Andrew Sullivan compares several views on the role of Social Media in Egypt and Tunisia.
And Evgyny Morozov on the Net Delusion
Social Media and the Middle East
Monthly Archives: February 2011
Something Else
It takes hold, grabs the mind, molds it, makes it blush – like a spark plug – in the distance between two disparate objects there is a leap of energy – a formation of futurity – a fig leaf torn away to reveal the nudity of perception – a freely floating feeling of friction – marking the territories of desire – masking tape falters – it cannot contain the forces of things – there is no one way street to truth – the raw motion of thought does not stop for signs of identity and stagnation – it meanders down the paths of its own reckoning – no melody or harmony – but a cacophony – the rhythm does not exist in a vacuous musical scale – but is always in relation – always surging – sending – melting and congealing – a sumptuous sort of sensation – these are the dream worlds of the everyday – the folding over and unraveling into – the sometimes and never – the always and not yet – this is the battle between to be and AND – it happens in the middle of things – on the literal and metaphorical grounds – and in caves within clouds – mimesis and imitatio – the anxiety of influence and the freedom of late style – where will be when the waters come crashing down – what happens when explanation no longer suffices – this is the stammering of the soul
Droppin’ Nussbaums
Nussbaum’s analysis of Aristotle is insightful yet ironic. If it is true that “in avoiding emotion, one avoids a part of the truth”(317), why does Nussbaum come off so disembodied and dry in her writing style? Why does she simply present her reading of Aristotle in the typical academic form, yoked by the same enlightened criteria she’s attempting to sublate? Nikidion could very well be a robot with different emotional states which react to various programmed inputs and outputs for all I know based on her description.
If “philosophy is not self-sufficient as a shaper of souls” one can’t simply point to the aporia or gap and acknowledge its existence, rather it must be made manifest. Perhaps, the emotional tone of the excerpt is just the appropriate one given the academic context, or is this simply a rationalization? Nussbaum points to something like ‘structures of feeling’ or what Bourdieu would have referred to as the ‘habitus’ that mold the ways we react to a given stimuli or phenomenon; if her intention is to shift this should she not act in a way that moves beyond it? Changing the conceptual ideals and cognitive interpretation of Aristotle alone falls short according to her own account of the relationship between philosophy and feeling. With all of the work currently being done on affect studies and new materialism you’d think she’d hop on the train, perhaps with William Connolly, Ben Anderson, and Jane Bennett.
In order to break out of the confines of the current theoretical dispotif shouldn’t we experiment with new ways of relating to academic labor itself? Not some new idealism or fantasy of freedom, but rather an embrace of the lived materiality of comporting oneself to their life-activity of knowledge production. If the point of Nussbaum’s criticism is that a representational form of philosophy will not suffice, than the critic should let this feeling flow through their thought itself. To learn to affect and be affected suggests becoming attendant to the subtleties, intensities, and rhythms of thinking. A loosening of the ideological shackles, a withering of conceptual blockages, and a fomenting of forces that seem hardly perceptible to the naked eye. Nussbaum is still stuck within the theoretical methodology of Aristotle that we can truly come to know the nature of emotive impulses. She constantly chides characterizations of emotions as “mindless surges of affect” (311). While it is true that affective reactions are forms of judgment and discernment implying value commitments, it does not follow that the “rich cognitive structure” then becomes completely intelligible. Nor does it follow that we can comprehensively list the way particular emotional feelings arise, as if they were clearly defined states.
She points to the ways in which Aristotle gave a qualitatively different analysis of Anger and Pity based on the use of the Greek prepositions ek and epi, but is there not a larger question at issue here? Beyond Aristotle making a distinction by manipulating grammar, could we not also look to the ways in which our structures of feeling are themselves manipulated by grammar? It could be argued that part of the difference between modern and ancient ideas of anger could be imbedded within the differences in linguistic structures we use. In the ancient example, the preposition ek is used to describe a pain which comes out of a belief of impending evils, rather than epi which is a feeling directed at a pain someone else is experiencing. Today it seems that we direct our anger at structures, people, or a general state of things. Or perhaps the translation is fundamentally just incomplete and unable to grasp the difference.
Community Is Not A Choice
The web reveals the exteriority of ourselves, the way we exist in and through others, not just in a game of shadows and mirrors but also materially for our subsistence. The way that such a seemingly abstracted and virtual assemblage can be so real exposes us to the finitude of the self and the irreducibility of the other. In a radical gesture of nay-saying to the suspicious scapegoating devices of demystification, Brown’s deconstructive approach to viral Texts opens up spaces of imagining otherwise.
The frustration of reading the article and what a ‘Post-Hermeneutic’ represents is intrinsic to the subject matter itself. The fact that it is difficult to conceive of what community looks like in Brown’s sense evinces the need to problematize the concept itself. Community is “something that happens to us,” not an ideology one chooses to accept or not, it exists as the condition rather than a coherent entity. Brown points to the way in which virtual encounters can be traumatic, uncanny and decentering. Viral texts often occur as a working on the limits, thresholds and aporias of our knowledge. We are unaware of the potential each packet of information sent contains, where are our virtual messages in a bottle will end up, and to whom our creations will impact. We are also forced to confront and come face-to-face, or stand side-by-side, with alterity. Browns writes; “The internet culture forces people to recognize the alien and other forms of culture which make up the planetary culture, the interconnectedness that informs their contemporary beings.”
Brown diagnoses two seemingly disparate yet interrelated symptoms of the hermeneutic impulse. In juxtaposing Poster’s limited tolerance with Asadullah’s fundamentalism Brown is able to show the naïveté of essentialist conceptions of community. The critique of Poster is more complex than at first glance. For Brown “it is not a matter of creating community without exclusion” for that would be the easy option. All one would have to do is tweak Poster’s position slightly to say it accepted fundamentalisms as well. Rather, “it is a matter of recognizing that no created community is universal.” Thus Brown is not making a specifically prescriptive claim about the need to tolerate the intolerant and always accept the other, rather it is a recognition of the traumatic kernel that is pricked in our fleeting moments of contact with the other.
Brown writes, “If we expand our definition of community beyond one of willing contributors and unified goals, we might be able to better formulate a road to peace.” The question is, who will build this road to peace? How will it be produced? What transforms its ideational formulation into a material entity? Perhaps I’m being rather reductive, but does ‘exposedness’ not become either some abstract property everyone possesses, almost akin to a universal human right, or just another floating-signifier without pragmatic import for programmatic politics? Arguably there may be an implicit assumption about the indefinite process of referentiality and the mediation of knowledge through texts; but is there not a danger in abandoning the idea of community founded on “unified goals?” Even if one grants the fact that a universalist conception of community is ultimately fictitious, is there not a very tangible way in which believing in the fantasy foments solidarity?
Brown problematizes the us/them dichotomy; demonstrating how Bert Laden represents the contradictions inherent to cyberculture. I think a point that should be pressed is whether that moment is always “instantaneously lost in the move to interpret the image and massage the trauma.” Why is creating a theoretical apparatus concerned with the idea of “being-in-community” any less totalizing than one centered around class conflict or sexuality? Does Brown not create a normative yardstick to measure his critique of normativity against? Does he not mirror his own critique of Poster by polemically positioning himself as in possession of a superior theoretical world view? Is Brown only open to concepts of community as long as they are the proper rethinking? Only open to hermeneutic approaches as long as they are Post-x, y, z form of instrumentality? To me this exposes what Davis says is the challenge to “compare without completely effacing the incomparableness of the ‘we’”(2005: 208). But what can this comparison entail? How do we know if we have transgressed the prohibition against effacement? Is this not what Mas’ud Zavarzadeh speaks to in his critique of postality when he writes “To be so totally opposed to totalizing is, of course, itself a totalization. But totalizing in opposing totalization does not seem to bother…anti-totalizing pedagogues because the issue, ultimately, is really not epistemological (“totalizing”) but economic (class). In contemporary pedagogy “totalizing” is an epistemological cover for the class cleansing of pedagogy.”
On the one hand, Egyptian protesters don’t seem to be appealing to abstracted concepts such as alterity or differance in their resistance, but on the on the other the looming atmosphere of anxiety surrounding the future trajectory of the movement seems to stem from the inability to derive certainty about social or religious issues which constantly exceed ideological demystification. While one can always become more orthodox or materialist to the point of absolute determination, the more important question to be raised is why have the programmatic politics of the left failed in many respects? Is it simply a question of aligning oneself with necessity, or has our thought not yet become adequate to its object of inquiry?
The Grammatron of Cybertexts
Grammatron is a hypertext created by Mark Amerika. Amerika views himself as a “cyborg-narrator creating a discourse network that serves as a distribution point for various lines of flight to pass through and manipulate data linked together by the collective-self.” Inspired by Post-Humanism, specifically the works of Deleuze & Guattari and Donna Haraway, Amerika argues that hypertexts function as “an alternative to the more rigid, authoritarian linearity of conventional book-contained text.” The experiential aspect of reading a hypertext, supercharges the way in which reading and writing always occurs in the middle of things, the reader/participant is not constrained to what is immediately before them, but is free to pursue a multiplicity of connections and linkages through clicking “their way into new writing or textual spaces (at this point we would expand the concept of writing to include all manner of text, graphics, moving pictures, sound, animation, 3-D modeling, etc.).” Reading and writing thus ought to be conceived as machinic, as part of a process of assemblage and composition. Books and discourse in general always-already occur within a network, a specific milieu. We do not possess language rather it is given to us indirectly.
Amerika is making a descriptive more than prescriptive statement about the nature of texts that cyberculture hypercharges. Amerika writes; “on the net, nobody knows how sexy you really are, how bad the dog gets whipped, how crude the sadistic brute can be, how ambiguous the thought patterns generally are, what race makes you salivate, what gender makes you cringe, what age you first got laid, in whose biology you are now swimming, in what hospital you gave birth, in what signal you now divest.” Amerika’s point is that we need to “rethink representation.” The fact that what virtual documentation is “always already fictionalized” means that we are “moving beyond the knowing and entering a world of immersive topographies that open up unknown narrative worlds composed of unstable identities, ambiguously located intentions, and surrogate lovers.”
While Amerika’s work may seem overly abstract, out of touch, or romanticized, its force as an analytic nonetheless contains an immense potential for political liberation. Activist, performance artist and critic Guillermo Gomez-Pena crosses borders physically, academically and virtually through his work on multiculturalism and Chicano Studies. Gomez’s notion of the Cyber-Aztec in his work “The New World Border” views cyberculture as a resistant space that fragments and frustrates traditional identity categories and forms of hegemonic thought. Gomez is highly indebted to Gibson and cyberpunk in general, “The New World Border” narrates a science-fiction “gringo-stroika” about the future of the U.S. Gomez does not just unwittingly celebrate border-crossing but uses his works to point to the paradox of identity politics and resistance in a postmodern economy. Resistance must simultaneously occur locally and dispersed while retaining its trans-cultural or global aims in order to ensure the desire for fluidity does not compromise the necessity of strategic essentialisms. Capital simultaneously deterritorializes rigid forms of identification with the nation-state or race while finding ways to commodify the dispersion of identities.
Dances with Dial-Ups
The advertisement is from the January of 1983 edition of Byte magazine. Byte began in 1975 and grew alongside the personal computer’s success with readership piquing in the early 1990’s. It covered development in computer technology, offering analysis of not just MS-Dos and Mac, but the industry as a whole. The advertisement is aimed at a relatively confined but influential class of consumers, baby-booming yuppies and sentimental bourgeoisies. The target audience is people who are tech savvy and affluent, but it also latches on to the discourse of family values. Dial-up Internet becomes a tool for talking to mom or having dinner parties without dishes.
Furthermore, the advertisement depicts a happy couple sitting comfortably at home in their robes. The environment is rather decadent but not toned down enough to seem realistic. The photograph is taken from the perspective of the computer, turning the device into a part of the home environment rather than just a stale piece of business technology. At the same time the family is sitting before a book case and grandfather clock, the computer becomes a sensible tool for the upper-middle class, a piece of luxury but nonetheless serves utilitarian ends. The woman stretches out her arm holding a single empty wineglass; this object becomes an impregnated metaphor for how viewers interpret the ad. Dial-Up becomes a glass to be filled up by whatever you desire, it can be a little bit of anything. The image depicts a living room with a bookshelf, a rocking horse, a light, a clock, and family photographs, the internet contains a little of everything.
The inspirations of the advertisement are several fold; a sense of possibility and ease, ambition and relaxation, familial sentiments and time-well spent. It provokes a sense of curiosity and awe surrounding the new friendships and connections that can’t be forged by the new technology. Yet it also speaks in a way that is relaxed and rather informal for such a radically new device; “(we call it Email).” The people in the photo are wearing a guilty smirk, smiling with their mouths closed and their faces glowing, perhaps it was the wine. Or maybe it’s that the Internet seemed like such a privilege and sign of status at the time that it made one prideful in an almost indulgent way. The image inspires its audience to buy its product, Compuserve. Buying such a product holds serious social potential. It is a tool for maintaining the most immediate relationship, the relationship between yourself and your mother and for the most superficial ones, for the people who are not worth doing dishes for. The advertisement also is meant to relax your concerns about the Internet, it is easy to use. One can simply sit back in their pajamas and “even use a scrambler, if you have a secret you don’t want to share.”
Moreover, the advertisement does appeals to stereotypes of mid-aged well to do’s, that they want to be on the cutting edge but only in order to either make life easier, augment the pleasures I already desire, or increase my social status. While, these desires may resonate almost universally, the living room the photograph is taken in, the clothing the people are wearing, and the magazine its from construct a particular identity that is self-consciously privileged. The advertisement toes the line, it both pulls you in, offering you an intoxicating glass, yet leaves it empty enough for you to fill it with your own rationalizations, dreams, or temptations. It does assume that the audience is very conscious of its consumption habits rather than conspicuous and thus weaves together the picture with its text to dispel any myths or questions that maybe in the back of your mind. The ad has to introduce an entire new concept more than its particular model or object.
Yet, the ad is also catered specifically to a good-looking couple, one that cares about family and social relations, keeping up with the joneses and appearances in general. One of its aims is in part to distinguish this type of computer owner from the glasses wearing geek, from the NASA men or the IBM Business types. It continues the drive to make the computer personal rather than a disembodied object.
The Question Concerning Convergence
Convergence Culture is the inauguration of a new era in consumption and production – like all of Capital’s epochal changes, its movement is caused by a confluence of forces, “technological, industrial, cultural and social”(3). Convergence is not just a congregation but also a collision, the contradictions between new and old, grassroots and corporate, and consumer and producer grow ever more complex. Jenkins toes the threshold between the pious followers of the Convergence cult and the unwavering dogmatism of “critical pessimists”(258). Convergence Culture is not necessarily good or evil, just potentially dangerous, Jenkins’ critical utopianism resists the view of technological determinists, “rather, convergence represents a paradigm shift – a move from medium specific content toward content that flows across multiple media channels, toward the increased interdependence of communications systems, toward multiple ways of accessing media content” and increasingly “complex relations between corporate media and bottom-up participatory culture”(254). The changes in media technologies generate new consumption habits, the postmodern economy is not limited to the old marketing strategies and essentialist identity formations but caters to niche markets. American Idol and The Matrix are examples of “affective economics” in which “the line between entertainment content and brand messages” are blurred (20). The transformation of brands into “lovemarks” entails a shift from passive to “active, emotionally engaged, and socially networked” consumers that produce, an example of how the medium becomes the message (20). The Matrix, Star Wars, and Harry Potter, all fantastic or fictional stories have succeeded in “transmedia storytelling”(93). Jenkins discussion of political coverage and news media’s cyber-interfaces shows “participatory culture’s power to negate” as well as “old media’s power to marginalize”(278). Ultimately, Jenkins think that “increasing participation in popular culture is a good thing,”(259) a progressive tool that will lead to “a more ideal society”(258). How we will get there and what technologies will be the machinery of resistance is a question for the democracy-to-come.
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| Jenkins Playing Guitar Hero |
In the end Jenkins accomplished the goal of his book, which was necessary but insufficient. Jenkins never claimed to possess all of the answers or that he had a specific politics embedded besides his basic normative claim that communication and popular culture are good activities. Jenkins’ focus on the way culture circulates rather than is produced lacks a theoretical framework for evaluating competing claims. The substance of Jenkins’ method of critique has become as virtual as his object of study. Granted dogmatism is a vice, but Jenkins merely seeks out the possibilities of “consumer-based politics”(260). The only discussion of the “process (expanding access to the means of media production and distribution)” is posed as an offhanded question (252). Should we really expect any fundamental change in the marketplace if we are only focused on the products created rather the method by which they were given life? Does the liberatory potential of Convergence Culture, within the economic realm anyway, simply mean the expansion of marketing strategies to better assimilate the diversity of identities, social niches, idiosyncratic consumption behaviors etc..? Jenkins vision of empowerment mystifies an ideological background of exploitation. He attacks the symptom of a process that exceeds his object of concern. Unless you criticize the fundamental structuring principles of media culture one will only end up putting a human face upon one facet of larger systemic forces of irrational violence and destitution. Jenkins is right that convergence culture cannot be dealt with through an all or nothing approach, but bracketing the discussion to how to make corporations respond better to consumer preferences is ultimately an even more disempowering and cynical way of relating to one’s own role as a critic and a consumer. It fulfills our desire to conceive of capital as a rational system, that if only we have more information about the products created we can reconcile its contradictions. It feeds the fantasy that if corporations knew what we really wanted they’d make it for us. But this evades the stark reality of the culture industry; the culture industry does not just rationally respond to people’s clear-cut demands, but rather produces desires and proliferates them through a leveling process.
Coerced Connections
Spencer Ackerman writes on the ways the U.S. military could have used its technological advantages to force internet upon authoritarian regimes.
Feelin’ Aristotelian: Rhetoric: Book 2 Chapters 12-26
If Aristotle is right when he claims, “When we know a thing, and have decided about it, there is no further use in speaking about it,” (II, viii, 1391b 7-9) then why is he still speaking? Perhaps it has to do with “the manner and means of investing speeches with moral character.” (II, xviii, 1391b 22-3) Aristotle’s overarching piece is to find out what moves a particular audience and cater to it. It is generally easier to play on the particular types of resonances that audience members hold and latch on to them, than to inaugurate an entire new world view. Crafting a moving speech does not entail creating new frames or associations, but modifying already held dispositions to fit the case at hand. Aristotle writes, “The orator has therefore to guess the subjects on which his hearers really hold views already, and what those views are, and then must express, as general truths, these same views on these same subjects.” (II, xxi, 1395b 10-12) Aristotle appears to have little faith in a particular rhetor’s ability to challenge an audience’s assumptions, rather they must appeal to already existing cultural values or modes of reasoning in order to gain ground.
Aristotle doesn’t make a claim about the origin of language or its nature overall, i.e. that language exists allegorically, or is structured fundamentally by metaphors or tropes. But he does elaborate the ways in which these devices serve pragmatic purposes. Aristotle further makes no distinction here between writing and speech, or do justice to the performative aspects of speaking. Yet he does apply the general framework of philosophy to language, he writes
In discussing deliberative oratory we have spoken about the relative greatness of various goods, and about the greater and lesser in general. Since therefore in each type of oratory the object under discussion is some kind of good – whether it is utility, nobleness, or justice – it is clear that every orator must obtain the materials of amplification through these channels (II, xix, 1393a 11-15).
What are these “materials of amplification” (II, xix, 1393a 11-15)? Is there an overlap between Aristotle’s metaphysics and his theorization of linguistic laws? For example, are the materials with greatest amplifying power the most moderate or virtuous ones? He outlines an entire spectrum of modes of argumentation, in what way can we assign different weights to the different methods? He claims that exaggeration and invention are sometimes necessary, couldn’t that also imply it is always-already happening?
Aristotle however would prefer not to dive too deep into these waters; “To go further than this, and try to establish abstract laws of greatness and superiority, is to argue without an object; in practical life, particular kinds count more than generalizations” (II, xix, 1393a, 15-18).
On the other hand, when he speaks to the types of uses of ‘Example’ he does differentiate between “the mention of actual past facts” and “the invention of facts by the speaker” (II, xx, 1393a 27-8). He reproaches Socrates for having deployed the latter form, through the use of ‘illustrative parallel.’ He also indicates that fables are more useful when speaking to popular assemblies. The reasoning behind this claim is two fold; 1) The Rhapsode, the poet, and drama were the primary modes of education for the majority of ancient Greeks, learning through narratives or story is thus what these people would be disposed towards and 2) given a larger group of people it would be more practical to deploy a fictional example if not everyone is familiar with the facts. Furthermore, perhaps the use of fables has the power to create a distance between our preconceived notions and the argument at hand. The way that they become abstracted, Aristotle gives an example of a story with animals for characters, forces disconnection. One has to see the whole story in order to see the moral arise and then apply it to the example at hand. A rhetor would pick a relatively narrow fable in which the moral of the story can only be applied to the case in a way that appeals to their larger argument.
If it is a narrative that possesses more cultural import it can be more amplifying to an argument, i.e. the way the left appeals to the ‘nation of immigrants’ narrative to pass visa policy reform. Grand claims about the historical origin of the U.S. can force people to think outside of the confines of the present position they’re in. In the U.S. this can be a very powerful tool, since the story of the founding of the nation can evoke waves of pride and nostalgia. I think that this example problematizes Aristotle’s division of speech types and their correlative appeal type, “that concerned with Amplification is…most appropriate to ceremonial speeches; that concerned with the Past, to forensic speeches;…that concerned with Possibility and the Future, to political speeches” (II, xviii, 1392a 4-7). Perhaps also the line between actual and invented facts should be exposed as arbitrary in many cases. While there may be a real distinction between what we know is a fact and what is not, there is no actual difference when it comes to the way we relate different facts to one another in a speech. The way historical facts are weaved together within narratives shifts the value that facts possess based on context et al.