Category: Essays

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Crimes of the Clock: The Crooked Corridor of Timecrimes

The time-travel trope, if employed well, never seems to wear thin. Several of my favorite narratives — Donnie Darko (2001), Primer (2004), Source Code (2011), and The Shining Girls (2013), to name a few — all involve time travel to some extent. “Part of the fascination of time travel concerns the stark paradoxes that threaten as soon as travel into the past is considered,” writes theoretical physicist Paul Davies (2001). “Perhaps causal loops can be made self-consistent. Perhaps reality consists of multiple universes” (pp. 123-124). These thought experiments are rife with unanswered and unanswerable questions, which are the very stuff of great stories.

Timecrimes (2007)

Time is a game
played beautifully
by children.
— Heraclitus, Fragment 79

Most recently, Project Almanac (2015) illustrates those paradoxes and their intrigue while still being a fairly mediocre movie, but it fails in spite of the time travel rather than because of it. 2009’s Triangle also loops time in a muddy and often confusing story. Time travel is such a huge cognitive load that it’s difficult to get right in a movie with much else going on and even harder to make feel real.

In contrast, Timecrimes (Los Cronocrímenes; 2007) capitalizes on its causal loops and suspenseful twists rather than wasting them. The film contains exactly four actors, and its action takes place over the course of about an hour and a half. In its handling of causality, Timecrimes is somewhere between Shane Carruth‘s Primer (2004) and the popular Back to the Future franchise of the 1980s, both of which feature extensive backwards time travel. Like Primer, which uses time travel as the pretext for the study of larger issues (Taubin, 2008), Timecrimes evokes themes of voyeurism and ethics in addition to its time-looping structure and the subsequent questions of causality. This is Spanish director/actor Nacho Vigalondo’s first non-comedic film and his sure-handed direction makes this condensed, pressure-cooker of a temporal thriller an imminently watchable and intriguing film.

One’s bearing
shapes one’s fate.
— Heraclitus, Fragment 121

Timecrimes tells the story of Héctor (played by Karra Elejalde), a lazy middle-aged man who has, with his beloved wife Clara, moved into a freshly built house in the rolling hills. After attempting to nap and receiving a strange phone call (he calls the number back, getting a machine with an outgoing message that says, “This is a restricted terminal. Leave your message or enter your access code”), Héctor is left lounging in his backyard, peeking in on the neighboring countryside with his binoculars. As Clara heads into town to buy groceries for the evening meal, Héctor catches a glimpse of a sultry scene-in-progress. Through his binoculars, he sees a half-naked young woman posed, poised, and undressing in a clearing in the woods. Upon closer inspection, fumbling through the woods as he goes, Héctor finds her naked and asleep. He attempts to awaken the helpless young woman, but is stabbed in the arm with scissors by a man in a ratty trench coat with pink bandages covering his head and face.

The event that sets the action in motion in this film is Héctor’s spotting the young woman in the woods. There’s no reason evident for his initial scoping of the landscape through his binoculars. We can only assume that he’s driven by the desire to see what surrounds his new environs. Once the young woman comes into view, his purpose changes. Héctor’s motivation shifts from the desire to see to the desire to see more. His intentions may have been pure at the onset, but upon seeing glimpses of the young woman’s naked body, Héctor becomes a voyeur. Voyeurism is the act of watching the activities of others without their knowledge (Hayward, 1996), and while cinema is inherently sexual via voyeurism (Metz, 1994), Timecrimes adds actual sexual voyeurism to its plot.

Mulvey (1986) sees the cinema system and its products as inherently patriarchal. Film teaches us to see as men see, to see women as men see women. Timecrimes fits Mulvey’s patriarchal schema not only by making us see literally as Héctor does, but also by making the naked female body the object of Héctor’s viewing. The young woman in the film, as in most films according to Mulvey (1986),

stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning (p. 199).

Indeed, the naked young woman in the woods in Timecrimes is the pivotal signifier, sending Héctor into the maelstrom of events that make up the rest of the film.

Schrödinger's cat shirt.
Schrödinger’s cat shirt.

Sound thinking
is to listen well and choose
one course of action.
— Heraclitus, Fragment 110

“By virtue of its handling of space and time,” Bordwell (1986) writes, “classical narration makes the fabula (story) world an internally consistent construct into which narration seems to step from the outside” (p. 24). In its handling of space and time, Timecrimes violates and simultaneously maintains Bordwell’s idea of the straight corridor. It violates it by looping in upon itself through the plot device of backwards time-travel. Throughout the film, there are three versions of Héctor traversing the same block of time in proximal space.

The film maintains the straight corridor by consistently showing the narrative from Héctor’s point of view as he travels back in time twice. The viewer follows Héctor through the time-traveling and the loops and thereby maintains his singular, linear path. If viewed from the scientist’s point of view, the film would appear chunked backwards, in a Memento-style “crooked corridor,” with the viewer seeing the third Héctor first, the second second, and the first last. By the end of the film, Héctor has passed through the same block of time three times and managed to emerge the singular Héctor.

“Manipulation of the mise-en-scéne,” Bordwell (1986) continues, “creates an apparently independent profilmic event, which can in turn be more or less overt, more or less ‘intrusive’ on the posited homogeneity of the story world” (p. 24). Upon first viewing, Timecrimes appears to be presenting its story in a nonlinear fashion, but this notion is a product of its time-traveling subject matter, not its narrative structure. Like Run, Lola, Run (1998), Timecrimes shows us three versions of the same block of time. It differs in that it’s showing the same block of time from Héctor’s point of view during his three trips through that block of time. In actuality, the film depicts a strictly linear path, albeit with two trips backwards through time (See Fig. 1.).

Crooked Corridor
Fig. 1. The arrow of time as seen through Timecrimes (2007).

Because Héctor’s narrative path overlaps itself in time, Timecrimes violates Bordwell’s straight corridor in attempting to maintain its linearity by following Héctor’s point of view. Bordwell (1986) states, “Causality also motivates temporal principles of organization: the syuzhet [plot] represents the order, frequency, and duration of fabula [story] events in ways which bring out the salient causal relations” (p. 19). Timecrimes twists up Bordwell’s (1986) straight corridor by attempting to show its multiple backwards time-traveling plot as a linear narrative.

Tainted souls who try
to purify themselves with blood
are like the man
who steps in filth and thinks
to bathe in sewage.
— Heraclitus, Fragment 129

In one shot we’re watching Héctor watch through the binoculars. In the next we’re seeing what he’s watching through them. His gaze becomes our gaze. In this way, the apparatus of Timecrimes is made apparent by transposing the camera through the binoculars. In several key scenes, we see what the binoculars see. Since these scenes are pivotal for the film’s plot, they bring the apparatus to the fore and make the act of viewing (or looking or watching) integral to the narrative.

Héctor 1’s seeing the young woman in the woods sets the first part of the narrative in motion. As soon as his wife Clara is gone, he immediately sets off to investigate. His use of the binoculars is the impetus for the action of the film. The lens is the apparatus by which the plot is spurred into motion.

Héctor 2 sees himself (the scientist goes so far as to call Héctor 1 his “mirror image”), setting off the second part of the plot. As Héctor 2 watches Héctor 1 interacting with his wife Clara through the binoculars, he feels that he has been replaced and thereby castrated (Mulvey, 1986). The rest of his actions in the movie are toward one goal: getting rid of Héctor 1 by making sure he gets into the time-machine. Héctor keeps a close watch on himself – both ways – through his ever-present binoculars.

When Héctor 2 accidentally kills Clara (or so he thinks), he realizes he has to travel back again (as Héctor 3) and keep himself (Héctor 2) from killing her. All of these events stem from Héctor’s (and thereby our) voyeurism through the binocular lenses, lenses that show the world as more real than what our naked eyes see.

Just as the river where I step
is not the same, and is,
so am I as I am not.
— Heraclitus, Fragment 81

Timecrimes upholds Mulvey’s (1986) contention that film is inherently voyeuristic, and that it utilizes the male gaze to subjugate the woman’s body for the male’s fantasies. If Héctor hadn’t been combing the countryside with his binoculars, he wouldn’t have seen the naked woman in the woods (ironically being held captive by another version of himself), he wouldn’t have investigated further, and the events of the film wouldn’t have unfolded as they did. The plot preys on Héctor’s voyeurism to propel itself forward.

The film also contains Bordwell’s (1986) notion of double causal structure, with one plot line involving heterosexual romance between Héctor and Clara, and another involving Héctor’s voyeurism and subsequent time-traveling adventure. The double loop of backwards time travel twists up Bordwell’s (1986) straight corridor, that is one of a linear causal plot. Though Timecrimes is shown as linearly as possible (i.e., from the point of view of one character), its causal chaos (i.e., the fact that Héctor 1 is spying on himself, and Héctor 2 is spying on himself, etc.) makes it seem nonlinear.

The apparatus of the lens (both movie camera lens and binocular lens), which is usually assumed to be transparent, is brought to our attention throughout the film by transposing one for the other: The binocular lens shows Héctor – and thereby us – what is real.

References:

Bordwell, D. (1986). Classical Hollywood cinema: Narrational principles and procedures. In P. Rosen (Ed.), Narrative, apparatus, ideology: A film theory reader. pp. 17-34. New York: Columbia       University Press.

Davies, P. (2001). How to Build a Time Machine. New York: Penguin.

Hayward, S. (1996). Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts. New York: Routledge.

Heraclitus. (2001). Fragments: The Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus (B. Haxton, Trans.). New York: Penguin.

Ibarretxe, J., Carneros, E., & Ibarretxe, E. (Producers), & Vigalondo, N. (Writer/Director). (2007). Los Cronocrimenes (Timecrimes) [Motion picture]. Spain: Karbo Vantes Entertainment.

Metz, C. (1994). Story/Discourse: Notes on Two Kinds of Voyeurism. In B. Nichols (Ed.), Movies and Methods, Vol II: An Anthology. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Mulvey, L. (1986). Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. In P. Rosen (Ed.), Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader. pp. 198-209. New York: Columbia University Press.

Taubin, A. (2008). Primer. In D. Sterrit & J. Anderson (Eds.), The B-list: The National Society of Film Critics on the Low-Budget Beauties, Genre-bending Mavericks, and Cult Classics We Love, pp. 79-82. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press.

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Sean Price, Rest in Peace

I’ve never hoped so hard for a hoax… My favorite rapper, Sean Price, reportedly passed away in his sleep Saturday morning.

Sean Price, R.I.P.

Sean Price taught me so much. He embodied and critiqued the hypocrisies and contradictions of being an entertainer, specifically a rapper, for a living. He taught me that you can make serious art, be serious about your craft, and still not take yourself too seriously. His friends Black Milk and Vinnie Paz both say he was one of the funniest people they knew. His albums and mixtapes all have goofy, punny names: Mic Tyson, Kimbo Price, Donkey Sean, Jr. His email signature on his iPhone read, “Sent from GOD!” He was as much a clown as he was a monster emcee. Here, in his “Rap Clinic” sketch, he demonstrates both.

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Once the news spread on the internet Saturday, reminders came quick that we need to recognize those we love while they’re alive — and let them know. As Rob Swift put it,

Sean Price’s death this morning is a harsh reminder that life is not promised, and so let’s not take for granted what the real giants in the game have done for Hip-hop. I say that because the truth of the matter is this, the majority of us celebrating Sean Price today are a day late. Ruck would of appreciated the youtube posts and all the love being channeled his way a lot more yesterday when he was alive!

I talk about Hip-hop a lot, so I talk about Sean Price a lot. In over a decade of teaching college classes, some of them about Hip-hop, I never met a student who knew who he was. Now, seeing the outpouring of tributes, I know he had more fans than I ever imagined. I just hope he knew that.

With that said, I don’t think the fame mattered that much to him. He did this because he loved it. He raps on “Like You” (from Jesus Price Superstar, 2007), “You do what you can, and I do what I want to.” As he told me in our one and only interview in 2009,

I’m a fan of Hip-hop first of all. I was one of those kids who taped Red Alert and Mr. Magic and Marley Marl. I copped LPs and read the credits, so when I got a deal later, it was a honor for me to be surrounded by motherfuckers I grew up listening to, and I stay humble… I remember smoking a blunt with Primo watching him work on “Unbelievable” for Biggie… Ah, good times.

I haven’t cried over a celebrity since Mitch Hedberg died. Sean Price was younger than I am, but he was a mentor to me. My man Aesop Rock writes of him, “Guy was an icon and should be remembered as such.”

Rest in peace, my brother. You are already sorely missed.

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Kim Gordon: Femme Fearless

When I started discovering music on my own, Sonic Youth was already a band with records out. In that sense, I don’t know a world without them. I once wrote that they weren’t a band, that they were an institution. One could say the same about Kim Gordon. Her presence in the band and her relationship with Thurston Moore showed us what was possible—and not only that it was possible but that it was also sustainable. Writer Elissa Schappell said that they’d shown an entire generation how to grow up. And then it ended.

Kim Gordon in controversial t-shirt (according to MTV).

Gordon’s is such a singular story, and her memoir, Girl in a Band (Dey St., 2015), tells it in perfectly placed prose. From art to music and back again, she’s been at the center of so much important work. It feels so good to see her emerge as a force of her own through the book. Her sociologist dad coined the vocabulary for the high-school social groups that we still use: geeks, freaks, preps, jocks, and other members of the Breakfast Club. Her mom contributed her sense of fashion: a love of thrifting and mixing styles into something unique. Her brother’s shadow unfortunately loomed over much of her early years, and until reading this, I didn’t even know she had a brother.

Girl in a BandLong-time friends with such creative souls as Dan Graham, Cindy Sherman, Kurt Cobain, Tamra Davis, Chloë Sevigny, Spike Jonze, Kathleen Hanna, Gerhard Richter, William Burroughs, Danny Elfman (whom she dated in high school), and many others, Gordon came into her own as an artist when it meant the most. At five years old she knew art would be the center of her life. “Nothing else mattered,” she writes: “Sometimes I think we know on some level the person we’re going to be in our life, that if we pay attention, we can piece out that information” (p. 67). As a dear old friend once said of our own high-school years, “Who knew we were already who we were going to be?”

When Nirvana was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last year, Dave Grohl asked Joan Jett, Annie Clark, Lorde, and Kim Gordon to sing renditions of Nirvana’s songs. Seeing Joan Jett sing “Smells Like Teen Spirit” with Pat Smear (whose first band‘s only record she’d produced in 1979), Krist Novoselic, and Grohl is its own kind of amazing, but Kim Gordon’s unhinged version of “Aneurism” is the absolute shit. She writes of the performance,

I sang ‘Aneurism,’ with its chorus, ‘Beat me out of me‘, bringing in all my own rage and hurt from the last few years—a four-minute-long explosion of grief, where I could finally let myself feel the furious sadness of Kurt’s death and everything else surrounding it (p. 272).

kSUncPXtE9k

I saw her walking up the sidewalk on California Avenue in Chicago last summer. We made eye contact, and her expression seemed to say, “Please, don’t recognize me.” I just smiled and nodded, and she did the same. The following passage from the book reminds me of that day:

One day I caught a glimpse of Warhol himself crossing West Broadway—the blond-white wig matching the white of his face, the black-framed glasses. It amazed me how in New York celebrities felt free to roam around the city with no one ever hassling them, in contrast to L.A., where famous people hid out in hidden gated hilltop communities. New York felt so much more real (p. 91).

Kim Gordon has helped define the art of her time, but she hasn’t been limited by it. Her art, performance, and writing all feel completely fearless. After reading this book, I can’t help but think that her story is just getting started.

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Bedlam and Then Some: This is not the Future

One of the many methods used in futures studies is what is called environmental scanning. “All futurists do environmental scanning,” write Theodore J. Gordon and Jerome C. Glenn, “some are more organized and systematic, all try to distinguish among what is constant, what changes, and what constantly changes” (p. 3). The process, which includes several distant early warning techniques (e.g., expert panels, literature reviews, internet searches, conference monitoring, etc.), helps inform the pursuits of issues management and strategic planning. According to William Renfro, President of the Issues Management Association, issues management consists of four stages: identifying potential future issues, researching the background and potential impacts of these issues, evaluating issues competing for a corporation or nation’s operations, and developing appropriate strategies for these operations (see Renfro, 1993, p. 67).

A little further afield, science fiction is another place we look to “see” the future (Hollinger, 2010; Woodgate, 2004). Citing Marx’s reification and Baudrillard’s simulacrum, Adam Roberts (2006) writes, “Science as simulation is the reason why fictional science, or ‘SF’, is so much more fun to watch than real science…” (p. 113). Spaceships, robots, cyberspace: These all exist in some form in the real world, but the widespread perception of these contrivances come from science fiction books and movies. “In the context of SF,” Roberts writes, “this reification works most potently on the interconnected levels of representation of technology and the technologies of reproduction” (p. 113). At varying levels, we look to science fiction to show us the potential directions in which technology is going.

Derek Woodgate (2004), founder of The Futures Lab, calls this method the “wide-angled lens” approach (p. 52). Analyzing the work of William Gibson, Woodgate (2004) writes, “Here, in the various levels of connectivity, we need to study the patterns and signals suggested by the ‘lens’ and models. More important, we must be able to recognize the patterns and make connections between seemingly unrelated data in a way that will provide us with powerful and effective future leverage points” (p. 60). As much as Gibson denies being a predictor of any stripe, his work is invariably consulted as a map to the future of technology.

The above approaches represent applied systems thinking for future planning. I briefly outline them here in order to analyze a few trends I’ve witnessed in recent science fiction, trends I do not believe are reliably predictive. As a member of the Futurist Board of the Lifeboat Foundation and fancying myself an amateur futurist, I enjoy dabbling in the techniques of futures studies. Pointing out the wrongs is much easier than getting it right, nonetheless, the following are four misrepresentations of future technology that I’ve seen popping up on movie screens:

Star Wars

Holograms: We all remember how futuristic Princess Leia’s message to Obi-Wan Kenobi looked when beamed out of R2D2’s projector in the original Star Wars (1977), and holograms have persisted throughout the series. Dennis Gabor was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1971 for his invention and development of the holographic technique for 3-D image representation. Since then they’ve shown up all over the science fictional universe in film, television, and novels: Total Recall (1990), Vanilla Sky (2001), Paul Levinson‘s novel The Pixel Eye (2003), The Island (2005), Avatar (2009), the Fringe television series (2008-2013), Spike Jonze’s her (2013), The Giver (2014), and perhaps most famously in the Star Trek series, home of the Holodek, as well as the aforementioned Star Wars films.

The best holograms have the resolution of old, black-and-white television. No one is going to turn away from the high-definition flat-screens found on every surface these days to look at a choppy, transparent, 3-D ghost.

her

Voice-activated Interfaces: This is another invention that’s been used throughout science fiction, from Edward Bellamy’s novel Looking Backward (1888) to Star Trek. While the movie her (2013) uses voice activation throughout, there’s a particularly unlikely scene showing main character Theodore Twombly (played by Joaquin Phoenix) checking his email while riding home on public transportation. That scenario is currently as commonplace as they come, but he’s doing it via a voice-activated interface. It’s like widespread adoption of the Bluetooth headset: Can you imagine everyone everywhere reciting commands to their communication devices? It would be Bedlam and then some!

Using a microphone for information input is the opposite of listening to headphones. The former is impossible to do in a crowded car, bus, train, office, or living room, while the latter is happens more often than not. I’ve also never really seen how modality can be expressed via voice. Without a supplementary input device, how does one, for instance, differentiate between writing, editing, and just talking?

Elysium

Exoskeletons: Robotic and semi-robotic exoskeletons are often shown as military contrivances used to augment human strength and agility. They’ve appeared most recently in Elysium (2013) and Edge of Tomorrow (2014). While these provide nice narrative crutches by keeping humans in the fore, and one can easily envision other uses for them, the future of warfare is largely unpersoned. Remotely controlled devices like missiles, bombs, satellites, and drones are the more likely path of future skirmishes. For an excellent speculative tale on the latter, see Daniel Suarez’s novel Kill Decision (2012).

Cloud Atlas

Round Screens: Outside of a radar room, I’ve only seen round screens in one movie. The Wachowski brothers’ adaptation of David Mitchell’s brilliant novel Cloud Atlas (2013) is full of bad ideas, but this has to be the most wrong-headed. Like the hologram, round screens look futuristic, but the grid as a textual and architectural form predates Gutenberg (see Hurlburt, 1978; Williamson, 1986). Unless we stop using symbolic language, its displays need to be rectangles. Screens, like the pages they emulate, require right angles.

To paraphrase Kenneth Burke (1974), science fiction provides equipment for living in future and alternative worlds — even when it gets it wrong. As Elizabeth Grosz (2000) writes, “History is made an inexhaustible enterprise only because of the ongoing movement of time, the precession of futurity, and the multiplicity of positions from which this writing can and will occur” (p. 1021). Science fiction’s speculative trajectories often show us what’s possible, even if its just by showing us what’s not.

References:

Burke, Kenneth. (1974). The Philosophy of Literary Form. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Glenn, Jerome C. & Gordon, Theodore J. (2003). Futures Research Methodology, V2.0. Washington, DC: AC/UNU Millennium Project.

Grosz, Elizaneth. (2000, Summer). Histories of a Feminist Future. Signs, 25(4), pp. 1017-1021.

Hollinger, Veronica. (2010, March). A History of the Future: Notes for an Archive. Science Fiction Studies, 37(1), pp. 23-33

Hurlburt, Allen. (1978). Grid: A Modular System for the Production of Newspapers, Magazines, and Books. New York: Van Nostrand Reinholt Co.

Renfro, William L. (1993). Issues Management in Strategic Planning. Westport, CT: Quorum Books.

Roberts, Adam. (2006). Science Fiction: The New Critical Idiom. New York: Routledge.

Williamson, Jack H. (1986, Autumn). The Grid: History, Use and Meaning. Design Issues, 3(2), pp. 15-30.

Woodgate, Derek (with Pethrick, Wayne R). (2004). Future Frequencies. Austin, TX: Fringecore Publishing.

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Special thanks to my futurist friends Scott Smith, Frank Spencer, Stuart Candy, Jamais Cascio, Bruce Sterling, and Emily Empel for getting me psyched about futures studies in the first place, and to Lily Brewer and Kathleen Tyner for providing additional texts and inspiration.

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Contested Boundaries and Saturated Selves

In her book The Social Machine (MIT Press, 2014), Judith Donath outlines designs for living online. Echoing George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980), she writes, “We are embodied beings, who have evolved in the physical world; our thoughts and imagination are rooted in the sensory experience of our physical surroundings. Online, there is no body; there is only information. We comprehend abstract ideas by reframing them in metaphoric terms that ultimately derive from physical experience” (p. 9). One needn’t look any further that a computer’s desktop to see this in action. “Immersion” was once a strong notion in computer-mediated communication studies, online communities, and virtual reality. Now we are not so much immersed in media as we are saturated by it.

The Social MachineDonath points out that these are boundary issues. Walls, fences, locked doors, online moderators—“the doormen of discussions” (p. 159), spam filters, and other gate-keeping contrivances protect the private from the public and vice versa. Even with such boundaries in place, our embodiedness is still at risk. We are as sieves, filtering news from noise, or as sponges, soaking up information and influence of all kinds. The latter evokes Psychologist Kenneth Gergen’s “saturated self”:

Emerging technologies saturate us with the voices of humankind—both harmonious and alien. As we absorb their varied rhymes and reasons, they become a part of us and we of them. Social saturation furnishes us with a multiplicity of incoherent and unrelated languages of the self (1991, p. 6).

Nearly twenty years ago, Nicholas Negroponte (1995) pontificated on the fading boundaries of the “post-information age,” writing,

In the same ways that hypertext removes the limitations of the printed page, the post-information age will remove the limitations of geography. Digital living will include less and less dependence upon being in specific place at specific time, and the transmission of place itself will start to become possible. In the post-information age, since you may live and work at one or many locations, the concept of an “address” now takes on new meaning (p. 163).

The history of the internet is largely a story of broken-down boundaries (see Grodin & Lindolof, 1996; Jenkins, 2006; van Dijck, 2013). Its architecture “rests upon principles of convergence, which enable multiple and overlapping connections between varieties of distinct social spheres” (Papacharissi, 2011, p. 305). The inherent irony of Negroponte’s observation is that since physical location no longer matters in the digital, post-geographic workday, it makes it matter even more. If you can work from anywhere, where you live means more than ever. You can live wherever you want regardless of where your work is. The old boundaries are gone.

The End of AbsenceThe overwhelming irony now is that where we are matters less than the digital wares with which we saturate our selves. On the commute, at school, at work, at home, on a trip, visiting friends—the smartphone usurps all of these with a persistent and precise hold on our attention. In William Gibson‘s term, the online world has “everted” itself into physical space. The fact that it is now inescapable is what writer Michael Harris calls “the end of absence.” His is an example of what I have called the Advent Horizon. We feel a sense of loss when we cross one of these lines. From the Socratic shift from speaking to writing, to the transition from writing to typing, we’re comfortable—differently on an individual and collective level—in one of these phases. As we adopt and assimilate new devices, our horizon of comfort drifts further out while our media vocabulary increases. It takes 30 years for a full, generational change and with that a full shift in advent horizons. Harris notes, “If you were born before 1985, then you know what life is like both with the internet and without. You are making the pilgrimage from Before to After” (p. 15).

Reaching across one of these divides, Thomas de Zengotita (2005) writes of digitally zombified youth,

… It was if they were somnambulating, hypnotized, into some newborn zone of being where hallowed custom and bizarre context were so surreally fused that the whole tableau seemed poised to shimmer off into the ether at any moment (p. 155).

Ours is a chronic presence in a chronic present. Donath (2014), writes of our online personal presences, “The stranger, as we think of him now, may cease to exist” (p. 336). But Harris (2014) adds, “Before all memory of those absences is shuttered, though, there is this brief time when we might record what came before. We might do something with those small, barely noticeable instances when we’re reminded of our love for absence. They flash at us amid the rush of our experience and seem to signal: Wait, wasn’t there something…?” (p. 8).

Well, was there?

References:

de Zengotita, Thomas. (2005). Mediated: How the Media Shapes Our World and the Way We Live in It. New York: Bloomsbury.

Donath, Judith. (2014). The Social Machine: Designs for Living Online. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Gergen, Kenneth. (1991). The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life. New York: Basic Books.

Grodin, Debra & Lindlof, Thomas R. (1996). Constructing the Self in a Mediated World. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Harris, Michael. (2014). The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection. New York: Current.

Jenkins, Henry. (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.

Lakoff, George, & Johnson, Mark (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Negroponte, Nicholas. (1995). Being Digital.  New York: Knopf.

Papacharissi, Zizi. (2011). A Networked Self. In Zizi Papacharissi (Ed.), A Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites (pp. 304-317). New York: Routledge.

van Dijck, José. (2013). The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Writing Women: Don’t Care If You Like It

Sometime in the year since reading Lauren Beukes’ The Shining Girls, I noticed that I’d been reading a lot of books written by women. It wasn’t a conscious decision, but looking back, it struck me as notable. But just as there are two kinds of racism, there are two kinds of sexism: noting the difference when it doesn’t matter and not noting it when it does. I love the writing of Rebecca Solnit, Chris Kraus, and Lauren Beukes regardless of their gender. I aspire to write like them because they are great writers. Several of the books I’ve been reading though tackle and twist ideas about feminism and femininity into new shapes for consideration.

Dare MeMegan Abbott already has another novel out, but 2012’s Dare Me (Reagan Arthur) is populated with the illest, fiercest, flyest cheerleaders you’ve ever seen. Chelsea Cain of The New York Times Book Review describes it as “Heathers meets Fight Club.” If that doesn’t sell it for you, then this might not be the book for you. These girls wield power that Thomas de Zengotita’s book Mediated (2005) calls “absolute” (p. 82). Describing the mise en scène of the halls of high school, he writes,

Girls, certain girls, dominate these settings because they are impresarios of an evolving social art. Propelled by incipient sexuality, yes, but across the whole range of its sublimations, they devote enormous energy to mastering an array of symbols and cues, an interplay of appearance, clothes, accessories, music, slang—a totality of customs that constitute their emerging world. And when they understand it well enough to play with it, improvise with it, innovate and disseminate, they take up their positions in that ruling clique and their authority will be recognized by all who know them. It will be their privilege to control the tones and terms that catch and shape the flow of days, and the long weekends. This clique of girls dominates because it presides over a Wittgensteinian language game—meaning, not just a language, not just the slang, but also the whole form of life that goes with it. Everybody who wants to be anybody must live by it, and they are the gatekeepers (p. 82-83).

Addy Hanlon, Beth Cassidy, Brinnie Cox, Emily, Mindy, Cori, Tacy, RiRi—the girls of Dare Me—are these certain girls. Untouchable, they run their school from a level above the workaday drama. To the common masses of lockers, duffel bags, and backpacks, their taut, tight existences carry nothing nonessential. No baggage to see or speak of—or so it seems from the outside. As Louis CK once puts it, speaking about his own daughters,

Boys fuck things up. Girls are fucked-up. That’s the difference. Boys just do damage to your house that you can measure in dollars, like a hurricane. Girls, like, leave scars in your psyche that you find later… That’s the difference between boys and girls. And it becomes the difference between men and women, really. A man will, like, steal your car or burn your house down or beat the shit out of you, but a woman will ruin your fuckin’ life. Do you see the difference? Like, a man will cut your arm off and throw it in a river, but he’ll leave you as a human being intact. He won’t fuck with who you are. Women are nonviolent, but they will shit inside of your heart (C. K., 2008).

All of the musings of men above smack predominantly of one thing: misogyny. Louis is joking, of course, but the inherent irony of a joke is often lost in the laughter. Some of the female revenge stories (e.g., Monster, Hard Candy, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo née “Men Who Hate Women,” etc.) may feel like they go too far, but there is rarely a point at which the righteous anger of a woman is not completely justified.

Tampa Turning the profile of the predatory pedophile on its head, Alissa Nutting’s newest novel inverts our gender-based perceptions of the perverted. Tampa (Ecco, 2014) tells the story of Celeste, an attractive middle school teacher who preys exclusively on her underage male students. Clare Swanson of Publisher’s Weekly calls it “Lolita meets American Psycho.” Only metaphorically feminist, Tampa is erotica wrapped tightly in satire, or possibly vise versa. Its critique turns on flipping gender expectations but also social mores; Nutting mixes gender-roles with sociopathy. “We can all tell when people have crushes on us, sexual or platonic,” writes M.E. Thomas (2013), “and we enjoy wielding that small amount of power over them. If anything, sociopaths are just a little better at it and enjoy it in a particular way” (p. 218). Always on the inside edge of getting caught, Celeste’s sociopathic obsession with young, male suitors never relents. Thomas explains the intersection of sociopathy and sexuality further as follows:

One of the manifestations of sociopathy in me is an ambivalence in regards to sex and sexual orientation. Sociopaths are unusually impressionable, very flexible with their own sense of self. Because we don’t observe social norms, we don’t have a moral compass, and we have a fluid sense of right and wrong… This extends, at least in some degree, to our sexuality (p. 241).

M. E. Thomas, a pseudonym used by the author of Confessions of a Sociopath (Broadway, 2013), evokes the prominent Victorian novelist M. E. Braddon, about whom Bruce Sterling says, “no one knew whether she was a man or a woman; she was passing for human” (quoted in Smith, 2014, p. 89). “Passing for human” might seem a sad phrase to use for escaping the trappings of gender, but it’s never quite so easy. “The problem isn’t so simple as a man-versus-woman frame,” Rebecca Traister writes in a recent piece for the New Republic. Citing an anecdote from Tina Fey’s Bossypants (Reagan Arthur, 2011) in which Amy Pohler tells off her friend Jimmy Fallon (See “I Don’t Care If You Like It,” pp. 143-146), Traister concludes,

I wish it were different. I wish that every woman whose actions and worth are parsed and restricted, congratulated and condemned in this country might just once get to wheel around—on the committee that doesn’t believe their medically corroborated story of assault, or on the protesters who tell them that termination is a sin they will regret, or on the boss who tells them he doesn’t believe in their sexual choices, or on the mid-fifties man who congratulates them, or himself, on finding them appealing deep into their dotage—and go black in the eyes and say, “I don’t fucking care if you like it.”

References:

Abbott, Megan. (2012). Dare Me: A Novel. New York: Reagan Arthur.

C. K., Louis. (2008). Chewed Up. New York: Showtime.

Cain, Chelsea. (2012, August 10). Bring It On: Dare Me by Megan Abbott. The New York Times.

de Zengotita, Thomas. (2005). Mediated: How the Media Shapes Our World and the Way We Live in It. New York: Bloomsbury.

Fey, Tina. (2011). Bossypants. New York: Reagan Arthur.

Nutting, Alissa. (2014). Tampa: A Novel. New York: Ecco.

Smith, Patrick, A. (2014). Conversations with William Gibson. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi.

Swanson, Claire. (2013, August 22). Q&A with Tampa Author Alissa Nutting. Publisher’s Weekly.

Thomas, M. E. (2013). Confessions of a Sociopath: A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight. New York: Broadway Books.

Traister, Rebecca. (2014, July 16). I Don’t Care If You Like It: Women are tired of being judged by the Esquire metric. New Republic.

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P.S. In the meantime, Lauren Beukes has written another outstanding novel. More on that one soon.

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Slayer: Building Bridges With Fire

Opinions often vary widely on the most important bands and records of any era, but only a few dare dispute the reign of Slayer and their thrash watermark Reign in Blood (Def Jam, 1986). There has always been a weird rift between punk and metal, but thrash was the first sub-genre to draw heavily from both. The two major movements have since spawned such tributaries as grindcore, metalcore, murdercore, power violence, and various strains of post-metal. “What do you think would get a bigger reaction: a Minor Threat cover or a Slayer cover?” Tim Singer, of long-defunct Seattle metalcore band Kiss It Goodbye, asked me during the recording of their one full-length record, She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not (Revelation, 1997). “Isn’t it weird that it’s debatable?”

Slayer
Fuckin’ Slayer.

As hardcore, post-punk. and new wave were expanding out of the punk explosion of the mid-1970s, thrash metal was also fomenting. Slayer and several other thrash bands helped knock parts of the punk/metal divide down during the 1980s. By decade’s end, there was a whole lot of genre trouble in heavy music. What exactly was Barkmarket? The Jesus Lizard? Helmet? Even Pantera, emerging from the most staunchly Southern forges, had sharpened its edges on something other than metal. Slayer was one of the early major bands to flaunt its roots in both genres, and Reign in Blood is clearly a blend of the best of both. “It wouldn’t be accurate to say it unified the metal and hardcore punk-rock crowds,” D. X. Ferris (2014) writes. “But no metal album did as much to open the channels between the two distinct cultures” (p. 6). Making those influences explicit a decade later, Slayer did a punk covers record called Undisputed Attitude (American, 1996) that includes tracks from Minor Threat, TSOL, D.I., Verbal Abuse, Black Flag, and The Stooges (via Sid Vicious).

Reign in Blood: 33 1/3 Metal Hammer‘s recent Thrash issue names Reign in Blood #1 in its list of the top-50 thrash records of all time. Calling the album “perfect,” Dom Lawson writes, “Reign in Blood towers above every other thrash album for several reasons, but the most important of them is its swivel-eyed intensity.”  There’s something about this half-hour slice of metal that no other band has ever come close to matching. It sounds as fast, as fresh, and as menacing now as it ever did. When I first heard it, I knew that things were different — for me, for metal, for music.” “It sounds like it’s ready to derail at any second,” Kerry King tells Ian Winwood, yet it sounds tightly controlled at the same time. There’s a tension, an anxiety to it that no one has touched in the almost 30 years since its release. Its terror so taut, its aggression so relentless, it’s focus so fierce, “It may never be surpassed,” Lawson concludes. He is not alone in this assessment.

It’s been a year since we lost Jeff Hanneman, and in the meantime, D. X. Ferris, who wrote the 33 1/3 book on Reign in Blood (Bloomsbury Academic, 2008), has cranked out another book about Slayer. Slayer 66 2/3: The Jeff & Dave Years (6623 Press, 2014) is a highly readable rush job that fills in the blanks surrounding his 33 1/3 book. No one questions the fact that Slayer has done their best work as the classic line-up of Tom Araya, Kerry King, Jeff Hanneman, and Dave Lombardo, and Ferris’s book is mainly about those times. After all, Reign in Blood was the first of what is one of the strongest three-album runs by any band in any genre: Reign in Blood (1986), South of Heaven (1988), and Seasons in the Abyss (1990). They remain the one metal band that punks who hate metal still revere.

Slayer: 66 2/3While Kerry King came up on traditional metal like Judas Priest and Iron Maiden, Jeff Hanneman and Dave Lombardo were the punks in Slayer. Hanneman was weaned as much on Sex Pistols and Dead Kennedys as he was Black Sabbath. Thrash is as close to punk as metal got in its formative years. James Hetfield listened to the Misfits, and Dave Mustaine loved the Pistols. Others in the scene were into it, but Slayer was the only band actually jostling with the punks at the time, banging elbows with the likes of D.R.I., TSOL, Bad Brains, and Suicidal Tendencies. They weren’t burning bridges, they were building them with fire.

I saw the O. G. Slayer line-up live in 2009, and it remains one of the best shows I’ve ever seen. “I don’t know, there seems to be this aura about Slayer,” King says, “and I definitely think our live performances have something to do with that.” No question. The show I saw was everything a Slayer fan wants from seeing Slayer: speed, aggression, evil, volume — classic thrash metal played with absolute abandon. And as much as I was looking forward to also seeing Marilyn Manson, no one can follow Slayer. No one.

They’re currently continuing without Jeff and Dave, and there seems to be no way to offer genuine support without sounding shitty about it. I have no doubts that Paul Bostaff and Gary Holt are holding down their half as they’ve both done with Exodus, who are widely considered the original thrash metal band. Regardless, Slayer will never be the same without the raw, punk aggression of Jeff Hanneman and Dave Lombardo.

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Postscript: I interviewed Jeff Hanneman on the phone in 1996 for the August/September issue of Ride BMX magazine. A little while after the interview, I got a call from their publicist. She said Jeff and Slayer were so stoked to be in a BMX magazine that they wanted to send me something. In the weeks before the package arrived, I made a joke that Slayer was sending me something to show their gratitude. Friends speculated wildly. Would it involve blood, bones, body parts? It turned out to be a Slayer hat, which I still have. Rest in peace, my brother.

References:

Ferris, D. X. (2008). 33 1/3: Reign in Blood. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

Ferris, D. X. (2014). Slayer 66 2/3: The Jeff & Dave Years. Akron, OH: 6623 Press.

Lawson, Dom. (2014). Metal Hammer’s 50 Hottest Thrash Albums of All Time. Metal Hammer Presents… Thrash, pp. 100-105.

Mustaine, Dave. (2010). Mustaine: A Heavy Metal Memoir. New York: HarperCollins.

Winwood, Ian. (2014). Slayer: Reign in Blood. Metal Hammer Presents… Thrash, pp. 106-109.

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Is Anyone There? On her and Transcendence

Cinema is our most viable and enduring form of design fiction. More than any other medium, it lets us peer into possible futures projected from the raw materials of the recent past, simulate scenes based on new visions via science and technology, gauge our reactions, and adjust our plans accordingly. These visions are equipment for living in a future heretofore unseen. As video artist Bill Viola (1995) puts it,

The implied goal of many of our efforts, including technological development, is the eradication of signal-to-noise ratio, which in the end is the ultimate transparent state where there is no perceived difference between the simulation and the reality, between ourselves and the other. We think of two lovers locked in a single ecstatic embrace. We think of futuristic descriptions of direct stimulation to the brain to evoke experiences and memories (p. 224).

Miles explains love to Edgar the computer in Electric Dreams (1984)
— Miles explains love to Edgar the computer in Electric Dreams (1984)

Welcome to the world of Pinecone Computers. This model will learn with you, so type your name and press Enter key to begin.
— Miles Harding reading from a computer manual in Electric Dreams (1984)

Since the big-screen tales of the 1980s’ PC-era, the idea of machines merging with humans has been a tenacious trope in popular culture. In Tron (1982) Kevin Flynn was sucked through a laser into the digital realm. Wired to the testosterone, the hormone-driven juvenile geniuses of Weird Science (1985) set to work making the woman of their dreams. WarGames (1983) famously pit suburban whiz-kids against a machine hell bent on launching global thermonuclear war. In Electric Dreams (1984), which is admittedly as much montage as it is movie, Miles Harding (played by Lenny von Dohlen, who would go on to play the agoraphobic recluse Harold Smith in Twin Peaks) attempts to navigate a bizarre love triangle between him, his comely neighbor, and his new computer.

From the jealous machine to falling in love with the machine, the theme remains pervasive 30 years on. As Ray Kurzweil writes of Spike Jonze’s her,

Jonze introduces another idea that I have written about (and that is the central theme of Barry Ptolemy’s movie about my ideas, Transcendent Man), namely, AIs creating an avatar of a deceased person based on their writings, other artifacts and people’s memories of that person. In her, the AIs get together and recreate 1960s philosopher Alan Watts (whom I remember from my teenage years).

Theodore Twombly at work in her (2013).
— Theodore Twombly at work in her (2013).

I’d say “her” is a movie about (the education of) an interesting woman who falls in love with a man who, though sweet, is mired in biology. — , Tweeted on February 16, 2014

in her, Theodore Twombly (played by Joaquin Phoenix) writes letters for a living. Letters between fathers and daughters, long-distance lovers, husbands, wives. He condenses stories from the vapor of their nuances. In doing so, he is especially susceptible to the power of narrative himself since his job involves the constant creation of believable, vicarious stories. His ability to immerse himself in the stories of others makes it that much easier for him to get lost in his operating system (“Samantha,” voiced by Scarlett Johansson) as she constructs narratives to create her personality, and thereby, their relationship.

In many ways, her can be read as a response to Lost in Translation (2003), directed by Jonze’s wife at the time, Sophia Coppola, who, like Jonze did for her, won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. That movie is in part about the dissolution of Jonze and Coppola’s relationship. Where Giovanni Ribisi plays a goofy, self-involved Jonze (“John”) in Lost in Translation, Rooney Mara plays an ununderstanding, judgemental Coppola (“Catherine”) in her: mere caricatures of themselves played out in bit parts. Where others have no problem with it, ex-wife Catherine has no truck with Theodore’s new OS love. He nonetheless remains incredulously committed.

Cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter calls our imbuing machines with more intelligence than they have—even when we know better—“The ELIZA Effect,” after Joseph Weizenbaum’s text-based psychoanalytic computer program, ELIZA. Hofstadter writes, “The most superficial of syntactic tricks convinced some people who interacted with ELIZA that the program actually understood everything that they were saying, sympathized with them, even empathized with them” (p. 158). ELIZA was written at MIT by Weizenbaum in the mid-1960s, but its effects linger on. “Like a tenacious virus that constantly mutates,” Hofstadter continues, “the Eliza effect seems to crop up over and over again in AI in ever-fresh disguises, and in subtler and subtler forms” (p. 158). To wit, in Chapter One of Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together (2011; specifically pp. 24-25), she extends the idea to our amenability to new technologies, including artificial intelligence, embodied or otherwise: “And true to the ELIZA effect, this is not so much because the robots are ready but because we are” (p. 25).

More germane to her is a program called KARI, which stands for “Knowledge Acquiring and Response Intelligence.” According to Dominic Pettman‘s first and only conversation with Kari (see Pettman’s Look at the Bunny, 2013), there’s a long way to go before any of us are falling in love with our computers.

Kevin Flynn getting zapped into the computer in Tron (1982).
— Kevin Flynn getting zapped into the computer in Tron (1982).

Others imagine a much more deliberate merging, postulating an uploading of human consciousness into the machines themselves, known in robotic and artificial intelligence circles as “The Moravec Transfer.” Its namesake, roboticist Hans Moravec, describes a human brain being uploaded, neuron by neuron, until it exists unperturbed inside a machine. But Moravec wasn’t the first to imagine such a transition (for another early example, see Stine, 1979). NASA’s own Robert Jastrow wrote in 1984 that uploading our minds into machines is the be-all of evolution and would make us immortal. He wrote,

At last the human brain, ensconced in a computer, has been liberated from the weakness of the mortal flesh… The machine is its body; it is the machine’s mind… It seems to me that this must be the mature form of intelligent life in the Universe. Housed in indestructible lattices of silicon, and no longer constrained in the span of its years by the life and death cycle of a biological organism, such a kind of life could live forever (p. 166-167).

Dr. Will Caster merges with the machine in Trancendence (2014).
— Dr. Will Caster merges with the machine in Transcendence (2014).

In Transcendence (2014) Dr. Will Caster (played by Johnny Depp) and his wife (“Evelyn,” played by Rebecca Hall, who almost seems to be filling in for an unavailable Johansson) do just that. Caster is terminally ill and on the verge of offloading his mortal shell. Once uploaded into a quantum computer connected to the internet, Caster becomes something less than himself and something more simultaneously. It’s the chronic consciousness question: What is it about you that makes you you? Is it still there once all of your bits are transferred into a new vessel? The Casters’ love was strong enough for them to try and find out.

If Kubrick and Spielberg’s AI: Artificial Intelligence (2001) can be read as an allegory for gays being accepted by their parents (see Kraus, 2004, p. 182), what sociological anxieties can we superimpose over her and Transcendence? I am admittedly a lapsed student of AI, having dropped out of the University of Georgia’s Artificial Intelligence master’s program several years ago. My interest in AI lies in the weird ways that consciousness and creation butt heads in the midst of such advanced technologies. Mix a love story in there and you’ve got questions and quests for a lifetime. As Jonze himself puts it, “… a lot of the feelings you have about relationships or about technology are often contradictory” (quoted in Michael, 2013). Love and technology willing, when one of us has to be leaving, we won’t let that come between us, okay?

References:

Hofstadter, Douglas. (1995). Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought. New York: Basic Books.

Jastrow, Robert. (1984). The Enchanted Loom: Mind in the Universe. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Kraus, Chris. (2004). Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness. New York: Semiotext(e).

Michael, Chris. (2013, September 9). Spike Jonze on Letting Her Rip and Being John Malkovich. The Guardian.

Pettman, Dominic. (2013). Look at the Bunny: Totem, Taboo, Technology. Ropley Hants, UK: Zer0 Books.

Stine, G. Harry. (1979, July). The Bionic Brain. Omni Magazine, vol. 1, #10, pp. 84-86, 121-122.

Turkle, Sherry. (2011). Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books

Viola, Bill. (1995). Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House: Writings 1973-1994. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Weizenbaum, Joseph. (1976). Computer Power and Human Reason. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman.

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Mixed Metonymies: Mechanization and Culture

Meanings are malleable. Words bend and break under the stress of unintended use, abuse, or overuse. Like machine parts pushed past their limits, cogs stripped bare of their teeth, the language we use wears out, weakening the culture that carries it and our knowledge thereof.

Charles Babbage's wheel work.

Aldous Huxley (1970) writes, “In the days before machinery men and women who wanted to amuse themselves were compelled, in their humble way, to be artists. Now they sit still and permit professionals to entertain them by the aid of machinery” (p. 11). We use metaphors and metonymies of the machine to explain everything from individual bodies  and brains to society and the cosmos (see Lakoff, 1993; Raunig, 2010; Wilden, 1972). Aristotle used many anthropomorphic ideas to describe natural occurrences, but the technology of the time, needing constant human intervention, offered little in the way of metaphors for the mind. Since then, we have compared the human mind to the clock, the steam engine, the radio, the radar, and the computer (Vroon, 1987). Machines, engines, motors—these are visible, tangible things. The mechanizations we need to watch are the ones we can’t see. As Bettina Knapp (1989) writes, “…machines increasingly cut people off from nature in general and from their own  nature, in particular” (p. 28).

Mechanization Takes CommandIn Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), originally published in 1948, Sigfried Giedion attempts to elucidate the cause of this splitting from our nature, the break between thought and feeling in modern society. The culprit according to Giedion? Mechanization. He uses a typological approach, moving chronologically through each of his categories: springs (movement), means (hand, key, assembly line), agriculture (gardening, bread-making, meat production), household (chair, table, furniture, feminism, refrigeration), and bath (steam, shower). This provides a matrix of mechanization (time vs type) that creates a fresh view across this “anonymous history.”

In spite of the machines, interesting people are still central to the story. Giedion follows how the in-house feminism of Catherine Beecher and “curtailed drudgery and improved organization” (p. 512) lead to the further mechanization of the home. He illustrates how Charles Babbage informed Frederick Taylor’s time studies, scientific management, and the division of labor of Taylor and Henry Ford, the inventors of modern industrialization.

“More perhaps than machinery,” writes John Kenneth Galbraith (1967), “massive and complex business organizations are the tangible manifestation of advanced technology” (p. 19). Institutions, bureaucracies, organizations like organisms led to the globalization of the machine: processors, keyboards, harddrives, screens, spreadsheets, websites, databases, fiber optic cables, satellites, wireless clouds bulging gray with data… Paul Virilio (1995) shortens the term “cyberspace” from its imaginary original form “cybernetic space-time” (p. 140), the extending of which evokes the ultimate mechanical prosthesis of the mind, a planet-spanning, command-control system to end all such systems.

The usually glum Huxley (1970) has his high notes: “Giving leisure and wealth, machines make general culture possible. There can be no doubt that many people, who would otherwise have longed in vain, are now permitted, thanks to machinery, to satisfy their longing for culture” (p. 11). From tilling machines to networked screens, our technology curates our culture. Like the precision workings of cogs and gears, let us be mindful of the language we use to describe it.

References:

Galbraith, John Kenneth. (1967; 2007). The New Industrial State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Giedion, Sigfried. (1948; 2014). Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Huxley, Aldous. (1970). America and the Future: An Essay. Austin, TX: Jenkins Publishing Company.

Knapp, Bettina. (1989). Machine, Metaphor, and the Writer: A Jungian View. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Lakoff, George. (1993). The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor. In Andrew Ortony (Ed.), Metaphor and Thought (pp. 202–251). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

Raunig, Gerald. (2010). A Thousand Machines: A Concise Philosophy of the Machine as Social Movement. New York: Semiotext(e).

Virilio, Paul. (1995). The Art of the Motor. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Vroon, P. A. (1987). Man-Machine Analogs and Theoretical Mainstreams in Psychology. In W. J. Baker, M. E. Hyland, H. van Rappard, & A.W. Staats (Eds.), Current Issues in Theoretical Psychology (pp. 393–141). New York: North-Holland.

Wilden, Anthony. (1972). System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange. London: Tavistock.

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Babbage wheel-work image from James Gleick‘s The Information (New York: Pantheon, 2011, p. 97).

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Cool by Committee: Cultural Capital and Art

“Nobody wants to be uncool,” writes Chris Kraus in her book Video Green (Semiotext(e), 2004, p. 24). She’s writing about the trials of graduate school, specifically MFA programs and the inherent ambiguity in determining the value of art. The rigor of graduate work is part of the gatekeeping and cultural encoding that make the art world go ’round, that make cool art cool. Kraus continues,

…this two-year hazing process is essential to the development of value in the by-nature-elusive parameters of neoconceptual art. Without it, who would know which cibachrome photos of urban signage, which videotapes of socks tossing around a dryer, which neominimalist monochrome paintings are negligible and which are destined to be art? (p. 24)

Damien Hirst: Shark

In his search for authenticity, writer Andrew Potter reduces this hard-won pedigree down to just an artist’s brand. His favorite example is Damien Hirst. “One logical endpoint of this takes us to the world of contemporary art,” he writes (2010), “where many of the works in and of themselves are so ludicrous in concept and so inept in execution that the old philistine war cry ‘My child could do that’ is an insult to untalented children everywhere. But this objection misses the point, which is that the work itself is totally irrelevant. What is being sold is the artist himself [sic], his [sic] persona, or better, his [sic] brand” (p. 98). Brands in this context are largely decided on by the gatekeepers in art schools, galleries, and museums, not so much by “the market” in any economic sense. Potter’s reductionist view is blind to an artist’s training and talent, not to mention her art’s raw aesthetic appeal. Hirst’s art speaks in the language of authenticity (see Boyle, 2003), which must make it worse. Potter adds, “[S]narkiness over sharkiness isn’t serious art criticism, and judging Hirst’s work by the criteria of technical skill, artistic vision, and emotional resonance is like complaining that the Nike swoosh is just a check mark” (p. 99). We may think we’re unaffected by such subversions, but that is a danger in itself. “Considering yourself immune to advertising and branding is not a solution,” writes Rob Walker (2008), “it’s part of the problem” (p. 68).

No MediumWhen Thomas Kuhn (1970) conceived of a paradigm, he was referring to the attitudes and beliefs of the scientists in a community, not the scientific facts themselves. His paradigms are “the entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so on shared by the members of a given community” (p. 175).* Certain things matter because enough of us decide that they do. We also decide that some of those things matter more than others and that some of them are cooler than others. Cool is tribal. It travels in groups, committees, and communities (see Eckert, 2000; Liu, 2004; Wenger, 1998).

All of these examples hover between what Pierre Bourdieu (1986) called social capital and what he called cultural capital: a system of exchange that takes cultural knowledge as its gold standard. Such knowledge creates in-groups and out-groups (Leppehalme, 1997). You are down if you get the reference and not if you don’t. Craig Dworkin writes in his book No Medium (MIT Press, 2013), “…[W]e are misled when we think of media as objects. Indeed, the closer one looks at the materiality of a work—at the brute fact of its physical composition—the more sharply a social context is brought into focus” (p. 30). Communities of people imbue these objects and their relationships with value. Cool could be the product of an MFA, but it could just as easily be the right amount of properly placed irony or the timely subverting of a paradigm. As Dave Allen puts it in his recent piece “White Ants and Flying Saucers,”

As the famous phrase goes: You are entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts. This is not to say there won’t be another transitory effect that may destabilize the current models, it is just to say that we must work hard to untangle our strongly held beliefs from the actual reality of the situation. That is where the opportunity for informed debate lies, and the opportunity should be embraced by all who have strong and passionate feelings for the “future of music.”

We tend to think of technological shifts as driven by their own forces (see Winner, 1977), as diffusing through the same old channels (see Rogers, 2003), or as slouching toward their own attractors. People still decide what counts though. Untangling the changes and how we feel about those changes points to the impossibility of finding distance from our devices: The changes happen without our noticing. It’s only when we look back that we can tell a threshold has been crossed, that the paradigm has shifted, that what we thought was cool is now not so much. Sound artist David Dunn (1999) describes it this way:

Most of what we live in now is a technological environment. That’s the status quo. That’s the social ground that constrains us. The degree to which we understand these tools is the degree to which we have freedom from them. If we don’t understand them and don’t know how they work, we easily ascribe to them some mystical significance and belief that the machines are doing our thinking for us (p. 65).

Capital may only want more capital, but art and technology don’t want anything. They are each radically subjective in their own ways. As Kaya Oakes (2009) writes, “Any valid culture, anything that changes people’s perception and way of thinking is made of many, many voices, and the disharmony and occasional harmony of those voices is what makes things interesting and complicated when you’re trying to define what that culture means” (p. 17). I prefer interesting and complicated over cool any day.

* Kuhn’s other definition of paradigms involves the models in use as puzzle-solving tools among those scientists (see Kuhn, 1970, p. 175).

References:

Allen, Dave. (2014, March 11). White Ants and Flying Saucers. Beats Music.

Boyle, David. (2003). Authenticity: Brands, Fakes, Spin and the Lust for Real Life. New York: Harper Perennial.

Dunn, David & van Peer, René. (1999). Music, Language, and Environment. Leonardo Music Journal, 9, 63-67.

Dworkin, Craig. (2013). No Medium. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Eckert, Penelope. (2000). Linguistic Variation as Social Practice: The Linguistic Construction of Identity in Belten High. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.

Kraus, Chris. (2004). Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness. New York: Semiotext(e).

Kuhn, Thomas. (1970). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Second Edition, Enlarged). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Leppihalme, Ritva. (1997). Culture Bumps: An Empirical Approach to the Translation of Allusions. Bristol, PA: Multilingual Matters.

Liu, Alan. (2004). The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Oakes, Kaya. (2009). Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture. New York: Henry Holt & Co.

Potter, Andrew. (2010). The Authenticity Hoax: Why the “Real” Things We Seek Don’t Make Us Happy. New York: Harper Perennial.

Rogers, Everett M. (2003). Diffusion of Innovations (5th Edition). New York: Free Press.

Walker, Rob. (2008). Buying In: Why We Buy and Who We Are. New York: Random House.

Wenger, Etienne. (1998). Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Winner, Langdon. (1977). Autonomous Technology: Technics-Out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.