening was not his fault but the government's, for turning its back on its neediest citizens and forcing them to steal to survive. [My wife] was quick to point out that neither she nor I had any connection with the regime. “Les tocó,” he said, in a perfect illustration of Mexican fatalism. Your number came up.

Couple, Mexico City. Photo: David Lida. All rights reserved.

Posted by Mark Dery at 02:38 PM | TrackBack

June 01, 2009

O Come, All Ye Unfaithful

Believer, Beware: First-Person Dispatches from the Margins of Faith, is out, and a handsome thing it is. Edited by the redoubtable Jeff Sharlet and Peter Manseau (of Killing the Buddha fame), the collection anthologizes essays with curiosity-piquing titles such as "Jew Like Me," "Zen Mind, Alkie Mind," "Agnostic Front," "I Was a Prepubescent Messiah," "Banana Slug Psalm" (is there a bandname in that, or what?), and the incomparable "Bible Porn" (sects sells!).

My contribution, a true confession about my brief-lived career as a teenaged Jesus Freak in the mid-1970s, is called "Jesus is Just Alright," a title that inspired Sharlet to write, in a note he enclosed with my contributor's copy, "I've been wanting to use that as a title for years, but never could figure out what. I'm glad you showed me the way."

Long ago, in the lost world of the '70s, when I never missed an opportunity to "witness" to the unsaved, I might have replied, "John 14:6: Jesus said to him, 'I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but through Me.'"

Mercifully, I've seen the light.

Posted by Mark Dery at 04:54 PM

April 01, 2009

Nature Morte: Formaldehyde Photography and the New Grotesque (Giftware #2)

WHAT: "Nature Morte: Formaldehyde Photography and the New Grotesque," a chapter from The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink (Grove/Atlantic: 1999) uploaded to the file-sharing site SCRIBD.

Wax venus (Baroque obstetric mannequin) from La Specola, in Florence, Italy. Photo: Joanna Ebenstein; all rights reserved. For more of this sort of thing, see Ebenstein's stunning wunderkammer, Morbid Anatomy.

THE OFFICIAL VERSION (SCRIBD ENTRY): In "Nature Morte: Formaldehyde Photography and the New Grotesque," a chapter from his meditation on the millenial zeitgeist, The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink (Grove/Atlantic: 1999), cultural critic Mark Dery analyzes the abject aesthetic he calls the New Grotesque, exemplified by the photography of Joel-Peter Witkin and Rosamond Purcell, Nine Inch Nails videos such as "Closer," David Fincher's movie Seven, and most notably the obscure subculture of medical-museum tourists whose mecca is the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia. "If the Enlightenment ushered in the 'disenchantment of the world,' as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno put it, postmodernism returns us to the age of wonder---and terror," writes Dery. "Now, as we return to a world of gods and monsters, there's a burgeoning fascination, on the cultural fringes, with congenital deformities, pathological anatomy, and other curious from the cabinet of wonder."

Drawing on Lawrence Weschler's study of the Museum of Jurassic Technology (Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder), Gwen Akin and Allan Ludwig's seminal essay "Repulsion: Aesthetics of the Grotesque," Julia Kristeva's notion of the abject, Wolfgang Kayser's landmark study of the grotesque, and Oliver Wendell Holmes's 1845 paean to "worshippers of morbid anatomy," Dery theorizes the Pathological Sublime, an aesthetic emotion that is equal parts horror and wonder, inspired by works of art (or nature) that hold beauty and repulsion in perfect, quivering tension. The Pathological Sublime is the sensation Emily Dickinson had in mind when she wrote, "'Tis so appalling---it exhilarates..."

NOTE: Author reserves all rights. However, users are free to download this PDF for their own use and to circulate it freely AS LONG AS they do not post the entire PDF online or publish the entire PDF in print. (Feel free to blog this page and link to it, though! And linking to the Amazon page for the book would be The Right Thing to Do.) No re-use or re-publication of this PDF FOR PROFIT, in any medium, is permitted.

Photo: Joanna Ebenstein, Morbid Anatomy.

Posted by Mark Dery at 11:07 AM | TrackBack

March 10, 2009

Cotton Candy Autopsy: Deconstructing Psycho-Killer Clowns (Giftware #1)

Recently, while ego-surfing GOODREADS, I stumbled across a review of my 1999 meditation on millennial America, The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium:

"i re-read this book and enjoyed it as much the second time. its focus is really on some of the darker threads of the fin-de-millennium american culture. end of the century apocalyptic schizo kinda stuff. killer clowns, branding, post humanism, aliens, and conspiracies. it is just as relevant now as it was when i first read it at the end of the 90's. it confirms to me that somewhere near the end of 2001 time started running in reverse..."

Naturally, the thought that everything old is new again gives hope to those of us midlist authors languishing in the remainder bin of history. Then, too, there is an almost '90s-style sense in what was once referred to (in all seriousness) as our American empire, that the gyre is widening, the center cannot hold, and the tassel-loafered Wall Street swine jostling for space at the public trough should be driven off the nearest cliff. On bOING bOING, Dan Gillmor sounded a portentous note:

"Like lots of folks these days, I find myself speculating about whether we're heading into something worse than a bad recession, such as the kind of calamity that tests civilization. Back in my younger days I played music for a living. [...] At one point, gloomier than usual about humanity's future, I wrote a song about how people like us would (or wouldn't) get along when the apocalypse happened, something I feared might be imminent. It wasn't, then, but I'm wondering again."

Deep in the comment thread, a reader named Dainel wrote, "All this talk of doom reminds me of 1999. Don't anyone remember that? Is every one here less than 20 years old?"

True, the militia movement seems to have switched into dormant mode (although white supremacists still fantasize about bringing The Turner Diaries' Mother of All Race Wars to a bloodbath near you). And the omens of millennium that darkened American dreams a decade ago---alien autopsies, black helicopters, Heaven's Gate suicide cultists, Timothy McVeigh-style Angry White Guys, Unabombers who just wanted to watch industrial society burn---have given way to a low-lying despair, the deepening sense that the United States of the near future is going to look a lot like the Weimar republic in its last, hyperinflationary days, when people were using banknotes as wallpaper and postage stamps had a face value of 50 billion Marks.

Still, Wired is once again waving the techno-libertarian flag, though its triumphalism is a bit frayed around the edges and looks depressingly like garden-variety neo-liberalism (with a dash of Gladwellian screw-the-spotted-owl contrarianism to validate its cubicle-warrior coolness quotient). 24 is the new X-Files. Unfrozen CyberGuy Kevin Kelly---who was wondering, not so long ago, "Say the Dow hits 100,000 by 2010. Would that surprise you?"---is back with yet more musings on the Unabomber. The inimitable Terence McKenna is no longer with us to hawk his '90s vision of the Coming Singularity at the End of Time™, but a flock of McKenna epigones---the Marjoes of the magic mushroom set, the Robert Schullers of psychoactive alkaloids---are barnstorming the Esalen hot tub-and-Burning Man circuit with suspiciously familiar-sounding talk of a zodiac mindwarp in 2012.

What better time for me to catch the last wave of the '90s revival, disaggregate The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium, and offer up a few chapters for your delectation, in PDF form, courtesy Scribd?

Here, then is, my first donation to the Creative Commons:

"Cotton Candy Autopsy: Deconstructing Psycho-Killer Clowns," from The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink.

(I still hold copyright to this essay, obviously, but encourage readers to re-post and re-publish it at will, as long as you add the following boilerplate:

©Mark Dery; this essay originally appeared as a chapter in The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink.

A link to the online bookseller of your choice, or to the Pyro page on this site, would be the right thing to do.)

In the Scribd blurb, I synopsize it as follows (in the Bob Dole-ian third person):

Using as his point of departure Lon Chaney's chilling observation that "there's nothing funny about a clown in the moonlight," Dery deconstructs the postmodern archetype of the psychopathic clown. In this perversely funny, closely argued essay, Dery ranges broadly over the psychic geography of American culture. Balm for the souls of those scarred for life by childhood encounters with balloon-twisting bogeymen in fright wigs.

Keywords: evil clowns, clownaphobia, John Wayne Gacy, Cacophony Society, culture jamming, Batman, The Joker, R.K. Sloane, Shakes the Clown, Jim Knipfel, The Fool, Stephen King's IT, Quentin Tarantino, American pathologies, Bakhtin, the carnivalesque, Arkham Asylum.

"Can't sleep, clowns will eat me..."

(Thanks to Gareth Branwyn, for his kind words about my essay---the inspiration, in part, for my decision to donate it to the Gift Economy.)
Posted by Mark Dery at 02:42 PM | TrackBack

February 12, 2009

J.G. Ballard: Pathologist of the Postmodern

My review of J.G. Ballard's nonfiction memoir Miracles of Life is out, in the L.A. Weekly.

Read it here.

"Nonfiction," meaning: scrupulously factual, a distinction one makes in the wake of bogus confessionals such as James Frey's A Million Little Pieces and Margaret B. Jones's Love and Consequences, and in light of Ballard's bestselling autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun and its less-than-bestselling (but by my lights more lyrical) sequel, The Kindness of Women, both of which are forthrightly fabulist.

Ballard's latest account of his Shanghai boyhood, his wartime years in a Japanese-run internment camp for British civilians, and his postwar exploits, playing the discreetly subversive Marcel Duchamp of New Wave SF (to Michael Moorcock's gonzo Salvador Dali) while raising three children single-handedly, may be his last, or at least his penultimate, book. As devout Ballardians know, the 78-year-old author is battling advanced prostate cancer. Ballard's longtime agent Margaret Hanbury is reportedly shopping a report from the cancer ward, Conversations with My Physician (mordantly subtitled The Meaning, if any, of Life), but Ballard's condition casts doubt on whether he'll have the strength---or time---to midwife the manuscript through the publishing process.

I've corresponded with Ballard, at intervals, ever since the mid-'90s, when he gave me the thrill of a lifetime by graciously consenting to blurb my first book, Escape Velocity, and then, no less thrillingly, lavished praise on my second, The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium.

William F. Buckley loved to repeat the anecdote that, when asked by a Playboy interviewer if in he'd discovered any "novel sensual sensations," in middle age, the crocodile-smiling apologist for American empire recalled the experience of being summoned to the Oval office by Nixon for a debriefing. Buckley, a former CIA operative, had been going to and fro and walking up and down in Saigon. "My novel sensual sensation," he told Playboy, "is to have the president of the United States take notes while you are speaking to him." (The revelation that Nixon, as twitchy-eyed a war criminal as ever perverted the constitution, took notes from the conscienceless conservative would explain a lot.)

My "novel sensual sensation"---I'd call it a New Drug, a reference Buckley, who admitted to a fondness for pot, would surely appreciate---was the sight of an incoming Ballard fax spooling out of my machine, and the subsequent buzz of deciphering the quintessentially Ballardian tropes and bon mots encrypted in JGB's galloping, Hancockian scrawl. Fax technology being far inferior to the papyrii of the Middle Kingdom, most of those '90s faxes have faded into illegibility. Still, Ballard's old faxes are talismans I can't bear to throw out; I'll keep them until their loopy scribbles have vanished altogether, leaving the pages blank as the day they were born.

Recently, I discovered another Novel Sensual Sensation: admission to the charmed circle of correspondents permitted to address JGB as "Jim." I had sent a sympathy note to Ballard about his cancer, offering to take up a collection on his behalf via fansites such as Simon Sellars's Ballardian. With his usual, pitch-perfect combination of British reserve and social grace, he politely declined, saying that while he appreciated my offer to pass the hat on his behalf, he wasn't in such dire straits, at least not yet.

In response to my inquiry about who would be bringing out Miracles of Life in the States, and when, he replied (with exasperation mellowed by resignation) that the book wouldn't be coming out in America because---my paraphrase, not a direct quote---he was well and truly fed up with American reviewers' middlebrow moralizing and pop-psych insistence on Deep Feelings over astringent ideas. American critics complain that his characters are crash-test dummies; that his books are plotless film loops, obsessive-compulsive meditations on the pathologies of everyday life in postmodernity.

Ballard's point exactly, as he writes in his incomparable introduction to the French edition of Crash (a virtual graduate seminar in a few pages, richer in insights into the postmodern condition than all of Lyotard's books laid end to end):

The marriage of reason and nightmare that has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the spectres of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. Thermo-nuclear weapons systems and soft-drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudo-events, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century---sex and paranoia. [...] Options multiply around us, and we live in an almost infantile world where any demand, any possibility, whether for life-styles, travel, sexual roles and identities, can be satisfied instantly.
[...] Given these transformations, what is the main task facing the writer? Can he, any longer, make use of the techniques and perspectives of the traditional 19th-century novel, with its linear narrative, its measured chronology, its consular characters grandly inhabiting their domains within an ample time and space? Is his subject matter the sources of character and personality sunk deep in the past, the unhurried inspection of roots, the examination of the most subtle nuances of social behaviour and personal relationships? Has the writer still the moral authority to invent a self-sufficient and self-enclosed world, to preside over his characters like an examiner, knowing all the questions in advance? Can he leave out anything he prefers not to understand, including his own motives, prejudices and psychopathology?
[...] I feel that the balance between fiction and reality has changed significantly in the past decades. Increasingly their roles are reversed. We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind---mass-merchandizing, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the pre-empting of any original response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.

Which Ballard has done, with a psychosurgeon's steady hand and a clinical eye unmatched in contemporary fiction. Of course, Ballard is no more a novelist than Freud was a scientist or Marx a political economist. Adopt the parallax view, and everything makes sense: Freud and Marx were, in fact, gothic storytellers in the tradition of Hoffmann and Stoker; Baudrillard and Haraway are among our greatest sci-fi writers (Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. argues a similar point in his essay "The SF of Theory"); and Ballard, as I note in my L.A. Weekly essay, is one of our foremost postmodern theorists:

Long before deconstructionists like Jacques Derrida were slinging around references to the "decentered" self, Ballard is talking, in his trenchant introduction to Crash (1973), about "the most terrifying casualty of the century: the death of affect" and about "the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods." Before postmodernists like Jean Baudrillard were announcing the Death of the Real and its unsettling replacement by uncannily convincing media simulations, Ballard is claiming that "we live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind"---advertising, "politics conducted as a branch of advertising," P.R. "pseudo-events," et al.---where "Freud's classic distinction between the latent and manifest content of a dream, between the apparent and the real, now needs to be applied to the external world of so-called reality." And before neo-Marxists like Fredric Jameson and Mike Davis were pondering the deeper meanings of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel and Frank Gehry's Hollywood library, Ballard is pondering the psycho-spatial effects of the built environment: the experience of swooping around a freeway cloverleaf; of walking through a cavernous, empty multistory parking garage; of waiting, alone, in an airport departure lounge; of walking the privately policed streets of an obsessively manicured exurban community. How, Ballard wonders, is our sense of our selves as social beings and moral actors---our very understanding of what it means to be a self---being transformed (deformed?) by the whip-lashing hyperacceleration of technology and the media, the blurring of the distinction between real and fake? Ballard was the first to ask how we became posthuman.

Posted by Mark Dery at 09:25 AM | TrackBack

September 14, 2008

Brother From Another Planet

This Saturday, in Tilburg, the Netherlands, I'll be keynoting ZXZW, an arts festival devoted, this year, to Sun Ra and headlined, of course, by Sun Ra's Arkestra.

The Basics: "In a keynote speech Dery will examine the science-fictional (i.e., AfroFuturist) and techno-bricoleur aspects of Sun Ra's work, setting them within the context of African-American culture's relationship to technoculture and sci-fi mythology."

I'll riff, too, on Ra's self-taught hermeneutics and voodoo numerology, the deeply gnostic strains in his music and philosophy, the homosocial ethos that undergirded his band's experiment in communal lliving (as well as its historical relation to American utopian communities), his pop Egyptology and UFO-ology, the relationship between his often hand-drawn record covers and the notion of landscape paintings and psychedelic record cover art as evolutionary precursors of virtual reality, and Ra's sci-fi theories of race.

The Details: Here .

Posted by Mark Dery at 09:18 PM | TrackBack

June 09, 2008

The Desert of the Real

This just in: a Los Angeles Times essay, pegged on former White House flack Scott McClellan's memoir, about the transformation of politics into a branch of special effects, and of the White House into a Hollywood backlot. The restless shades of Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays haunt the West Wing. But beyond this obvious point, I argue that the Bush administration's faith-based worldview, the logical terminus of Ronald Reagan's belief that "facts are stupid things," marks the official beginning of our age, the Unenlightenment.

Teaser:

Like no administration before it, the Bush administration has mastered what the media critic Walter Lippmann called "the manufacture of consent"---the use of what Lippmann called "psychological research, coupled with the modern means of communication," to muster mass support for elite agendas. Staging photo ops whose choreographed drama and camera-ready visuals (Mission Accomplished!) are intended to play to the emotions and overrule objections; reducing complicated geopolitical issues to black-or-white dualisms (Team America: World Police versus the Axis of Evil!); stonewalling the media, cherrypicking military intelligence, and parroting the same Karl Rove-approved talking points---the Bush administration represents the apotheosis of government by spin control. Sure, sure, truth is the first casualty of war, and politics is just war with a smile and a starched collar. But this is the stuff of which doctoral dissertations on Baudrillard are made.

(Note: the LAT website is prone to link rot---nothing stays put for more than a week or two, seemingly---so you may have to plug the article headline---"McClellan's "Matrix" moment: Bush's former press secretary has stumbled out of a White House that lets political rhetoric shape reality"---into Google.)
Posted by Mark Dery at 09:09 AM | TrackBack

July 03, 2007

Product Placement

Boy from Brazil: Ah-nuhld cathects the carrot.

Back from lecturing about sex, society, and Netporn in Porto Alegre, Brazil, for which I had prepared myself, as I told my audience, by screening the 1983 Playboy video "Carnival in Rio." Hosted by a helmet-haired Arnold Schwarzenegger, groping everything within reach of his pithecanthropoid arms and nudge-nudge, wink-winking (in his newly acquired frat-tuguese, which seems to consist entirely of come-on lines) about the delights of the mulatta and the bunda, the video is a cringe-inducing exercise in post-colonial cluelessness. It amounts to starring Conan the Barbarian in Black Orpheus. The section in which Our Man in Rio teaches a bemused Brazilian babe how to bite and suck a carrot---Freud-friendly close-ups of a carrot sliding in and out of heavily glossed lips, while Arnie chortles, "Good, yesss"---is enough to summon a righteously pissed Frantz Fanon forth from the tomb.

Anyway, Brazil was stupendous, a mind-stretching experience. With its cosmopolitan thinkers, fluent in colonial history and postmodern thought (at a churrascuria, my professorial hosts in Porto Alegre gave me the equivalent of a wine-fueled graduate seminar on the Brazilian cultural psyche); its stunning contrasts between amok urbanism and wild nature; and its mind-stretching juxtaposition of First World turbo-capitalism and Third World bricolage, Brazil pushed the boundaries of my thought. As a citizen of the Republic of Fear, where the air is thick with talk of terrorist threats and invading immigrants, and where the citizenry has been gulled into offering up its civil liberties as a burnt offering to the god of paranoia, I was thrilled by what Mike Davis would call the "magical urbanism" of Brazil's exuberant metropolises, and by the dark magic of its primordial matta---a smack-in-the-face reality check to laptop-toting citizens of American empire who think they've seen it all.

Some who attended my lecture have asked for hardcopy. Happily, a version of the text ("Paradise Lust: Pornotopia Meets the Culture Wars") has just been published in C'Lick Me: A Netporn Studies Reader by the Institute for Network Cultures in Amsterdam. The anthology also includes my interview with "realcore" researcher Sergio Messina, which originally appeared on this site.

In unrelated news, the latest issue (June 2007) of ID magazine includes my "Rant" column on the cult of the iPhone, in which I inveigh, on behalf of the conscientous objectors I call iTheists, against the interminable, culture-wide geekgasm that has greeted the release of the iPhone. This hallelujah chorus is hardly a surprise, given "the brown-nosing obsequiousness of most tech coverage," complicit in "the lip-biting, teary-eyed, Moonie-mass-wedding jubilation that greets the release of every Apple product." You'd think this thing was the infinitely regenerating prepuce of the Risen Jesus, for chrissakes. Give it a rest, Pod people. The geeky paeans to God's little blobject, the helpful hints to Jobs about how to make it even cooler: You're getting a little too Raelian about this thing, and it's starting to creep the rest of us out.

Posted by Mark Dery at 11:10 AM | TrackBack

June 18, 2007

The Abyssal, Revisited

Humpback anglerfish (Melanocetus johnsonii).

Any more thoughts on the questions I posed? Still curious to hear your thoughts, especially on recent sightings of the squid or octopus meme.

In the meantime, a postscript to my last post:

Kristeva gave us the Abject. Baudrillard gave us the Simulacrum. Freud gave us the Uncanny, among other unforgettable theorizations, and Kant, Burke, and company group-hacked the open-source idea of the Sublime. The Abyssal, a philosophical subspecies of the Sublime, cries out for theorization, here and now.

The Abyssal appears, in the mass imagination, as shorthand for the stygian, the cthonic---a lightless realm of bioluminescent nightmares, a Dalinian dreamworld populated by bathypelagic monsters unlike anything on land. Speaking of whom, Dali famously used the Abyssal as a metaphor for our collective dream life, delivering a lecture in a bell-helmeted deep-sea diving suit, the better to descend into subconcious (he nearly asphyxiated in mid-lecture) .

As Mikita Brottman implies, the Abyssal is its own binary, appearing in Jacques Cousteau and David Attenborough nature documentaries as a hallucinogenic fantasia on one hand, all rainbow-hued tropical fish and Day-Glo coral reefs and kelp forests, gently rocked by the waves, and on the other as an inky-black underworld populated by grotesque creatures, some of them blind, albino monstrosities. (In this context, James Cameron's bathetic Abyss represents a mythopoeic attempt to reconcile visions of the undersea kingdom as celestial and cthonic.)

The abyss often figures, in the pop unconscious, as the dark doppelganger to space exploration: the race to the stars, reversed. And what about the aquarium, which domesticates the deep-sea sublime, offering a porthole on the Mariana trench for armchair Captian Nemos? When did bourgeois aquarium owners start putting divers, treasure chests, and the crumbling ruins of Atlantis in their aquariums? And what do they mean?

Random thought: Is our persistent vision of the Deep as a darkworld populated by monsters, a counterweight to the Jungian vision of the sea as nurturing memory of intrauterine bliss, an evolutionary hangover---a dim but troubling recollection of prehistoric horrors (see Chased By Sea Monsters by Nigel Marven)?

Or does the Abyssal represent the last terrestrial frontier, the rainbow's stubborn refusal to be unwoven by human knowledge? As the noted postmodern philosopher Donald Rumsfeld reminds us, there are known knowns and known unknowns and unknown unknowns---things we don't even know we don't know---into which last category must fall the undiscovered denizens of the deep. Is it the business of the Abyssal to be the inexhaustible account from which we withdraw our wonder and horror, the last great repository of awe in a world descralized by science, cynicism, and the media? If so, then embodied myths like Architeuthis and living fossils like the coelacanth are totemic animals, giving shape to the notion that monsters may still lurk in the far corners of Google Maps, that time travel may exist, that the dead may rise again, that science has not killed magic and mystery dead.

Posted by Mark Dery at 02:10 PM | TrackBack

June 01, 2007

My Dream Date with Bill O'Reilly

Where were we? Right, the blowback from my Los Angeles Times editorial ("Wimps, wussies and W.: How Americans' infatuation with masculinity has perilous consequences," May 3, 2007).

I learned a few tough-love lessons from My Dream Date with Bill O'Reilly.

(By the way, The Radio Factor's transcripts and audiofiles are available exclusively to paid-up members of the Fox Nation. A subscription gives you all-areas access to Bill's World, not to mention a pitchfork, a chain-mail tunic, and front-row seats at Saruman's next Nuremberg rally. But for those of you interested in my gentlemanly smackdown with O'Reilly, send an e-mail and I'll send audioclips in RealPlayer format, as attachments. Of course, you'll have to have RealPlayer to play them.)

And I took a few pearls of wisdom away from the Reich-wing hate mail I received, much of it in screaming, spittle-flecked CAPSLOCK, all syntactical trainwrecks and grammatical spaz attacks, like those epic Sharpie-marker screeds that your friendly neighborhood Manson-eyed homeless guy used to staple to telephone poles when he was off his meds.

From O'Reilly, I learned that I'M MORE NAIVE ABOUT THE FOX NATION, BY AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE, THAN I EVER SUSPECTED. For example, O'Reilly called me a "communist," like, five times, deadpanning, "I'm not using that in a pejorative way...I have nothing against communists," all because I say on the AUTHOR page of this site that I'm "deeply committed to a progressive politics whose calls for social justice, economic equality, and environmental action are founded on a tough-minded critique of the catastrophic effects of multinational capitalism." During the interview, I was at pains to point out to Mister Bill that, since Buchanan, Perot, and other nabobs of nativism have inveighed against the yawning chasm between CEO and wage-slave salaries as well as the global race to the bottom of the wage pyramid, calls for economic equity and critiques of multinational capitalism aren't exactly the Mark of the Commie Beast, right about now. Naturally, my argument was just so much static to Bill, who blinked, then recommenced shelling.

I was naive enough to think that this sort of paleoconservative red-baiting was buried under McCarthy's gob-streaked tombstone, or at least under Khrushchev's. I mean, Moscow fell to McDonald's without firing of a shot, China's parvenu bourgeoisie are buying up SUV's as fast as Detroit can turn them out, and Castro's playing Peter Falk playing a paranoid, cigar-chewing banana-republic dictator in that old Twilight Zone episode. The last of America's red-hot Marxists are either cowering under Bill O'Reilly's bed or tenured members of the professoriat; not since Eugene Debs walked the earth has the Archie Bunker demographic viewed the Left with anything but cordial contempt, if not the paranoid fear and loathing of the John Bircher, and I say that as a Leftist, for chrissakes. I mean, I love Mike Davis like a brother, and Terry Eagleton is my homeboy, but compare their royalty statements to Anne Coulter's if you want a reality check about how big a neighborhood threat Marxism really poses, beyond the fever dreams of a few swoony grad students. So how can O'Reilly use an Atomic Cafe-era smear like "commie" with a straight face? Is he just playing a throwback to the era of blacklists and bomb shelters, chuckling all the way to the bank? Or is the Fox Nation so cretinous that it really, truly equates calls for economic justice with being a "loopy" (unquote) commie? Clearly, I need to spend more time in O'Reilly Country, taking the pulse of the average orc.

I also learned, when O'Reilly asked if I was gay (because my LAT essay inveighs against homophobia), that ONLY GAYS CAN DECRY HOMOPHOBIA. In other words, if a public intellectual (a pompous sobriquet, but there it is) makes the case against an anxious American masculinity that defines itself in neurotic opposition to wimps, wussies, and fags, he's got to be a homo. Incredibly, neither O'Reilly nor his legions of flying monkeys seem to have Clue One about the homophobia inherent in the presumption that anyone arguing against homophobia must, by definition, be a homosexual. Somewhere, the founding fathers of the Enlightenment are weeping tears of blood into Diderot's Encyclopedie...

Finally, I learned that WHEN YOU PASS THROUGH THE COSMIC BUNNYHOLE BETWEEN FACT-BASED REALITY AND FOX REALITY, YOU FIND YOURSELF IN A PARALLEL WORLD WHERE IRONY IS AN ALIEN NOTION AND HYPOCRISY EXCLUSIVE TO THE LEFT. After thumping his tub angrily about "secular progressives'" underhanded tactic of smearing their opponents rather than debating their ideas, O'Reilly proceeded to invalidate my ideas by...demonizing me as a loony commie. The "hysteria building around the secular progressive movement has basically said, 'Look, if you don't agree with us...we're going to find a way to put a psychological tag on you that will marginalize you,'" said O'Reilly. "The only thing that you'll hear through all the cacophony is someone calling someone a nasty name." Then he proceeded to characterize me as "a communist" who "hates Bush," just some nutty professor who's "nothing," really, "just some bloviator down at NYU who wants the United States to be a communist country." That's right, Bill. I, and my dark hordes won't rest until the red flag flaps from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and every knee bows and every tongue confesses that Karl is Lord, our godless atheism notwithstanding.

Finally, from the right-wing mouth-breathers who sent me mash notes from all over this fair land of ours, I learned that

THE IRONY OF ASKING IF THE AUTHOR OF AN ARTICLE ABOUT HYSTERICAL, HOMOPHOBIC MASCULINITY IS GAY IS LOST ON MOST CONSERVATIVE READERS, INCLUDING THE GUY WHO THOUGHT HE COULD SIDLE UP TO MY INBOX, WHEN I WASN'T LOOKING, AND SLYLY TRICK ME INTO REVEALING THE SORDID SECRET OF MY SEXUALITY WHEN MY GUARD WAS DOWN:

Sir:

I really enjoyed your article today in the LA Times. My question to you, sir, are you gay?
Alex ------

I also learned that

MY ARGUMENT IS INVALID BECAUSE WHEN YOU'RE GOING MANO A MANO WITH A TOWELHEADED JIHADI, YOU DON'T WANT A GIRLYMAN COVERING YOUR, UH, ASS

Mark,
Just read your LA Times piece. Very interesting. One quick question for which I'm sure you have an answer. If you were to go 2 on 2 with a couple of Islamofascists in a Baquba alley, would you pick a.) W., b.) Harry Reid, c.) Steny Hoyer, or d.) Dick Durbin? (Nancy Pelosi is not a vialble choice.)

You can only pick one. Hopefully, you wouldn't be flumoxed by the choice.

Regards,

John ------

No, John, I'm not at all "flumoxed" [sic]. But I can't help wondering why Pelosi isn't on our dance card. Maybe I've been cruising too many MILF sites, but I'd much rather spend a few idle hours in a Baquba alley with the leggy Speaker of the House than any of the gentlemen you mention, none of whom are my type.

Next, I learned that

The trouble with manhood "American-style" is that the wussies have indeed taken over and "balls" simply are not an important portion of the anatomy for anyone left of center in this country.
My best to you,
Sue, California

And my best to you, Sue! One thing worries me, though: Why the ironic quotes around balls? Are you implying that, while the Left has none, the Right has only faux balls---"balls," rather than true-blue balls? A scary thought! I don't know which is worse---no balls, or Stepford balls, just lurking there in the shadows between our legs, passing as the Real Thing. Spooooooky. Please keep me posted on the state of America's balls, Sue. I sleep a little better knowing you've got your unblinking eye on American manhood's low-slung undercarriage.

I also learned that I SUFFER FROM W. ENVY, because I had some mean-spirited, snark-monkey fun in my LAT op-ed with G. Gordon Liddy's approving remarks about the size of the Presidential Package in that photo of W. in a flight suit, I have "the hots for President Bush," according to some bottom-feeder on AOL. "Dery definitely seems to be in a crouch...over the presidential crotch." Maybe that's because liberal "men on magazine covers require air-brushing in the crotch area in order to create the illusion of having balls," whereas "W. didn't require any help in this area. In the pilot jumpsuit, his manhood spoke for itself. Lib men have to be airbrushed even in a Speedo in order to project their manhood. They must suffer from W. envy."

And there you have it, dear reader. The yahoos have spoken. Vox bacilli.

There is a silver lining to this cloud: According to his producer, Big Bad Bill rilly, rilly, rilly didn't want to like me, but just couldn't help himself. To his horror, he liked me, he really liked me, his producer confided. Could this be the beginning of a beautiful friendship?

Posted by Mark Dery at 10:25 AM | TrackBack

May 03, 2007

Testosterone Poisoning

First there was this ("Wimps, wussies, and W. : How Americans' infatuation with masculinity has perilous consequences," in The L.A. Times).

It features the following choice morsel, calculated to turn the nearest right-wing shark tank into bloody chum:

SO THERE'S a smoking crater where Don Imus used to sit. That's fine with those of us who never understood the appeal of his grizzled-codger shtick, which always sounded like Rooster Cogburn reading "The Turner Diaries" anyway. But if we're going to administer a ritual flaying to every blowhard who channels the ugly American id, why has a hate-speech Touretter like Ann Coulter escaped the skinning knife?

Then there was this, live from Darwin's waiting room, in my Inbox:

I recently read your sniveling article, Mark. Sounds to me like you got your panties in a wad, your freaking sissy boy. You better not bring yourself to Ann Coulter's attention, because she will rip your ass apart
John -----
Atlanta

Then there was this:

Homosexuals need to grow thicker skins. When are people going to come to the realization that most folks simply have trouble differentiating what somebody is (homosexual) from who he is. Unfortunately, many of the, so called, "girliemen" reveal themselves to be angry and hateful ultra-libs. Precisely the mirror image of those they accuse of being "homophobes." That aside, let Imus and Coulter toss insults all they want. There is a market for it. Just like there is a ready market out there for the kind of "wussy" tripe you just published in the LA Times.
Ken ------
Charleston, SC

And:

Dear Markie: If all American males were like you in 1941, half the US would be speaking Japanese and the other half would be speaking German. The America they hate gives wimps, wussies and faggots the best living environment on earth.
Dick ------
San Diego

San Diego! My old stomping grounds! The town Gore Vodal immortalized as "the Vatican of the John Birch Society!"

Anyway, you get the idea. There's more---much, much more---where that came from.

Then Bill O'Reilly's radio show called, asking me to be on today's show at 1 PM EST.

And I said yes, Bob help me.

Posted by Mark Dery at 10:46 AM | TrackBack

April 27, 2007

Satan's Fetus Stalks the Suburbs

We interrupt the unending torrent of comment spam ("Hello people, your site is best! Nice site look this: teen lesbians showering!") to flog our product.

The latest, insect-themed issue of the cultural quarterly Cabinet is in bookstores and on newsstands now, and includes my essay on the ginormous Jerusalem Cricket, which is, in fact, neither a cricket nor from Jerusalem. (As Linda Richman used to say on Saturday Night Live: Discuss.) Titled "Armies of the Night: Satan's Fetus Stalks the Suburbs," the article is at once an overheated exegesis of the J.C. as myth and symbol, an eco-political critique of SoCal sprawl, and my attempt to exorcize the post-traumatic stress engendered by a nocturnal confrontation with one of these grotesque animals, an experience no Californian who has run across a J.C. in the dead of night will ever forget. (The Jerusalem Cricket, a.k.a. Stenopelmatus, ranges widely west of the Rockies but is ubiquitous in California, where sprawl's encroachment on the insect's habitat is giving rise to more and more confrontations between the insects and shocked-and-awed suburbanities. )

Look upon me and know fear, puny mortal: Jerusalem Cricket on the prowl. Photo copyright Takwish. Contact photographer at takwish at gmail dot com.

Here's a teaser...

In a jump cut, I was out of bed, across the room, switching on the light to reveal a crawling horror: a humongous insect, thicker than a man's thumb, maybe three inches in length. It had powerful, cricketlike hind legs and a caramel-colored abdomen, ringed with amber bands. Its head was dried-blood red, with the lacquered glossiness of a candied apple. It made me think of a skinned thumb, or the swollen head of an aroused penis, shiny with precum.
The creature was obscene in its ugliness. But what was it? David Cronenberg's idea of a partial-birth abortion? A stool sample from the man-eating xenomorph in the movie Alien? A nightcrawler from the cultural unconscious?
Sweeping the thing into a dustpan, I shuddered at its weight as I carried it to the bathroom. To my horror, the creature swam against the tide when I flushed, scrabbling frantically at the toilet bowl. I flushed. And flushed. And flushed. (Die, monster, die!) At last, it disappeared down the porcelain gullet. The toilet made a gagging sound. Trembling with revulsion, I laid the heavy ceramic lid of the toilet tank across the closed seat to ensure that no six-legged freak could exact revenge, even if it did manage to clamber up, out of the sewer. Not that I slept much that night. In the dark, I could still see those beady black eyes staring back at me unblinkingly as I sent the abomination swirling into Eternity with a final flush.

Sleep tight.

Posted by Mark Dery at 11:25 AM | TrackBack

January 25, 2007

The Eyes Have It: Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen on the "Science of First Impressions"

Stuart Ewen and Elizabeth Ewen at home, NYC, 2006. Photo: Yoko Inoue. © Yoko Inoue. From my December 2006 ID magazine Q&A with the authors.

(In its December 2006 issue, ID magazine ran my interview with Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen, two of our most incisive thinkers about the politics of images and the social history of consumer culture. But that wasn't the half of it. ID didn't have room for my intro, and had to truncate the interview for reasons of space. Here's the director's cut, with all of the insights that ended up on the cutting-room floor restored.)

Amid the cultural crossfire over illegal immigration, at a moment when 60 percent of the respondents to a Quinnipiac poll applauded the racial profiling of people who look "Middle Eastern," the visual-culture critics and social historians Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen are pulling our stereotypes up by the roots.

Their new book, Typecasting: On the Arts and Sciences of Human Inequality (Seven Stories Press), is a history of stereotyping in racist science and popular culture. (Poke your browser into the Ewens' spirited, intellectually omnivorous blog, "Stereotype and Society.")

Revealing the origins of the pictures in our heads—the powerful images that shape our attitudes toward "enemy aliens," the lower class, or anyone in a different skin—the Ewens make sense of our most pernicious myths by restoring their lost historical context: the eugenics of Francis Galton, the criminal anthropology of Cesare Lombroso, and other systems of scientific racism that molded the visual imagination of the modern age.

If that sounds like 497 pages of sternly self-flagellating political correctness, it isn't. Profusely illustrated with period images, the book is an intellectual thrill ride, rollercoastering from the sad tale of the Hottentot Venus to hidden agendas in Roget's Thesaurus; from the cannibal stereotype in King Kong to the deeper meanings of the minstrel show. In Typecasting, the Ewens open our minds by opening our eyes.

Mark Dery: In Typecasting, the act of stereotyping turns out to be central to our attempts to make sense of the social worlds we inhabit.

Elizabeth Ewen: That's why we started with [the journalist and early writer on mass culture] Walter Lippmann. He says that first we define and then we see; what we see is already conditioned. Stereotypes become unconscious reflexes, ordering the world as you navigate it.

Stuart Ewen: Lippmann makes the argument that this repertory of presuppositions that we bring to interactions with other people is shaped by our culture. For instance, the first thing you see when you look at another person is this biological fiction—race—that gets in the way of other ways of seeing.

EE: There emerges this way of thinking that leads up to the ability of a culture to produce one image that represents a whole category of people. [The 18th century Dutch anatomist Petrus Camper, who classified humans according to a racial hierarchy], has this enormous array of skulls. One day, he pulls them down and fondles them and decides, on the basis of that, who has the proper facial angle and who doesn't. But it's based in each case on one skull representing entire groups of people. What it leaves out is as important as what's in the frame of vision.

SE: Every way of seeing is also a way of not seeing. One of the things that is built into the way in which [the 18th century Swedish botanist Carolus] Linnaeus defines a species is that there's a single image that becomes the encompassing ideal of what that species is.

In [the sexual researcher Alfred] Kinsey's work, the picture of a species is not about a single ideal type but about multiplicity. He's been studying gall wasps forever, but what is the ideal gall wasp? In all of the hundreds of thousands of gall wasps he's seen, none of them are the same! So, in fact, the law of nature is not the ideal type; the law of nature is that there is no ideal type.

Part of the history that we're dealing with is the systematic intellectual and aesthetic tradition in which exclusivity—the ideal type—becomes the iron law of understanding. Notions of multiplicity are marginalized from what is considered to be scientific or aesthetic truth.

EE: The interesting thing is that these images work through juxtaposition. Every image has its counter-image. When you went to the phrenology museum, you saw the busts of presidents but you also saw the busts of miscreants.

SE: What we live with today is the intrinsic outcome of a process that's been going on for some time.

The repertory of fixed impressions that is developed in phrenology and criminal anthropology gets animated within Hollywood. The movies dramatized the ability to give you stereotypes that would allow you to know who the good person was and who the bad person was in an instant.

We have a whole chapter on King Kong, the most recent version of which portrays the natives of Skull Island as much more atavistic and less comical than they were in the original. It's closer to a 19th century vision of atavism as a primordial menace lurking within dark people. The inner core of stereotype is this fear that there may be a transgression, that the degenerate is gonna run away with your woman. Stereotype is how peoples' deepest fears about themselves get projected, imagistically, onto others.

MD: Or even onto a design aesthetic, which then becomes "degenerate," to use the Nazi term of art. I'm reminded of Adolf Loos's essay "Ornament and Crime" (1908). Loos, a modernist, is horrified by Art Nouveau—the "feminine" sexuality of its writhing lines, its "primitive" love of ornamentation.

SE: Modernism was predicated on certain ideal forms. It's incumbent upon designers to think about the extent to which certain aesthetic ideals may contain some of the same premises that taxonomies of human difference have reinforced in other realms. The notion that there are ideal forms—certain typographies that are ideal for producing this, that, and the other kind of response—is a particular way of seeing that designers really need to re-evaluate.

Let's go back to this whole question, well-discussed in the book, of taxonomies that are predicated on the idea that there are ideal types—"This is what a Negro is," "This is what a Caucasian is." The notion that Stephen Jay Gould argues in much of his work on natural history—that the ideal in fact is a complete obfuscation and that variation, not fixity, is the truth about form—would be a major challenge for design, because I think fixity is part of the kit bag of design traditions: "Here is this tradition, here's that tradition."

EE: If you're a designer, I think you have to think in new ways. You have to examine where popular culture is going and what images truly represent peoples' desires outside of the framework of stereotype, because if it's true that on the one hand conservatism has this hold on the culture, on the other there's a wide variety of diversity happening.

SE: Linnaeus's system for categorizing plants is based completely on physical structures—on visual evidence. Before Linnaeus, the taxonomy of plants was based on their use within human existence.

Design and architecture need to re-connect to the utility of those forms within human lives—the way in which they mesh with human behaviors, the passed-on "finger knowledge" that people on survive on. Rather than becoming students of design, designers need to become students of society—of the human uses of things.

For example, early forms of government-built public housing utilized nature as a grid and placed people's lives within it, leaving cars on the outside, creating pedestrian walks for shopping and leisure-time activities, with public meeting houses placed in the center.

The design world is still very much married to the logic of typecasting—the logic of ideal types. For the designer to really imagine the way in which the form connects to how people live, the kind of uses they make of things (I realize this is very hard within the world of the client) would represent a revolution in design.

EE: When you teach about mass media and mass culture, one of the things that you do is you ask people to freeze the frame, to think about what's in the image. Once they understand the composition of the image, they begin to see the world in different ways.

SE: What we're asking in Typecasting is: What does each generation pass on to the next that will prepare that generation to deal with the moment when they encounter people not like themselves? Do we hand them fixed taxonomies that are designed to serve the interests of power, which is what Lippmann and most of the people in Typecasting are talking about? Or do we provide them with tools to unpack these visual narratives—to be able to see themselves in others, to imagine seeing through other people's eyes?

Posted by Mark Dery at 06:48 PM | TrackBack

December 19, 2006

Unpacking My Library

A while ago, the technoculture writer David Pescovitz---whose mind was probably elsewhere at the time---rashly asked me for a reading list. He was curious to know what was on my nightstand. (He'll rue the day he asked, before I'm done.) Typically, I have a half-dozen books I'm picking up and putting down, in my desultory way, reading a few pages here, skimming a chapter there. The presumption, at least subconsciously, is that this hodgepodge will form a sort of montage in my mind, inspiring intertextual conjunctions, juxtapositions, synchronicities. (At least, that's the theory...) Literary ADD meets Freudian free association.

For example, I recently buzzed through Elizabeth and Stuart Ewen's Typecasting: On the Arts and Sciences of Human Inequality, a panoramic study of racial stereotyping in Western culture. For the Ewens, Baroque cabinets of curiosity, social Darwinism, eugenics, wartime propaganda, and pop culture (Roget's thesaurus, King Kong, minstrel shows) are vectors of transmission for racist fables of genetic predestination.

Every night, after doing some deep-breathing exercises with the Ewen book, I'd relax before sleep with some intellectual Fluffernutter. One night, while listening to an audiobook of Sherlock Holmes stories, I was fascinated to hear fictional echoes, in Holmes's snap judgments of human character, of the Victorian racial science critiqued by the Ewens.

Holmes's X-ray visions of the evils lurking in the minds of men are at once gothic in their morbid obsession with the ever-present past; Freudian in their sense of a libidinous self, at odds with the superego; and social Darwinian in their insistence on Victorian assumptions about gender, race, and ethnicity. The physiognomies and body language of Conan Doyle's criminals are indelibly stamped with the stigmata of inborn criminality, reminding us time and again that heredity is destiny. Of Holmes's would-be assassin, the murderous Colonel Moran, Dr. Watson observes,

I was able at last to have a good look at our prisoner. It was a tremendously virile and yet sinister face which was turned towards us. With the brow of a philosopher above and the jaw of a sensualist below, the man must have started with great capacities for good or for evil. But one could not look upon his cruel blue eyes, with their drooping, cynical lids, or upon the fierce, aggressive nose and the threatening, deep-lined brow, without reading Nature's plainest danger-signals" ("The Empty House").

Moran exemplifies Holmes's theory that ontogeny recapitulates familial phylogeny: "The individual represents in his development the whole procession of his ancestors...[becoming], as it were, the epitome of the history of his own family." Likewise, Holmes's arch-nemesis Moriarty is of "good birth and...endowed by nature with a phenomenal mathematical faculty," yet the man is inescapably blighted by "hereditary tendencies of the most diabolical kind," instantly apparent in his creepy habit of "slowly oscillating [his face] from side to side in a curiously reptilian fashion" ("The Final Problem"). From the Italian jewel thief Beppo, a "simian man with thick eyebrows, and a very peculiar projection of the lower part of the face like the muzzle of a baboon" ("The Six Napoleons"); to the vengeful Jonas Oldacre, "more like a malignant and cunning ape than a human being" ("The Norwood Builder"); to the mad scientist Professor Presbury, whose use of a rejuvenating elixir (think: Victorian Viagra) extracted from "the great black-faced monkey of the Himalayan slopes" turns him into a missing link ("The Creeping Man"), Conan Doyle's stories are fraught with the anxieties of his age---the Xenophobic fear that the English gene pool was being contaminated by bestial immigrant strains; devolutionary nightmares inspired by Darwin's revelation that simians and Homo sapiens are branches of the same evolutionary tree; Max Nordau-ish worries about the moral degeneration of the ingrown nobility. Conjunctions, juxtapositions, synchronicities.

It gets weirder: Another night, I downshifted from the Ewens by reading The Colour Out of Space: Tales of Cosmic Horror. The title story, by H.P. Lovecraft, is a gothic sci-fi story about a meteor whose otherworldly influence, somewhere between radiation sickness and nameless evil, turns the farm where it landed into a "blasted heath" and the hapless family that lives there into "grey, twisted, brittle [monstrosities]." The Mark of the Devil, in Lovecraft's story, is color---ambiguous color, its promiscuous blending of pigments the outward manifestation of an unspeakable evil. Inside a fragment of the meteor, investigators find "a large coloured globule" whose color "was almost impossible to describe; and it was only by analogy that they called it colour at all." On the poisoned farm, where mutant flora worthy of Three Mile Island has sprung up, "no sane wholesome colours were anywhere to be seen...but everywhere those hectic and prismatic variants of some diseased, underlying primary tone..."

My curiosity piqued, I dialed up the Wikipedia entry on Lovecraft, and found the Ewens whispering in my ear again. Conjunctions, juxtapositions, synchronicities: According to Wikipedia, Lovecraft's fiction is shot through with racist sentiments. He expounded on racist themes in poems such as "On the Creation of Niggers" (1912); in his story "Herbert West---Reanimator," the author experiences a shudder of almost self-parodic revulsion at the sight of a dead African-American: "He was a loathsome, gorilla-like thing, with abnormally long arms that I could not help calling forelegs, and a face that conjured up thoughts of unspeakable Congo secrets and tom-tom poundings under an eerie moon. The body must have looked even worse in life---but the world holds many ugly things." Too true, too true, and one of the ugliest stared back at H.P., out of his shaving mirror: According to his ex-wife, a stroll through the mongrel metropolis made Lovecraft apoplectic. "Whenever we found ourselves in the racially mixed crowds which characterize New York," she wrote, "Howard would become livid with rage. He seemed almost to lose his mind." Little wonder, then, that for the self-appointed Scourge of the Mud People, color---the multiethnic face of an ever more racially mixed America---should be synonymous with horror. In Typecasting, the Ewens sketch the background for Lovecraft's fulminations, a historical moment in which racial segregation is the law of the land, eugenics is sober science, and expert testimony before congress helps push through the Immigration Act of 1924, a bulwark against the pollution of Aryan DNA by inferior breeding stock from eastern Europe and the Mediterranean.

Just two examples, Constant Reader, of the hypertextual connections---the intellectual crosspollination---encouraged by literary channel-surfing.

Which brings us, by twists and turns, back to The Reading List. Here, then, are some gleanings from recent readings.

Note: Some of the titles that follow are books that have always intrigued me, but which I have yet to read. Nothing odd about that: Some of the best books are the ones we haven't read. Some of the most cherished volumes in my library are titles that have gone untouched since the day I bought them, no less loved for that. Anatole France, Umberto Eco, and Jacques Derrida are thoughtful on this subject. Asked if he'd read all the books in his library, France famously replied, "Not one-tenth of them. I don't suppose you use your Sevres china every day?" In his essay, "How to Justify a Private Library," Eco writes, "The best answer is the one always used by Roberto Leydi: 'And more, dear sir, many more,' which freezes the adversary and plunges him into a state of awed admiration." Derrida's zinger, in the documentary Derrida, is more gently witty: "No, I've only read three or four, but I've read them very, very well." Of course, I have every intention of reading the books in question some day; I bought many of them out of the neurotic fear that the dissident and the deviant will be black-market commodities in the not-so-distant future, when a home-schooled creationist ascends to the presidency with the 10 Commandments in one hand and a Left Behind potboiler in the other, exhorting the faithful to start readying the lighter fluid and the faggots for the secular humanists and their godless, sodomite lit.

To the stacks, then.

1. A Philosophy of Boredom by Lars Svendsen. Never read it. Love the fact that there's a painstakingly scholarly study devoted to boredom, with every op cit and ibid spit-shined to a blinding luster. Even better, the book is by all accounts gripping. An edge-of-your-seat deconstruction of the deeper meanings of boredom! What could be better? Unbelievabll, there's another book on the subject: Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind by Patricia Meyer Spacks. Unfortunately, it's "actually, well, boring," in the words of one Amazon reviewer.

In any event, I love these obsessive-compulsive social histories of little-studied subjects, such as The Encyclopedia of Stupidity by Matthijs van Boxsel, and The Anatomy of Disgust by William Ian Miller (and its conjoined twin, On Disgust by Aurel Kolnai, Carolyn Korsmeye, and Barry Smith).

Speaking of the disgusting, the Miller and Kolnai/Korsmeye/Smith books are scholarly studies, whereas Dominique Laporte's uneven History of Shit and Paul Spinrad's incomparable, inexhaustible RE/Search Guide to Bodily Fluids engage more, er, viscerally with the subject at hand. By contrast, Wim Delvoye: Cloaca (which I also haven't read) with contributions by Dan Cameron, Dieter Roelstraete, Gerardo Mosquera, Georges Bataille, and Milan Kundera (!), looks suitably bizarre, while Divine Filth: Lost Writings by Georges Bataille and Filth: Dirt, Disgust, And Modern Life, edited by William A. Cohen and Ryan Johnson, bring a scholarly approach to an abject subject.

2. Albertus Seba: Cabinet of Natural Curiosities---The Complete Plates in Colour, 1734-1765, edited by Dr. Irmgard Musch. Another breathtaking wonderbook from the German publisher Taschen. From the Amazon blurb: "In 1731, after decades of collecting, Seba commissioned illustrations of each and every specimen [in his wonder closet] and arranged the publication of a four-volume catalog detailing his entire collection---from strange and exotic plants to snakes, frogs, crocodiles, shellfish, corals, insects, butterflies and more, as well as fantastic beasts, such as a hydra and a dragon. [These] illustrations, often mixing plants and animals in a single plate, were unusual even for the time. Many of the stranger and more peculiar creatures from Seba's collection, some of which are now extinct, were as curious to those in Seba's day as they are to us now. This reproduction is taken from a rare, hand-colored original." Once seen, never forgotten, these hand-painted dream photographs from the Baroque capture, with stunning vivdness, the aesthetic of wonder.

3. The Strange Case of Edward Gorey by Alexander Theroux. Theroux is a gossipy, waspish writer who never misses an opportunity to flaunt his (admittedly prodigious) erudition, sneer at the booboisie, name-drop, or score-settle (especially with his vastly more celebrated brother, for whom he nurses an undying grudge). Bitchy, affected, and too clever by half, his style aspires to Oscar Wilde but more often approximates Paul Lynde. For all that, The Strange Case is an addictively readable book, stuffed with scandalous morsels of gossip, witty table talk (Gorey and Theroux were friends), and sharply perceptive insights into the mind and art of the incalcuable, eccentric Gorey. A poisoned bon-bon of a book.

4. J.G. Ballard: Quotes by J.G. Ballard; edited by Mike Ryan, V. Vale. Slapdash in comparison with the indispensable RE/Search #8/9 (the Ballard issue)---"unknown" is a too-frequent citation, and the loving inclusion of every possible variation on a given quote, culled from decades of interviews, is calculated to appeal to the devout fan only---this is nonetheless a bottomless font of insights and inspiration from the incomparable Ballard, a visionary novelist whose black-comedic critique of the postmodern condition is more trenchant, and wittier by far, than anything French philosophy has to offer. Read Baudrillard and Virilio as science fiction, and Ballard as philosophy or, better yet, self-help guru for the irreparably disaffected. I begin every day with a quote, chosen at random, from this book of daily affirmations---or, more properly, daily negations---and go forth with a spring in my step, intellectually well-armed to do battle with my local megamall, multistory parking garage, and other Ballardian horrors come to life.

5. Losing Our Heads: Beheadings in Literature and Culture by Regina Janes. The fact that there's an entire book devoted to this subject gives meaning to my life, and almost convinces me there's a god.

6. Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body by Armand Marie Leroi. The Two-headed Boy, And Other Medical Marvels by Jan Bondeson. The Last Sideshow, a book of photographs by Hanspeter Schneider. Inside the Live Reptile Tent: The Twilight World of Carnival Midway, text by Bruce Caron, photographs by Jeff Brouws. Monsters: Human Freaks in America's Gilded Age: The Photographs of Chas Eisenmann, edited by Michael Mitchell. As these titles remind us, we've lost the ability to stare without Puritan guilt or the intellectual agonies of Political Correctness. In these pages, we find ourselves face to face with the Utterly Other. Stare, and stare some more, and be forever changed.

7. My Last Sigh by Luis Bunuel. As sublimely dry and sophisticated as the martinis whose virtues he extols, the great Surrealist's breezy, effortlessly charming memoir is a time capsule from a lost world, when conversation over cocktails was an art. A master raconteur and wicked wit, Bunuel regales us with tales of Dali, anti-clerical bon mots, and profound insights into the filmmaker's art. Before you know it, you've reached the bottom of the martini shaker and the book is over. What's not to love about a chatty, self-deprecating autobiography that includes an entire chapter on the vital importance of the martini in the creative process and a detailed recipe for the author's own variation on that immortal theme, the Bunueloni? Favorite passage: Bunuel's description of the ideal martini, in which a shaft of sunlight passes through a bottle of Noilly Prat and thence into a brimming glass of Bombay gin, as "the generative powers of the Holy Ghost pierced the virgin's hymen."

8. The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death by Corinne May Botz. One of the strangest little books ever published. From the Amazon blurb: "Bizarre and utterly fascinating, The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death is a dark and disturbing photographic journey through criminal cases and the mind of Frances Glessner Lee--grandmother, dollhouse-maker, and master criminal investigator. Photographer Corinne May Botz stumbled across the "Nutshell Studies" while making a video about women who collect dollhouses. On the suggestion of a collector, she visited the Baltmore Medical Examiner's Office, where Lee's miniature reconstructions of crime scenes were on display. The macabre dioramas fascinated and repulsed her: "I was entranced by the details: the porcelain doll with a broken arm in the attic, the grains of sugar on the kitchen floor...I was also riveted by the miniature corpses. Shot in bed, collapsed in the bathtub, hung in the attic and stabbed in the closet; all were eternally frozen in miniature rooms that had become their tombs." Can you believe it has a competitor? The Dollhouse Murders: A Forensic Expert Investigates 6 Little Crimes by Thomas Mauriello, Ann Darby; photographs by John Consoli.

9. The Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators by Gordon Grice. A mordant masterpiece, in which the author invents a genre all his own: Nature Gothic. The chapter titles---"Tarantula," "Recluse," "Mantid," "Black Widow," "Rattlesnake"---tell it all. Fascinated by the alien ways of the nonhuman world, Grice combines the sardonic deadpan of noir fiction with the best naturalists' unsentimental scrutiny of animal behavior and a rural midwesterner's applied knowledge of the predator-prey relationship. A Jean-Henri Fabre for literati who drive pickups with rifle racks.

10. Memories, Dreams, Reflections by C.G. Jung, edited by Aniela Jaffe, translated by Clara Winston and Richard Winston. Recently, I had an inexplicable craving for this book, which I first read when it was assigned by a high-school Teacher Who Changed My Life. In the name of time famine, I opted for the abridged audiobook version, read by Michael York---a fateful decision, as it turned out, since the contrast between York's plummy, uppercrust English accent and Jung's retelling of his "personal myth" (not his life, but his inner life) is as uproarious as it is surreal. Shove one of these tapes into your car stereo and let the man who channeled the Collective Unconscious, psychology's answer to Lemuria---a consoling fiction that laid the cornerstone of the New Age (and obliterated beyond repair the notion that psychology was even remotely scientific)---provide a wonderfully incongruous voiceover to the geography of nowhere (Wal-Mart, Target, Costco, Red Lobster, Olive Garden, Wal-Mart, Target, Costco...) as it flashes past.

Thrill to Jung's formative childhood dream of a giant, one-eyed phallus sitting erect on a king's throne---a monstrous thing "made of skin and flesh, and on top there was something like a rounded head with no face and no hair. On the very top of the head was a single eye, gazing motionlessly upwards." Gird up your loins for a week of fear-crazed bedwetting: "The thing did not move, yet I had the feeling that it might at any moment crawl off the throne like a worm and creep towards me." The one-eyed trouser snake of locker-room lore, as reimagined by H.R. Giger! Pure terror! Listen, in rapt fascination, to the account of the female patient who believes she travels to and from the moon, where the moonpeople are threatened by a hypnotically beautiful vampire, who turns out to be a buried memory of sexual abuse, risen from her childhood nightmares. Laff until the tears run down your cheeks as Jung recounts the Battle of the Titans, in which he and Freud struggle for control of the historical narrative of psychoanalysis, each interpreting the other's dreams as maliciously as possible---as evidence of sublimated sexual pathologies, death wishes toward the father figure, or worse! (Profoundly unsettled by Jung's interest in the then-recently discovered mummies of pre-Christian "bog people," Freud is convinced that the Swiss analyst's obsession with "these corpses" masks a death wish toward him, and faints dead away at the dinner table.)

Jung's account of his childhood crisis of faith is worth the price of admission, all by itself. In it, we accompany the author on his way to school. Rejoicing in the chirping birds and exquisitely blue sky, he offers a silent prayer of thanks to the Creator God: "The world is beautiful and the church is beautiful and God made all this and sits above it far away in the blue sky on a golden throne and...and...and..." Suddenly, our narrator is struck with A THOUGHT TOO MONSTROUS TO THINK! Tormented for days by this soul-shriveling blasphemy, he finally decides, after much agony of mind, that God must have intended him to think this scaldingly sacreligious thought. This revelation "liberated me instantly from my worst torment, since I knew that God himself had placed me in this situation." Abandoning himself to divine will, Li'l Jung allows himself to think the unthinkable: "I gathered all my courage, as though I were about to leap forthwith into hellfire, and let the thought come." (Pregnant pause by York.) "God sits on His golden throne, high above the world and under the throne an enormous turd falls upon the sparkling new roof, shatters it, and breaks the walls of the cathedral asunder." (That, Virginia, is why they call it a throne.) "I felt an enormous and indescribable relief; instead of the expected damnation, grace had come upon me, and with it an unutterable bliss." (Where are the Farrelly brothers when we need them? Do not go in there!)

Let that be a lesson to the morbidly religious among you---not to mention those bibliocentrists who turn up their noses at the obscure pleasures of the audiobook.

Posted by Mark Dery at 04:28 PM | TrackBack

June 10, 2006

On the Beach

Caveat lector: This summer, I'll be posting even more infrequently than usual (!), which is to say: about as often as Kohoutek comes around. I've got my head in the big, shaggy maw of a book-in-progress, and unlike those authors who roll over in their sleep and snore out a book a year, effortlessly, I labor mightily and bring forth a pellet maybe once every five years (if I'm lucky). My books aren't so much written as accreted, forming at the speed of your average stalactite. (Sorry, can't divulge the subject of this one until closer to my as yet unscheduled publication date. Hopefully, sometime this century...)

All of which is to say that I'll be checking in only desultorily, so if you want to be pinged when I've posted, sign up for my mailing list.

In the meantime, more Advertisements for Myself:

Looks like I've attained a Warholian level of microfame via Wikipedia. Shovelware readers should feel free to take the Pepsi Challenge and hack the page, adding any information that seems relevant. Of course, the site's editors will expunge any shameless editorializing or full-throated ranting.

Finally got a contributor's copy of an anthology that came out last year, The Legacy of McLuhan, which includes my essay "The Mechanical Bridgeroom Stripped Bare: A Catechism of McLuhanism for Unbelievers." It's high-spirited bloodletting, in which I settle my Oedipal issues with the Father of Us All (or at least those of us who do media criticism).

In other news, I wrote a profile, for The New York Times "Styles" section, of the suitably saturnine underground cartoonist Mark Newgarden.

Teaser: "For most of his working life, Mr. Newgarden, 46, has been using the visual rhetoric of gag culture to plumb the dark places in the human psyche. His cartoons are absurdist valentines to the losers who knock themselves out trying to make people laugh: the alcoholic clowns, the painfully lame comedians, the no-talent cartoonists and especially the hack humorists who ground out joke books and magazines in the 1950's and 60's, the golden age of novelty-shop culture."

More here.

Also, the June and July issues of PRINT and ID, respectively, feature articles by me. PRINT is publishing my essay on the Death---or not!---of Print, and ID is running my essay on the French banlieue (brutalist low-cost housing) as incubators---or not---of the social pathologies that gave rise to the recent immigrant riots and car-burnings throughout France. (Read it here if you're too cheap to buy the damn thing, but be aware that the online version is a pale shadow of its sumptuous hardcopy self. And read it fast, before link rot sets in.)

Speaking of France, a Parisian start-up called Verity just ran a spirited (if somewhat linguistically fractured) Q&A with me. I'm in Al Gore-Inconvenient Truth-Mike Davis-Ecology of Fear-Day After Tomorrow-Eco-pocalyptic Jeremiah mode, in the last half. Sample: "My great worry that is even the rising tides won't instill some sense of 'planetary awareness' in our Dear Leaders, to resurrect a moldering phrase from the eco-conscious '70s. Do they have an escape plan, equal parts Doctor Strangelove and Silent Running? Are they planning to hit the eject button when the going gets tough and send their gated communities, well-staffed by small persons of a brownish hue, hurtling toward the stars, in search of new worlds to colonize? Somehow, we have to deny them that failsafe, and make them understand that, like it or not, we're all in the same leaky little Poseidon lifeboat together."

Diverting beach reading, as the polar caps melt and we move our beach chairs back, back, WAY back---say, about a mile inland...

Posted by Mark Dery at 09:02 AM | TrackBack

April 06, 2006

The Savage Eye: War Porn, Video Beheadings, and the Politics of "Just Looking" in the Age of Abu Ghraib

I'm lecturing in Baltimore this Friday, at the Maryland Institute College of Art. If you're within hailing distance, bum-rush the show.

When: Friday, April 7, 7 p.m.

Where: Falvey Hall, Brown Center

What (From the official press release): Sponsored by MICA's language, literature, and culture department, cultural critic Mark Dery explores the far fringes of visual culture, from the torture porn of Abu Ghraib to the cultural collateral damage of videotaped beheadings; from the growing traffic in Victorian post-mortem photographs on eBay to the posthuman fantasies—photoshopped images of half-human/half-animal chimera—dreamed up by online fetishists; from homemade videos of wartime atrocities to the strange afterlife of 9/11 images of the Twin Towers 'jumpers, forever frozen in mid-leap.

"Because of the explicit nature of the lecture, it is recommended for mature audiences."

Details here.

Posted by Mark Dery at 01:12 AM | TrackBack

March 14, 2006

The Leisure of the Theory Class: Academy Hacking with McKenzie Wark

In another life, the Australian media theorist and cultural critic McKenzie Wark was (in his words) a "lapsed Marxist in the pay of Rupert Murdoch"; his provocative column, which ran for nine years in The Australian newspaper, was an Improvised Exploding Device in the salons of the Australian intelligentsia, inflicting collateral damage on—and inspiring fiery blowback from—some of the country's more reactionary intellectuals. Now he's an accidental theorist in New York, where he teaches cultural and media studies in Lang College, at the New School University. A critic of uncommon gifts, he views American empire from a parallax angle that is at once Australian, post-Marxian, and ineffably Wark-ian.

Photo courtesy V2, an an interdisciplinary center for art and media technology in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

Wark's most recent book is the critically acclaimed A Hacker Manifesto (Harvard University Press, 2004), which the cybercritic Julian Dibbell deemed nothing less than "The Communist Manifesto 2.0." Additionally, Wark is the author of Virtual Geography (Indiana University Press, 1994), The Virtual Republic (Allen & Unwin, 1998), and Celebrities, Culture and Cyberspace (Pluto Press, 1999).

For his 2002 book, Dispositions (Salt Publishing), he took his own adage "we no longer have roots, we have aerials" seriously and reimagined himself as a rootless theorist. Equipped with a laptop and a global-positioning system, he filed a series of philosophical dispatches, each one ID'd by exact time and pinpoint location. Sample transmission:

We're all soldiers now, and know exactly where our asses are. The luxury of accuracy—the fifth coordinate. Let X equal X. Your ass is where and what you think it is. No wonder they pronounce him Colon Powell. The English ruled the seas with their chronometers; now Americans rule the skies. Hold this yellow ruler and hold with it the logic of empire. Digital sextant. Precision's cutting edge. The perfect good for a perfect world. It arms me for that other struggle: to find what tiny wavering lines might steal away from all perfected surfaces. An art of digging digits that don't add up.

Hart and Negri's Empire crossed with Johnny Cash's "I've Been Everywhere." Or something like that.

The New Statesman described Wark as "a cross between Jean Baudrillard and John Pilger." For my money, Wark is a lock-and-load theory jock who can field-strip Marx's Grundrisse blindfolded and dash off gnomic Baudrillardianisms like "Abstraction is always an abstraction of nature, a process that creates nature's double, a second nature, a space of human existence in which collective life dwells among its own products and comes to take the environment it produces to be natural" (A Hacker Manifesto) without batting an eyelid.

It seemed only appropriate to kick off our exchange by kicking the corpse of critical theory.

Mark Dery: On November 4, I was in the audience at the New School for "The Parallax of Evil: Domination and Hegemony," a lecture by Jean Baudrillard, followed by a conversation with his longtime publisher Sylvere Lotringer (whose Semiotext(e) books introduced the New York hipoisie to French postmodernism in the '80s), ably moderated by yourself.

Didn't it all seem a bit retro '80s? The faculty, lining up to ask questions during the Q&A period with that unhappy mix of forelock-tugging servility and killing earnestness that recovering theory addicts reserve for the mandarins of French theory. The crowd, trampling itself in the soccer-mob stampede to be the first to prove their tragic hipness by laughing at JB's foot-draggingly ironic laugh lines. And J.B. himself, shamelessly recycling '80s chestnuts with eyebrow fully arched, pulling his best poker face—de Tocqueville meets the Wachowski brothers. What a card! I sank into my seat, letting the billowing clouds of French fog roll over me, feeling as if I was trapped in the Seven Flags version of The Matrix...without the irony, but with the smoke machines working overtime, to compensate.

Apparently, I wasn't alone. Here's Rhonda Lieberman, from her Artforum.com review of another whistlestop on the JB tour of Manhattan:

His call now for art to subvert "the banality of hyperreality" puzzled the room that evening, but he's always been a Situationist—very anti-"society of the spectacle"—an intellectual black hole aspiring to implode the system from within. They would have known that if they had actually read him. But few people did. His discourse was a fetish; "Baudrillard," a brand name. That's what people came to see tonight, and that's what they got. Most couldn't follow what the heck he was saying—and not for lack of trying. Some blamed themselves for it. He's the antifetish fetish, but his brand identity is "difficult," so...whatever!"

And Larissa MacFarquhar, from her New Yorker review of the same event (a reading at the Jack Tilton Gallery in support of Baudrillard's new book, The Conspiracy of Art:

After he read, Baudrillard expanded on his theme. "We say that Disneyland is not, of course, the sanctuary of the imagination, but Disneyland as hyperreal world masks the fact that all America is hyperreal, all America is Disneyland," he said. "And the same for art. The art scene is but a scene, or obscene"—he paused for chuckles from the audience—"mask for the reality that all the world is trans-aestheticized. We have no more to do with art as such, as an exceptional form. Now the banal reality has become aestheticized, all reality is trans-aestheticized, and that is the very problem."

I'm curious to hear your post-mortem on JB's lecture, and equally curious to hear your deconstruction of the media commentary on the French philosopher king.

Photo courtesy Salt Publishing, an independent literary publisher.

McKenzie Wark:The Jean Baudrillard gig at New School was so popular, they put the overflow in a second lecture hall to watch it on video. Which was weird, because exactly 20 years ago the same thing happened when i saw him in Sydney. Only back then I was watching him on video; this time I was the moderator.

People asked the same dumb questions and got the same dumb answers, pretty much. Which is the odd thing to me. People keep reading him, but reading him badly. Looking for the wrong things. It's quite simple. Nietszche said that God is dead. Baudrillard just updates it. He winkles the old deity out in its last hiding place. He says the Real does not exist.

You would think that might be a good starting place for a reflection on the tragedy of American letters. I enjoy The New Yorker as much as anyone, but it's the most brain-dead publication in the world. It's based on the underlying principle of American prose: that if you have described something, you have done your duty.

And look where this "fetish" for description gets us. Never mind the James Frey fiasco. That he fabricated a memoir and took in Oprah is a great gag, but not the worst of it. The worst of it was Colin Powell describing the mobile chemical weapons labs Saddam allegedly had driving around Bagdad. Poor o'' Colin has to straight-face it through that one—in PowerPoint—before the United Nations. As if description were some magic incantation to evoke the real.

That's where one wants to pick up some Baudrillard. He has a great essay in The Conspiracy of Art called "Radical Thought," which is the most direct statement of this iconoclastic, or rather logoclastic, idea. What if language and the Real have nothing to do with each other?

I don't think what I do has much to do with Baudrillard. He's read A Hacker Manifesto and we've talked about it a little, but it's not his sort of thing. But I admire his integrity and his courage. He's been an outsider to French letters for half a century. An unrepentant militant in thought.

MD: The New Yorker's tendency to let description stand in for deconstruction has less to do, I think, with "the tragedy of American letters" than it does the vacuity of American journalism. We've reduced the Orwellian dictum "good prose is like a windowpane" to an absurdity. Then again, MacFarquhar specializes in the deadpan drive-by; her profile of Chomsky ("The Devil's Accountant," March 31, 2003) is an exercise in bloodless bloodletting. Maybe she's just giving JB enough rope to hang himself, here. In other words, critiquing by merely quoting, without comment. It's either the driest form of irony or, as you suggest, intellectual brain-death. You tell me.

I haven't read he Conspiracy of Art. When it comes to art criticism, I'm more inclined to Dave Hickey, Ralph Rugoff, old-school critics like Calvin Tomkins, or even the determinedly un-P.C. Robert Hughes, who for all his blowzy bluster and scurrilous anti-feminism at least retains the saving graces of humor and a hedonistic appetite for retinal pleasures (the guy seems to actually like art, always a liability in a critic). The writers I've named are a bracing corrective to the thin, gray theory-gruel that passes for art criticism in Artforum or the investment tips for Ladies Who Lunch that passes for art journalism in ArtNews. You say "Radical Thought" is "the most direct statement of this iconoclastic, or rather logoclastic, idea: What if language and the Real have nothing to do with each other?" Isn't this the very idea JB and the other French postmodernists have been arguing into the ground for decades now? I mean, isn't the post-structuralist and postmodern assault on meaning all about questioning the epistemic function of language? In that light, "Radical Thought" doesn't sound all that radical. What am I missing?

Any thoughts on the cultural politics of prose style, French postmodernist, American journalistic, or otherwise? You've returned to the subject, with some heat, time and again in your online writings, so I'm interested in hearing you delve deeper into the subject. As well, anything to say about the current state of art criticism, as practiced in the citadels of high theory by Rosalind Krauss, Hal Foster, and the October and Artforum crews, or in the popular press (Hughes, et. al.)?

MW: I admired Robert Hughes as a prose writer for a long time. He's great over short stretches. Great with a sentence, good with a paragraph, but there's no larger structure to his writing, and consequently to his thought. Met him a few times. The man knows how to cook crusteceans. He's from the bosom of Sydney's Catholic elites, which is not my part of town, but now that my countrymen have decided to despise him as an ungrateful expatriate I'm much more sympathetic.

Critics are what institutions make them. Hughes lucked into that great job as art critic for Time magazine, which had international pretensions, a budget to burn, and no art advertisers to worry about. Academic art criticism is exactly what you would expect from the American university system. It's highly specialized, ruthlessly "rigorous," fantastically elitist. Exactly like the universities that make it. It's the prestige cultural goods business.

But I'm only tangentially connected to the art world, so what would I know? I did enjoy Chris Kraus's book Video Green, which seems to me to nail that particular branch of the bespoke spectacle. And I did have the idea once to do a parody of October, and call it November (after the "November revolution" of 1989). Same typeface, but with the title in blue.

The problem for writing is always to escape its own institutionalization. Is there a way to write across the limits imposed by genre, discipline, "demographic," and all that? My favorite writers these days are mostly bloggers. It's turning into a mainstream form right before our eyes, but like all new forms, it has its interesting edges.

In my own writing, I try to invent a form for each book, a style for each book, a readership for each book. Each one so far had a different publisher, and that was also an aesthetic choice. It's a materialist approach, I think. I'm interested in how all the heterogeneous layers connect, how "text" is connected to design, to the marketplace, to book production and distribution, publicity, and so on.

And for me, that approach comes partly out of a reading of Deleuze and Guattari. They talk about the book not being a representation of a world outside it, but a continuation of its processes, a part of the whole. As an inky fingered wretch who came out of print production and design and so on, that made a weird kind of sense to me.

And, incidentally, it is only in America that one could lump all these things together as "postmodern theory," because that is how it was marketed here. But the way Deleuze approaches language is completely at a tangent to, say Derrida. It just makes no sense to lump them all together, other than in the most general way.

Most of the people one would be talking about (Baudrillard excepted) trained as philosophers. And for philosophy, the question of the relation of word and world is basic. It's not a fad, it's a tradition that goes back to the invention of writing. But where philosophy tends to take it up as a purely theoretical question, I was interested in this question of word and world as a media question, a question about the materiality of communication.

In the Phaedrus, Plato has Socrates wonder about whether the problem with writing is that it can be "orphaned." You can't control who will get to read what you write. In an oral culture, you can control who hears what; in a literate culture, you can't really control the circumstances of reception. And of course, that's its virtue. Writing is perhaps the first durable medium for cutting across social hierarchies.

In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin updates this thought. Unlike Plato, he is no cultural aristo. He is on the side of the people. And for him the mechanical reproduction of the image is a good thing, since it means the image can escape from ownership, from property, and create a whole new economy of sense with which to discover—and remake—the world.

So for me, those are two crucial points through a very long and involved tradition, but which is about the medium of thought, rather than just "thought" in the abstract. You could amend Kant's three principles of critical inquiry along these lines: What can I know (via media)? What should I do (about media)? For what can I hope (from media)?

MD:All right, I'll bite: Who are your favorite bloggers, and why? How are they pushing the envelope of writing—destratifying it, in Deleuzean terms (if you agree that's what they're doing)? Was Montaigne the first blogger? I wonder if you're dreaming of writing your way out of writing, by which I mean: writing in a way that tears free from the gravitational pull of the awful "writerliness" that afflicts so much writing? (The New Yorker is a case in point! Have you ever seen more self-consciously "writerly"—and I don't necessarily mean "literary"—writing?)

What nonfiction writers "write across the limits," for you? Deleuze and Guattari in Milles Plateaux? Bataille in Tears of Eros? Steven Shaviro in Doom Patrols? Donna Haraway in her "Cyborg Manifesto"? And (since, long, long ago, in a universe far, far away, you were a journalist toiling in the Fields of Murdoch) what about rock critics like Lester Bangs, or New Journalists like Wolfe or Didion, or public intellectuals like Sontag or McLuhan?

MW: One blogger I read religiously is called k-punk. He seems to be in his 30s, and teaching in the English equivalent of community college. He's probably the only person writing about music who can get really, really upset about something like the success of the Artic Monkeys, and why it is the end of civilisation as we know it. I miss that kind of committment, wherein there could be something at stake in aesthetics.

I asked him once why he doesn't write a book, and he said he doesn't have the time. But he does have the time to tear of thousands of words of blog. There's less inhibition. In that sense blogging has been quite liberating. Of course most blogs are shit. Most people did not need this technological laxative and did not need to loose the inner thought from the bowels of their minds. But when you find a good one, that very excess makes it seem even better.

k-punk is just one example for me of how this new gift economy can actually work. Someone who is not going to get a contract to write a book for Verso any time soon, but who is terrific to read in this medium, which unlike The Book inspires no fear. You just have to be better than The Huffington Post and already you're canonic.

I'm too old fashioned to embrace blogs wholeheartedly. Blogs can be more narcissistic than listserv culture (if that's possible). A blog is your property, whereas a listserv is always in-between, always in transit. So I'm not a blog booster. But I am interested in creating new circuits of meaning.

I always read and reread what I want to be influenced by. So lately I read Guy Debord's late works and film scripts. I read Adorno's Minima Moralia. I've been reading a lot of John Berger, of all things. I want to pick up certain things the "high critical" establishment regards as bastard offspring.

There was a time when I read Sontag, but not lately. I don't know who I should be reading among the current critics. I read enough Klosterman in a book store to be sure it was complete shit. I read N+1 with interest but I hate The Believer. I'm an unbeliever.

I just finished Caetano Veloso's memoir, which has to be the best book by a pop star ever. It is fairly honest but also well-observed, modest but not too falsely so. His favorite words are "delicate" and "delicious." The pop star as intellectual, but with feeling. He claims to be an irrationalist who loves reason. Delicious indeed.

"Writing one's way out of writing" seems like a good project to me. I'm interested in anti-literature: Stewart Home, Luther Blissett, Bernadette Corporation. Avant-garde mixed with trash. That's always worked for me.

But I was never in "writing" in this country, so for me there's nothing to write myself out of. I sort of come at it from outside and find readerships whereever I can, for a sort of fictional nonfiction. All my books are nonfiction, except for the fact that they're not true. But then that's one of the ways to resolve the tensions of a decadent age, in which what is real is not true, and what is true is not real...

MD: You say you "always read and re-read what [you] want to be influenced by." What are the guiltiest pleasures on your bookshelves? And I don't mean so-lame-they're-cool ironic pleasures, in the Throbbing Gristle-in-Abba-T-shirts sense. I mean tragically unhip books that you curl up inside, closing the covers behind you, when you need to flee the world, into some mental Fortess of Solitude. I'm talking painful lameness, here; the literary equivalent of Foghat. No, wait, Klosterman has made Foghat ironic-cool. How about critical theory's answer to Emerson, Lake & Palmer's Love Beach? You get my drift.

MD: Well, I did read all of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars novels: Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars. Very techie, sciency sci-fi. And of course I have a ton of books about toddlers, since I have one. And there's nothing cool about two-year-olds. Oh, and I'm addicted to Maureen Dowd—how tacky is that?

MD: On the subject of blogs, any thoughts on flickr (admittedly, not a blog, but an emergent, group-mind phenomenon, rather like Wikis)? What do you make of this tendency, on the more confessional blogs and on flickr, to extrude one's innermost self into the public sphere, like a starfish extruding its stomach? I'm baffled by the utter lack of selfconsciousness on the part of people who post their Kodachrome Moments with friends or family or who write nakedly revealing true confessions on their blogs. (I just stumbled on a blog by some random guy chronicling the slow-motion implosion of his marriage; the readership seems to consist entirely of a pack of anonymous jackals rolling their jaws at the prospect of the poor sap's impending divorce). Are we witnessing the emergence of a new mass psychology, midwifed by self-publishing and the death of privacy?

MW: Yes, it is a new kind of subjectivity, I think. In a world that oozes with pungent gushes of pure signage, people have figured out that one strategy is to ooze back. If one's work life is all about massaging other people's information, at least on myspace or flickr you can create your own tabloid story. I find it interesting, the way people cannibalize the media and extrude it as their own, sometimes in wild, unpredictable mixes.

MD: You write, "All my books are nonfiction, except for the fact that they're not true." Meaning what, exactly? As well, what (precisely) do you mean by "what is real is not true, and what is true is not real"? I'm having a Baudrillard Moment...

MW: To paraphrase Robert Crumb: An aphorism is like doo wah diddy—if you have to ask what it means, you ain't never going to get it. But one can say something about an aphorism's pedigree.

Hegel said that "the false is a moment of the true." Meaning that it is in the struggle against what it is not that the true comes into being. Debord inverted that to say: "the true is a moment of the false." Meaning that the world has been falsified by commodity and spectacle, but that something persists against it from within.

Hegel again: "The whole is the true." Meaning that it's totality that matters, how everthing connects and moves together towards its goal. But Adorno says: "The whole is the false." Meaning that the way the commodity makes everything equivalent connects everything into a totality—but a false one.

I just changed the terms a bit. "The real is not true." The signs we take to be our world have falsified it. "The true is not real." There is a possibility of the good life, but tis is not it.

In everyday speech, we just take words like "true" and "real" for granted and use them interchangeably. One of the tasks of writing is to peel words away from automatic use and then show how they could be used differently. To get a perception of the world into language you have to tweak it.

MD: Well, I find asking exactly what philosophers mean to be a highly effective way of piercing the linguistic Cloud of Unknowing that sometimes envelopes discourse. And in the case of lesser minds, it acts like a flick of the Bic to a big ball of methane. I've seen high-theory poseurs melt down spectacularly when asked the fatal question, "What, EXACTLY, do you mean by that"?

Let's use your observation that "the signs we take to be our world have falsified it" as a jumping-off point. You were at pains to point out, earlier, that your work and JB's have little in common, and I take that point, but this is such a Baudrillardian formulation that I can't resist returning to him and our abiding subject, critical theory, its popular reception, and the power politics of theoryspeak. (Don't worry, we'll get around to A Hacker Manifesto in a few terabytes, I swear!)

In an interview with First Monday magazine, you said, "My interest is in praxis—in the relationship of knowledge to action." Conservatives, and even those on the Naomi Klein/No Sweat/Battle of Seattle flank of the Left (what '60s radicals used to call the Direct Action school of sociopolitical activism), roll their eyes at what they perceive as French theorists' tendency to substitute cloud-dwelling theory for engaged critique, the sign for the thing. JB's preferred mode, the oracular pronouncement, epitomizes this sensibility in its Olympian omniscience, its arched-eyebrow aloofness, its airy insistence that Everything You Know is Wrong and There is No Fixed and Final Truth (except the ones I, and I alone, am about to reveal).

Here's an apposite quote from The Observer:

"But the French love affair with words has its drawbacks. A Swiss journalist friend spoke of the 'logorrhoea' of the French, which is unfair, but does indicate the degree to which words are favored over action. There is a strong sense that if the ideas are there, and expressed in the right words, then actions are superfluous. So, during the riots of last year, which pitted angry, unemployed, alienated, disenfranchised youth from ethnic minorities against not angry, employed, fully franchised white policemen, the refrain 'the Republic is not racist' was everywhere. This was true: the principles of the French Republic are inspiring, the institutions are impartial, the laws are stunning in the simple elegance of their justice. But there is liberte, egalite, fraternite and there is realite. As another French friend commented: 'We are interested in pourquoi (why), the Anglo-Saxons are interested in comment (how).'"

Yes, conservative Babbitts have been rolling their eyes at pomospeak for years—"French fog," they call it—and yes, the historical subtext of English anti-Gallic jingoism is just beneath the surface, here. But I never fail to be surprised at the virulence of English and American intellectuals' contempt for JB, much of which springs from his allegedly blithe disengagement from the muck and mire of The Real. Few of them have ever gotten over JB's ironic declaration that the Gulf War never happened. I had lunch with Mike Davis and the late Mike Sprinker, both unswerving lefties, and they excoriated their then-publisher Verso for publishing Baudrillard's America, a book that many left-wing American intellectuals regard with a lip-curled revulsion usually reserved for The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. (Personally, I find the book delightful: The funniest science-fiction novel Ballard never wrote.)

Two questions: How do you square your dedication to praxis with your obvious love of high theory? And: What do you, as an Aussie Alien Among Us, make of the American reaction to JB?

MW: I really don't have much patience for any of the "camps" supposedly at war over this stuff. I don't care if high theory is alive or dead, as I never wrote in that vein in the first place. I'm not much interested in the anti-theory position either. It's usually semi-literate at best.

Within the theory world, what you mostly get is commentary. Its home is the archive. It is sometimes useful to me, but it's not what I do. I'm interested in how everyday life can yield moments of reflection, and moments of possibility.

It was clear to me in the '90s that there was a whole social movement going on around new ecologies of information. New ways of creating culture, new ways of sharing knowledge, new ways of writing or making art. The Internet made it possible, but it wasn't all that much to do with technology. It was more about new kinds of social relationship.

Issues would come up: copyright, censorship, and so on. A loose network of people formed—activists, artists, theorists. New ways of collaborating and convening were tried out. It was all very exciting. The central node for me was Nettime. It had a good mix of theory and practice, was more European than American in flavor. It was trying to extend its networks, most successfully toward the east.

So I sat down one day in a coffee shop, on a visit to Boston, I think, and tried to articulate a theory about what it was we were doing. That's the genesis of A Hacker Manifesto. I took one of the key works behind this whole movement—Debord's Society of the Spectacle—and I rewrote it. I read one of his paragraphs, then I wrote my own. Plagiarism plus correction, or what he would have called detournement.

That, to me, is low theory. Don't start in the archive, start in the street. Then ransack the archive for anything of use, and repurpose it. I don't think I was the only one who thought we were both continuing and abolishing our avant-garde longings. But there's a certain tension between the various ways you can go about it.

You can read A Hacker Manifesto alongside Geert Lovink's book Dark Fiber, which is a more post-anarchist, pragmatic approach to laying the ghosts of what Geert would call "leftism." Or put it alongside Matt Fuller's writing, or Brian Holmes's, or Faith Wilding's; I can't speak for them, but for me I thought we were doing something different to either "high theory" or leftist dogma.

MD: The inevitable, determinedly pragmatic question, and one that will doubtless brand me, in your eyes, as a hopeless vectoralist.

(Editor's note: "Vectoralist" is Wark's term, in A Hacker Manifesto, for the Third-Wave captains of industry who strive, everywhere and always, to copyright and commodify the intellectual innovations of the hacker class. Here's chapter and verse: "The vectoralist class wages an intensive struggle to dispossess hackers of their intellectual property. Patents and copyrights all end up in the hands, not of their creators, but of a vectoralist class that owns the means of realising the value of these abstractions. The vectoralist class struggles to monopolise abstraction. For the vectoral class, 'politics is about absolute control over intellectual property by means of war-like strategies of communication, control, and command.' Hackers find themselves dispossessed both individually, and as a class."—Thesis 021, A Hacker Manifesto.)

When John Perry Barlow first started televangelizing, in the early '90s, about the Death of Intellectual Property As We Know It (see "Selling Wine Without Bottles: The Economy of Mind on the Global Net"), it was never clear to me how the long-suffering hacks of the world were going to survive in a gift economy. To a one-man Chautauqua and A-list networker like Barlow, the presumption that we'd all survive by spinning ideas into gold on the lecture circuit was a no-brainer. But to those of us who had to make a living peddling piles of atoms (also known as books), the Napster-izing of publishing offered, as an alternative to corporate publishing's usurious contracts and the slave-wage purgatory of the midlist author, the end of the evolutionary line. Given the alternatives of wage slavery and species extinction, most writers would choose the former.

Thus, I'm intensely curious to hear your thoughts on this point, the very point where crypto-Marxist rhetoric meets personal financial reality for a book author such as yourself. In the promo interview archived on the Harvard University Press website, your publisher asks, "So what from your own experience led you to this book?" And you reply: "Signing contracts with publishers! I'm not kidding. I realized, as many people do, that you have very little control over the terms under which you sell the product of your own mind. The 'intellectual property' laws, which pretend to protect the interests of the creator, really protect the interests of the owner. And since most of us don't own the means of production, we don't stay owners for long." An artful dodge, but it still doesn't tell me how authors make buck in the gift economy (of the sign) you imagine. Nor did the book. Care to clarify?

MW: In medieval times, the ruling doctrine was "no land without a lord." In our neo-medieval times, it has been updated to: "no information without an owner". The dominant doctrine for "intellectual property" is now that it should all be privately owned. Against that trend the quite modest proposals of Creative Commons are treated as if they were something radical, when all Lawrence Lessig wants is something short of what the Founding Fathers created.

In that context, I wanted to go to the extreme other case. Is it possible to imagine an information commons without ownership at all? What would be the consequences? On the technical side, digital technologies separate information from its material substrate. Information never exists without a material form, but that material form can now be arbitrary. We can finally escape from scarcity, at least where information in concerned.

The two things that remain rare are, firstly, material forms wherein information can reside. I can give you the contents of my laptop at minimal cost, but the laptop itself is still worth several weeks if not months earnings for most people, even in the 'overdeveloped' world.

The other thing that is rare is the critical intelligence to sort through all this free-flowing information and discover what is really of value in it. The new information labor is not in producing "original content"—both words of which are absurd. There is no originality and no content. Rather, what really has value is selection, editing, reduction, analysis, variation, combination.

It's tempting to think that so-called "intellectual property" is on our side. But most of us don't own television networks or publishing houses. We have to sell or lease intellectual property to others—what I call the vectoralist class—owners of the means of distribution of information. Most of what we do ends up in their hands and most of the profits in their pockets.

MD: In your interview with Richard Mitchell, you explore ideas that later coalesced in A Hacker Manifesto. At one point, you refute the capitalist assignation of intellectual property to a sole creator, arguing that "creativity belongs to the people as a whole, that it's a kind of social result. [...] But its real source, it seems to me, is the dreams and desires of the people as a whole."

Now, obviously, this is so in the canonical instance of the early computer-programming community chronicled in Steven Levy's Hackers, where ideas were open-source things, freely circulated and collectively lathed into shape. Programming lends itself to group beta-testing and collaborative editing. As you've noted, A Hacker Manifesto is, likewise, a sort of shareware, deeply indebted to the Euro-lefty cybercrit listserv Nettime, where you published the source code, so to speak, of many of A Hacker Manifesto's essays, inviting critique and incorporating ideas generated by the tough-minded responses of Nettime's highly distributed network of artists, activists, and theorists. And, finally, all creativity acts are (arguably) "social results," inextricably interwoven with the author's social world and herhistorical moment. Foucault touches on this idea, in The Archaeology of Knowledge, when he writes, "The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, othersentences: it is a node within a network."

Now, hackers deal with code, and code is almost pure content. Yeah, yeah, there are elegant hacks and crufty hacks, code that accomplishes the most with the least and sloppy, buggy code that takes forever to execute the simplest task. But computer programming is math, by any other name; zeroes and ones. Highly creative? At its best, no question. Yet, chopping code is utterly unlike writing a book, where form and meaning are often indissoluble, especially in those writers whose style is their substance—who articulate their meaning in the grain of their voices, to sample Barthes. Is the open-source metaphor truly fungible across discourses?

MW: A Hacker Manifesto came out of my experience with nettime.org and other instances of what we used to call net-criticism and new media actvism. It doesn't really add much—it distills and reduces that experience. As Zizek would say, I "overidentified" with the ideology of nettime. The book is sort of a bastard child of nettime that it knows as its own but doesn't quite acknowledge. It pushed the radicalism of "information wants to be free" to the extreme.

Another longtime nettimer, Felix Stalder, has been asking this same question about how the "open source," or rather "free software" metaphor might apply to other media. There's a lot to be done to think this through, and a lot of experimenting to be done. Each medium has its own technicity, its own economy, its own culture.

Did you invent the English language? Did I? Did you make up the words you use? I did, actually. I coined some new ones—and the thing A Hacker Maniesto is most criticised for is precisely this "originality"! But mostly, writers kick around the same language as everyone else. Language which, as Baudelaire said, is the "collective genius of a people."

I think we seriously overestimate our God-like powers of creation as individual creators, and underestimate the extent to which language is always escaping from individual will, and escaping from regimes of property. It is by definition collective, a commons.

And as for style: it's just a question of editing differently. Of leaving different things out. As Oscar Wilde said, "every artist has their limitations. Those limitations are called style."

MD: Aren't you fudging the (in my opinion vast) difference between creative works spawned in the social ecology of a listserv or a blog, such as A Hacker Manifesto, and works written in the monastic isolation of the library cubicle? Clearly, you prefer work that springs from, and speaks to, the street, rather than work that stinks of the lamp ("the archive"). That's your Inner Debord talking (not to mention your Inner William Gibson!), I think. Regardless, isn't there a world of difference between a work whose "creativity belongs to the people as a whole" because it's the "social result" of a networked community of minds, versus a work that is only a "social result" in the sense that the author bears the stamp of his society and his times and breathes the same media air you and I breathe? To be sure, all creativity is indebted to the culture around it, and to the historical continuum in which it sits; hyperlinked media have made this truer than ever. But I question your assumption that all creativity is equally a "result" (in what way?) of the "social" (which is what?), an a priori that elides the difference between a book forged in dialectical smackdowns on a listserv and one borne of conversations carried on, in the writer's mind, with the ghosts of "the archive."

The subliminal subtext, here, is my abiding suspicion of our era's (ironically post-Marxist) fetish for collectivist paradigms—flickr, friendster, folksonomies, Wikis, del.icio.us—and the "wisdom of crowds." Given your earlier comments that "most blogs are shit" and "most people did not need this technological laxative and did not need to loose the inner thought from the bowels of their minds," I would imagine you'd share some of that suspicion. Or do you? I wonder how you reconcile your obvious faith in social ecologies and gift economies with your no less obvious doubts about the inherent wisdom of the wired million. On which note, any thoughts on James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations?

MW: Well, unlike Surowiecki, I'm still on the side of the philosophers, who have maintained for millenia now that even a smart crowd can be wrong. There are criteria for what constitutes the good, there is an aesthetics, an ethics and an epistemology, other than what the market decides. It's a good thing that the general intellect is coming into being and into an awareness of itself, but it is not the same thing as the market.

Unlike most journalists who have covered it, I think the supposed scandals about wikipedia prove that it is working very well. Malicious information on it gets exposed and corrected. It works. But only because it is developing its own hierarchies. It's a system for producing hierarchies of authority from the bottom up. People who make a gift of their knowledge and do it ethically end up with the respect of the community and the authority to decide on knowledge. In that respect wikipedia is not unlike collaborative "open source" programming. These things are not "anything goes." They produce their own criteria as they go. They are, in short, philosophy in action.

Marx said that "the philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point however is to change it." In a way he anticipates exactly how this could come to pass without realizing it. Famously, when he was exiled in London, he used the resources of the libtary of the British Museum, a fairly unique "open access" source of knowledge—the wikipedia of its day. What he didn't realize was that this was the commons that was achievable—the commons of information. In which we can all be philosophers.

MD: You said:

The other thing that is rare is the critical intelligence to sort through all this free flowing information and discover what is really of value in it. The new information labor is not in producing "original content"—both words of which are absurd. There is no originality and no content. Rather, what really has value is selection, editing, reduction, analysis, variation, combination.

Are you saying, then, that critique has displaced the object of critique? That the only "value added" (corporatespeak hacked!), in our age of data shock, is generated by those—suspiciously like ourselves,
Ken (insert emoticon grin)—who can Explain It All For You? This, of course, is a commonplace among new-media wonks who believe that reality editing, winnowing out the signals from the noise for us, is a growth industry. But I'm surprised to hear you say this, since just a few years back, you wrote, in a Nettime post, "Let's be blunt: I think criticism is useless. Finished. And a bad idea in the first place. [...] No longer able to ground itself in any one secure vantage point, from which to see everything as other, as a false double or copy of the true, criticism has become free-floating, relative, pervasive. It is everywhere and no where. It's the nagging, self-defeating echo of every attempt to make something happen." Of course, this was largely a spasm of pique at that species of academic Stalinism that wants to line wrong-thinkers up against a wall. Still, it seems to indict deconstruction per se, and therefore strikes an odd dissonance with your current belief that critical intelligence is our last, best hope.

Then, too, aren't the objects and ideas generated by your recombinant culture of rip, mix, and burn "original"? Pardon my semantic headbanging, but as every student of modernist (and postmodernist) avant-gardism knows, the keystone assumption of the last century, and this one, is that suturing together fragments of unoriginal content—say, a bicycle wheel and a stool (Duchamp) or a stuffed goat and a tire (Rauschenberg)—yields something rich and strange...and new. As in: original. In other words, can't content—even critique—created through "selection, editing, reduction, analysis, variation, [and] combination" be original?

MW: There's still new information to be made, but it shrinks in proportion to the act of recombination. The postmodernists were right, in other words, but underestimated how profound their discovery was. But new information is till being made in the sciences, and sometimes even in poetry (understood very broadly). "New" information is a very strange concept, however, and I wouldn't pretend to understand it. The science of information isn't much help, vaulable as it is, because it is mostly about measuring the stuff. It has little to say about what it is.

"Originality" is mostly a matter of playing out the possibilities of existing codes, however. If I roll a a pair of dice and it comes up snake-eyes, did I "originate" this result, or is it is a product of the combinatory possibilities of the dice? If I choose lines from George Perec's "20 Billion Sonnets," did I write it, or did he? After all, he wrote all the lines, but there are so many combinatorial possibilities that it's unlikely he ever actually put the same lines together.

Or try this thought experiment: let's say I created an absolutely original work of art, and I presented it to you. Would you even know it exists? After all, it would have no familiar elements at all—and do we not always recognise the "original" element through their contrast with familiar ones? In short, originality is much more troubling than the romantic theory or its everyday declension would have us believe.

Mark Dery: I'm still chewing on your distinction between the new and the truly original, a distinction that underwrites your earlier assertion that "there is no originality." Help me reconcile that notion with your rather Romantic vision, in A Hacker Manifesto, of "new things" sprung from the hacker brow: Whatever code we hack, be it programming language, poetic language, math or music, curves or colourings, we create the possibility of new things entering the world. [Italics mine.] Not always great things, or even good things, but new things. In art, in science, in philosophy and culture, in any production of knowledge where data can be gathered, where information can be extracted from it, and where in that information new possibilities for the world are produced, there are hackers hacking the new out of the old."

McKenzie Wark: It is perhaps an attempt rather to rethink the modern via the classical, and bypass the romantic and the postmodern. A classical aesthetic is all about mimesis, about the copying of an ideal form. A modern aesthetic is all about overturning one form and replacing it with another. But rather than a romantic modernism, which privileges the unique subjectivity of the artist as the source of the difference, I think rather that the new appears as an effect of coping, but that copying is not mimetic. The paradox of plagiarism is that it produces a difference, it makes things new.

So there may be new things but they can't be "originated." You can't pin down a place, a time and an author wherein the new enters the world. Or in other words, creation can't be represented. And if it can't be represented, any claim to own a piece of it is false. So my argument against so-called "intellectual property" is essentially ontological. It is contrary to the very nature of information to claim to have "originated" a piece of it. Information just varies and elaborates on itself, using us as its intrument.

And I think it should be left to its own devices. As Deleuze and Guattari write: "what if we have not become abstract enough?" We haven't seen anything yet. We bought a one-way ticket on this roller coaster called modernity and there's no going back. "All that is solid melts into air, all that is sacred is profaned." I think the dominant tendency in leftist discourse now is conservative, even reactionary. It fetishises roots. It is romantic in its privileging of national cultures. The best strategy it can come up with is "resistance." It gives up on thinking synthetically and gives in to particular demands, demands which cannot be aggregated in any way, not even in new ways.

So I wanted to affirm a creative, synthetic, and in some senses "modern" view of the world. but one shorn of the romantic cult of genius and the individual.

MD: As long as we're talking about the new, let's talk about the New World. I'm interested in your vision of America, critiques of which are very much in the air these days: Bernard Henri-Levy's excoriating "Letter to the American Left," published in The Nation, has called down the predictable wrath of the Nation faithful, one of whom reviled the designer de Tocqueville as a "French buffoon in an expensive suit" hissing "vacuous, masturbatory hot air." Time and again, in your writing, you view our Evil Empire from the bemused, gently sardonic, and sometimes perversely affectionate perspective of an Outsider, specifically, through the eyes of Our Man from the Antipodes. To be Australian is to be far from everywhere, to an American. (Your review of Peter Beilharz's book, Imagining the Antipodes, is a motherlode of insights into this subject.) In an exchange with the post-colonial theorist Coco Fusco, on the Netcriticism listserv Nettime, you responded to one of her hectoring posts with a razor-sharp post that, for me, is a veritable psychoanalysis of American pathologies, writ small:

Dear Coco......Unfortunately, we cannot always determine how others regard us. You may want to present yourself as a CUBAN-America, but i hear a Cuban-AMERICAN. You presume to tell someone from another culture how to regard their own culture, just like an American. You presume a moral authority grounded in the purity of an interiority that looks out at the world, just like an American. You adopted the adversarial style of e-mail discourse, just like an American. You privilege the subject as a node of moral autonomy--just like an American.
To me your discourse really is a hybrid, a mix of privilege, wounded pride, genuine anger, rhetorical violence. To you it is node of superiority from which you can correct the failings of the other. Well, to each [his] own hell of misrecognition!
I'm glad you mention my home country, Australia. It is precisely through the experience of the struggles against racism and the attempt to think them through in the Australian context that i came to reject the imperial pretensions of a certain kind of transnational postcolonial discourse.

Talk about your sense of yourself as an Australian, and how America looks from that perspective. Since Baudrillard has been the absent presence haunting our discussion, I'll evoke him again: I've always gotten the impression that, as he views New York, so you view America, as "a world completely rotten with wealth, power, senility, indifference, Puritanism and mental hygiene, poverty and waste, technological futility and aimless violence." At the same time, you seem to echo his coda to that statement, from America: "...and yet I cannot help but feel it has about it something of the dawning of the universe."

How important is the United States—as geopolitical actor, simulcra factory, or its own wish-fulfillment projection—to you, as a philosopher with one foot in the political?

MW: I love America. I know one is not supposed to say it, but there it is. I love America. That is why I write about it. I'm not entirely out of sympathy with Richard Rorty's book Achieving Our Country, the title of which really sums up the struggle, it seems to me. Rorty speaks up for the "old left" and its values. He is anchored in Whitman—and it was Whitman's Specimen Days that I chose as the book to bring with me when I emigrated here. I remember holding it in my hands when the immigration officer stamped my visa in my passport when I came in via Canada. He said something like: "Welcome to America. If you have come here under false pretenses you should know that we will hunt you down and prosecute you to the full extent of the law!" It was like something out of Kafka.

So one ends up attempting to love a country that doesn't love you back. Which doesn't love anyone. Least of all those thousands of Delphi car parts workers who are just about to get the sack, and get hired back at subsistence wages, without pensions or benefits. America (the state) no longer belongs to Americans (the people). It's a government without the people, against the people and for another people. It's been hollowed out, and its carcass now prosecutes the interests of a new global ruling class. It's exactly as John Carpenter imagined it in his amazing movie They Live.

I call this "latent destiny." If manifest destiny was the right to rule through virtue alone; latent destiny is the virtue of rule through right alone. Or in other words, we are living in a decadent time—and of course the Christian right's mania for moral purity is a leading sign of this decadence.

Americans are a defeated people. They just refuse to realize it. And that's their charm. There's something honorable in this complete refusal to confront one's fate. To just carry on talking about Paris Hilton and Hilary Clinton as if nothing was happening. It's a moving spectacle.

Australians think they know America, but of course we don't really. It's a privileged way to be an immigrant. We speak your language pretty fluently but you don't speak ours. We can almost "pass." Not as well as Canadians. but perhaps we have a little more critical "distance" from which to see this new "'undemocratic vista."

It's a dangerous time. Power is shifting back to the East, and the brief heyday of the West is drawing to a close. The United States is becoming the Untied States. It's armed to the teeth and being used essentially as the base for a mercenary force with no loyalties to anyone. And as we know from Macchiavelli, when the state relies on mercenaries, we're in trouble.

But then there's this extraordinary people with their amazing culture, which unlike any European culture you can name, thrives in spite of, rather than because of, attention by the state. And has always done so.

Incidentally, the best texts on the antipodean approach to America, with all its insights, resentiments, misunderstandings, is for me in the novels of Chris Krauss, particularly the new one, Torpor, but also I Love Dick and Aliens & Anorexia. For me, she nails it.

MD: I'd like to use as foils a line or two from some of the reviews of A Hacker Manifesto. In his Nation review of the book, Terry Eagleton calls it "a perceptive, provocative study, packed to the seams with acute analysis." But he also touches on a subject dear to my heart—a recurrent theme in this interview—namely, the politics of language. Eagleton writes, "It is true that one's faith in the nuanced nature of [Wark's] judgments is somewhat undermined by statements like 'education is slavery' or 'all representation is false.' There is an audible clashing of genres here, as the scrupulous academic in Wark does battle with the flamboyant polemicist, New School University meets the Left Bank. On the whole, Wark is at his best when he is not trying to sound like Gilles Deleuze. But then, who is not?" Themes we've touched on, here, bob to the surface in Eagleton's review: the culture clash between French intellectuals and Anglo/American ones and, more interesting, the political costs of The Philosophical Voice. Eagleton implies a (false?) binary of cloud-dwelling French theory and streetwise Anglophone praxis, to use your preferred term—of philosophy, on the one hand, and engaged critique on the other. I'll tip my hand: I've always preferred the Wark of the pithy, sharp-witted, lightly ironic broadside, the public intellectual broadcasting to me, live, from the corner Starbucks. I'm thinking of pieces like "The Lost Art of the Caffeinist," "Post modern pair: what jeans mean is now more important than what they are," and, forever and always, your incomparable Netletters, most notably Netletter #1: English and Netlish, Netletter #2: Is Meme a Bad Meme?, and Netletter #8: Critiquing Net Criticism.

I'll be honest: I'm one of those hopelessly obtuse, follow-the-bouncing ball readers who succumbed to a sort of ontological vertigo while reading A Hacker Manifesto. The near-total absence of illustrative examples, of concrete evidence, of specific historical points of reference results, makes me dizzy. I can't feel the intellectual ground under my feet. For me (and for a few other critics, I've noted), to read A Hacker Manifesto is to wander lost in a fog bank of generalizations and abstractions. Obviously, this is the Way of All Philosophy, and it has its pleasures and its rewards. Still, I can't help but hear echoes in this voice, which insists that the reader accept on faith generalizations unmoored from specific examples and arguments unsupported by specific evidence, the very "imperial pretensions" you reject in "a certain kind of transnational postcolonial discourse." It's far from the street, to be sure. I'm not accusing *you* of "imperial pretensions," because I believe you see the Philosophical Voice from a radical perspective committed to engagement with our moment. Which is why I'd like to challenge you to think, here, about the costs—and benefits—of the rhetorical voice you employ in A Hacker Manifesto, versus the public-intellectual voice you've used in your pop broadsides, such as the Netletters. What are the costs? What are the benefits?

MW: I'm very thankful to have been reviewed by Terry Eagleton. An irony here is that if there's a prose style I was copying when I wrote it then it was the Eagleton of The Function of Criticism, although that is a book i think he may these days disavow.

I don't see it as a flaw, necessarily, that there are different kinds of statements in the text that aren't reductible to the same genre. I was quite consciously pushing my own writing abilities to the breaking point. Would there be any point in doing otherwise?

One has to think about what the book is supposed to do, in the age of the Internet. Most books I read thesedays seem to be just a bunch of articles bound together, and I don't really see the point of that. A book has to produce its own milieu, its own consistency.

But this is a big problem for modern thought: form hasn't caught up to content. We know how to write sentences that express new ideas, but paragraphs? chapters? That's much harder. The larger forms elude us. So for me a question was: what do you have to do to the form of a sentence or a chapter to bring things together as a book? If there's a deformation of the sentence, that's why.

Books can circulate in a different rhythm to articles, and via different networks. I don't think the articles of mine you mention were really built to last. A second reading doesn't yield more than a first reading. I still get new things out of reading A Hacker Manifesto. It's like real chocolate compared to Hershey's; you don't want to consume it all at once.

It was also made to be translated. That's why, unusually for a book in English, the language is highly latinate. The exception is the term "hacker," which is a good old Saxon word that I wanted to put into trans-European circulation in a different way. The book is coming out in eight languages. I have no idea what the Korean or Japanese will read like, but in French, German, Italian, Spanish, even Croatian, you can see how the text is made of words with much the same roots. A more "Saxon" or everyday English doesn't work like that.

There's an old argument here: the difference between political writing and writing politically. In this case, I chose the latter. It might be closer to the poetry of a Bruce Andrews or a Drew Milne than to, say, Naomi Klein. The funny thing is, this book has been remarkably popular. If it's so "difficult," i'd like to know wyt it's selling so well.

Since the first review of the Spanish edition just came out, i've been thinking that A Hacker Manifesto was an attempt to write textual DNA rather than RNA. It's not a text, its a code for making texts (DNA). There's a separate step for turning it into texts (RNA). That's done by reviewers. As a writer of books, you can encode it for the reviewers to decode and expand out into 'useful proteins' in their own context. Of course if you make reviewers actually do some work, they complain that your book is too hard, and if you don't make them work they complain that your book is too easy.

It might not be a book for everybody but it is for anybody. One reviewer on Amazon complained that it is "encrypted." And indeed it is. And the key to decrypt it is in it. You just have to read with a bit of attention.

I do promise that the next book, Gamer Theory, will be more fun. But not without what you call "ontological vertigo".I'm too old to take drugs, but I still want to read—and write—a good literary high. It does have "examples," although why anyone with a passing acquaintance with logic would trust examples is beyond me.

Isn't this the whole problem with, say, Malcolm Gladwell? Terrific descriptions of examples, but we leap straight to the concept and bypass the case. Spot the dog has three legs, therefore all dogs have three legs. It's what Eco called 'abduction' (as opposed to induction ordeduction). A promiscuous leap from example to concept or vice versa.

I would rather show how one concept is related to another concept, and another. Once you have a constellation of concepts in place, then you can see how it relates to the world.

Posted by Mark Dery at 08:23 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

January 20, 2006

Spam Lit

If only Tristan Tzara had lived to read spambot subject lines, some boiler-room hacker's idea of a foolproof strategy for bluffing your way past spam-killer defenses. "Be godparent or osteology," admonishes today's first hunk of junk mail, a Dadaist ultimatum if ever there was one. What mental-ward wisdom hides in this love-it-or-leave-it, my-way-or-the-highway dualism? Does it mean: If you're not part of a social network, bound by family ties, you've got one foot in the boneyard? "Riddle and barbecue," another spam subject line advises, sounding like a '50s cookbook for patio Daddy-o's who want to be the life of the garden party, even while grilling. "Ragweed conjunct Sherlocke," reads another, cryptically. A reference to Conan Doyle's mythical detective? If so, why ye olde terminal "e"?

Intriguingly, this last one makes use of the market-tested alt.music formula of stringing together three unrelated words to generate a record title or bandname guaranteed to inspire hours of beer-bong explication de texte, as in Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot or The Butthole Surfers' Locust Abortion Technician or Independent Worm Saloon or the Mother of Them All, Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica. Do spambot programmers in offshore sweatshops have a secret sweet spot for the Captain? Or is there a neurocognitive reason for our requirement that three's the magic number when it comes to dream-logic word games? I've archived mails with Beefheartian subject lines such as "biracial Auerbach crankshaft," "boil longleg Kant" (those of us with little patience for the bewigged old dear couldn't agree more) and the painful-sounding "hardwood pancreatic departure," whose message begins on an exuberant note ("cowpony joyful plexiglas biz") but ends, dejectedly, "casino tulane cattlemen denebola colorado skim cried allegro discernible florican abbas binaural cathedral brace."

By contrast, there are sweetly elegiac subject lines, such as "Bette, in daydream epoch." Read with a little poetic license, this spam subject line evokes with admirable economy the image of big-eyed Bette Davis in mid-reverie, lost in the ever-expanding moment of a sudden, Proustian recollection. No idea what to make of the paragraph tacked onto the end of this mail, a bit of free-associated absurdism—and a further attempt to defeat spam-sniffing programs—that rivals anything written by the Language poet Jackson MacLow:

with a squint who had no other merit than smelling like a stanhope coneflower
has increased upon him since I first came here He is often very nervous or I fancy so It is not fancy

Much ink has been shed about the irretrievable loss of gigabytes of writerly correspondence, now that we live in the Age of the Recycle Bin, when time is the scarcest commodity and spam overgrows our Inboxes like so much kudzu. Literary scholars mourn the passing of the letter as a literary art form, and note what a loss it would have been had, say, Robert Browning vaporized his wife Elizabeth Barrett's overheated e-mails with a single, irrevocable mouseclick.

Perhaps. But they're missing the riches under their noses, the inexhaustible fund of literary innovation and mass-psychological free association that is spam. An MRI of the mass mind, spam at its best gives voice to the dream life of consumer culture, and gives the Dadaists and the Burroughsian cut-up squad a run for their money when it comes to machine-age avant-gardism.

(Why not a Turing test for experimental lit? Who will code the first Deep Blue to win the prestigious $40,000 Griffin Poetry Prize, awarded in 2002 to the experimental poet Christian Bok for his Eunoia, a collection of poems in which each chapter is composed entirely of words of a single vowel.)

And speaking of Dadaists, if Marcel Duchamp had lived to read spam, the man who nonchalantly proclaimed snowshovels and hatracks "found" sculptures would surely have edited a Library of America anthology of spam, the signature genre of our times (not to mention our only truly new literary form, one written increasingly by machines). Printed, as always, on acid-free paper and set in Galliard type, bound in the finest binding cloth, and topped off with a ribbon marker, the better to mark memorable passages, such a volume would be grist for a million dissertation mills:

automat see ammonia try petrifaction in capistrano be mosaic!
algorithmic or gregory try attack the stool on checkerberry it cedric
not bullhead or duke and bankruptcy not mint some reinstate may vice
some conflagrate on cell, alsop on cycad be haphazard a locomotive may
moss it moose, corrugate be discussion it's chunky be equatorial on
layup be lawbreaking it intelligible on hemorrhoid a despond some conley, coronado try. Not, go here

martini it metabolite it andrei a angeles but roustabout in betony in resignation in anxiety, dreamboat and progress may conspire on offsetting a khan the reptile see petrify in forsake it grizzly not monkeyflower! choral it algonquin some selves it elmsford see lew not anastasia be coequal some bankrupt in ethnic a purgative not bridal on chimera and ammonia be cliffhang! began or kickback be amalgam or tycoon! Not, go here

Posted by Mark Dery at 10:45 AM | Comments (23) | TrackBack

January 07, 2006

Vinyl Fetish: "Scary Cute" in I.D. Magazine

Can "pop"-ness be quantified? Is there a quality, inherent in the shiniest, rubberiest, squeakiest, squeeziest expressions of disposable culture, that can be distilled into pure essence of pop? If so, what is it? A product's giddy embrace of its instant obsolescence? An earnest attempt at mass appeal that stumbles unwittingly into kitsch or camp or brain-scalding weirdness? An unselfconscious delight in its wiles, counterweighted by a slyly self-mocking awareness of just how unconvincing its seductions are? All of the above? Where's Andy Warhol when we need him to Explain It All For Us with one of his brilliantly vapid aphorisms?

Kaiju toys, which I recently discovered while researching "Scary Cute," my November 2005 I.D. magazine article about Japanese designer toys, are the coagulated essence of Japanese pop culture. Manufactured by companies such as Bandai and Toho, these collectible vinyl figurines are based on characters from the Japanese monster movies whose heyday was the late '50s and '60s, when tyrant lizards with conspicuous zippers ruled the earth (or, at least, the onscreen dream life of a nation trying to exorcize the post-traumatic specters of Hiroshima and Nagasaki). As well, they draw on Japanese ghost stories and folktales.

Now, a feverish, mostly adult U.S. fandom is paying astronomical prices for these toys, bidding them into the stratosphere on eBay or buying them from retailers such as Toy Tokyo and Giant Robot.

I don't delve very deeply into the kaiju subset of vinyl-toy fetishism in my sprawling I.D. article, whose keyhole view of the vinyl toy subculture focuses on Western artists' inspired glosses of Japanese toys, many of which were, in turn, loving knockoffs of Western pop-culture icons such as G.I. Joe, Playmobil figurines, '70s cereal-box characters, and Big Daddy Roth's hot-rodding Rat Fink.

A Herculean effort, the article damn near killed me. I interviewed a cast of thousands, including Frank Kozik, Tim Biskup of Gama-Go fame, Nathan "World of Pain" Jurevicius, Pete Fowler (known for his Monsterism toys), and Japanese designers such as Devilrobots, Touma, Mori Chack, and Junko Mizuno.

Here's a teaser:

Japanese designer-toy artists continue to draw inspiration from the clash between Japan's Blade Runner present and its venerable traditions, producing work that marries traditional values such as the delicate balance of opposites (as in the kowaii/kawaii, or "creepy/cute," aesthetic) to a postmodern love of ironic (yet affectionate) quotation. Some, such as Touma, Mori Chack, and Junko Mizuno, take the cuddly-sinister aesthetic to new extremes, adding the frisson of punk-rock aggro. A Japop synthesis of kiddie culture, irradiated deformity, and simmering hostility, their work mocks the suffocating cuteness of much Japanese commercial culture. Touma's scowling, growling KnuckleBears cross Winnie-the-Pooh with the Terminator. Mori Chack's Gloomy Bear is warm and fuzzy yet red in tooth and claw, accidentally bear-hugging its child owners to death (or so goes the "character explanation" on the packaging). Junko Mizuno's Miznotic Fantasy dolls reincarnate in PVC the moist-eyed waifs in her ero-guru ("erotic-grotesque") manga—baby-faced women who gnaw on bloody bones or gambol naked with decomposing cadavers, exorcizing the petite, sweet-faced Mizuno's frustration at being treated like a doll.

My valentine to the rubbery seductions of kaiju figurines will have to wait for another day. In the meantime, here's a gallery of these weird little totems, whose overripe colors and glossy vinyl skins are so luscious—so visually tactile—that you want to caress them, maybe even consume them, with your gaze.

A feast for the eyes...

Posted by Mark Dery at 12:04 PM | Comments (22) | TrackBack

October 28, 2005

Axles of Evil

What with pound-of-flesh gas prices; Bush's tax incentive to stimulate SUV sales, unbelievably; an anti-terrorist driving school offering tips on high-impact ramming techniques and high-speed evasive maneuvers for dealing with death-racing terrorists (or just garden-variety road ragers); and the cheese monkeys' recent eco-vigilantism against our gas-slurping behemoths, my 2004 essay on the relationship between America's love affair with monster cars and its oil-dependent foreign policy seems more relevant than ever...

(This is the extended dance remix of an essay that appeared, in shorter, substantively different form, as "Axles of Evil" in the fall/winter '04-'05 issue of Vogues Hommes. I later revised and expanded it for a lecture I gave in Mexico City. This is yet another version of it. And why not? If Raymond Chandler didn't blush at "cannibalizing" his work, as he called it, why should we lesser mortals? — M.D.)

Go ahead, indulge yourself. Give in to the guilt-free nastiness of hating someone or something that richly deserves it. It's one of life's little pleasures. WordSpy.com calls it "hathos," the journalist Alex Heard's term for the giddy headrush we get—equal parts hate and happiness, laced with pathos and bathos—from hating things we love to hate.

For conservatives, that means Janeane Garofalo, PETA, Michael Moore, the ACLU, scent-free "womyn-friendly spaces," and group hugs. For liberals (whose godless legions include this writer), it means the Fratboy-in-Chief, "El Rushbo" (Limbaugh), the NRA, Anne Coulter, bible-belt troglodytes like the "10 Commandments Judge" Roy Moore (the Alabama Chief Justice who displayed God's Laws in his courthouse, in defiance of federal law), meatheads who do that fist-pumping U.S. Marine "Huah!" thing and, always and everywhere, the SUV and other so-called "light trucks." (The light-truck classification enables manufacturers to drive SUVs through a regulatory loophole, deftly evading fuel-economy regulations and many emissions rules).

Sure, fulminating against SUVs, Hummers, and other members of the Axles of Evil is like shooting fish in a barrel. Still, for many, these four-wheeled behemoths are just too obvious a target to ignore. Satisfying, too: The pure, uncut hathos of a good Two Minutes Hate directed at SUVs and the people who love them is Crack Rock for the Liberal Soul. Tim Robbins, Earth First!, and the shoot-your-TV gang over at Adbusters magazine couldn't have dreamed up a better bull's-eye for greenie spleen.

And there's spleen to burn, in the post-9/11, post-New Orleans, mid-Iraq United States. The culture wars are threatening to escalate into a blood feud. Partisan rancor and ideological bitterness have given rise to what the Pew Research Center described, in a 2004 study, as a political landscape split by "rising political polarization and anger," a nation "almost evenly divided politically—yet further apart than ever in its political values."

In such a supercharged atmosphere, people and things that catch the media eye often become semiotic attractors, accumulating meaning in the eyes of defenders and detractors alike. This is especially true of the car, a potent symbol in the American mind since the postwar economic boom of the '50s, when easy credit made the dream of car ownership a reality for middle-class consumers. The Interstate Highway Act of 1956 helped midwife the birth of suburbia, giving us the Auto America we know and love.

Of course, our veneration of the car as a household deity and our eagerness to raze whole neighborhoods (provided they were poor) in our alabaster cities and pave our fruited plains to make way for its asphalt temple, the highway, has earned us the blessings of smog, deforestation, and the cultural kudzu known as sprawl.

Nonetheless, the American obsession with cars—the bigger and badder the better—continues, seemingly unchecked by soaring gas prices and a moribund economy. According to a May, 2004 USA Today story, SUVs accounted for 30 percent of the new vehicles sold in 2004, a 3 percent jump from 2003, and sales of the biggest SUVs climbed by more than 10 percent in the first four months of 2004. And why the hell not? Driving Detroit's answer to a Tyrant Lizard from the Late Cretaceous is every American's god-given right, goddamit, second only to the right to hunt deer with armor-piercing rounds or to make a mockery of Old Europe by repackaging her culture, American style. Triscuit® Bruschetta, anyone? Slim-Fast® Cappuccino Delight Shake? Now tell those cheese-eating surrender monkeys to get the hell out of the global fast lane, before they end up in The Road Kill Cookbook.

Then again, the daily death march that is each morning's news—the horror stories, live from Iraq, of Army humvees or civilian SUVs ripped apart by rocket-propelled grenades or improvised explosive devices—has ratcheted up the hostilities between the pro- and anti-SUV factions. When the family friendly light truck first lumbered onto the cultural landscape (the debut of the Jeep Cherokee, in 1983, is as good a starting point as any), critics saw them as muscle cars on steroids, the embodiment of yuppie materialism and hard-bodied masculinity in the age of Rambo, Robocop, and Reagan. To bomb-the-suburbs punks and slackers, soccer mom-mobiles such as the Chrysler minivan (which also rolled out in '83) were symbols of Stepfordian conformity: in his novel Snow Crash, the cyberpunk writer Neil Stephenson derided them as "bimbo boxes."

Now, in post-traumatic America, where we live our lives on orange alert, we take our big cars seriously. If we are what we drive, big cars such as SUVs and Hummers are the embodiment of all that is right or wrong with this country, in the mass imagination. To its devotees, the SUV is a "safe room" on wheels, a bunker with beverage holders. "Sometimes the road ahead is paved with anything but good intentions," warns an ad for the Jeep Grand Cherokee—a tagline with an unintentionally (?) ominous subtext at a time when grotesque images of four American military contractors, dragged from their burning SUV and torn to pieces by exultant Iraqis in Fallujah, replay themselves in American nightmares.

In his book High and Mighty—SUVs: The World's Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way, Keith Bradsher quotes Clotaire Rapaille, a psychologist whose work with car-owner focus groups has led him to believe that the American fear of violent crime is an important factor in the psychology of big-car appeal: "People buy SUVs, he tells auto executives, because they are trying to look as menacing as possible to allay their fears of crime and other violence." Marshall McLuhan's observation, in Understanding Media (1964), that "the car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man," is truer than ever in locked-down, wartime America. All phallic power on the outside, reassuringly womblike on the inside, SUVs are armored cocoons for an Age of Anxiety.

To some, though, the road ahead still looks like the "thoroughfare for freedom beat/ across the wilderness" evoked in "America the Beautiful." In this light, that Jeep Liberty or that Ford Escape you're driving is the incarnation of the pioneer spirit, the freethinking individualism that made this country great (or so the story goes). Screw the tree-huggers and their Al Gore-in-a-hairshirt jeremiads about hydrofluorocarbons! We're revving up our Chevy Trailblazers and our Ford Explorers and our Nissan Pathfinders and we're lighting out for the territories. And if we run out of road, we'll make our own.

"Refaced" billboard.

John Bruno, Jr., manager of Hummer of Manhattan, knows a bit about the mythic appeal of big cars. "People just love this truck; it's really uniquely American," he says, driving me around New York City in a hulking 2004 Hummer H2. He's sold it to all types, he notes, but "the target demographic was successful achievers, entrepreneurs, rugged individualists, outdoorsy people, executives who've made it for themselves and want to make a statement about it." Intriguingly, Bruno claims that some of his buyers are veterans of the war in Iraq who "want to buy [Hummers] just to keep identifying with the car."

For others, of course, monster trucks like the Hummer are rough beasts slouching, at 10 miles per gallon, toward Bethlehem—poster cars for American Empire at its most nasty, brutish, and supersized. Bruno knows this better than most: He's friends with the owner of Clippinger Chevrolet, the West Covina, California Hummer dealership that was fire-bombed in August, 2003 by the Earth Liberation Front, a decentralized group of guerrilla environmentalists who espouse guerrilla warfare. The inferno reduced 20 Hummer H2s to blackened carcasses and damaged another 20. Some of them flaunted mocking slogans, such as "I'm a greedy little pig" and "I love pollution" and "Fat lazy Americans." Ironically, says Bruno, the toxic fumes belched out by the burning Hummers "was some ridiculous amount of times more than any of those cars ever would have made if they'd burned gas for 200,000 miles every day for the next five years," an assertion more or less confirmed by West Covina Fire Chief Richard Greene, in an LA Weekly story about the attack.

Fire-bombed SUV, Clippinger Chevrolet. AP photo.

Obviously, torching 20 Hummers in defense of Mother Earth and unleashing 20 lifetimes' worth of toxic spew in the process wins the Homer Simpson Hole-in-the-Forehead Award. Even so, the ELF's ritual sacrifice of these battle-ready gas-guzzlers is just the Unabomber version of a riptide of rage that is churning beneath the surface of American society. A significant number of Americans is infuriated by what they see as the rogue-state lunacy of the war in Iraq and the crony capitalism and anti-environmentalism of an administration run, in their eyes, by draft-dodging hawks, corporate kleptocrats, and a president widely perceived to be dumb as a bag of hammers ("Nobody would ever enroll him in a quiz show," conceded David Frum, Dubya's former speechwriter).

These are the people who look at the big, black SUV, its tinted windows inscrutable as Darth Vader's faceplate, and see the hated symbol of an evil empire. They ponder its gas-hogging fuel inefficiency and reflect on the swinish selfishness of a nation that, as Bradsher notes in High and Mighty, "has 5 percent of the world's population, but produces nearly a third of all greenhouse gases from automobiles." They think about the my-way-or-the-highway arrogance inherent in SUV design—the way their Brontosaurian bulks cut off other drivers' sightlines; the way their Xenon headlights flood the cabins of smaller cars, turning rear-view mirrors into eye-frying spotlights; the way their drivers can't see the Camry they just forced off the road, exploding into a fireball, because they've got more blind spots than a glaucoma convention. To some, the SUV is a living parable about the menace to global society posed by our go-it-alone "exceptionalism," here in what Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz likes to call the New American Century. They mull over the grim statistic that SUVs, because they ride high and typically have stiff fronts, without protective crumple zones, are nearly three times as likely as ordinary cars to kill the other driver in a crash, a fact that accounts for 1,000 needless deaths annually.

Thinking on these things, they divine in the SUV a bleak fable for our age. It's a fable about the apocalyptic threat of a rogue superpower that brakes for no one. Were the exploding Hummers in West Covina a harbinger of Days of Rage that will rip apart a nation "evenly divided politically—yet further apart than ever in its political values"? None can say. But if every age has its emblematic artwork, ours is surely the Chinese-American artist Sarah Sze's stunning 2001 installation, an exploded SUV spilling its mechanical innards down a flight of stairs. Its title? "Things Fall Apart."

Posted by Mark Dery at 12:03 PM | TrackBack

October 16, 2005

Time Bomb

The other day, as I was musing idly, one foot in the remainder bin, the other on a banana peel, Time came calling, out of the blue. They were interested to know if I'd be willing to play a walk-on role as fringe futurist in their "What's Next" issue (October 24, 2005, on newsstands now). A few days later, I found myself in the standard-issue characterless conference room, playing brain pong with Tim O'Reilly, Malcolm Gladwell, Clay Shirky, David Brooks, Esther Dyson, and Moby. (What were they thinking?!?) <g> I have next to nothing in common with them, but it was fun nonetheless, a real thought-rattling kick in the head. Transcript here. Posted by Mark Dery at 06:52 PM | TrackBack

September 27, 2005

Coming Attractions: Net Porn, Brown Power.

This blogging thing is thirsty work. Give me enough Premoistened Lemon Pledge Wipes, and I'd rather clean the Augean stables.

I've been under the hammer of a dozen deadlines, hence my absence from the bully pulpit.

That's my cover story, anyway.

Truth is, I'm having blogger's block. Every time I crank up the interface and stiffen my resolve with a few belts of screw-top Shiraz, I get this paralyzing what-does-it-all-mean? feeling. I'm not overly burdened by modesty, but blogging about my Diurnal Whatever reminds me too much of one of those Book of Lists entries where they inventory the objects found in the belly of a Great White. It's scarily close to that This American Life segment about the obsessive-compulsive geek who breathlessly narrated, into a handheld tape recorder, everything he did, no matter how mind-crushingly banal, as he did it.

There's something about this medium that convinces us that our merest flights of fancy, our wispiest free-floating musings, are Revealed Truths, outtakes from Thus Spake Zarathustra. One example: I browsed on over to the blog of a whip-smart cultural commentator and best-selling author who rarely fails to shock and awe, and the guy is blogging about...snow, for the love of Mike. He's got a bee in his bonnet about the fact that people only take photos of snow when it's a beautiful cottony blanket of virginal whiteness. But snow isn't always that way, Sweet Jesus; it gets GRUNGY, it sprouts dog dirt and stubbed-out cigarettes and why, oh WHY don't people take photos of it then, huh? HUH? Are they AFRAID to reveal the awful, unspeakable truth of...Dirty Snow?!? (Imagine white-knuckled hands tugging at your lapels, here...)

But this sort of thing is oil on the ruffled waters of the Dery soul compared to self-anointed Masters of the Bloviosphere like this Jeff Jarvis guy. Style dies screaming in the man's hands. His prose is so soul-killingly beige that somewhere the shades of Strunk and White are weeping tears of blood.

And the extravagant self-regard, the Alpha Weenie arrogance that drips from the man's every oracular pronouncement on The Obvious! There's more hubris in a single Jarvis entry than all of Sophocles laid end to end. Why, when, say, the levees fail again in New Orleans, do some people feel the need to POST A NOTE TO THAT EFFECT? Is it the Cokie Roberts effect—the chattering class's presumption that it must have something, anything to say about everything? (Joan Didion famously said that she left New York because she didn't have an opinion about everything.) The newswire chatters, and out comes the late-breaking news, and the Jarvises of the Bloviosphere labor mightily to bring forth a quip about Commander in Chief, or Hurrican Katrina, or the International Freedom Center at Ground Zero, or why it's "appalling" that transit officials are suing over the copyright of subway maps (oh, the humanity...). Why, these people have an opinion about EVERYTHING. The only thing worse than this leveling wind of smug, self-important pontification is the obsequious claque of flipper-clappers that will Post A Comment, seconding virtually anything the Amazing Karnak says.

(By the way, is it just me, snark monkey that I am, or is there a delicious irony in the all-knowing, stentorian style adoped by some of these Titans of the Bloviosphere? Isn't this the selfsame monologic, "I Speak, You Listen" old-media model they're always decrying? For all their arm-waving about "citizen journalism" and "social networks" and "my readers are my editors," most of these self-appointed evangelists of the New Media Order deliver their commandments with all the self-effacing understatement of some biblical Hairy Thunderer, inscribing His Laws in stone with a fiery finger. It's the Great Men model of history, come back to haunt us. Talk about a pathetic phallacy...

Compare this Old Testament filibustering to the model inherent in the intellectually nimble, effortlessly brilliant bOING bOING, whose added value comes as much from the community of minds that enriches the editors' already supersmart posts by tacking on links that further nuance the original idea or comment ironically on it.)

That's the short version of why I've let this blogging thing twist in the wind for awhile.

And speaking of smug, self-important pontification, I'll be doing a keynote lecture, "'Sex Organs Sprout Everywhere': The Sublime and the Grotesque in Web Porn," in Amsterdam, at the Art and Politics of Netporn conference, September 30 and October 1. Come help me live out my flickeringly brief fantasy that I, too, am a Promethean Bringer of Fire. I wouldn't be anything without you, the little people.

Oh, and the Sept./Oct. issue of Print magazine includes my feature on cholo/Chicano visual culture.

Posted by Mark Dery at 10:50 PM | Comments (14) | TrackBack

August 07, 2005

Tomorrow Belongs to Me

Worst Halloween Costume Ever," found on Snopes.com.

Prophesied to last a millennium, Adolf Hitler's Thousand-Year Reich lasted only 12 years, from 1933 to 1945. Scripted to end—if it ever ended—in the melancholy grandeur of triumphal arches wreathed in ivy, its tawdry finale turned out to be a self-inflicted bullet in Der Fuhrer's brain, as Soviet tanks rumbled into Berlin. The Third Reich's only memorials are the death camps that scream its guilt from every stone, and the odd, unmarked grave of evil dreams: here, a buried mound of rubble (the Reich Chancellery); there, a weed-tufted field (the Nuremberg stadium, where the party rallies were held). Even Hitler's remains were not laid to rest in the pharaonic crypt he envisioned for himself, a Holy Sepulchre for the Nazi death cult. Poetic justice ordered a more appropriate fate: Hitler's corpse was shoveled unceremoniously into a shell hole outside the Fuhrerbunker, in a lull between bombings.

(The following is an extended dance remix of an essay that appeared in Vogues Hommes International, spring/summer 03, pps. 252-255, under the title "Fascinating Fascism 2.0." Now that the copyright has reverted to me, I thought I'd republish it here, in expanded form, for those who missed it the first time around. Auto-plagiarism Alert: the Rick Poynor quote that appears here, taken from an interview done for this article, also resurfaces in "Deconstructing Harry," written for this site. Chandler called this sort of thing 'cannibalism'—which means I'm in good company, at least.)

Yet, Nazi Germany won't stay buried. In the United States, at least, the Chaplin-mustached murderer of millions and his Thousand-Year Reich live on—in newspaper headlines, pop culture, the mass imagination. Examine that spiky EEG of American culture, The New York Times, and you'll find dozens, sometimes hundreds, of stories in a single year alone that relate, in one way or another, to Nazi Germany. Every Sunday's Book Review seems to include at least one book like the historian Michael Beschloss's best-seller, The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1941-1945; each day's headlines seem to trumpet another German company's admission that it profited from slave labor during wartime, another Holocaust denier outed, another silver-haired, lawn-mowing grandpa next door exposed as a Nazi war criminal. The satellite dish of our media unconscious is still receiving the ghostly images of a horror show that stopped transmitting a half-century ago.

Which would be appropriate, in light of the Nazis' proto-postmodern intuition that filmed images, not firsthand experience, are what endures, in a media culture. Witness their love affair with the cinema, from Leni Riefenstahl's creepily effective use of moving images to move the masses in Triumph of the Will to the Nazis' obsessive documentation of their genocidal handiwork (brilliantly used as exhibits for the prosecution by Alain Resnais in Night and Fog) to Eva Braun's fondness for home-moviemaking to Hitler's boundless appetite for movies, usually one or two a night, mostly "light entertainment, love, and society films" (Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich) and, more revealingly, footage of the sadistically slow strangulation of the conspirators who attempted to assassinate him, which he watched "down to the last twitches of the condemned" (Joachim Fest, Hitler). "Those Nazis had a thing for movies," quips a character in Don DeLillo's Running Dog (1978), a novel about the black-market intrigues swirling around "the century's ultimate piece of decadence"—a fictional movie shot in the Fuhrerbunker during Hitler's last days. "They put everything on film. Executions, even, at his personal request. Film was essential to the Nazi era. Myth, dreams, memory."

Piotr 1.jpg

The Third Reich of Dreams. Hollywood conjurations, from The Nazis, by Piotr Uklanski.

And film is where our myths, dreams, and memories of the Reich That Will Not Die are endlessly replayed. Strange attractors in the chaos of human history, Hitler and the Holocaust confound all efforts to make sense of them. Even so, two recent movies attest to our unending attempts to understand do just that: Max, the Dutch director Menno Meyjes's portrait of the Fuhrer as an angry young boho and artist manque, and The Pianist, Roman Polanski's tale of a Polish-Jewish virtuoso who survives the brutality and degradation of the Warsaw ghetto to play another day. Of course, they're only the latest bids, in our long exit from the 20th century, to mine meaning from the hellpit of the Holocaust—or, less loftily, append a Hollywood ending to the unspeakable, as in Schindler's List, Triumph of the Spirit, The Truce, and Life Is Beautiful.

Meanwhile, on the small screen, World War II—a reassuringly Manichean struggle between good and evil, in our age of videotaped beheadings and Abu Ghraib torture porn—is fought and re-fought on cable-TV shows such as The History Channel, waggishly dubbed the "Hitler Channel," in recognition of its seemingly all-Nazi, all-the-time programming. The satirical webzine Bizcotti.com wasn't far from the truth when it ran a parodic item headlined "History Channel Goes To All-Hitler Format." According to Bizcotti, executives sporting red-and-black armbands adorned with a "Teutonic version of the History Channel's 'H'" announced that "in addition to the usual slew of documentaries about WW II Germany and the life, death, and machinations of Adolf Hitler," the channel was developing "Cooking with the Fuhrer," "Hitler's Top 10 Funky-Fresh Videos," and the "madcap sitcom "Keeping Up with the Himmlers.'" To quote Jack Gladney, the professor of Hitler studies in DeLillo's novel White Noise (1985), "He's always on. We couldn't have television without him."

Piotr 2.jpg

From The Nazis, by Piotr Uklanski.

Closer to the bottom of the cultural slagheap, the straight-to-video market thrives on Hitleriana, juiced up with "historical recreations." The shelves of my local video store sag under the weight of titles such as Hitler's Home Movies, a blurry, low-budget exercise in exploitation whose absence of any narration—in fact, any sound whatsoever—or even titles lends it a weirdly pornographic air. Volume 5 (!) of the series begins abruptly, in the middle of a non-narrative whose jerky, hand-held camerawork and cinema verite plotlessness would make it the envy of undergraduate auteurs everywhere: anonymous children toddle jerkily around the Fuhrer's Bavarian hideaway, watched over by genial SS guards; women (Eva Braun among them?) frolic in swimsuits. But where's Adolf? Like those shrouded, trussed-up models in fetish magazines, their invisibility the source of their erotic power, the Fuhrer's absent presence haunts this chaste pornography. Grabbing a copy, I ask the woman at the register if I get a discount for being the first person to rent it in years. "Oh, you'd be surprised," she says, with the unflappable deadpan of the career video clerk. "There's a lot of interest in this stuff."

Indeed there is, if eBay is an index of our obsessions. Checked recently, the "collectibles" section of the American version of the auction website was awash in Nazi memorabilia. Up for auction were Hitler Youth backpacks, a Nazi officer's photo albums, a pair of size 42 clogs made in "the largest forced labor shoe factory in occupied Europe," and enough "genuine" Nazi-era Hitler-head stamps to mail some deserving Holocaust denier a mountain of SS daggers and concentration-camp armbands.

Hitler Youth Drum.jpg

Little Drummer Boy. Hitler Youth figurine, hawked through the neo-fascist UFC website, bringing you "information which is uncorrupted by the forces of political correctness and Liberal Consensus."

But what's it all about? Susan Sontag's groundbreaking essay "Fascinating Fascism" (1974), a meditation on the eros-and-thanatos frisson of all those chisel-faced Aryans in their death's-head insignias and black uniforms, isn't much help in explaining media dream life in the early oughts. The eroticizing of the swagger stick and the jackboot was a product of the pleasure-dungeon demimonde in the days before AIDS. Our conjuration of the Third Reich has more to do with the sudden realization that the last living Holocaust survivors are dying—as are their Nazi tormentors, a development that spurred the record-breaking acceleration, in 2002, of U.S. Justice Department prosecutions of Americans suspected of Nazi war crimes.

Then, too, there is the sheer, staggering enormity of Nazi evil, a black hole in the cosmos of intellectual discourse that we are only now beginning to reckon with, through pop myth and scholarship. "If we ask why Nazism feeds the imagination more than, say, the horrors of Stalinism, or other dictatorships, then we can recall that no other dictatorship spawned both a world war and a major genocide—in fact, the worst genocide in history," says Professor Ian Kershaw, author of an acclaimed multi-volume biography of Hitler, in an e-mail interview. "Mussolini, Franco, even Stalin seem therefore to be more understandable products of their own societies and state systems, whereas the riddle of how such a devastating doctrine of inhumanity and regime of breathtaking brutality and destruction could arise in a modern, economically advanced, and culturally sophisticated country like Germany (with its many similarities to our own societies) prompts unceasing interest and enquiry."

Thus, there may be less irony than meets the eye in our tendency to replay flickering Third Reich newsreels on our mental movie screens at a time when cloned sheep and pigs with human genes are science fact and bacterial computing and molecular robotics seem just around the bend. "Hitler's contemporaries—Baldwin, Chamberlain, Herbert Hoover—seem pathetically fusty figures, with their frock coats and wing collars," wrote the sci-fi novelist J.G. Ballard in 1969. "By comparison, Hitler is completely up to date, and would be equally at home in the '60s as in the '20s. Certainly, Nazi society seems strangely prophetic of our own—the same maximizing of violence and sensation, the same alphabets of unreason and the fictionalizing of experience."

Rudolf Herz, "Zugzwang" (1995), from "Mirroring Evil" at the Jewish Museum, New York City.

The mass psychosis that swept through Germany in the '30s nags at us because '30s Germany was perhaps the first truly modern, mass-media society, in many ways scarily like ours; if it happened there, it could happen here, the logic goes. The Holocaust was the nightmare offspring of the Machine Age and a Wagnerian mysticism whose virulent anti-semitism may have been of its moment, but whose murderous anti-modernism is always with us, making blood brothers of Ted "Unabomber" Kaczynski, Osama bin Laden, and every other mad bomber who wants to Fight the Future.

Then, too, our hypercapitalist age—when politics has been annexed by advertising, nations hire image consultants, and war fever is fanned by P.R. firms—is especially susceptible to the mesmeric power of what might flippantly be called Nazi "branding." In a culture seduced by surface, the brutalist Deco of Nazi architecture and design becomes one more historical style to rip, mix, and burn. "This material engages us not only because of what it represents to the popular mind—the specter of absolute evil—but because it does so with a stylish command of imagery that has never been surpassed," says the design critic Rick Poynor, author of Obey the Giant: Life in the Image World, in an e-mail interview. "The devil has the best tunes and the Nazis have the best uniforms, insignia and banners, and a 'logo,' the swastika, of incomparable power. (No wonder books on corporate identity can never resist including it; next thing you know, they'll be calling it a 'brand.')"

Instructive to remember, at such a moment, the original "No Logo" refusenik Karl Marx's admonition that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce—to which one might add: and finally, as brand. "Fascism—I hate to say it, but it's sexy," said a magazine editor quoted in a 2000 New York Times article about the passing fad, in couture, for gladiatorial breastplates, military uniforms, and other fascist chic.

Ann Coulter, She-Wolf of the Media SS. Nazi kitsch, ripped and remixed by Eponymous.org.

The moral weightlessness required to see fascism as sexy is a sublime obscenity, especially in a world where the ethnic cleansing, eugenic rhetoric, and apocalyptic politics of the Nazis have come back to haunt us. But that's the danger of playing with loaded images: The boots gleam, the death's-heads wink; we'll try them on, we think—just for fun, only for a minute, when no one's looking. They fit like a dream, and before we know it, we're acting the part.

Posted by Mark Dery at 12:28 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

December 21, 2004

The Being John Malkovich Effect

Why blog? First problem: the word, second only to org in its mortifying dorkiness. (Speaking of which, isn't an "org" one of those seafaring enclaves formerly headed by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, who hightailed it to the high seas "to continue his research into the upper levels of spiritual awareness and ability," far from the distracting attentions of the IRS)? "Blog" sounds like a portmanteau for some clammy new fetish, best left undescribed—an unhappy hybrid of blob and flog. Yeah, I know it's short for "weblog," but who calls journals "logs," anyway, except the glassy-eyed minions in sea orgs or people who begin their diary entries with stardates?

Second, there's the gnawing fear that anyone who blogs is fated to become one of those tub-thumping Alpha Wonks who've given the medium a bad name—you know, those self-declared Masters of Their Own Domain whose poured-concrete prose, cosmic sense of self-importance, and weird refusal to use contractions makes them sound like the genetically engineered offspring of Roger Rosenblatt and Galactus ("My journey is ended! This planet shall sustain me until it has been drained of all elemental life! So speaks Galactus!") So what if Instapundit gets more hits than God? Would you want to be trapped in steerage, on Jet Blue, next to one of these self-styled Masters of the Universe with an Opinion About Everything?

Worse yet, you might wake up to find yourself blogging about...blogging! Going to Bloggercon (a name whose similarity to "Starcon" is way too close for comfort) and listening to other blogwonks maunder on about wuffie-hoarding and social networking and then..blogging about it! Live! From the convention floor!

Look, I know I'm not fit to polish Clay Shirky's power laws, nor to touch the hem of Siva Vaidhyanathan's garment. I abject myself before the terrible grandeur of Josh Marshall, Jason Kottke, Wonkette, and Bruce Sterling(on his good days). And yeah, yeah, blogging is our Last, Best Hope for citizen journalism, Seizing the Mode of Production and Speaking Truth to Power without changing our underwear for days at a span. But Sweet Jesus, why do most of the revolution's standard bearers have to be so skin-crawlingly geeky? Why do most of the Power Bloviators who've become the angry white poster boys for blogging look as if, just a few short years ago, they were off to Klingon Language Camp with a song in their hearts? (Is it mere coincidence that one of the seminal screeds on blogging is John Hiler's "Borg Journalism: We are the Blogs. Journalism will be Assimilated"?)

So why blog? Certainly not because blogging is fated to swallow journalism whole and burp up A.M. Rosenthal's bowtie. The best thing about blogging is that it's not journalism. Or, if it is, it's a viral strain of journalism, cultured in the agar of the Net, that resembles no journalism we know. Sure, blogging can serve as a corrective to the ideological blind spots and commercial orientation of the corporate media monopoly, Fact Checking Their Asses and Working the Ref and restoring some semblance of balance in the absence of the Fairness Doctrine.

But bloggers who want to remedy what ails the corporate McMedia monopoly should grab a clue from Chris Allbritton and haul their larval, jack-studded flesh up out of their Matrix-like pods and do some goddamn reporting instead of just getting all meta about Instapundit's post about The Daily Kos's post about Little Green Footballs's post about the vast left-wing media conspiracy's latest act of high treason. It's the Yertle the Turtle syndrome: Pundits stacked on top of pundits on top of pundits, all the way down, and, at the very bottom of the heap, the lowly hack who kicked off the whole frenzy of intertextuality: the reporter who dared venture out of the media airlock to collect some samples of Actual, Reported Fact.

Who can argue with Dan Gillmor's call for a grassroots journalism, a peer-to-peer alternative to the radically deregulated, massively consolidated Murdochian horror that currently passes for the newsmedia? But it sure as hell isn't going to come from political-pundit and media-wonk bloggers, who with some notable exceptions represent More of The Same: the same gel-headed, glittery eyed weasels who make a career out of torching straw men on Scarborough Country and Sean Hannity; the same attacking heads who reduce each other to chum in what passes for debate on Firing Line; the same corporate flacks, thinktank drones, and bowtie-and-braces neocons who represent the full spectrum of political opinion (from zero-forehead centrism to the far, frothing right) on the PBS Newshour; and worst of all, the same Barcalounger-bound Masters of the Universe who feel well qualified to hold forth on any subject, no matter how arcane. Too much blogging—at least, the blogwonkery embraced by the mainstream media—looks too much like the jowly, sclerotic old white guys in tortoiseshell glasses or the lunging, in-your-face young white guys who already rule the mediaverse. Is this the bottom-up, many-to-many revolution we were promised? Another dictatorship of the commentariat? Another grotesque hypertrophy of the chattering class? None for me, thanks. You can stack your Instapundits like cordword and they still won't have the empirical authority or moral gravitas, not to mention the hard-swinging old-school literary chops, of one blogger reporter like Chris Allbritton. (Okay, he's white and he's a guy, but at least he's a young white guy, and he's risking his goddamn neck to bring back some truth about our imperial adventure in Iraq. Besides, he's got one of those cool neo-beat Van Dyke things.)

The best blogging, then, isn't yet another hairy-eyed jeremiad from some Angry White Guy or another somber thumbsucker about the Deeper Meaning of Whatever. Hungry for more hallelujah choruses to the obvious, delivered with all the oracular solemnity of Charlton Heston reading the Ten Commandments? Tune in NPR, where "news analysts" like Daniel Shore and Cokie Roberts can be heard, handing out received truths as if they were pearls of great price.

By my lights, the best blogging offers a Bizarro World alternative to the mainstream media. Their content isn't determined by agenda-setters and opinion leaders who tell you what you need to know—then tell it to you again, every hour, on the hour, all day long, like CNN. They aren't run by editors who want to sell your attention to advertisers who want a piece of your niche demographic. Example: civil libertarian and Net activist John Perry Barlow's harrowing account of his brush with rough justice in the new, Ashcroft-ian America. (Barlow was stripped, cavity-searched, and held incommunicado for the high crime of flying with "misdemeanor possession of controlled substances that had allegedly been discovered during a search of my checked baggage.") Another example: the NBC cameraman Kevin Sites's riveting, straight-from-the-gut letter to the marine battalion with whom he was (is?) an embedded freelancer, one of whose soldiers he captured on video, executing a severely wounded and apparently unarmed Iraqi with a shot to the head.

Not that blogging has to bring back horror stories from battlezones or breaking news from the culture wars. Some of my favorite blogs reclaim the radical promise inherent in the notion of an online journal, letting casual passersby eavesdrop on a stranger's innermost thoughts, see the world through another mind's eye. Call it the Being John Malkovich effect. The cultural critic Julian Dibbell had it just about right when he theorized the weblog as postmodern wunderkammer?an idiosyncratic jumble of found objects (in this case, ideas and images, facts and fictions scavenged from the global mediastream) that "reflects our own attempts to assimilate the glut of immaterial data loosed upon us by the 'discovery' of the networked world." Some of the most consistently enlightening and entertaining blogs are the inscrutable products of borderline obsessive-compulsives. Like the baroque "wonder closets" invoked by Dibbell, blogs such as bOING bOING, The Obscure Store, Kottke.org, and Die, Puny Humans are omnium gatherums, overstuffed with anything that catches the fancy of their eccentric curators. Wish you lived in a world where Entertainment Tonight peeled away the vacuform latex face of mainstream celebrity to bare the scabrous, Hollywood Bablyon reality beneath? Wish no more: Rebecky.com's got the dirt, in a story no obsequious, tukus-licking mainstream outlet would dare run: "HOW I APPEARED ON JEOPARDY, or, ALEX TREBEK IS A SCUMBAG," by Ethan de Seife. Wonder what the morning headlines would be like if Groucho Marx were alive and well and living and partnered up with Charles Fort in a joint media venture? Wonder no longer: bOING bOING offers a brain-shriveling compendium of weird science items, Barnumesque stretchers, and stranger-than-fiction news stories, delivered in the inimitable bOING bOING deadpan.

Reading blogs like these is like subscribing to someone's stream of consciousness; it's the closest thing we have to telepathy. What do a pair of mathematicians using 25,511 crochet stitches to represent the Lorenz manifold; a list of "words that aren't in the dictionary but should be" (Example: "Sarchasm (n): The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it)"; a step-by-step Taiwanese tutorial on how to make incredibly realistic "teeny tiny" oranges out of clay; photos of "Chinese salad architecture"; and the discovery of Homo floresiensis have to do with each other? Nothing, other than the fact that they caught the attention of Jason Kottke, however briefly.

Do the ongoing insurgency in Iraq, the barometric fluctuations of the Dow-Jones, and the Caligulan grotesqueries of the Bush administration still matter? No question. That's why God created The New York Times, The Nation, The New Yorker, and The Guardian. But I want to live in a world where the broadcast media that struggle for mass appeal are counterweighted by microchannels whose programming reflects one mind's caprices, the tastes and interests of a single intelligence that cares not a whit for market share or popular acclaim (or critical applause, for that matter).

After all, isn't that what an online diary should be—an internal monologue that the rest of the world can listen in on; a Cornell box of fleeting impressions and true confessions assembled by an obsessive collector of images and ideas? At worst, such blogs can be like KLAS-TV, the Las Vegas TV station that Howard Hughes bought in the late '60s so he could alter the late-night movie schedule at whim, TV Guide listings be damned. This is the downside of one-to-many personalized media: An insomniac billionaire wearing Kleenex boxes for bedroom slippers, inflicting his monomaniacal fascination with Ice Station Zebra on disgruntled viewers for the trillionth time. The upside is a blog like Kottke's, which might feature a single daily post. Or 10. Or none. It can be about anything. Or the proverbial, Seinfeld-ian nothing. People read it not because they're interested in the subjects Kottke covers, but because they want a front-row seat to the movies projected on the inside of his head. Reading blogs like his is the intellectual equivalent of Beaumont's experiments in gastric physiology, observing digestion through a hole in the stomach of a wounded soldier.

It's a beautiful thing.

Posted by Mark Dery at 12:22 AM | Comments (35) | TrackBack