Stand in front of a railway flap sign, a historical form of today's electronic time schedule, and you see, above you, a grid of numbers, letters and symbols for keeping time that changes rhythmically, but unpredictably. Changes are accompanied by a mass of noise, the simultaneous flapping of hundreds of letters and numbers, changes marking the arrival of a new train on the board, the progress of time as a schedule of arrivals and departures, all trains and their itineraries moving to the left to give way to a new train added to the right, signaling that time is moving forward and so is the schedule.
You search the board to find "your" train: the train you had planned to take, the train you always take, the train that you know is due, was due 5 min ago, 20 min ago. Or you search the board to find the train the best suits you: the one leaving soonest, the one with the fewest stops, the one that gets you to the right connection point. You scan the board for times, for place names, for changes to time or place. The board keeps you abreast of changes as they happen; it also helps you to synchronize the time of your day with the schedule of trains, to catch up, or to inhabit the lag of waiting.
The railway sign seems to lay out all that there is to know. The total corpus of knowledge about the trains at that particular moment; changes to this corpus are marked by the noise and visual disarray of the flapping sign. Because of this appearance of completeness, any ideas you might get about knowledge that is not represented makes you a paranoid (which doesn't mean that you are wrong; it simply means that you believe appearances are never all that there is). [whereas search engines work, in part, because they foster in us the radical imagination of limitless information, IF ONLY we can figure out the right sequences of letters and numbers to get us there. The flapping digits of the search engine are the flappings of our furious typing and re-typing, perfecting the query].
The railway sign also presents knowledge about a knowable, more or less visualizable entity: a network of trains. The railway sign thus offers access, through semiotics, through visual scanning, through the right positioning of our bodies beneath and in front of the sign, to knowledge about the workings of a network [whereas search engines use a network to give us knowledge that seems to be about something else: it figures content as the object of our search, while form is the network itself]. The train network, represented by the railway sign, appears as a grid of time and timings, the salient information for railway sign searchers being the timing of arrivals and departures. There is a limit to this network, although it is vast, although marketing for train transportation often tantalizes with the allure of "going anywhere." But there is an empiricism as work in even the most idealistic of train slogans: you can look it up on the sign: a train either goes there (today) or is doesn't (today or ever). There are railroad tracks that go there, or there aren't. [whereas books like "Invisible Web" hyperbolize the endlessness of our already endless imaginations for what might be out there, for what the Internet's network might contain, if only...]. Looking at a railway sign, we place ourselves amidst the possible. [Looking at a search engine's blank field, we take our chances with a space that search engines themselves encourage us to believe goes on and on without cease.] The network of trains can be visualized by a grid of symbols which is finite because the network of trains itself is finite. In this sense, it is not a network at all. But calling it a network of trains is denotatively sound; it also helps us mark a difference. Call it a grid-network.
Search engines visualize the Internet network with a blank rectangular field (the search field) in order to imply the limitlessness of the field to be searched. The search field places the epistemological onus on the searcher, not on the search engine. Search Engine's famous secrecy about their algorithm augments this implication. Older search engines, called directories (e.g. Yahoo), presented a list of categories rather than an empty field. One scanned the categories like an index, or a railway sign. The categories seemed to measure the extent of what there was to be known, to hint at, if not actually demarcate, the boundaries of that space. This was a space of places (Castells, Shaviro). The empty search field indexes a space of flows (Castells, Shaviro, Jameson), which is the space of finance capital in the midst of which search engines like Google now thrive.
Beacon thinks about the form of a search field. It visually echoes the empty search field with its austere online version. It maps that open field onto the field of projection (see Cavell on projection and screens) in its installation version. And it jams that open form, a space of flows, into the grid-network or space of places form of the railway sign [here talk very precisely about the form of the fit; the precise way that the open search field fits within the grid-network search field].
Showing posts with label jameson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label jameson. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Jameson 3 (New frontiers for the dispersion of culture?)
Jameson 3 (New frontiers for the dispersion of culture?)
7.8.08
The severest point of change to which Jameson returns again and again in his writings on postmodernity is the becoming-culture of everything. He also refers to the complete merger of culture and economy, refereing thereby to a broad process of commodification. Since his postmodernity is constitutively spatial (a feature masked, he argues, by the visual spectacles of postmodernity), the most significant feature of the expansion of capital in postmodernity (which J also calls the third phase of capitalism) is its territorialization of the globe itself, its exploitation of land as new markets, and including its expansions into (production of and then expansion into) what J calls "cyberspace," which he describes as an information space. He often points to contemporary art to exemplify this claim: there is no longer, he argues, any art produces outside of the vast and varied processes of commodification (as there were, he argues, at the turn of the 19th c.). But also to the way that corporations (which we might formerly have thought were more or less purely on the side of the economy) benefit from, extract from, learn from, steal from, thrive on, depend on...culture and cultural production (e.g. fashion companies employing cool hunters, see: Gibson's Pattern Recognition).
But S. Shaviro argues in a recent blog post (from a series of extracts from his forthcoming book on Aesthetics, see: http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=646) that capital can never be all that there is, even though it "is the milieu that all our thoughts and actions presuppose, the environment to which they all refer, the context in relation to which they alone have meaning." It can never be all because capital is not self-generating, not auto-poetic; it needs people as resources to exploit and as consumers to buy. It also needs new raw materials to convert into markets. The "monstrous body of capital" or body without organs can never be complete in itself. Reciprocally, D&G figure humans as parasites on the body of capital or the socius.
In the equivalence between Capital, body (without organs) and socius, we can hear echoes of J's constitutive postmodern merger of culture with economy, the dissemination of culture to all parts of the globe, and the coeval dissemination of capital (commodification) to all parts of culture. But, J argues for a total merger while Shaviro theorizes capital as a set of processes never complete in itself, a process that is constitutively parasitic, or, better for the comparison with J that I'm after here, territorializing. Is there a contradiction here? Or is Jameson's total dissemination of culture compatible with, even reliant upon, Shaviro's version of capital as forever-imcomplete, constitutively incomplete?
I've also been reading Lewis Hyde's work in progress on creative commons (http://www.warholfoundation.org/paperseries/article8.htm, http://www.lewishyde.com/progress.html), in which Hyde argues that there is a trackable trend in contemporary culture to relegate the protection of creative culture to the market and to thereby steal from, and gut, the creative commons (obviously he's not the only one to make this argument, but from what I've read, I can't yet tell how or where his work diverges from, say, Lessig's, although in places, Hyde's emphasis on the non-incompatibility of market forces and creative commons sounds like Lessig's Libertarian slant). Thus, the commodification of the human genome project jeopardizes the potentials of human genome science by yolking all innovation to profit, thereby foreclosing on any chance that a nonprofitable discovery, or a discovery whose profitability are simply unknown and unknowable, might be pursued. Hyde's stuff is well written, and I'm looking forward to his book, which he promises will be a parallel historicization of 1. the commons and 2. the creative individual. But so far it's all a pretty standard creative commons defense (like my essay "What will happen next?" in that sense).
Still, his essays make me think about something like creativity or the creative mind or innovation or potentiality itself as the latest frontier, or gap, of the sort Shaviro theorizes from his cross-reading of D&G and Marx. The latest itch of capital. Boltanski and Chiapello's work on The New Spirit of Capitalism offers very broad-scale support for this idea (being parasitic on avant garde culture, capitalism was, throughout what J calls the end of modernism, already capitalizing (on) potentiality as such). Deleuze's essay "Postscript on the Societies of Control" makes a cognate argument via D's retooling and updating of Foucault's concept of biopolitics.
Of course, this wouldn't surprise Jameson. In his discussion of the waning of affect, and his idea that the modernist Sublime has been replaced in postmodernity by theory, he is clearly pointing to some of the impacts of postmodernism on the human body, the sensorium, and more broadly, on the horizons of personhood itself. He refers negatively to the same problem (postmodernity's impacts on personhood) with his ideas about our disorientation in space and consequent need for cognitive mapping. Nor would drawing the recent changes to copyright and patent law into this discussion be dischordant with J's overall sense of the defining changes of postmodernity.
But there might nevertheless be value in charting the micro-movements in what J refers to, very broadly, as the total dissemination of commodity culture. Such micro-movements might materialize significant details which nuance our understanding of the overall process by establishing any number of relations with the overall trend: from contradiction to affirmation to exemplification to counter-models, etc. And (to think J and S together) we might think of these micro-movements within the wider flow as exactly the kinds of gaps that Shaviro describes in his version of capital as the "monstrous body," socius, or body without organs.
Along these same lines, Beacon charts the further excursions of capital: into the very idea of searching itself, the retrieval of knowledge, the potentiality of knowledge as such, the very idea of finding out, formulating questions, the very thought that the world contains an answer, that it's possible to know [something]. The value of placing this description within the broader changes outlined by Jameson, understanding it as a micro-flow within the wider flow of commodity culture, would be that any resistance I might find Beacon to offer up in this context could not be divorced from, or set in opposition to a more pessimistic Marxist account. Utopianism could not be set in opposition to critique because optimism and pessimism would both be set in motion within the broader currents of capitalist territorialization. Capitalism becomes the terrain, the field of operations, the conditions, not the force to be resisted (what is to be resisted, then, sits below capital and capitalism as such; this placement is one of the sought-after effects of Jameson's work on postmodernity: namely, to produce a clear-eyed description of capitalism today so that we can stop the residual form of utopianism which says that capitalism itself can still meaningfully be resisted, tout court, even though it's obvious that it bears responsibility for all sorts of lived misery).
7.8.08
The severest point of change to which Jameson returns again and again in his writings on postmodernity is the becoming-culture of everything. He also refers to the complete merger of culture and economy, refereing thereby to a broad process of commodification. Since his postmodernity is constitutively spatial (a feature masked, he argues, by the visual spectacles of postmodernity), the most significant feature of the expansion of capital in postmodernity (which J also calls the third phase of capitalism) is its territorialization of the globe itself, its exploitation of land as new markets, and including its expansions into (production of and then expansion into) what J calls "cyberspace," which he describes as an information space. He often points to contemporary art to exemplify this claim: there is no longer, he argues, any art produces outside of the vast and varied processes of commodification (as there were, he argues, at the turn of the 19th c.). But also to the way that corporations (which we might formerly have thought were more or less purely on the side of the economy) benefit from, extract from, learn from, steal from, thrive on, depend on...culture and cultural production (e.g. fashion companies employing cool hunters, see: Gibson's Pattern Recognition).
But S. Shaviro argues in a recent blog post (from a series of extracts from his forthcoming book on Aesthetics, see: http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=646) that capital can never be all that there is, even though it "is the milieu that all our thoughts and actions presuppose, the environment to which they all refer, the context in relation to which they alone have meaning." It can never be all because capital is not self-generating, not auto-poetic; it needs people as resources to exploit and as consumers to buy. It also needs new raw materials to convert into markets. The "monstrous body of capital" or body without organs can never be complete in itself. Reciprocally, D&G figure humans as parasites on the body of capital or the socius.
In the equivalence between Capital, body (without organs) and socius, we can hear echoes of J's constitutive postmodern merger of culture with economy, the dissemination of culture to all parts of the globe, and the coeval dissemination of capital (commodification) to all parts of culture. But, J argues for a total merger while Shaviro theorizes capital as a set of processes never complete in itself, a process that is constitutively parasitic, or, better for the comparison with J that I'm after here, territorializing. Is there a contradiction here? Or is Jameson's total dissemination of culture compatible with, even reliant upon, Shaviro's version of capital as forever-imcomplete, constitutively incomplete?
I've also been reading Lewis Hyde's work in progress on creative commons (http://www.warholfoundation.org/paperseries/article8.htm, http://www.lewishyde.com/progress.html), in which Hyde argues that there is a trackable trend in contemporary culture to relegate the protection of creative culture to the market and to thereby steal from, and gut, the creative commons (obviously he's not the only one to make this argument, but from what I've read, I can't yet tell how or where his work diverges from, say, Lessig's, although in places, Hyde's emphasis on the non-incompatibility of market forces and creative commons sounds like Lessig's Libertarian slant). Thus, the commodification of the human genome project jeopardizes the potentials of human genome science by yolking all innovation to profit, thereby foreclosing on any chance that a nonprofitable discovery, or a discovery whose profitability are simply unknown and unknowable, might be pursued. Hyde's stuff is well written, and I'm looking forward to his book, which he promises will be a parallel historicization of 1. the commons and 2. the creative individual. But so far it's all a pretty standard creative commons defense (like my essay "What will happen next?" in that sense).
Still, his essays make me think about something like creativity or the creative mind or innovation or potentiality itself as the latest frontier, or gap, of the sort Shaviro theorizes from his cross-reading of D&G and Marx. The latest itch of capital. Boltanski and Chiapello's work on The New Spirit of Capitalism offers very broad-scale support for this idea (being parasitic on avant garde culture, capitalism was, throughout what J calls the end of modernism, already capitalizing (on) potentiality as such). Deleuze's essay "Postscript on the Societies of Control" makes a cognate argument via D's retooling and updating of Foucault's concept of biopolitics.
Of course, this wouldn't surprise Jameson. In his discussion of the waning of affect, and his idea that the modernist Sublime has been replaced in postmodernity by theory, he is clearly pointing to some of the impacts of postmodernism on the human body, the sensorium, and more broadly, on the horizons of personhood itself. He refers negatively to the same problem (postmodernity's impacts on personhood) with his ideas about our disorientation in space and consequent need for cognitive mapping. Nor would drawing the recent changes to copyright and patent law into this discussion be dischordant with J's overall sense of the defining changes of postmodernity.
But there might nevertheless be value in charting the micro-movements in what J refers to, very broadly, as the total dissemination of commodity culture. Such micro-movements might materialize significant details which nuance our understanding of the overall process by establishing any number of relations with the overall trend: from contradiction to affirmation to exemplification to counter-models, etc. And (to think J and S together) we might think of these micro-movements within the wider flow as exactly the kinds of gaps that Shaviro describes in his version of capital as the "monstrous body," socius, or body without organs.
Along these same lines, Beacon charts the further excursions of capital: into the very idea of searching itself, the retrieval of knowledge, the potentiality of knowledge as such, the very idea of finding out, formulating questions, the very thought that the world contains an answer, that it's possible to know [something]. The value of placing this description within the broader changes outlined by Jameson, understanding it as a micro-flow within the wider flow of commodity culture, would be that any resistance I might find Beacon to offer up in this context could not be divorced from, or set in opposition to a more pessimistic Marxist account. Utopianism could not be set in opposition to critique because optimism and pessimism would both be set in motion within the broader currents of capitalist territorialization. Capitalism becomes the terrain, the field of operations, the conditions, not the force to be resisted (what is to be resisted, then, sits below capital and capitalism as such; this placement is one of the sought-after effects of Jameson's work on postmodernity: namely, to produce a clear-eyed description of capitalism today so that we can stop the residual form of utopianism which says that capitalism itself can still meaningfully be resisted, tout court, even though it's obvious that it bears responsibility for all sorts of lived misery).
Thursday, July 3, 2008
Jameson 2 (What kind of fragments are search queries?)
Do the fragments [Jameson, "Culture and Finance Capital"] in Beacon [the serialized queries] emit meaning as a kind of reflex of re-narrativization, as Jameson says of postmodernist fragments? I.e. as stereotypes do, each of which reflexively calls up an entire world, an entire narrative without ever needing to materialize that world, that story (pastiche is J's favorite po-mo tactic of re-narrativization)? I don't think so. I think they're broken, although not necessarily as modernist fragments were broken. Modernist fragments of meaning (e.g. its abstractions) were critical, negative; they referenced the object to be criticized by severing its legibility, its legible relations to that world (of history painting, of narrative fiction). They accumulated into texts that were illegible, partially legible, alienating, aggressive. This aesthetic strategy mirrored a world that had become alienated, like aesthetic fragments. Subjectivity was so fragmented. Experience was fragmented. The body's experience of space and time was fragmented. In J's description of postmodernity, we experience a oneness with the world because all of the fragments (aesthetic, experiential, ordinary) are referentially replete like stereotypes are: they call up everything one needs to receive a full narrative, they fill in the blanks, make us believe that everything we need for understanding is present. Aesthetic fragments no longer need to mirror this world; they are no longer separate from it. "The Cultural Turn" marks the complete merger of aesthetics with the life of capital, and thus the closing of the Historical gap between experience and aesthetics. Beacon's fragments seem to be neither modernist nor postmodernist: they are severed, but not alienating; they are referential, replete, they seem to amount to something like a theory, a sociology, a representation of a public, but they don't get there, they tease with proximity and meaning, but only tease. The broken calligram. What might this imply about the economy of which they are a part? And what is their relation to that economy (if the economy of modernity is mirrored by the aesthetics of modernism, and if the economy of postmodernity has merged with the aesthetics of postmodernism)?
In any case, this sounds like a good articulation of my problem: what larger life do search queries point to, IF they're fragments, and how does this relate to the present economy? OR, if they're not fragments because search engines point to a new horizon of un-representability [data over theory], then what relations do they have to the world they reference [if 'reference' is the right word for their relation to the world]?
In any case, this sounds like a good articulation of my problem: what larger life do search queries point to, IF they're fragments, and how does this relate to the present economy? OR, if they're not fragments because search engines point to a new horizon of un-representability [data over theory], then what relations do they have to the world they reference [if 'reference' is the right word for their relation to the world]?
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
Jameson 1
Jameson's analytic vision of postmodernism is a massive interlinking: of the experience of the subject to experience of space to aesthetic culture/consumer culture/form (all equivalents in J's vision), where artistic and commercial form (e.g. the Bonaventure Hotel) registers some profound aspect of a shift in our experience of space which is tied to a precipitating economic shift (post industrialism).
Pastiche is a formal strategy that marks the shift in our relation to history (and how we've become stuck in a perpetual present, also, in a world where our primary access to reality is through images). Unlike parody, pastiche quotes older forms without a normative standard that is implicitly being privileged and appealed to. Pastiche is not critical, in other words. And in this, it is metonymic to postmodern culture in general, which J thinks has not yet found its mode of criticism or negativity (cf. Edelman, No Future). The overall strategy marked by pastiche is mirrored in both artworks and the self-experience of subjects: neither can predicate their existence or worth anymore on uniqueness, individuality, singularity.
Pastiche is a formal strategy that marks the shift in our relation to history (and how we've become stuck in a perpetual present, also, in a world where our primary access to reality is through images). Unlike parody, pastiche quotes older forms without a normative standard that is implicitly being privileged and appealed to. Pastiche is not critical, in other words. And in this, it is metonymic to postmodern culture in general, which J thinks has not yet found its mode of criticism or negativity (cf. Edelman, No Future). The overall strategy marked by pastiche is mirrored in both artworks and the self-experience of subjects: neither can predicate their existence or worth anymore on uniqueness, individuality, singularity.
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