My essay, “The Memes is Dead, Long Live the Meme,” argues that Dawkinsian memes have been supplanted by internet memes and are therefore dead. Here’s an excerpt:
If memes are indeed analogous to genes, then the real power of memes is that they add up to something. I’m no biologist, but genes are bits of code that become chromosomes, and chromosomes make up DNA, which then becomes organisms. Plants, animals, viruses, and all life that we know about is built from them.24 “The meme has done its work by assembling massive social systems, the new rulers of this earth,” writes Howard Bloom. “Together, the meme and the human superorganism have become the universe’s latest device for creating fresh forms of order.”
Perhaps that was true two decades ago, when Bloom wrote that, or three decades ago when Dawkins wrote The Selfish Gene, but the biases and affordances of memes’ attendant infrastructure has changed dramatically since. After all, memes have to replicate, and in order to replicate, they have to move from one mind to another via some conduit. This could be the oral culture of yore, but it’s more and more likely to be technologically enabled. Broadcast media supports one kind of memetic propagation. The internet, however, supports quite another.
After a successful run of movies in the 1980s, Spike Lee used to say “Make Black Film” like a mantra, and we saw it in the 1990s with Matty Rich, the Hughes Brothers, John Singleton, and Lee himself. It looks like it’s in effect again with boundary-bombing work by Ava DuVernay, Ryan Coogler, Arthur Jafa, Donald Glover, Jordan Peele, and Boots Riley. The latter’s Sorry to Bother You is not just the movie of the moment, it’s a statement, a stance, and a hopeful catalyst for change.
— Lakeith Stanfield is Cassius Green [sketchy sketch by Roy Christopher]Like any worthwhile project, Boots Riley has been working on this one for a while. The screenplay itself was finished in 2012 and published by McSweeney’s in 2014. I got it and started reading it before I knew it was a movie. Once I heard it got made, I had to stop.
At times—for obvious reasons, I know—you can hear Riley talking directly through these characters. For instance, when Squeeze tells Cassius that it’s not that people don’t care, it’s that when they feel powerless to fix a problem, they learn to live with it. As surreal and wacky as this movie often is, social commentary rarely gets more germane than that.
Earlier this year I started a screenwriting class. I started trying to write a screenplay several years ago just to see if I could do it. It’s a very different kind of writing than I’m used to, and I wondered what exactly you put on a page to make things happen on a screen. I never finished the script I started, so I thought a class might help me get it done.
Anyway, the teacher of this class made me very uncomfortable. It took me several days after our first class meeting to figure out what it was. I am not easily offended, nor do I do passive-aggressive online reviews (I emailed the institution about this teacher; in fact, much of the description in this post is excerpted from that email), but I couldn’t shake my unease after that one class. My instructor had some very odd attitudes toward movies, stories, and, more specifically, people. His frequent jokes about Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, and Woody Allen bordered on apologist, while his views on anyone who wasn’t a straight, white male were heteronormative in the extreme and bordered on the sexist, racist, and outright intolerant. He was a nice enough guy and a knowledgeable teacher, so I was trying to figure out what had me so on-edge after the one class. I kept coming back to things he’d said: subtle references, jokes, comments, and recommendations that I finally found I couldn’t ignore. I was unable to attend his class again.
One specific thing that instructor said is relevant here. He made the argument that if you’re telling a universal story (i.e., one about love, loss, coming of age, etc.), it doesn’t matter what your background is, your story will connect with an audience. While this assertion is true and could be the basis for a great argument for diversity, he used it to defend the longstanding white-male dominance of storytelling!
One of my other writing heroes, Tina Fey, does a great job of diplomatically explaining this issue to David Letterman on his My Next Guest Needs No Introduction. She uses the SNL writers’ room as a microcosm or cross-section of the audience at large. Explaining that things that might not have played well with mostly (white) men in the room, did when the room became more diverse. So, sketches that had never made it to dress rehearsal before started making it onto the show once there were more women and people of color in the room to laugh at them. That is such an important shift in gate-keeping, and it applies to all such gates, not just those in comedy.
While I’m writing here about voices in the figurative form, Sorry to Bother You uses them much more directly though still metonymically to make a similar point. The phrase “Sorry to Bother You” applies not only to the telemarketing refrain on which it’s based but also to the hegemony against which it stands. It’s in theaters now. Go see it!
There has never been a better time to get off-line, soothe your spirit, and build your brain with a stack of books. We’re back again with reading recommendations for just that. This year, our 15th, we have ideas from newcomers Nisi Shawl, Veronica Fitzpatrick, and Penni Jones, as well as the return of Rick Moody, Douglas Rushkoff, Cynthia Connolly, André Carrington, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Zizi Papacharissi, Jussi Parikka, Peter Lunenfeld, Joseph Nechvatal, Lily Brewer, Dominic Pettman, Paul Levinson, Brian Tunney, Mike Daily, Paul D. Miller, Alex Burns, and myself. We know what you’ll read this summer!
— Librarian Sultana Vest at Lucky Dog Books in Dallas, Texas.
As ever, the book links below lead to the title at Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon, the best bookstore on the planet. Read on!
“Summer reading” will forever conjure the halcyon months after I graduated college. Condensed milk lattes and serial killers; my metabolism may have changed but my taste in therapeutic pleasure reading is evergreen.
I just reread The Likeness (Penguin, 2009), the second of Tana French’s Dublin murder squad novels. The series is literary catnip for international police procedural enthusiasts, but the real draw is French’s focus on the intimacy and perceptual acuity of detection. Her books are populated with eyebrow hitches and side-cut glances, all the little ways people read each other and give themselves away. This one is about a doomed undercover op set among reclusive The Secret History-style grad students—thus my favorite, and a fine place to start.
Before that was Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends (Hogarth, 2017), the merits of which are hard to describe without sounding unduly condescending (“more than the sum of its parts!”). If the premise of an affair seems simple, and the prose style minimal (plus texting transcripts), Conversations is plenty complex and abundant in original insights re: interiority, hooking up, and radical politics, plus it’s a real, rare pleasure to read young women described and describable as wielding “a remorseless intelligence.”
Finally: the only book(s) adjacent to travel I want to read are L.S. Hilton’s Maestra series (so far Maestra [Putnam, 2016] and Domina [Putnam, 2017]), which follow a young female sociopath with an extensive art history education and impeccable style, sort of American Psycho on the Rome leg of Eat, Pray, Love with more niche sex clubs. And every coming-of-age novel I picked up in the last year, I read out of the pain of missing Elif Batuman’s romantic Ivy League epic The Idiot (Penguin, 2017).
Bernard Stiegler The Neganthropocene (edited and translated by Daniel Ross; Open Humanities Press, 2018): In the essays and lectures here titled Neganthropocene, Stiegler opens an entirely new front moving beyond the dead-end “banality” of the Anthropocene. Stiegler stakes out a battleplan to proceed beyond, indeed shrugging off, the fulfillment of nihilism that the era of climate chaos ushers in.
Maria Stavrinaki Dada Presentism: An Essay on Art and History (Stanford University Press, 2016): Dada is often celebrated for its strategies of shock and opposition, but in Dada Presentism, Maria Stavrinaki provides a new picture of Dada art and writings as a lucid reflection on history and the role of art within it.
Jonathan Fineberg Modern Art at the Border of Mind (University of Nebraska Press, 2015): Modern Art at the Border of Mind and Brain is a broad investigation by one of the foremost scholars of modern art of the relationship between modern art and the structure of the mind and brain. Based on Fineberg’s Presidential Lectures at the University of Nebraska, this book examines the relationship between artistic production, neuroscience, and the way we make meaning in form.
I have such a delightful summer and fall lined up that I’m feeling a great deal of gratitude. I expect some of the things I’m going to read will reinforce that feeling. As usual, my habits are geared toward nonfiction:
Jenifer Lewis The Mother of Black Hollywood (Amistad, 2017): I bought this in audiobook format, because I love her voice. From interviews, I think this will be a truly humbling and inspiring read about her extraordinary career and the challenges she’s faced with bipolar disorder.
Mamadou Dia 3052: Persiguiendo un Sueño (Hahatay, 2017): The story of the author’s life from Senegal to Spain. Every couple years, I try my best to make it through a book in Spanish; this one, recommended by my esteemed colleague Dr. Jeffrey Coleman, is a little hard to find stateside, so I might have to take a field trip.
James Bridle New Dark Age (Verso, 2018): Exposes the myth that quantifiable data can provide a coherent model of the world.
David Lynch Catching the Big Fish (TarcherPerigee, 2006): David Lynch (director of Twin Peaks and many great movies) shares why mediation is so important and how to access the unified field.
Jason Louv John Dee and the Empire of Angels (Inner Traditions, 2018): Jason Louv, world’s leading expert on Enochian magic, reveals the occult roots of the British Empire, and our own.
Walkaway, by Cory Doctorow (Tor, 2017), is an audaciously optimistic near-future book about immortality and consensus. Also beer, massages, and anarchy.
The Dreamquest of Vellitt Boe (Tor, 2016) is arch-storyteller Kij Johnson’s feminist take on Lovecraftian fantasy, with bonus cat.
The Good House (Washington Square Press, 2004) is prime Tananarive Due. It’s horror, but of the redemptive sort, and deals with a particularly African American issue: the violent deaths of our young men.
Elysium, by Jennifer Marie Brisset (Aqueduct Press, 2014), is a gorgeously elegiac tale of love and planetary cleansing, told in cleverly overlapping narratives that gradually reveal what has been saved and lost over the numberless eons covered. It’s a swift read, but a deep one.
A Stranger in Olondria, by Sofia Samatar (Small Beer Press, 2013), is a nearly perfect sojourn in an imaginary land. It reminds me very much of early Ursula K. Le Guin.
I have been reading a lot of poetry recently, in part because I have been co-teaching a class at Brown called Writers on Writing that’s half prose and half poetry. I taught this course in the spring with the poet Sawako Nakayasu, whose book The Ants (Les Figues Press, 2014) would be on any list of contemporary collections I really love. (It’s about ants!) In the fall I’m teaching with the excellent Monica de la Torre, whose Public Domain (Roof Books, 2008) is likewise a contemporary poetry must-read.
Whereas, by Layli Long Soldier (Graywolf Press, 2017) was the last book we read for class in the spring, and I’m still thinking it through. It’s sort of half experimental poetry, half incredibly powerful and moving critique of official governmental responses to the treatment of indigenous peoples in the United States of America. The experimental part demonstrates the struggle of First Peoples to deal with the oppressor tongue of American culture in a way that seems unique to me. What a great and powerful book.
Don Mee Choi’s Hardly War (Wave Books, 2016) came to my attention through Monica, and it is in part about Don Mee Choi’s father’s photographs of wars and conflicts in Southeast Asia. (The author is Korean, but her father, as a photographer, ranged as far as Cambodia, as I understand the story so far.) Photos are included in the text. Again, there’s a mixture of poetical methods here, far more than in a conventionally “confessional” work. The poems are sly, funny, devastating. Don Mee Choi’s voice is a knowing, tragic, and comic thing that orbits around the work in ways that deepen and complexify the field of investigation.
David Grubbs is my friend and occasional collaborator (and I can’t overlook to mentioned his first book, a work of criticism called Records Ruin the Landscape [Duke University Press, 2014] that I admire a great deal), and an unparalleled musician, above all, but his first book of “poetry” is now out, a book-length prose poem called Now That the Audience is Assembled (Duke University Press, 2018), which is sort of a long meditation on experimental music making and the ekphrastic route through which one might describe such an endeavor. I have used quotation marks to describe the work as “poetry” simply because I think there’s such a great area of hybrid activity between prose and poetry these days that things that people are describing as poems to me are also very conventionally be understood as “prose” as well. Grubbs’s book might also be understood as music! It’s an incredibly promising and funny first imaginative work by an artist who seems able to produce in almost any medium.
Mark Haskell Smith Blown (Grove Press, Black Cat, 2018): I’ve been a big fan of Mark Haskell Smith for about eleven years. His novels are clever and fun, with one-word titles packed with innuendo. His protagonists are often regular folks who find themselves plunged into worlds where they don’t belong. The stakes are high and the outcomes are hilariously subversive.
Ariel Gore We Were Witches (Amethyst Editions, 2017): Gore’s raw honesty while challenging the status quo is enlightening and inspirational. Her latest release is a “memoirist-novel” that draws on her experience as a struggling artist and single teenage mother in a time when the phrase “family values” was synonymous with women like her being demoralized and demonized.
Christopher Buckley No Way to Treat a First Lady (Random House, 2002): I read several of Buckley’s political satire novels in rapid succession of seeing the movie Thank You for Smoking which was based on his 1994 novel of the same title. Somehow I missed No Way to Treat a First Lady, which is about a United States first lady on trial for murdering her philandering husband. For some reason the plot is very attractive to me right now.
Alexandra Sokoloff Stealing Hollywood (Amazon Digital Services, 2015): This book is meant to arm authors with screenwriting tricks that will strengthen and simplify novel writing. Is it too good to be true? I’ll let you know.
Charles Salzberg Second Story Man (Down & Out Books, 2018): If Salzberg’s previous works are any indication, this novel won’t disappoint. Second Story Man is a crime caper with alternating points-of-view between two lawmen and a master burglar. The criminal taunts the men who are hunting him as the stakes grow higher. Sounds like the perfect beach read to me!
I’m writing at least half a dozen things right now, with no time for reading, but here are three recommendations, all fiction, of books I’ve recently finished and much enjoyed:
Peter Watts’ The Freeze-Frame Revolution (Tachyon) was [is due to be] officially published on June 12, but I was fortunate to get an advance copy. Watts is a gifted science fiction writer, with a knack for combining disparate threads of science rooted in hard-as-nails science, and he does this par excellence in his latest novel. This time it’s far-future humans far away from Earth, in a tense web woven of AI, biology, cyberpunk in the flesh and robots with music. Not only that, the novel is just 192 pages.
Heather, the Totality (Little, Brown, 2017) is also short – 134 pages – and is written by someone, Matthew Weiner, whose work you may well know in a very different medium, television. Weiner brings the same incisive understanding of the underside of human nature he brought to The Sopranos and Mad Men to this explosive little novel, which sports only one line of actual dialog. What’s it about it? Here’s what I’ll tell you: A few months ago, I noticed a guy eyeing a woman in a supermarket parking lot. It happened very quickly, and I stayed in my car until the woman got safely into hers and drove away. As I drove back on the highway, I realized there was something, I don’t know, really angry in his gaze, certainly more than just appreciation. That’s the ignition point for Heather, when her Manhattan father notices a construction worker ogling his 14-year old daughter.
And I’ll complete this triad by highly recommending for your summer reading pleasure Come Out Tonight by Bonnie Rozanksi (Amazon Digital Services, 2011; whose The Mind Traveler appeared on my list last year). This one’s not that short – more than 200 pages – and every page is worth reading. It’s mostly a police mystery, with a dash of science fiction, when a top-notch researcher working on a powerful new sleeping aid is savagely assaulted and left in a vegetative state. Her boyfriend, her father, and all manner of suspects abound, and Rozanski brings her unerring eye for New York detail to this story, noting how, after a subway car pulls out of Grand Central, it “futzes around” for a few minutes. Don’t futz around regarding this novel — snap it up!
Ordinarily, when invited to contribute to my husband’s famed Summer Reading List, I include more books, more force, more flourish; this summer, in between and during stops on my way to L.A. through Reno from Houston for my yearly research and exhibition road trip in preparation for my dissertation, my list becomes shorter and shorter. This is that short list.
This summer I have been and will continue to read Unthinking Mastery by Julietta Singh (Duke University Press, 2018) and Decolonizing Dialects by George Ciccariello-Maher (Duke University Press, 2017); Freedom is a Constant Struggle by Angela Davis (Haymarket, 2016) and How We Get Free by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (Haymarket, 2017); Supercommunity: Diabolical Togetherness Beyond Contemporary Art edited by Lulieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, and Anton Vidokle (Verso, 2017). I also continue to wait as patiently as possible for Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin’s next couple books in their series Intercalations–Decapitated Economies and These Birds of Temptation–for K. Verlag at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Every day I still think, the word for world is still forest.
My immediate reading right now is Johanna Drucker’s The General Theory of Social Relativity (The Elephants, 2018). Drucker will be known to some as a book artist, to others as a scholar of modernist art, to still others as a leading figure in the digital humanities community. Here, however, in this short chapbook, she is a diagnostician of the contemporary public sphere. Heady title notwithstanding, Drucker’s focus is squarely on the everyday of our collective media and discourse, both united under the rubric of what she terms aesthetics. Like other writers (Angela Nagle, #recentcontroversiesdulynoted) she seeks to dismantle the notion that there is anything inherently progressive in art or aesthetics, or that associated leftist tactics can in any simple, causal, or mechanistic way constitute a “resistance.” Instead, Drucker turns toward an account of cultural phenomena as “extrusions” or “manifestations” of our swirling, affective engagement with an all-consuming and resolutely non-partisan media spectrum. The key term to emerge here is the phantasmatic: no mere simulacrum, but the metastasizing of meme into reality fabric. In this there are also sympathies with the “eversion” hypothesis, a word William Gibson first introduced in Spook Country (Penguin/Viking, 2007) to describe the virtual’s quotidian intrusion into the real world, so-called. Likewise, Drucker offers a direct critique of digital dualism, the notion that what’s on our screens is somehow less real than our (somehow?) more authentic analog surroundings. By contrast, screen and the everyday now co-constitute the real, held together by the quantum gel of the social, presented here not as relation but as medium, a medium which one doesn’t have to be Einstein to see the Commander-in-Cheese has mastered. (Don’t like the thought of quantum gel? Call it covfefe instead.) This one is essential, folks.
Following the Drucker, my next project will likely be Justin Joque’s Deconstruction Machines: Writing in the Age of Cyberwar (University of Minnesota Press, 2018). I mean, come on, Justin, you had me at deconstruction, machines, writing, and cyberwar! Starting with the brute-simple observation that what contemporary militaries dub cyberwar or netwar is carried via malignant computer code—which is to say texts that literally take things apart (think Stuxnet)—Joque asks what it means to entertain the weaponization of a philosophy, namely the book’s titular deconstruction. Also on deck are a brace of books from the MIT Press’s Essential Knowledge series, Nick Montfort’s The Future (2017) and Amaranth Borsuk’s The Book (2018).These entries are intended to provide fast and accessible but critically engaged introductions to a topic; still, the secret (don’t tell) is that one reads such books at least as much for their author as for their individual subject matter, and such is the case here. Tar for Mortar (Punctum Books, 2018), meanwhile, is still another short chapbook, Jonathan Basile’s archaeology of Borges’s multitudinous Library of Babel (Basile having also programmed a computer simulation of same). Speaking of multitudes, Chicago’s Interacting with Print (2018) volume bills itself as a multigraph: a monograph-length book collectively authored by some two dozen leading scholars of nineteenth century print culture and book history, composed with a wiki so as to interleave their expert voices rather than produce the standard edited collection. Finally, my colleague Tita Chico’s monograph The Experimental Imagination just out from Stanford, offers a historicized account of the entanglement of literature and science during the Enlightenment, a period when (she argues) the language of the one co-created the discourse of the other—a story that is all the more relevant now that the science wars have been phantasmatically mobilized.
This summer I am returning to a book that has been reissued. Giuliana Bruno’s Atlas of Emotion came out in 2002 but was out of print for a long period, and Verso has now republished it. Bruno’s work is a great example of the methodological innovation that I also read as inspiring “media archaeological” work: moving across art history, architecture and built environments, gender, cinema and many other contexts. And it is beautifully written. This time round I am reading it in a specific context of (media) archaeologies of fashion, which relates to our AHRC-funded project on the fashion film.
Another inspiring scholar, Matthew Fuller, has a new book out on sleep (How to Sleep: The Art, Biology and Culture of Unconsciousness; Bloomsbury Academic, 2018). Jonathan Crary’s 24/7 (Verso, 2014) came out some years ago, but Fuller’s book is clearly following the same footsteps and has opens up with this wonderful outline of the book’s aim: “Sleep is quite a popular activity, indeed most humans spend around a third of their lives asleep. However, cultural, political, or aesthetic thought tends to remain concerned with the interpretation and actions of those who are awake.”
David Parisi’s Archaeologies of Touch (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) is also on my reading list in the pile of books unofficially labelled “things media archaeological” – also Susan Murray’s new book on the history of the color television – Bright Signals (Duke University Press, 2018) — can be broadly said to belong to the same category of interesting takes that deal with media history, perception and technicity.
I am reading Joanna Zylinska’s Nonhuman Photography (MIT Press, 2017) too as I am in the midst of preparing a project proposal on Operative Images. Eric Alliez and Maurizio Lazzarato’s book War and Capital (Semiotext(e), 2018) arrived recently in the mail and is one of the books I aspire to read. In order to understand contemporary capitalism, one studies it as a military operation. Next one on my reading list is Janine Marchessault’s Ecstatic Worlds: Media, Utopias, Ecologies (MIT Press, 2017) that came out last year already but I am a bit late to reading it. Besides being interested in what it says about ecology and the Cold War, I think it might have good points useful for our Lab Book project, a book about humanities and media labs that in many ways go back to the Cold War (as a forthcoming book by Ryan Bishop and John Beck argues well). And today I learned that the English translation of Markus Krajewski’s The Server (Yale University Press, 2018) is out. Translated by Ilinca Iurascu, the book is one key reference point in the German cultural techniques literature and outlines a cultural history of servantry from the technological point of view too.
This summer I have five books out. So, I will happily be spending time away from books, computers, and reading.
But, here’s what I read in the process, and highly recommend:
Rod Hart Civic Hope:How Ordinary Americans Keep Democracy Alive(Cambridge University Press, 2018): A prescient analysis of letters to the editor, dating back to the fifties. Reminds how much and how little, at the same time, things have changed in politics. Beautifully written; a love letter to democracy.
Svetlana Boym The Future of Nostalgia (Basic Books, 2002) Perhaps you read this when it first came out. Reread and realize how every idea of yours you thought original, she wrote about decades ago.
Chris Nashawaty Caddyshack: The Making of a Hollywood Cinderella Story (Flatiron Books, 2018): My father has this strange Rodney Dangerfield as cartoon character statue in his house that speaks some of his most infamous lines. Amid piles of CDs and videos, old assortments and antiques, this Rodney Dangerfield animated doll thing stands out as a reminder that my father kinda raised myself and my brothers on Rodney Dangerfield’s comedy and movies. From Easy Money to the long sought after record Rappin’ Rodney, Dangerfield’s character was used as a basis for my father to relate to his sons.
Granted, not the best role model, or traditional form or father-son relations, but it encapsulated something we’re still able to relate on all these years later. I believe that fascination with the comedian began with his appearance in Caddyshack, and to this day, whenever it’s on TV, I pretty much put everything aside and watch it.
Also to this day, it’s quite apparent that the movie makes little to no sense at all. As it would happen, that belief stretches far beyond anything I could have ever imagined. In April 2018, writer Chris Nashawaty released the book Caddyshack: The Making of a Hollywood Cinderella Story, and I quickly read through it within a few days of buying it.
Beginning with the story of National Lampoon magazine, followed by the writing and creation of Animal House, the book tracks the story of the writers and director as they take life experience (and lack thereof), lighting in a bottle moments that featured young comedic legends in the making and all of the behind the scenes mayhem that formed the basis for the movie. I won’t divulge much here, except that I was correct in assuming that the movie makes little to no sense, and that the finished product was the result of editing down a rough four and a half hour cut into something that could be bought and sold in Hollywood.
With the addition of an animatronic gopher, large improvisational bits from Bill Murray and more than few drunken blowups from the cast and staff, the movie ultimately went from critical disaster to earning over $30 million at the box office.
It also pushed a 57-year-old Rodney Dangerfield out of Vegas and into the movie business. Though Dangerfield didn’t think he was funny during the filming of the movie (because the director’s staff couldn’t laugh at him while filming), he went on to foster an odd father-son relationship for myself, my dad and my brothers.
Walter Issacson’s Steve Jobs (Simon & Schuster, 2011) is what my kids used to tease me about as a “big fattie” summer read. I’m long overdue to grapple with this book as part of understanding the links between neoliberalism and what I’m calling the California Design Ideology.
As for the rest of the summer, I want to catch up with the recent output of friends and colleagues who I can’t keep up with during the year.
I still need to read rather than browse Johanna Drucker’s Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (Harvard University Press, 2014) which is just what it sounds like, an analysis of the ways in which how we see affects the ways that we come to know. Johanna came out with not one but two more books in the spring of 2018: Downdrift (Three Rooms Press, 2018) is an eco-fiction that begins with the voice of an Archaean, “the most ancient creature on earth”; The General Theory of Social Relativity (The Elephants, 2018) melds quantum physics with social analysis. Given that I can’t understand how quickly the global polity has deteriorated in the past one thousand days, I’m open to new paradigms.
Todd Presner, David Shepard and Yoh Kawano’s Hypercities: Thick Mapping in the Digital Humanities (Harvard University Press, 2014) joins Jeffrey Schnapp and Matthew Battles’ The Library Beyond the Book (Harvard University Press, 2014) as titles in and around digital humanities that I want to follow as a reminder that ars longa, vita brevis, and that (I hope) certain political winds are briefer still.
Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter’s new book Organization after Social Media (Minor Compositions, 2018) wants us to construct “social technologies based on enduring time” and value action over weak ties. The .01% knows that likes and followers are nice, but what moves the world and the art world (at least right now) is cold, hard cash. Andrea Fraser’s bespoke big data project, 2016 in Museums, Money, and Politics (MIT Press, 2018), is a brick of a book designed by the wonderful Geoff Kaplan. It organizes the deep research that Fraser put in to understand exactly how culture and power intersect by looking in detail at the political contributions by board members at more than 125 of the most important museums showing contemporary art in the United States.
Bruce Sterling’s Pirate Utopia (Tachyon, 2016) also interrogates culture’s tortured relationship with power, but from a deiselpunk perspective, creating an alternative past in which the Futurists take over the Regency of Carnaro to wreck havoc on their enemies. It was a nominee for the 2016 Sidewise Award, Best Short-Form Alternate History. In my alternate history, it won.
Finally, there’s Made Up: Designs Fictions, edited by Tim Durfee and Mimi Zeiger (Actar, 2018), which I’d recommend even if I didn’t have a short piece in it. Caveat lector should be the motto for all summer reading lists, in any case.
Michael Fallon Creating the Future: Art and Los Angeles in the 1970s (Counterpoint, 2014): Explains the various art scenes in LA and how that scene always was considered the bastard child of contemporary art in the eyes of the NY art critiques and beyond. It explains how the landscape and place was a strong influence on the art and for my own life, having grown up in LA, I see how much this scene influenced me, even as a child. It has helped me inform my own artwork.
Spain & Portugal’s Best Trips (Lonely Planet, 2016): Going to Spain and Portugal for some Banned in DC (Sun Dog Propaganda, 1988) talks this fall. Reading this book.
Richard Brautigan The Beatles Lyrics Illustrated (Dell, 1975): I found a battered-but-intact reading copy of this paperback for $5.74, shipping included. Richard Brautigan wrote the Introduction, a short story-like piece of brilliancy not published anywhere else. I always knew that someday I’d get into The Beatles. “She Loves You” (B Side: “I’ll Get You”) mesmerized me at seven years old, much. Oh yeah.
Ronen Givony Jawbreaker’s 24 Hour Revenge Therapy (or, The Strange Death of Selling Out) (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018): I can’t recall if it was Blockbuster, Best Buy, or The Wherehouse that had CD baristas in the mid-’90s. You’d bring shrink-wrapped compact discs to the circular bar/listening station, and they’d open ’em for you. How sophisticated! it felt. Elegant. ‘Twas at one of these retail stores that—while reading the lyrics, of course—I first heard 24 Hour Revenge Therapy (Tupelo Communion Conspiracy Theory, 1994) by Jawbreaker. I already knew I needed to own the album. Unfun (Shredder, 1990) and Bivouac (Tupelo, 1992) were often being spun at high volume in my affordable student housing at the time.
Sam Pink The Garbage Times/White Ibis (Soft Skull Press, 2018): I flipped through the pages of my Verified Amazon Purchase. “Wait. What? Soft Skull is European?” I wondered after noticing single quotation marks for the dialogue in both novellas. I checked one of the copyright pages. “New York, NY.” Phew. Binge-read alert x 2. New Sam Pink.
Rob Plath Swallowtude (Epic Rites Press, 2017): New York poet, novelist, photographer, illustrator, and painter Rob Plath knew Allen Ginsberg. Imagine one of your heroes handing you a bowl of beans and telling you simply to eat. Maybe it was soup. Vegan. Ginsberg passed away in ’97, right around the time I stopped following what was happening on the underground poetry scene. Today, university students in Wales are studying Rob Plath’s writing alongside the work of Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Dan Fante (Plath’s unpublished 2014 interview with Dan Fante will be in the September/October issue of UK ‘s esteemed print Magazine, Cold Lips). I’m excited to read his first novel. Signed copy purchased from the author.
Jane Friedman The Business of Being a Writer (University of Chicago Press, 2018): A candid guide to career pathways for (academic) writers, how the publishing industry works, how to build an author platform, the role of entrepreneurship, and diverse money-making strategies. Part of the series Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing.
Annie McClanahan Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First Century Culture (Stanford University Press, 2017): McClanahan is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Irvine. Austerity and debt have defined the post-2008 socio-economic landscape. This book draws on behavioral economics, cultural analysis, and other disciplines to critically examine the economic, social, and historical transformations in the United States economy – and their impact on contemporary life. Credit, debt, and property speculation now reshape our individual subjectivity: McClanahan contends that these changes are likely to endure in the future.
Arne De Boever Finance Fictions: Realism and Psychosis in a Time of Economic Crisis (Fordham University Press, 2018): De Boever teaches American Studies at the California Institute of the Arts. This book examines how books, film, and other popular culture have communicated to a wider audience the economic realities of the post-2008 world. De Boever finds that black box algorithms have replaced commodities in popular imagination.
Lawrence Creatura Long and Short: Confessions of a Portfolio Manager: Stock Market Wisdom for Investors (Mill City Press, 2015): For fans of SHO’s Billions, Creatura’s book is a series of short, reflective, and practitioner-focused essays on how he achieved ‘alpha’ (excess returns above a benchmark) as a portfolio manager, and what you can learn from some of his mistakes.
David Graeber Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (Simon & Schuster, 2018): Graeber is a Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics who was involved in Occupy Wall Street’s direct action protests. This book expands on Graeber’s 2013 essay “On The Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs” (Strike Magazine) to examine why neoliberal capitalism creates a range of meaningless jobs that its employees know are pointless. Graeber also includes survey responses from international readers on the bullshit jobs they have had to endure, and the creative strategies developed to cope with them.
Suzanne Buffam A Pillow Book (Canarium Books, 2016): Full of anecdotes and lists related to pillows and sleep, Buffam’s book is the perfect before-bed meditation. I read this one at night before I sleep, my head appropriately on my pillow.
Hieu Minh Nguyen Not Here (Coffee House Press, 2018): Nguyen balances words on a page with such heart-pounding delicacy, I can only take a few at a time. These poems feel by turns like they will shatter apart or stab you to death. Either way, they’re honed to a deadly point and pointed right at you. It’s as beautiful as it is painful.
Amos Tutuola and Ben Okri: I was doing research on intertextuality, as you do, and I came across a book comparing the work of Nigerian novelist Ben Okri with those of his forebear Amos Tutuola (the auspiciously titled Intertextuality and the Novels of Amos Tutuola and Ben Okri by Durojaiye Owoeye). I decided to take a closer look. I immediately recognized that Brian Eno and David Byrne ganked the title of their 1982 record from Tutuola’s second novel (My Life in the Bush of Ghosts; faber & faber 1954), which I took as annoying but also as further endorsement. I’ve been reading Tutuola’s books as fast as I can find them, and I’m stacking up Okri’s for after (e.g., The Famished Road, Astonishing the Gods, etc.). Someone—not the authors, of course—called this stuff “magical realism,” and I guess that’ll have to do.
Tade Thompson Rosewater (Orbit Books, 2018): Though I’ve been reading a lot of Nigerian literature lately, I didn’t know Tade Thompson was originally from there (He is Yoruba) when I started reading this. The deft way that Rosewater jumps time periods and switches from the actual to the virtual and back is a sure sign that a steady hand is in control. The story is also mind-expanding. It’s cyberpunk, but it’s also so much more. This is the first book of his Wormwood Trilogy, so there’s thankfully more to come.
Susan Lepselter The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, Captivity, and UFOs in the American Uncanny (University of Michigan Press, 2016): I’ve been researching UFOs and alien abductions for the last several years for no reason other than curiosity, and Lepselter brings together nodes I haven’t seen connected in other books on these topics. Using the possible presence of aliens as an avatar for alienations of all kinds: persistent hauntings, captivity stories, conspiracy theories, uncanny memories. In the end, this is not a book about UFOs and things far away. It’s a book about the aliens at home. It’s a book about the United States.
Roy Christopher:What would you say is your area of work?
Dominic Pettman: My official title is Professor of Culture & Media, so I guess that gives an accurate idea of the scope of my beat. In other words, pretty much anything is fair game! My university education in Australia was quite eclectic and promiscuous, and we were not encouraged to squat on a sub-sub-field as many are here in the States; so I never learned to get the laser vision that some of my colleagues have. When I arrived in the US in 2004, and people described my writing as “brave,” it took me a while to figure out that this was code for “crazy and reckless.” Nevertheless, it’s too late for me to hyper-specialize now.
I do, however, have enduring themes that I’m interested in, and my work pays particular attention to questions concerning the species-being of “the human,” especially in relation to the technical aspects of various libidinal economies and ecologies. For the past twenty years, my research has focused on neglected connections between philosophical ideas, psychological states, social anxieties, and cultural artifacts, with a particular focus on the media used to create and navigate these phenomena. While the objects of my research may seem quite different from project to project, they are all case studies relating to the three main questions animating my work: 1) how do humans use media/technology to symbolize their complex experience of time? 2) how do humans use media/technology to communicate their conflicted experience of intersubjectivity? and 3) how do humans use media/technology to perpetuate—or complicate—their ambivalent relationships to other forms of intelligence, such as animals or machines?
In one recent book, Infinite Distraction: Paying Attention to Social Media (Polity, 2016), I demonstrate the ways in which online sharing platforms “hypermodulate” our attention in order to more effectively control our behavior, via different digital rhythms and time signatures. In another recent title, Sonic Intimacy: Voice, Species, Technics (Stanford University Press, 2017), I ask why it is that humans have historically been considered the only being blessed with voice. I proceed from there to explore the notion that animals and machines may in fact have their own modes of “speech,” and may thus be trying to tell us something that we are currently incapable of hearing. A companion title, Creaturely Love: How Desire Makes Us More and Less Than Human (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) details some of the ways that desire makes us both more–and less–than human by looking closely at some canonical literary, philosophical, and aesthetic uses of animalistic themes, within the lovers’ discourse.
RC:You are quite prolific, having finished as many books as I’ve started in the same amount of time, as well as posting regularly online. Do you have an elaborate writing scheme and schedule? Are there really two of you?
DP: I’m somewhat abashed to say that I don’t. I’m not one of these people that write a little bit a day, and then—by the end of the year—I find I have 100k words ready to go. Rather I tinker a little bit with notes, as I circle the project, and then—when the moment feels right—I pounce, and work like crazy until it’s finished. I definitely need a clear block of time in order to bring a manuscript together–whether this be a Summer break or a sabbatical. Also, what you might notice is that my books are getting shorter and shorter. One day I aspire to be Agamben, and have even a haiku published as a book in a 5,000 point font. But I can work quickly. Infinite Distraction, for instance, was written during a four-week winter break. Of course, it sold more copies and got more attention than the book I spent several years on! There’s a lesson there perhaps.
But usually when people ask what the secret is, I tell them don’t have kids. Then again, my colleague, McKenzie Wark is a very committed father, and he is even more prolific than I am. Maybe it’s an Australian thing.
Seriously though, I do think that many academics or theorists—especially those traumatized by grad school—tend to be wary of sharing anything with the world until it is so polished as to be mortified. There is also a fear that if you haven’t read every single text even vaguely pertaining to your subject then you have no right to enter the conversation. But I prefer to see each book as a moment, or specific contribution, not the very last word on an issue. And this frees me up to address any gaps or unconsidered angles in a subsequent work.
RC:Since you write about so many different topics, I am curious as to what is coming up next.
DP: My current research, speaking generally, seeks more explicitly to “reanimalize the human,” in order to more consciously track the ways in which our historical sense of human purpose (“species-being”) is being challenged by, and responding to, new ethological discoveries, and a rather urgent new sense of ecological entanglement (not to mention mutual precarity).
I am in the midst of two manuscripts that emerge from this research. The first outlines a general “libidinal ecology,” beginning with the provocative notion (borrowed from Bernard Stiegler) that we are running out of libido, in the same way that we are running out of natural resources, like fresh water or oil. It begins by asking: “What is the carbon footprint of your libido?” – a quantitative conceit to clear the way for qualitative questions around desire, mobility, and media. Part of this project scans the archive of philosophical commentaries on human intimacy in search of seeds which never took root, but which have the potential to free us from the dangers of “peak libido,” and the associated impasses or afflictions of contemporary private life. Plato’s Symposium, for instance, offers an array of definitions of human passions, but only Aristophanes’s figure of the sutured hermaphrodite, fusing itself back together with its other half, has come to dominate the romantic imagination. What if we follow more nuanced accounts of what it means to be an individual among other individuals (none of whom, perhaps, are as in-dividual as they may like to think)?
The second project is more creative in spirit: an engagement with Vilém Flusser’s theory of mediated gestures. This collaborative endeavor, with historian Carla Nappi, experiments with the written and performative forms through which scholars might engage and communicate media theory. This has yielded a complete manuscript, Meta-Gestures, which gathers together short stories written in tandem, responding to Flusser’s original gestures, such as “the gesture of photographing,” “the gesture of making,” and “the gesture of planting.” Can only humans make authentic gestures? Or can this specific type of semiosis—less than an action, but more than an intention—be something performed also by animals and machines? Together, Nappi and I intend to make an audit of contemporary gestures made in response to intensifying digital imperatives, while also creating a blueprint of alternative gestures which (at least potentially) embody the kind of “freedom” that Flusser himself felt must follow the rather dismal options provided by the program industries.
Ultimately, this research is conducted in the service of recognizing, and fostering, not only new forms of intimacy and understanding between radically different types of being, but new conceptions of what it means to be human in a (productively!) dehumanized world.
During my undergraduate days, my friends and I used to play a silly game. Whenever a situation or topic came up and they pointed to me, I would attempt to recite a relevant rap lyric. Sometimes it was a stretch to get Ice-T or the Beastie Boys to fit a late-night Waffle House run, but I was rarely stumped.
As Gorham and Gilligan (2006) put it, “media allusions represent an important way in which audiences make use of the cultural products around them to form relationships with others and build community out of shared media experiences” (p. 3). That is, we determine which texts are appropriate for appropriating and which resonate with the shared beliefs of our community (Linde, 2009). We run around in these collective “textual communities” (Stock, 1983). Members of said communities allude to the same, shared texts in their personal narratives. The shared texts are where we “compare notes” on our collective experiences, as I used to do in college. The fans of a particular cultural artifact (e.g., fans of the band Rush, fans of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, etc.) do not constitute a textual community; textual communities are constituted by their sharing of similar texts in their personal narratives (Linde, 2009). A lot of these texts come from song lyrics.
Sometimes this sharing is called intertextuality, but the term is often misused and abused (Allen, 2000; Irwin, 2004; Orr, 2003; Roudiez, 1980). As originally coined by Julia Kristeva in 1966, the term meant “the transposition of one or more systems of signs into another” (Roudiez, 1980, p. 15; emphasis in original). Therefore, while lyrics, media allusions, and conversational sampling can all be considered intertextual, their intertextuality does not indicate a cohesive system of signs.
Reguardless, intertextuality says there is something outside the text — more texts. Building on Gérard Gennette’s work in art and literature (see Gennette, 1982; 1987; 1994/1997) , The Pop Palimpsest: Intertextuality in Recorded Popular Music (University of Michigan Press, 2018), edited by Lori Burns and Serge Lacasse, aims to explore those texts in popular music. I did my own dissertation research on allusions in rap lyrics, so I immediately gravitated to the chapters on hip-hop: “Rap Gods and Monsters: Words, Music, and Images in the Hip-Hop Intertexts of Eminem, Jay-Z, and Kanye West” by Lori Burns and Alyssa Woods would’ve been invaluable in my earlier research; “Intertextuality and Lineage in The Game’s ‘We Ain’t’ and Kendrick Lamar’s ‘m.A.A.d. City'” by Justin A. Williams also immediately grabbed me; “Mix Tapes, memory, and Nostalogia: An Introduction to Phonographic Analogies” by Serge Lacasse and Andy Bennett overlaps with a couple of new areas of my research.
It’s not all rap lyrics and samples though: Everything from French Vaudville and Neil Young to Genesis, E.L.O., and Eurythmics get a spin. And it’s not all just research either: The Pop Palimpsest is that rare academic collection that’s exhaustively researched and meticulously assembled, but also damn fun to read. The book has inspired dueling desires: I wish it had not only come out earlier but also that I could have contributed.
References:
Allen, Graham. (2000). Intertextuality: The New Critical Idiom. New York: Routledge.
Genette, Gérard. (1982/1997). Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
Genette, Gérard. (1987/1997). Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Genette, Gérard. (1994/1997). The Work of Art: Immanence and Transcendence. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Gorham, B. W. & Gilligan, E. N. (1997, May). And now for something completely different: Media allusions, language, and the practice of everyday life. A paper presented to the Language and Social Interaction division, ICA, Montreal.
Irwin, William. (2004, October). Against Intertextuality. Philosophy and Literature. Volume 28, Number 2, pp. 227-242. The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Linde, Charlotte. (2009). Working the Past: Narrative and Institutional Memory. New York: Oxford University Press.
Orr, Mary. (2003). Intertextuality: Debates and Contexts. Cambridge: Polity.
Roudiez, L. S. (1980). Introduction. In J. Kristeva, Desire in language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 1-20.
Stock, B. (1983). The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
“Media literacy” is as socially contested a term as they come. Its meaning of has been debated at least as far back as 1933 (see Tyner, 2010).It’s not difficult to make the case that Marshall McLuhan‘s work in the main was about media literacy. Not to mention Howard Rheingold‘s lengthy and thorough work on new media and social media literacy. So much has changed and changed hands since McLuhan left us. The computer moved from business and industry to the home and finally to every place and pocket available. In Coding Literacy: How Computer Programming is Changing Writing (MIT Press, 2017), Annette Vee argues that literacy is infrastructural. She explores two phases of its spread. One is where we adopt inscription technologies as material infrastructures. Then, as we adopt those technologies that affect the “quotidian activities of everyday citizens: literacy is adopted as infrastructure” (p. 141). She notes crucially that communicative practices such as writing and programming can manifest as actions and as artifacts. Vee’s approach addresses the social aspects of these literacies (i.e., understanding the actions), as well as their material underpinnings (i.e., understanding the artifacts). It’s an important new view of several serious issues.
Zooming out to the walls, rooms, and roads around us, Shannon Mattern’s Code + Clay… Data + Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) takes up the mantle of media archaeology and “challenges the newness of the new” by looking back at infrastructure at large — our built environment. Our urban areas are the site of information access as well as media themselves. Citing Malcolm McCullough and echoing McLuhan, She writes, “Our physical landscapes inscribe, transmit, and even embody information–about their histories, their state of repair, their potential uses, and so forth” (p. xii). Mattern’s use of sound, inscription, voice, and code illuminates our environment in a different and generative light.
We academics do a lot of work to justify and perpetuate our own work, a lot of advertising for ourselves. This is not that kind of work. Both of these books are about current situations verging on crises, and both of them take a long, historical view of these situations. There is still much to learn about all of these constructs and all of their relationships. There is an entire network of literacies we all need to learn. Now.
References:
Mattern, Shannon. (2017). Code + Clay… Data + Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Tyner, Katherine (Ed.). (2010). Media Literacy: New Agendas in Communication. New York: Routledge.
Vee, Annette. (2017). Coding Literacy: How Computer Programming is Changing Writing. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
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Many thanks to Alison Langmead, Lily Brewer, and the fine folks at the University of Pittsburgh and their Digital Scholarship Services for hosting and allowing me to crash the Willful Transgressions: Transdisciplinary Teaching workshop with Shannon Mattern. It was there that I was able to meet and work briefly with both Shannon and Annette.
To point out changes in the media landscape is to recite clichés. Everything is different, and nothing has changed.
Those two forces are flipping our media environment inside out. On one end, broadcasting became narrowcasting, and has now become microcasting. Advertisers and politicians are able to send ever-more targeted messages to smaller and smaller groups, moving from the broadcast model of one-to-many to something ever-closer to one-to-one. This shift has allowed an entity to tell one person one thing and then next person something possibly contradictory and gain the support of both in the process. Incidentally, that is how criminals communicate. They tell one group (their cronies) one thing and another group (law enforcement) the opposite.
This is also known as lying.
Computer hackers and vandals maintain communication channels in a similar fashion. Both want fame and recognition in one context and anonymity in the other. Often adopting gang-like names and attitudes, hackers rarely do a job without leaving behind their signature.
Where taking credit is key inside the hacker community, outside it anonymity is essential. One cannot boast without proof of the hack, and bragging is one of the only rewards for such exploits. Credit and credibility are inextricably intertwined.
As much as an artist’s reputation relies on signing their work, the freedom to perform computer crimes relies on that information staying inside the community. No one outside can find out. The contextual difference here is the difference that matters.
On the other end of the same spectrum, we’re seeing the mass exposure of bad things done in contexts assumed secret. From sexual assaults and police brutality to government collusion and illegal surveillance, communication technology available to everyone has boosted whistle-blowing possibilities. Following Matt Blaze, Neal Stephenson (2012) states “it’s best in the long run, for all concerned, if vulnerabilities are exposed in public” (p. 27). We have been able to pull evil deeds out of hiding and put them in contexts of accountability. As Geert Lovink told me,
An engaged form of criticism can only happen if people are forced to debate. In order to get there we need more conflicts, more scandals, more public liability. I no longer believe in begging for interdisciplinary programs in which scientists, artists, and theorists peacefully work together. That soft approach has failed over the last decades. It simply did not happen. It should be part of a shift in IT culture to go on the attack.
These two factors–power using resources against people and people using them against power–help define the way we see the world now. It’s a view defined by simultaneously filtering out some things and filling in others. It’s a view defined by global connections and mobile screens. It’s a view defined by the tail chasing its own dog.
A professor in English with appointments in Film and Media Studies, Comparative Literature, and Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Rita Raley studies all sorts of things that culminate in interesting intersections. She centers her study of tactical media, a designation Geert Lovink called a “deliberately slippery term,” on disturbance. Her book on the subject, Tactical Media (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), illustrates not only the ways in which media participate in events but also her own nuanced thinking about and through that participation. She and her colleagues have also been busy dissecting Mark Z. Danielewski’s 27-volume novel-in-progress (five of which are currently available), The Familiar, of which Matthew Kirschenbaum calls Raley, “perhaps his best current reader.”
Roy Christopher:What would you say is your area of work?
Rita Raley: Quite broadly, I would say new media (aesthetics and politics), contemporary literature, and what we might call the machinic and geopolitical dimensions of language in the present – by which I mean investigations of the transformations that have occurred in our reading and writing practices in tandem with the development and widespread adoption of computational platforms for everyday communicative use. Concretely, this last has led me to think about machine reading, writing, and translation – alongside of electronic literature, code poetics, global English, and networked forms of expression from spam to picture languages. At the moment I am grouping these forms and practices together under the rubric of the post-alphabetic.
RC:I haven’t read Danielewski since House of Leaves. How would you convince fans of that book to invest in the lengthy journey that he has only just begun with The Familiar?
RR: Life is short, our attention spans are shorter, and the perfect antidote to the sense that the world is slipping from our grasp is deep immersion in a serial narrative that prods us to be self-conscious about historical and planetary time on the one hand and our lived experience in the moment on the other. It rewards deep reading, as Danielewski’s texts always do, and there are ample pleasures to be found in the decoding of the text’s many puzzles and in the following of its lines of reference and inquiry out to other texts and bodies of knowledge, from AI to physics. But its pleasures are not only cerebral: it is at core – I want to say underneath its shimmering surface, which has been meticulously designed and crafted from cover to cover, but what I really mean is at its heart – a fantastic story. What might seem in volume 1 to be a set of stories (told in different genres, voices, and fonts) starts to converge over the course of the first season (volumes 1-5), and it’s clear that everything is moving toward a spectacular convergence that is either going to be apocalyptically destructive or truly regenerative and probably a bit of both. There are many things to say, and many things have been said, about what Danielewski does with and for codex as a medium and all of that pertains to The Familiar as well. What differentiates the project from House of Leaves and Only Revolutions – and I say this with the awareness that they are situated in a shared (or parallel) diegetic world – is the scale. That its planned run is 27 volumes makes this seem obvious perhaps but there is something different in the orientation. House of Leaves and Only Revolutions seem to me to turn in on themselves, opening up and mining abyssal structures or systems by which they then seem to be absorbed. The Familiar rather gestures out and beyond: Its span is Alpha to Omega, and it wants not to plunge us into the trapdoor beneath our feet but to show us the stars.
RC:Is there a such thing anymore as Humanities that are not Digital?
RR: No.
But to answer that more seriously, I would say all knowledge work in the 21st-century university has been transformed (How could it not be?), but computational media are just part of the story. Paradigmatic changes in scholarly methods and practices are evident across the disciplines, and they are all in part attributable to the development of new tools, platforms, and techniques, but understanding the significance of all of this requires some consideration of the evolution of the idea of the university: what is its function and purpose, now; what are its products; which constituencies does it serve; why should institutional culture be defined by vision statements, agenda setting, and entrepreneurial activity. So, indeed, there has been what is often termed a “turn” to quantification, visualization, and making as both the means and end of knowledge production, but this shift is by no means particular to the humanities alone.
To be even more serious, I think that at least some humanities scholars should continue to think about, and with, that which is not-digital – not in the sense of what has been left behind but rather in the sense of what cannot be captured. The accelerations that we seem collectively to sense – in AI research, climate change, and tribal realignments – are in fact real, and we need to put our minds to reimagining a world that is not only inhabitable but worth preserving. How can, and should, we live in common, with each other and with nonhuman things? For these questions the humanities need not only engineering but also the environmental and social sciences.
RC:I want to go back to your work on tactical media. How broadly do you define the concept?
RR: I remain agnostic about what is or what is not “properly” tactical media. If it seems like a nail, use the hammer. If it works – if it gets the job done, whatever the job – great. The only way to guard against the inertia, apathy, and depression that often results from defeat is to act, but at some level we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes a meaningful action. My own view is that now, in 2017, sharing ideas about the future and a common purpose are more important than sharing a definition.
I am happy to announce a contribution to the Journal of Hip-Hop Studies (Volume 4, Issue 1). I wrote a review of André Sirois’ book Hip-Hop DJs and the Evolution of Technology (Peter Lang, 2016).
Sirois’ book is not only a great fit for coverage in this particular journal, but it’s also one of the many pieces of the multiple puzzles I’m trying to assemble in the research for one of my own books-in-progress. Here’s an excerpt of my JHHS review:
André Sirois, a.k.a. DJ Food Stamp, the man behind the turntables on mixtapes by some of my favorite emcees, including Sean Price, Planet Asia, Common, M.F. Doom, and Atmosphere, grasps that tonal history [of turntablism]. In his book Hip-Hop DJs and the Evolution of Technology: Cultural Exchange, Innovation, and Democratization, Sirois argues that in its complexity, hip-hop culture is itself a new media culture. Current so-called ‘new media’ can be traced back from smartphones and the internet to landlines and the telegraph. Following hip-hop DJs’ hacking of recording technology and playback from Grandmaster Flash’s mixer toggle-switch and Grand Wizard Theodore’s manual scratch to digital sampling and Serato, Sirois historicizes the technical evolution and cultural practices of Hip Hop DJs as new media. Emphasizing the network mentality present from the beginning of Hip Hop, he employs an open source metaphor to characterize the culture. ‘From my perspective,’ Sirois writes, ‘what these South Bronx DJs started was the foundation of the new media ideology present in popular culture today: sample, mix, burn, share, and repeat’ (XVII).
In the creative process, constraints are often seen as burdens. Budgets are too small, locations inaccessible, resources unavailable. Sometimes, though, the opposite is true. Sometimes, a multiplicity of options can be the burden. “In my experience,” writes Brian Eno, “the instruments and tools that endure… have limited options.” Working with less forces us to find better, more creative ways to accomplish our goals. As sprawling and sometimes unwieldy as movies can be, low-budget and purposefully limited projects provide excellent examples of doing more with less.
Like many of us, James Wan and Leigh Whannell started off with no money. The two recent film-school graduates wrote their Saw (2004) script to take place mostly in one room. Inspired by the simplicity of The Blair Witch Project (1999), the pair set out not to write the torture-porn the Saw franchise is known for, but a mystery thriller, a one-room puzzle box. Interestingly, like concentric circles, the seven subsequent movies all revolve around the events that happen in that first room. They’re less a sequence and more ripples right from that first rock. And let’s not forget that the original Saw is still one of the most profitable horror movies of all time, bettered by the twig-thin budget of The Blair Witch Project and the house-bound Paranormal Activity (2007), two further studies in constraint.
James Ward Byrkit’s Coherence (2013) is also the product of pulling back. After working on big-budget movies (e.g., Rango, the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, etc.), Byrkit wanted to strip the process down to as few pieces as possible. Instead of a traditional screenplay, he spent a year writing a 12-page treatment. Filmed over five nights in his own house, Coherence documents a dinner party gone astray as a comet flies by setting off all sorts of quantum weirdness. The story is small enough to tell among friends over dinner but big enough to disrupt their beliefs about reality. With the dialog unscripted, the film unfolds like a game. Each actor was fed notecards with short paragraphs about their character’s moves and motivations. Like a version of Clue written by Erwin Schrödinger, Coherence works because of its limited initial conditions — not in spite of them.
When producer David W. Higgins was developing the film Hard Candy (2005), he knew the story should play out in the tight space of a single room or small house, so he hired playwright Brian Nelson to write the script. Not as cosmic as Coherence, Hard Candy nonetheless tells a big story in as small a space and with fewer people. The budget was intentionally kept below $1 million to keep the studio from asking for changes to the controversial final product — another self-imposed constraint in the service of freedom. Tellingly, Nelson also wrote the screenplay for Devil (2010), which transpires almost entirely in the confines of an elevator.
Narratives have personalities we have relationships with. An audience can’t get to know something that continually evolves into something else. Eno concludes, “A personality is something with which you can have a relationship. Which is why people return to pencils, violins, and the same three guitar chords.” Personalities have limits. Intimacy requires constraints. Don’t let lack of resources stop you from pursuing a project. The end result might be better anyway.
A professor in English with appointments in Film and Media Studies, Comparative Literature, and Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, 
Like many of us, James Wan and Leigh Whannell started off with no money. The two recent film-school graduates wrote their Saw (2004) script to take place mostly in one room. Inspired by the simplicity of The Blair Witch Project (1999), the pair set out not to write the torture-porn the Saw franchise is known for, but a mystery thriller, a one-room puzzle box. Interestingly, like concentric circles, the seven subsequent movies all revolve around the events that happen in that first room. They’re less a sequence and more ripples right from that first rock. And let’s not forget that the original Saw is still one of the most profitable horror movies of all time, bettered by the twig-thin budget of The Blair Witch Project and the house-bound Paranormal Activity (2007), two further studies in constraint.
