the bubbling up
2 04 2005Richard Powers on the blindness of (1950s) American high culture to American music puts me in mind of De Certeau’s “bubbling up” of creativity:
…this country had a music - spectacularly reinventing itself every three years, the bastard of chanted hymns, spirit hollers, cabin songs, field calls and coded escape plans, funeral rowdiness gathered by way of New Orleans, gutbucketed and juggged, slipped up the river in cotton crates to Memphis and St. Louis, bent into blue intervals that power would never recognize, reconvening north, to be flung out everywhere along Chicago’s railhead as unstoppable rag, and overnight - the longest, darkest overnight of the soul in all improvised history - birthing jazz and its countless half-breed descendants, a whole glittering Savoy ballroom full ofoffspring scatting and scattering everywhere, dancing the hooves off anything whiteness ever made, American, American, for whatever that meant, a music that had taken over the world while the classical masters were looking the other way…
Oh, and more academically speaking, I quite like Mark Poster’s take on Hardt and Negri’s underinformed cyberdystopia. Thanks to Mel for the heads up on the inaugural issue of Berg’s new journal Cultural Politics.
Jean,
Mark Poster’s take on the ‘virtual’ in Empire is frustrating for two reasons. He doesn’t seem to grasp the specific Deleuzian sense of ‘machine’ or ‘virtual’ in N&H’s use of the terms. Poster quotes Negri and Hardt without seeming to understand the context of the quote:
“Hardt and Negri, empire ?appears in the form of a very high tech machine: it is virtual? (ibid.: 39).” (105)
The complete quote from N&H is:
“Empire thus appears in the form of a very high tech machine: it is virtual, built to control the marginal event, and organized to dominate and when necessary intervene in the break-downs of the system (in line with the most advanced technologies of robotic production).” (39)
Poster then writes:
“They metaphorically transfer the attributes of ?a very high tech machine? to their concept of empire. But the term ?high tech? or even ?very high tech? is too vague. Do they mean a nuclear reactor or a linear accelerator? Probably not.” (105)
Well to answer his question, no they don’t mean any of those things. In N&H’s admittedly sloppy piece of writing, the _metaphor_ is the robotic production line and the _reality_ is a high-tech virtual machine. N&H are talking about a sovereignty that is machinic and ‘machinic’ in the specifically Deleuzian sense. According to D&G ‘machinic’ does not mean anything necessarily mechanical or technological (ATP, 435). But, without explaining it properly, it is closer to machinery belonging to the Autonomist notion of the social factory, which is now like the ‘advanced technologies of robotic production’. If Poster has made this big a mistake in his understanding of the main argument of Empire — that ‘empire’ is a virtual sovereignty-machine that is actualised in many different ways — then I don’t know how useful the rest of his argument is.
Second problem:
“The conceptual sloppiness of Hardt and Negri in using the term virtual is more than a minor oversight.” (105)
Poster makes the same mistake that other media scholars constantly make in their understanding of the ‘virtual’ as it is used by Deleuzian influenced scholars. It is excrutiating he would accuse N&H of conceptual sloppiness when he does not fathom they are using the term ‘virtual’ in a completely different conceptual way to his neo-platonic understanding, eg:
“The Internet is virtual not in its lack of territoriality but its departure from space/time configurations associated with earlier forms of communication. It affords virtual presence in the
sense that it reduces distance and time factors in communication to zero.” (105)
The virtual relates to temporal manifold actualised as the present, not to real-copy distinction made of presence that media scholars, such as Bolter and Grusin and their followers, seem to love making.
Ciao,
Glen.
Well, I reckon ‘the virtual’ has had its day in any case, no matter who uses it - and that’s hardly the crux of the argument anyway. Poster’s points about the underinformed discussion of technologies, particularly networked communication technologies, (despite the added misunderstanding of ‘machines’, which believe it or not, is one of the few Deleuzianisms I actually understand) are still right though, IMHO.
Yeah that is what I reckon, too. About the lack of discussion re: net, puters, etc. in Empire.
I don’t understand why Poster decided to problematise N&H’s use of ‘virtual’ and ‘machine’ if what he wanted to actually argue related to the underinformed aspects of Empire on technologies of communication.
It is a pity, because it reads like ‘me-too-ism’, where a scholar decides that a popular text should have included something in the argument and writes an article that says, yes, but me, too! Often, though, the object of such a me-too-ism wasn’t necessary for the original argument to be made.
Instead of Poster getting his bellicose freak on, maybe he would’ve been better served to argue he is extending some of the underdeveloped aspects of N&H’s work. It still would’ve retained the positive aspects of his paper, without leaving open such an obvious critique from the Deleuze police. (haha, that is me! what a joke…)
I wonder who the referee’s were of that article? Because they would be partly to blame for not picking Poster on these relatively obvious issues.
“Cultural Politics” journal
Mel and Jean noted the arrival of the journal “Cultural Politics”, and it was as depressing as expected from the advance CFPs. I mean, seriously, do we really need a new journal called “cultural politics” run by three white gu…
pure ressentiment! that is what gets me riled, lol! I am far too angry a person to do anything cheerfully, Jean.
Yeah, I dunno, maybe I was too harsh on the paper, but it certainly shits me when I read stuff about other things that I spent so long working to understand.
Doesn’t it bug you when you read something that misrepresents another argument so badly?
I think my thesis is going to be a work of anger more than anything else. It is what sustains me. Oh, I am a sad little man…
i can’t imagine Mark and bellicose going together at all, Glen.
And to be honest, I always wonder what is it that gets you so riled? I’d prefer to take the useful bits from other people’s work, note the bits that don’t work and move cheerfully on.
[…] On the virtuality of Empire see this discussion here on Mark Poster’s alleged critique of Empire as virtual biopolitical machine argument, relevant extract: […]