Category: cultural studies

complexity, pragmatism, critique

According to Theory, Culture and Society we are having a complexity turn. From John Urry’s introduction to the special issue on the topic:

Overall, complexity approaches both signify and enhance a new ‘structure of feeling’; one that combines system and process thinking…such an emergent structure involves a sense of contingent openness and multiple futures, of the unpredictability of outcomes in time-space, of a charity towards objects and nature, of diverse and non-linear changes in relationships, households and persons across huge distances in time and space, of the systemic nature of processes, and of the growing hyper-complexity of organizations, products, technologies and socialities.

See also Fibreculture Journal’s latest issue, on Distributed Aesthetics, edited by Lisa Gye, Anna Munster and Ingrid Richardson:

Rather than try to define the terminology or taxonomy of distributed art theories and practices we have proposed instead a descriptor for the ‘aesthesia’ of contemporary networked encounters. Distributed aesthetics, then, concerns experiences that are sensed, lived and produced in more than one place and time. This might equally be a sketch of reconsiderations of the operations of cultural memory or of phenomena such as endurance performances. But what we propose, through gathering together the disparate pieces in this fibreculture journal issue, is that techno-social networks are crucially constitutive of this distributed aesthesia. In various ways, all the texts here take up the mode through which ‘the network’ – the juncture and disjunction of here and there, you and I, social and individuated – functions as the crucial operand in dispersing and contouring perception, art practice and aesthetics.

Although I am probably more interested in socially distributed and differentiated aesthetic (value) systems, rather than the spatial and temporal (albeit networked and socially contingent) distribution of art, this is kind of tangentially useful as I attempt to describe the complex system of technologies, literacies, values, and social identity formations that shape effective access to ‘voice’ in the apparently autonomous ‘cultural public sphere’ of the Internet (i know, doesn’t work as a sphere, but leave it for now). It seems to me that it is necessary to find a rigorous and defensible position on the ‘democratisation’ of technologies of cultural production that evades binaristic thinking, does not simply ‘debunk’ hyperbole, does not promise or warn of utopias or dystopias, and does not simply rely on glib theoretical virtuosity (or glib neologisms) to get out of those double binds.

A commitment to participatory ethics in research, combined with lightly interventionist research-led practice and an insistence on theory grounded in the empirical practice of such research is both a way through these problems and an additional burden – but all worth it. And I don’t want to wake up and realise that yet again I’m either the voice of complicity – using academic rigour to legitimize shallow marketing hype – or (even worse) the arrogant and ascetic ‘voice in the wilderness’. I have to sleep at night.

In this post about the risks of critiquing that which is cool (in this case, ‘things’), and this one on technological inevitablity and intervention Anne seems to me to be practising the steps of a similar dance. I think she is falling over a lot less frequently on the slippery floor than I am, though.

As an example of where I might be able to add some value to these debates: from Bradley Horowitz, an interesting post that explains the (exponentially scaled) continuum of online participation replicated across yahoo groups, flickr, etc. (although he’s careful not to call it a ‘natural law’). The post is thoughtful, the numbers and the graph are useful, and I was quite taken by the acknowledgment of ‘implicit creation’ as a legitimate form of participation (well, actually, as a form of participation that will still work to create value for the web service – flickr, say).

Still, I can’t help but feel that there is so much missing here – why does participation pattern like this? What does it mean for the emergence of complex systems of cultural capital and social power in these environments? Does it matter, for cultural democracy? And what about considering the idea that the necessary motivation to be a content creator or even editor is not only a matter of personality, but articulates to social identity, class, education, and literacy – which itself is a complex formation that articulates to the other three. And so on we go.

too hot for the beach

Against my better judgement, because I knew the effect it would have on my ability to focus on the rather cheerful article I’m writing, I spent a few hours catching up with some of the discussion that’s happening in my Australian cultural studies blogging neighbourhood about the Cronulla Riots. As predicted, the wind has gone out of the sails on my little boat somewhat. So, for the purposes of catharsis, really:

einstein

(image generator picked up from Sorrow at Sill’s Bend)

love and the mechanical sublime

In Adelaide over the weekend, I used Harry Potter as an excuse to experience the Capri Theatre first-hand. The Capri is a majestic, massively high-ceilinged theatre, with wooden floors, and two tiers of plush velvet seats. It is also home to the SA branch of the Theatre Organ Society, and boasts the most incredible theatre organ I’ve ever seen – a modern mechanical marvel featuring 20-foot high pipes, automatic flapping vent things (excuse my ignorance on the details) that kind of act as selective amplifiers, and a battery of percussion instruments (from glockenspiels to snare drums and canastas) mounted on the walls. They’re played via switches and pedals on the organ itself, which – you better believe it – rises from underneath the stage to thunderous, delighted applause from the audience. (A history and lots of photos here).

I’m not satisfied yet that I know what’s going on when we love obsolete mechanical technologies (and, come to think of it, old things, and lost and found things) so much. I could follow a well-trodden cultural studies line, and argue that the ubiquity of the digital (that is, technological plenty, for those who have it) means that cultural capital can only be accumulated by performing your knowledge and mastery of the rare and forgotten as well as the new and undiscovered (that is, technological scarcity). I think maybe part of it is that digital culture, and digital technologies, are so slippery, transparent, and uniformly inscrutable – when they do break, or die, or become outdated, they just sit there like deactivated clones, blank and silent, with their blank little screens. Maybe loving the way that you can see and touch and hear and feel the moving parts of clocks, and cars, and spanners, and pianos, is not only about about their enhanced presence as things, but also something to do with bodies.

the cultural public sphere

I haven’t really got the heart to involve myself in yet another round of cultural-studies-defensiveness-and-infighting just at the moment, but the discussion at Mel’s blog has prompted me to think that maybe it’s time for another set of Keywords, in the tradition of Grand Hegemon Raymond Williams. If I were brave and energetic enough to do it, I’d start with the knee-jerk terms that keep popping up in these debates – terms that are astoundingly multivalent, but seldom recognized as such. So for a start:

  1. “populism”
  2. “critical”
  3. “theory” (and theorised, as in “theorised work”)
  4. “political”
  5. “engaged” (which is usually preceded by the adverbs “politically”, “theoretically”, or “critically”, but not by the adverb “popularly”)

And like the well-trained, rigorous cultural studies practitioner I am supposed to be, in another, more energetic, universe, I’d maybe trace the contexts in which these terms are used, and the cultural and political work they are made to do in each of those contexts.

Anyway, this latest article by one of cultural studies’ inhouse critics is kinda relevant as an input to the politics of the popular in cultural studies, and so is handy for my thesis:
Jim McGuigan, The Cultural Public Sphere, European Journal of Cultural Studies 8 (4)

…let us identify three broad stances regarding the politics of the cultural public sphere: uncritical populism, radical subversion and critical intervention. Uncritical populism is associated with populist cultural studies, the credibility of which derives not so much from its intellectual acuity but from its affinity with currently conventional wisdom. The domain assumption here is that consumer capitalism is culturally democratic. Consumer sovereignty goes unquestioned. What we get is what we want. The consumer is consulted and permitted to speak. In any case, consumption is an active phenomenon. Consumers are not the passively manipulated recipients of commodity culture and mediated experience: they choose, and woe betides any business that fails to respond efficiently to its customers’ demands.

[...]

The value of uncritical populism – the kind of position that would regard Big Brother as a vehicle of the public sphere – is its debunking of the critical idealization of a public sphere that is never present but always absent in favour of a ‘realistic’ attention to what actually goes on.

[...]

Radical subversion is the exact obverse of uncritical populism. Instead of apologetics, it offers total transformation whether people want it or not. In this sense, it is elitist and, to many, either downright offensive or simply unintelligible. The third position regarding politics and the public sphere, critical intervention, combines the best of uncritical populism – an appreciation of the actually existing cultural field – with the best of radical subversion, producing a genuinely critical and potentially popular stance.

Speaking of engagement and critical populism and the politics of research (and researching cultural politics), somewhere or other Glen noted that UWS cultural studies types did quite well in the last round of ARC grants: list of projects here.

Bringing Theory Home

Lilia Efimova has been thinking about the academic’s desire to explore and hunt down treasures deep in “theory land”, and how best to reconcile that with the ethics of research – by which both she and I mean something much more than the functional applied ethics that are represented by the hoop-jumping processes of getting “ethical clearance” from your university. Rather, the ethics at the core of our research practice have serious implications for how we go about engaging research “subjects”, the relationship theory has to methodology, and how our research is fed back into the world ‘out there’.:

For me research is about impact. Of course, intellectual curiosity, contribution to a theory and rigor should be there, but for me my own research makes sense only if it makes a difference in the lives of people. People who may or may not understand the language of theory [...] It’s only now I’m starting to articulate my implicit beliefs in [the] researcher’s accountability to the broader community than his or her research peers, the responsibility to bring the research results back from the theory land to where most people live, either by translating them into everyday words, teaching the language of theory or even involving them as co-researchers…

Amen to that. Back here, there has been a bit of a discussion going around lately about the place of theory in Australian cultural studies.

What I would say about it is that cultural studies as research practice, at least in the tradition that I identify with most (OK, mostly ‘British’), has traditionally integrated and built cultural and critical theory in symbiosis with various kinds of empirical work, with both ‘theory’ and ‘praxis’ emphasised to greater or lesser extent. But if work that is happy to march under the banner of cultural studies loses its core ethics – which I might articulate variously as popular empathy, ‘critical’ engagement, and a commitment to building agency – then for me it just becomes the egocentric performance of theory. Really, although it can be seductive and mesmerising and intimidating, some of these modes of performance are not too much more than an exercise in theoretical and cultural omnivorousness and competetive aesthetic virtuosity.

More seriously, when the main game of theory is the performance of theory, it implicitly disavows any need on its own behalf to achieve material outcomes, or even material relevance, because Theory is supposed to be somehow inherently, transcendently, transformative. I didn’t leave classical music for more of that.

Activating the research ‘subject’

I’ve been aware of David Gauntlett’s ArtLab project at Bournemouth Media School’s Centre for Creative Media Research for a while, and keep meaning to post briefly on it.

The ArtLab studies represent a new type of research in which media consumers’ own creativity, reflexivity and knowingness is harnessed, rather than ignored. In these studies, individuals are asked to produce media or visual material themselves, as a way of exploring their relationship with particular issues or dimensions of media. Examples, which appear in the projects section, include research where children made videos to consider their relationship with the environment; where young men designed covers for imaginary men’s magazines, enabling an exploration of contemporary masculinities; and where people drew pictures of celebrities as part of an examination of their aspirations and identifications with stars.

It’s an innovative approach to media “consumption” research, and one which in many ways is the natural next step for cultural and media studies’ researchers who really believe in the active audience tradition and want to stop treating audiences as research ‘subjects’ and start treating them as research participants.

Two comparisons occur to me: one is to art therapy, where, through self expression, the subject both “works out” psychological/affective issues and makes them visible to the therapist – similarly, in the artlab projects, the participants “work out” some of their relationships between culture, media and identity through creative practice. These relationships can then be harvested as data, apparently providing some answer to the longstanding problem of how to ‘get at’ media audiences and consumers in something approaching a naturalistic, or at least organic, way.

The other comparison that springs to mind is with “action research”, or ethnographic action research, methods, where the process is designed to have some positive outcome for the participants, and the research is around the process of achieving that outcome. In both the art therapy and action research approaches, there is the assumption that the subject or participant benefits somehow. Likewise, I think it would be interesting for the artlab projects to articulate more explicitly whatever the outcomes (especially unintended ones) seem to be for their participants. There certainly seems to be something implied in the rationale as well as the project descriptions and reports about creative and critical media literacies – if there’s something more elaborated on the website and I’ve missed it, I apologise.

Anyway, these issues are interesting to me because of the important but problematic place that “practice” has in my predominantly cultural studies-oriented research. That is, the small amount of work I do as a digital storytelling trainer and creative practitioner functions not only as an ethnographic instrument, but also as a direct intervention into the field I’m studying. In conducting digital storytelling workshops in the community, I’m not only “observing”, I’m trying to collaborate with the participants to contribute directly and practically, not polemically, to cultural change. This is a challenge that, to be honest, my formal research training in English departments hasn’t really prepared me for at all, but which I welcome as a chance to contribute to the development of a cultural studies praxis that can effectively combine “critical” analysis, participatory research methods, and (yes, I said it) instrumentality.

Back to the writing deadlines…

BigBrother as Morality Play?

BigBrotherLeaving aside for a moment the utterly barren and bimboesque human landscape that is this year’s Australian series of Big Brother, those of us in cultural and media studies will be more than familiar with the arguments for and against viewing reality TV shows like Big Brother as spaces for the exploration of everyday ethics and/or as interactive spaces for audience engagement. This engagement and exploration occurs not only crudely and explicitly through the voting process, but in an ongoing distributed manner, through loungeroom, watercooler, and online discussions about the relative moral (or aesthetic) worth of the characters onscreen, debates about right actions and human values, and so on. So in some very specific ways, the argument goes, BB inherits and remediates the traditions of the premodern theatre of Shakespeare’s time – a mediated space that was equally robust, unmannered, and interactive. In response, the outraged, ignorant, and/or deliberately obtuse have been heard to cry, “Cultural studies academic argues Big Brother is as good as Shakespeare!!!!!!” .

In stark contrast, this article in The Age by Dirk den Hartog (no, not the explorer, people) is the most lucid critique of the pro-BB media studies position I’ve heard. It’s still a bit snipy towards cultural studies in parts (calling CS researchers ‘enthusiasts’, and ‘populists’, and not in the celebratory way I might employ those terms!). But I am quite convinced by the elegant calls to engage with ethics and historicity in a less one-sided way (eg the comparison with darker forms of premodern entertainments like public hangings and not only the relatively benign Shakespearian comedy as metaphor).

hopefulness

I hope one day I get Anne as a panel chair/moderator, because in her role as moderator of the final session at Floating Points 2 (on networked art in public spaces) she’s going to ask the panel members this most wonderful question:

Isabelle Stengers has described the creative enterprise as an “adventure of hope” – inherently political processes in which we resist the probable and fully engage the possible. And Chantal Mouffe has pointed to other “social imaginaries” crucial in revitalising an everyday politics of hope. What kind of hope do you see in networked public space? How do you see hope acting in your work? What possibilities and imaginaries drive you?

Guest Post: David Berry on Ethics and Enterprise in Open Source Communities

I’m so pleased that David Berry came through with a response to the WordPress/Google Adwords controversy, and in double-quick time too. By way of introduction (filched from his homepage on the Sussex University website):

David M. Berry is a doctoral candidate at the University of Sussex, exploring the critical political economy of free/libre/open-source culture. The thesis is titled: ‘The Democratic Potential of the Internet: A political economy of open source and free software’. David also founded the underground electronica record label LOCA records. This experiments with copyleft and open-source releases on vinyl and CD influenced by the Free Software and Open Source movements. His latest project, together with Giles Moss, is the Libre Society Manifesto. This explores and researches issues around informational-capitalism and technology and the implications for society of a wider application of Free/Libre and Open Source ideas.

This is what David had to say on the relationships between FLOSS politics, ethics and the almighty dollar (neoliberal creative industries types be warned):

Open source and free software projects are built primarily on a shared understanding of certain norms of behaviour that mediate the disconnected and distributed nature of the projects. However, these norms are often unspecified, or rather like a ‘gentleman’s understanding’ or a ‘handshake’ have the assumption that all parties to a project share a set of beliefs and values, which is often little more than a myth. The Internet is a diverse and globally heterogeneous ethical space that somehow the technology dampens in our day to day dealings. Perhaps through a crystallisation of technologists ‘non-ethics’ ethics shaping code or a seemingly ‘neutral’ technology mediating interactions seeming to disconnect ethics and the technical. When issues like the word-press debacle occur, suddenly the whole unstable foundation of a globally distributed open source community will be thrown open, and unsurprisingly a complete plethora of ethical positions and warring parties suddenly appear. One could call this, following Carl Schmitt, a technical ‘state of exception’, a situation under which the normal functioning of an open-source project is thrown into disarray and there is no clear way of making a decision about what should be done. For Schmitt, this is when the true sovereignty is discovered, when the real power behind the discourse of community, freedom and democracy are uncovered. Thus if the lead developer simply over-rules the community, perhaps deletes the forum and wiki’s and centralises control then we realize that it was never the kind of community project it was purported to be (e.g. the Benevolent Dictator of some open source projects). If on the other hand the community of users and developers’ deliberations are taken seriously and implemented then the sovereignty lies with them (the idea of ‘Our’ project perhaps). It will be interesting to see how this ‘event’ develops.

But first it is important to be clear. Neither open source nor free software lies outside of capitalism. The pressures of necessity mean that we are forced to go out and work for a living. Consequently the pressures on developers and website owners to commercialise, or to allow portions of their blogs to be colonised by capital is extremely high. Indeed, it is through the action of necessity that we are enslaved and forced to compromise ethics. There is no outside of capital anymore (as Hardt & Negri argue in Multitude), and the pressures of corporations to make a profit and to subsume any other values to the market will be powerful. The notions of a shared ethic in relation to many online sites are a developing area, constantly being pulled to and fro, as it is transformed from a commons of peer-produced content to a consumer market where everything is for sale. Asking whether sites that get involved in ‘gaming Google’ should or should not be penalised by an imagined community of the Internet is beside the point, we should be asking whether the Web is worth fighting for as a commons, a shared space of interaction and communication, of common human intellect and social life. These ‘crises’ act as signifiers, denoting a much more malign and dangerous transformation ? the continuing and intensifying commercialisation of the web, the way that big business is seeking to undermine and shape the protocols that structure online life (e.g. code, tcp/ip) and the communities that develop from them, and finally the privatisation of our social life so that instead of mediated through love and friendship it is mediated through contract and money. These developments can only be halted and reversed by action in the ‘political’, reinvesting our communicative lives with the power to take decisions on issues within the world. As Arendt argues, it is only through Action, the political, that a World can appear.

Dynamite, anyone?

Seems “propaganda of the deed” is already a slogan:

Propaganda of the Deed or Propaganda by Deed was an anarchist doctrine that promoted the decisive action of individuals to inspire further action by others.

As a doctrine-in-practise, its heyday was the period between 1881 and 1901, starting with the assassinations of Russian tzar Alexander and ending with that of United States President William McKinley.

Arguably it was in this period that modern-day international terrorism was born. The invention of dynamite, and its widespread distribution the 19th century, gave enormous power to anyone able to obtain it.

This newfound power led anarchists, notably Johann Most in his pamphlet The Science of Revolutionary Warfare, to advocate its use to further their cause through assassinations and terrorism.

By the mid-1890s it was clear that “Propaganda of the Deed” was a failed strategy, and most revolutionary anarchists, including Kropotkin and Malatesta, distanced themselves from the idea. A fringe continued the practice for a few years more.

But can’t we reclaim it, like viruses and schizophrenia, for the good?