Monthly Archives: January 2011

Fear Factor

In Chapter 5 Aristotle gives us a definition of fear as “Fear may be defined as a pain or disturbance due to a mental picture of some destructive or painful evil in the future.” (1382) This definition however seems limiting and far too rational for such an unpalatable feeling. Do we not also fear the reliving of certain memories, fear talking about what has happened to us in the past, or expressing certain things to people? One might say well that’s because it will bring you pain in the present, but is it pain in the destructive sense Aristotle is speaking of? Do we not also fear things that may bring us pleasure? What about people who fear public speaking? They know that if they do well that it will bring them a reward, it is not as if the act itself is painful but just the potential reaction of certain people.

Aristotle also continues on to say that we fear things “only if they appear not remote but so near as to be imminent.” (1382) This might make sense in the abstract but what about the fear of nuclear weapons, a terrorist biochemical attack, or China invading? Are these not real fears with particular objects that exist in people’s minds although they are remote? But perhaps Aristotle’s point is not that the thing we fear itself is imminent that makes us fear it, but rather the ability for it to be felt as such. Then again Aristotle continues to say “Of those we have wronged, and of our enemies or rivals, it is not the passionate and outspoken whom we have to fear, but the quiet, dissembling, unscrupulous; since we never know when they are upon us, we can never be sure they are at a safe distance.” [1382b] The element of not knowing whether something is to be feared or not is able to provoke fear itself. Is this fear? It has some elements of particularity in reference to a certain person and a certain act they might do, what makes it frightful is the uncertainty surrounding whether or not it will occur. Perhaps this is just an example of anxiety rather than fear? But where do we draw the line?

This inability to distinguish where certain feelings begin and others end points to a larger criticism I have of Aristotle in Book II. He posits emotions such as fear and confidence and friendliness and enmity etc.. as directly opposing one another. But not just are the emotions antithetical to one another such as anger and calm, he claims that they are mutually exclusive. I would contend that there is no such thing as being within a pure state of an emotion. Or that emotions are even a state as such. Rather they are always mixed, always flowing into and out of one another. The OED’s definition of emotion includes ‘a moving out or migration.’ Emotions are not something which are possessed one second and dispensed with another but occur as processual encounters and with varying intensities.

Aristotle writes [in reference to fear ] “People do not believe this when they are, or think they are, in the midst of great prosperity” [1383a] Yet when people are feeling pleasure from their prosperity do they not also develop a sense of paranoia and fear that someone will try to take them down a notch? Sometimes we want to feel angry at a person, not because they represent a real threat to us but because we gain a sense of pleasure out of it. Yet Aristotle writes of anger as necessarily painful. It seems difficult to reconcile these inconsistencies.

Worldly Desires

The Matrix trilogy circulates within our imaginaries not as an enclosed cultural artifact but as an ensemble that weaves together “multiple texts to create a narrative so large that it cannot be contained within a single medium”(97).  Jenkins describes the phenomenon as an example of “transmedia storytelling”(97). The Wachowski Brothers’ dream fashions an entire world fresh for an eager audience to conquer, explore, and build upon.


New Media theorist Janet Murray compares the horizontal integration of media to the works of Faulkner, while perhaps a less modern example I think Balzac’s La Comedie Humaine is most illustrative of the dynamic.



Balzac created a world of his own by writing over 30 novels. La Comedie Humaine is composed of nearly 1000 characters whose lives and stories often intersect. Balzac’s style, however, is characterized as Realism. This seems to be distinct from the most successful styles of transmedia storytelling. The Matrix, The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Harry Potter all relied on fantasy or science fiction in order to give the author the freedom to invent an entire new world.



Within the culture of convergence corporations must work harder to captivate their audiences. Transformations in consumption patterns mirror changes in production. Jenkins notes that with the move to a Post-Fordist economy “our workplaces have become more collaborative; our political process has become more decentered; we are living more and more within knowledge cultures based on collective intelligence”(133). The thing that makes The Matrix such an interesting example of Convergence Culture is that it is a meta-commentary and perhaps a dystopian prediction about where the trend itself is taking us. While our minds may not be directly plugged into a machine that sucks our energy out, it is apparent that the shift to affective forms of consumption has some striking implications. There is now an assemblage of diffuse forces that seek to subtly manage and maintain the ways populations relate to different stimuli. The realm of human perception and attention has become commodified. The rift between the flow of material and immaterial forms of capital has shrunk to the point where the opposition between the two is now a sham, if there is an opposition at all.  Jonathon Beller described this process in an article titled “The Spectatorship of the Proletariat” [Boundary 2, Vol. 22, No. 3 Autumn, 1995, pp. 171-228] over 15 years ago. He writes, “The commodification  of  the public sphere and the attendant commodification of the sensorium returns the struggle with capitalism to the senses.” Rather than seeing affect as a solely repressive force, Beller argues that we must use our own potential to resist “in the very arena of domination.” He sees film as an opportunity for that form of resistance itself.




Perhaps The Matrix is an example of this. On the other hand it seems the continued references to Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation indicate that the movie is just an attempt to push theory and culture to its extremes, to its point of implosion rather than a political act in the strong sense of the term. In a world already oversaturated with meaning, political struggles that attempt to accumulate and make as much meaning as possible are just another futile wave crashing against the rocks of the status quo. This stance however just feels too nihilist.


Slavoj Zizek a Slovenian, Psychoanalytic Marxist and cultural critic wrote an article on The Matrix titled The Matrix or Two Sides of Perversion [Philosophy Today 1999, Celina 1999, Volume 43. http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/articles/the-matrix-or-two-sides-of-perversion/]. He interprets the concept of the matrix as “the Lacanian “big Other,” the virtual symbolic order, the network that structures reality for us.” The matrix is the name for the “substance of the social.” It accounts for the structure by which the subject is not master of his own house. It is the paranoiac fantasy that explains the ways in which we are not fully in control of our own actions, that what we do is the result of an entire edifice that determines what and who we are.  The matrix conceals the inconsistencies, gaps, and excesses that prevent us from having a complete or true view of reality. Some interpret The Matrix as meaning reality is a hoax, there are only multiple virtual or fictional worlds we choose to move between or as being a screen that blocks our view of the real world behind the matrix. For Zizek both of these views miss the point of the paradox, “the Real is not the “true reality” behind the virtual simulation, but the void which makes reality incomplete/inconsistent, and the function of every symbolic Matrix is to conceal this inconsistency — one of the ways to effectuate this concealment is precisely to claim that, behind the incomplete/inconsistent reality we know, there is another reality with no deadlock of impossibility structuring it.”


The film gains its power not from showing us that reality is simply artifice, but in the moment of awakening. People realize that there is not a beautiful pristine world outside of Plato’s cave of shadows, but rather a dimly lit claustrophobic space. Zizek notes several inconsistencies within The Matrix, one of which is that such a powerful machine could have easily used a different form of energy than humans. Further, why not give each individual their own reality rather than a shared one? His response is that “the Matrix feeds on the human’s jouissance.” Rather than acting as an anonymous machine the big Other requires this constant flow of enjoyment to sustain itself. The scene of awakening produces its opposite, which is “the very fundamental fantasy that sustains our being.” The enlightenment belief in the autonomous subject is maintained as a fantasy through positing paranoid stories of control and our ability to free ourselves from them. Zizek sums up his argument as:


Therein resides the correct insight of The Matrix: in its juxtaposition of the two aspects of perversion — on the one hand, reduction of reality to a virtual domain regulated by arbitrary rules that can be suspended; on the other hand, the concealed truth of this freedom, the reduction of the subject to an utter instrumentalized passivity. In other words, The Matrix gets it right, but in a wrong (inverted) way, i.e., we just have to turn around the terms in order to get at the true state of things. What the film renders as the scene of our awakening into our true situation, is effectively its exact opposite, the very fundamental fantasy that sustains our being. We are not dreaming in VR that we are free agents in our everyday common reality, while we are actually passive prisoners in the prenatal fluid exploited by the Matrix; it is rather that our reality is that of the free agents in the social world we know, but in order to sustain this situation, we have to supplement it with the disavowed, terrible, impending fantasy of being passive prisoners in the prenatal fluid exploited by the Matrix. The mystery of the human condition, of course, is why the subject needs this obscene fantasmatic support of his/her existence.  


The inversion of the terms of The Matrix, provokes an interesting intersection with the work on affective economics. Products like SNS’s produce the fantasy of an enlightened subject that masters their own virtual world. They control the impressions other people have of them and manage their appearance meticulously. The virtual subject feels empowered and active at the helm of their virtual vessel. But what does not become obvious to them is the ways in which they are prey to the whims of their news feed and comments. Or how their daily life becomes penetrated by the anxiety of checking what they and their ‘friends’ are up to, how the conception of what your attention should be dedicated to has been slowly structured by your investment in a website. Or how people freely give up their labor to a site that profits off them. What appears as an off the cuff comment about an event or a product becomes aggregated for generating knowledge about consumer preferences. The realm of sensibility and feeling has now become so integrated into corporate strategies that people can no longer just ignore the material effects of affect. The only option is not cede the sphere to the right, but rather to cultivate ways to learn to be affected by that which seemed imperceptible before. 


Affective Energetics

Memories of conversations and good laughter pour out of the woodwork of this porch. Each creek and bend in its beams puts a bounce in my step. Each timber teems with a trajectory of what has been and what is promised to come. There are knots that have fallen out, they hold the secret to lost objects, forgotten once and for all. I’m seduced by what may lie beneath this rigid frame. When in times of wind, I care for these columns as if they were my only hope. This porch makes possible the oscillations of my swing. Each movement enchants me, amidst its uncertainty a subtle rhythm emerges, grabs hold of me, and takes flight. An iridescent light of reverence spills out upon me, an entire reservoir overflows the dams of memory’s clogged pores. In a single moment of intensity of the everyday, I finally become free to resonate with the multiple me’s.

Turning Documents into Monuments

    Jenkins seems to be just as seduced by the objects of convergence culture as those he intends to inform. He claims that his “goal here is to document conflicting perspectives on media change rather than to critique them.” (p. 13) He attempts to take’ a God’s eye view from nowhere’, speaking from a position as somehow above the fray of the structures he’s analyzing. While being reflexive and rigorous in research methods is key, Jenkins seems to fear reaching any semblance of a decisive conclusion. He merely points to the existence of a paradox, without providing a measurement of the way the scales are tipped. Granted the Survivor chapter and others points to the problem of an oversaturation of dogmatic interpretations about the dynamics of convergence, it seems there is an even greater risk in claiming to be apolitical.  


    Jenkins states that, “The new knowledge culture has arisen as our ties to older forms of social community are breaking down, our rooting in physical geography is diminished, our bonds to the extended and even the nuclear family are disintegrating, and our allegiances to nation-states are being redefined.”(p.27)It is unclear whether a single causal claim can be made as to whether the internet erodes these ties or if these ties determine  the way we engage the internet; the forces appear to be mutually reinforcing. People have been making statements like “knowledge becomes power in the age of media convergence” (p. 20) repeatedly since the Renaissance, what seems more important is to evaluate the trends of its dispersion or concentration. While Jenkins points to the paradoxes that emerge within the particularized cases of reality television or other pop culture examples, it seems that if one is able to pan out and investigate the overall effects of convergence culture Levy’s feet seem more firmly rooted in the ground than at first glance. Knowledge is now able to circulate with increased rapidity and scope than ever before, people are able to check the manipulation of events, and see beyond what immediately given to them. The difference in the available knowledge about the current wars and the First Gulf War that may or may not have ever occurred seem an especially poignant demonstrations of the ongoing transformation. While there certainly are limits, it seems misguided to present the case as just a paradox, without having a yardstick by which to judge it. Perhaps there are contradictory forces which problematize the way one ought to understand the dynamics of convergence, but one can also discern more universal forces emerging amidst all the noise.


    Jenkins uses the most commodified examples of convergence culture to point to the inevitability of consumer capitalism’s stranglehold on resistance. Why would we expect the forms of collaboration that develop out of a reality television show to hold emancipatory potential? If a group’s method of exerting control upon a media corporation is part of the “narrative pleasure” (p. 28 ) or the experience of its product then that only makes people more affectively invested in the process of consumption. Jenkins points are not to be overlooked, it is extremely important ” to understand the emotional underpinnings of consumer decision-making as a driving force behind viewing and purchasing decisions.” (p. 62) And to analyze the way “commodification is also a form of exploitation.” (p. 62) But Jenkins analysis is limited, almost threadbare, in scope in certain respects. Why even mention exploitation as an abstract concept unless one is willing to make it felt? It seems the importance in the cases of Survivor or American Idol is to show the way in which these original Frankensteined combinations birthed by convergence culture breed interpassivity among publics. They participate within a larger ideological frame that keeps people distracted from struggles beyond themselves by creating the illusion of activity. People go on voting on their cell phones or really sticking it to Mark Burnett, thinking companies are changing the way they relate to you as a consumer, when in reality nothing changes. 


    Jenkins thinks he is the spoiler of the spoilers. He criticizes Pierre Levy at the points where Levy is “most utopian” (p. 38) or “at his most optimistic” (p. 29) rather than at his most pragmatic level. What about the numerous examples in which convergence has led not to cynical disenchantment with politics but toward cultivating new modes of engagement? What about the use of social media in the Iranian elections? Cell phones documenting human rights abuses? Wikileaks? or whistle-blowing organizations?