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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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 apartJohn -----
Atlanta
Then there was this: Ken ------
Charleston, SCHomosexuals 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.
And: Dick ------
San DiegoDear 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.
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
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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
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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
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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 | Comments (7) | 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...
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
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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 eve