Tag: Media Theory

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Babbage Claim: A Media Archeology Primer

Steampunk, that excitingly innovative yet alienatingly weird subculture, possesses hints of nostalgia, punk-rock attitude, and a love for self-styled, homemade gadgets. William Gibson and Bruce Sterling provided an easy touchstone with their 1990 book The Difference Engine (Bantam Spectra), a revisionist history of the world in which Charles Babbage actually finished a steam-powered calculating machine and the information age preceded the industrial revolution. Another great example is Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985). The movie’s ontology operates atop what Barry Brummett (1999) points out is a machine metaphor. He writes, “Several references within the film make it clear that the characters regard their society as if it were a machine” (p. 122). Certainly Babbage aimed at divining this universal machine or at least harnessing its hidden power (see Spufford & Uglow, 1996; as well as Babbage’s memoirs, 1864; 1994), and so it goes with steampunk as a whole.

Sam Lowry takes the promotion, disappointing his boss Mr. Kurtzmann.

This strange machinery is keeping you from seeing me.
— Ride, “Leave Them All Behind”

After applying a twisted version of media archeology in his last book, Jussi Parikka has come to explicate the approach proper. Under the playful guise of legitimizing a steampunk approach to media studies, What is Media Archeology? (Polity, 2012) introduces the field with just as much fun and fervor. It makes way more sense that it seems to at first. Steampunk, so named to contrast it with cyberpunk, looks to the past as well as the future and wonders whether certain initial conditions could change the outcome of our machinic media-madness. Digging up pieces of the past, media archeology seeks the same. So, beyond the weak tie to a sci-fi subgenre, what is media archeology? Parikka breaks it down on his website like this:

If you ask Erkki Huhtamo or Siegfried Zielinski, you might get a different answer than from asking me. For Huhtamo, it is the recurring topoi/topics of media culture; for Zielinski, a poetic exploration of deep times and variantology; and so forth. For me, it is an exciting theoretical opening to think about material media cultures in a historical perspective. However, it expands into an experimental set of questioning about time, obsolescence, and alternative histories as well. In one way, it is about analyzing the conditions of existence of media cultural objects, processes and phenomena. It picks up on some strands of ‘German media theory’, but connects that to other debates in cultural theory too. I like what Bernhard Siegert has said about the early ethos of media archaeology being that of Nietzschean gay science — experimental, exploratory, radical. Perhaps in this vein, media archaeology is one answer to the need to think transdiscplinary questions of art, science, philosophy, and technology.

Following Michel Foucault, Friedrich Kittler, Paul Virilio, Katherine Hayles, Geert Lovink and Jeffrey Sconce, among others, the field has a pedigree, and Parrika’s book is the first to align its lineage. Further afield, Media Archeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, edited by Parikka and his colleague Erkki Huhtamo (University of California Press, 2011), samples the many flavors of media archeology. In many ways, the field offers an alternative to simply historical views of media (see Wolfgang Ernst, this volume). It is “first and foremost a methodology,” as Geert Lovink (2004) put it, “a hermeneutic reading of the ‘new’ against the grain of the past, rather than telling the histories of technologies from past to present” (p. 11). For example, citing Howard Rheingold‘s discussions of the development of Apple’s Smalltalk (primarily by Alan Kay; see Tools for Thought, 1985), and Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language (Oxford University Press, 1977) via the germinal book Design Patterns (Addison-Wesley, 1994), Casey Alt illustrates how object-orientation pushed programmers from mere computer programming to media-making. By allowing them to see the machine as many machines, each with access to all of the machine’s resources, they could see potential past its place as one big computing device.

Also consider the indexing of dead media. Media are “dead” based on their manufacture, adoption, business viability, etc. (or lacks thereof rather), but all of these aspects vary, overlap, and waver in and out of relevance. “Radio didn’t kill newspapers, TV didn’t kill radio or movies, video and cable didn’t kill broadcast network TV;” writes Bruce Sterling, “they just all jostled around seeking a more perfect app.” From the onset of the digital and imaginary media to dead devices and the world of sound, finding these (non)lineages as such and predicting the present is what media archeology is all about. As Manuel De Landa (2000) wrote, “Human history is a narrative of contingencies, not necessities, of missed opportunities to follow different routes of development, not of a unilinear succession of ways to convert energy, matter, and information into cultural products” (p. 99). Indeed.

So, what if Charles Babbage had finished the Difference Engine? What if one cog in the universal machine were different? What happens when dead media come back to life? Outside of the speculations of steampunk and science fiction, media archeology provides a method for finding out. If you’re interested in a finding a new way to how we got to today, these two books are the place to start.

References:

Babbage, Charles. (1864; 1994). Passages from the Life of a Philosopher. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press

Brummett, Barry. (1999). Rhetoric of Machine Aesthetics. Westport, CT: Praeger.

De Landa, Manuel. (2000). A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. New York: Zone Books.

Gardener, Mark. (1992). Leave Them All Behind [Recorded by Ride]. On Going Blank Again [Record]. United Kingdom: Creation Records.

Huhtamo, Erkki & Parikka, Jussi (Eds.). (2011). Media Archeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Lovink, Geert. (2004). My First Recession: Critical Internet Culture in Transition. Rotterdam, Netherlands: NAi/V2.

Milchan, Arnon (Producer), & Gilliam, Terry. (Writer/Director). (1985). Brazil [Motion picture]. United Kingdom: Universal Studios.

Parikka, Jussi. (2012). What is Media Archeology? Cambridge, UK: Polity.

Rheingold, Howard. (1985). Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Spufford, Francis & Uglow, Jenny. (1996). Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time, and Invention. London: faber & faber.

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Mindfulness and the Medium

Over forty years ago, media philosopher Walter Ong wrote that the “advent of newer media alters the meaning and relevance of the older. Media overlap, or, as Marshall McLuhan has put it, move through one another as do galaxies of stars, each maintaining its own basic integrity but also bearing the marks of the encounter ever after” (1971, p. 25). That is, a new technology rarely supplants its forebears outright but instead changes the relationships between existing technologies. During a visit to Georgia Tech’s Digital Media Demo Day, Professor Janet Murray told me that there are two schools of thought about the onset of digital media. One is that the computer is an entirely new medium that changes everything; the other is that it is a medium that remediates all previous media. It’s difficult to resist the knee-jerk theory that it is both an entirely new medium and remediates all previous media thereby changing everything, but none of it is quite that simple. As Ted Nelson would say, “everything is deeply intertwingled” (1987, passim).

Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice (MIT Press, 2012), Murray’s first book since 1997’s essential Hamlet on the Holodeck (MIT Press), is a wellspring of knowledge for designers and practitioners alike. Unifying digital media under a topology of “representational affordances” (i.e., computational procedures, user participation, navigable space, and encyclopedic capacity), Murray provides applicable principles for digital design of all kinds — from databases (encyclopedic capacity) to games (the other three) and all points in between. There’s also an extensive glossary of terms in the back (a nice bonus). Drawing on the lineage of Vennevar Bush, Joseph Weizenbaum, Ted Nelson, Seymour Papert, and Donald Norman, as well as Murray’s own decades of teaching, research, and design, Inventing the Medium is as comprehensive a book as one is likely to find on digital design and use. I know I’ll be referring to it for years to come.

“Mindfulness” illustration by Anthony Weeks.

Designers can’t go far without grappling with the way a new medium not only changes but also reinforces our uses and understandings of the current ones. For example, the onset of digital media extended the reach of literacy by reinforcing the use of writing and print media. No one medium or technology stands alone. They must be considered in concert. Moreover, to be literate in the all-at-once world of digital media is to understand its systemic nature, the inherent interrelationship and interconnectedness of all technology and media. As Ong put it, “Today, it appears, we live in a culture or in cultures very much drawn to openness and in particular to open-system models for conceptual representations. This openness can be connected with our new kind of orality, the secondary orality of our electronic age…” (1977, p. 305). “Secondary orality” reminds one of the original names of certain technologies (e.g., “horseless carriage,” “cordless phone,” “wireless” technology, etc.), as if the real name for the thing is yet to come along.

These changes deserve an updated and much more nuanced consideration given how far they’ve proliferated since Ong’s time. Net Smart: How to Thrive Online (MIT Press, 2012) collects Howard Rheingold‘s thoughts about using, learning, and teaching via networks from the decades since Ong and McLuhan theorized technology’s epochal shift. Rheingold’s account is as personal as it is pragmatic. He was at Xerox PARC when Bob Taylor, Douglas Englebart, and Alan Kay were inventing the medium (see his 1985 book, Tools for Thought), and he was an integral part of the community of visionaries who helped create the networked world in which we live (he coined the term “virtual community” in 1987). In Net Smart, his decades of firsthand experience are distilled into five, easy-to-grasp literacies: attention, participation, collaboration, crap detection (critical consumption), and network smarts — all playfully illustrated by Anthony Weeks (see above). Since 1985, Rheingold has been calling our networked, digital technologies “mind amplifiers,” and it is through that lens that he shows us how to learn, live, and thrive together.

These two books are not only thoughtful, they are mindful. The deep passion of the authors for their subjects is evident in the words on every page. A bit ahead of their time, Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan gave us a vocabulary to talk about our new media. With these two books, Janet Murray and Howard Rheingold have given us more than words: They’ve given us useful practices.

References:

McLuhan, Marshall. (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Murray, Janet. (2012). Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Nelson, Ted. (1987). Computer Lib/Dream Machines. Redmond, WA: Tempus Books.

Ong, Walter J. (1971). Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Ong, Walter J. (1977). Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Ong, Walter J. (1982). Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New York: Routledge.

Rheingold, Howard. (1985). Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Rheingold, Howard. (2012). Net Smart: How to Thrive Online. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

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The Human Factor: Animals, Machines, and Us

Before we all take the nonhuman turn, perhaps we should revisit what being human means in the first place. The debate has a rich pedigree. Situating the humans among the animals, as well as among our machines, is as fraught a philosophical position as one is likely to find. What separates us? Language? Self-awareness? Consciousness? Suffering? The machines themselves? No one, from Descartes and Kant to Heidegger and Levinas, seems to have a defensible answer. Two recent books explore the animal question in very different but interesting ways.

The human is a pointless and treacherous category.
— Kodwo Eshun

Burroughs to Ginsberg: “Human, Allen, is an adjective, and its use as a noun is in itself regrettable.” — Tweeted by Steven Shaviro, November 28, 2009.

Building an elaborate three-way bridge connecting animals and humans and machines (a.k.a. “the cybernetic triangle”), Human Error: Species-Being and Media Machines by Dominic Pettman (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) is a wildly engaging exploration of what it means to be human. From the philosophies of Agamben, Deleuze and Guattari, Haraway, and Heidegger to documentaries like Grizzly Man (2006) and Zoo (2007) and from songs like Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer to God” to Aerogramme’s “A Simple Process of Elimination,” Pettman swings wide in search of the lines we draw as well as the ones we cross.

Animals came from miles around
So tired of walking so close to the ground
They needed a change, that’s what they said
“Life is better walking on two legs!”
But they were in for a big surprise
‘Cause they didn’t know the law!
— Oingo Boingo, “No Spill Blood”

Pettman writes, “In Descartes’s time, the beating of an animal was, in most cases, the beating of a machine, akin to thrashing an unreliable car that would complain by beeping its horn. Compassion for animals was seen as a misguided and extravagant anthropomorphism” (p. 114). He cites Jean Baudrillard arguing that animal cruelty, specifically the late medieval ritual practice of hanging a horse, makes us more human by equalizing the two. He continues, “Today, we have widened the circle of empathy, depending on our cultural and individual sensibilities, although not yet to the extent that we would throw our arms around a photocopier were we to witness it being assaulted by an overworked librarian” (p. 114). The argument continues, citing a sort of Turing test of suffering, as if each species must prove to us (humans) that it is in pain.

The rules are written in the stone
Break the rules and you get no bones
All you get is ridicule, laughter
And a trip to the house of pain!
— Oingo Boingo, “No Spill Blood”

Donkeys are stoic in their suffering, forever keeping their cards close to their chests. They would pass the Turing test of animal suffering in only the most extreme cases. In The Wisdom of Donkeys: Finding Tranquility in a Chaotic World (Walker & Co., 2008), Andy Merriman explores his humanity through the calm eyes of the donkey. A former academic, Merriman escaped that bookish bedlam to the south of France to roam the hills with a donkey named Gribouille. He visits the outdoor clinic of the Society for the Protection and Welfare of Donkeys and Mules in Egypt and finds it more inspiring than the Pyramids. The economy there is driven by donkeys, not camels as is widely assumed. Donkeys plow the fields, carry the equipment and supplies, and since they are being bred less and less, the few extant donkeys are more precious to the economy and subsequently evermore overworked. Head veterinarian Dr. Mohsen Hassan posits that most donkey mistreatment comes from ignorance not cruelty, and that most of the donkeys collective problems seen in the clinic could be avoided “with sensible handling practice and informed care” (p. 187). In short, respect for the donkey. The workers there don’t seem to think that donkeys feel pain. They treat them as machines.

Merriman’s book follows his travels elsewhere through the southern regions of France and through many fictional tales of humans and donkeys and donkey treatment. They do not respond well to the prodding and beating they get. Donkeys need patience and gentle encouragement. Often their circumstances do not afford them this. Saying the same about us, Merriman writes, “Global donkey inequities mimic the human world’s inequities” (p. 191). Or, as Pettman puts it, “To err is human; to forgive, equine” (p. 110).

————–

Special thanks to Ken Wark for recommending Merriman’s donkey book.

References:

Elfman, Danny. (1983). “No Spill Blood”  [Recorded by Oingo Boingo]. On Good For Your Soul [LP]. Santa Monica, CA: A&M Records.

Eshun, Kodwo. (1998). More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction. London: Quartet Books.

Merriman, Andy. (2008). The Wisdom of Donkeys: Finding Tranquility in a Chaotic World. New York: Walker & Co.

Pettman, Dominic. (2011). Human Error: Species-Being and Media Machines. Minneapolis, MN: The University of Minnesota Press.

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Digging in the Gates: The Digital Socratic Shift

If bricolage is the major creative form of the twenty-fist century, then the archive is its standing reserves. Socrates famously worried about the stability of our memories as we moved from an oral to a written culture, and his concerns have been echoed in the move to digital archives. The pedigree of this technological Socratic shift is deep. When Thomas Edison first recorded the human voice onto a tin foil roll on December 6, 1877, he externalized and disembodied a piece of humanity. Jonathan Sterne writes that “media are forever setting free little parts of the human body, mind, and soul” (p. 289). By the time Edison patented the phonograph in 1878, the public was familiar and comfortable with the idea of preserved foods. As a cultural practice, “canned music” in John Philip Sousa’s phrase, was ripe for mass consumption. Envisioning a world without such “canned” media is difficult to do now. We preserve everything. The problem is not so much the authenticity of our entertainment and information, but how to parse the sheer expanse of it. Andreas Huyssen (2003) mused, “Could it be that the surfeit of memory in this media-saturated culture creates such an overload that the memory system itself is in constant danger of imploding, thus triggering fear of forgetting?” (p. 17).

Condense fact from the vapor of nuance.
— Juanita Marquez in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash

Alongside library science and other information archiving skills, forensics is a contemporary growth field. If we are to use our media as a sort of technological “Funes the Memorious,” what do we do when technological change outpaces its retrieval compatibility? You likely have (or have had) mass storage containers (e.g., cassettes, VHS tapes, floppy discs, etc.) that lack a device capable of reading them, ghosts of information past trapped in a black box forever. We’re all archivists whether we notice or admit it, but the gates to our archives have expiration dates. A recent trip to UT’s Harry Ransom Center revealed stacks of media unreadable by any technology on-site. William Gibson‘s electronic work Agrippa: Book of the Dead plays on this very trope of archival decay. The piece, set for a one-time reading, consists of a 300-line poem on a 3.5″ disc encased in a box made to look like a hard drive, is set to scroll once through and erase itself forever, a textual spectre set free from the archive after its single haunting episode. The pages of the included book version were treated with photosensitive chemicals which fade with exposure to light.

According to Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’s Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (The MIT Press, 2008; now available in paperback), There was one public performance of Agrippa. On December 9, 1992, at the Americas Society in uptown New York City, Penn Jillette read the poem aloud, which was projected on a big screen, exacerbating its scroll into oblivion. The event is fraught with rumor and lie, as the full text of the intentionally ephemeral Agrippa was posted online the next morning. The conditions of its hacking are detailed in full in Kirschenbaum’s book, and a collection of documents surrounding the work is available online. Another interesting artifact sprung from this event: Re:Agrippa, a choppy remix of videotaped footage from the single Agrippa public event, test patterns, and haunting voiceovers kludged together by the NYU students who “hacked” Agrippa‘s text for online consumption [runtime: 5:44]:

J9s3HIsWZyc

Our archive fever needs feeding. With its flickering signifiers and configurable nature, we consider the things on the screen temporary. But, as Kirschenbaum notes, in lieu of hard drives and other external devices (the main concern of his book), the visual display of the computer was originally considered a storage device. Now, crashed drives and outmoded media hide their secrets from everyone except those closest to the machine. Forensic scientists, not unlike those seen on that other screen, are more important than ever to our unstable memories. They can condense fact from the vapor of hidden nuance and open the gates to the archival entrails of dead media.

—————

It should be noted that my conception of the archive and the haunting thereof owes a large debt to the teachings of Josh Gunn. Oh, there’s some unacknowledged Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Dick Hebdige, Bruce Sterling, and Kate Hayles in there as well.

References:

Borges, Jorge Luis. (1964). Funes the Memorious. In Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. New York: New Directions.

Huyssen, Andreas. (2003). Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. (2008). Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Stephenson, Neal. (1993). Snow Crash. New York: Spectra.

Sterne, J. (2003). The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Mark Dery: Nothing’s Shocking

I read a review of a Weird Al Yankovich record several years ago (i.e., eons past Al’s 1980s prime) that pointed out that his schtick had become commonplace. When irony and parody become the norm, the edges move toward the middle. When culture jamming becomes culture, there’s nothing left to jam. When the news is just another reality show… After many binges on the fringes, learning the edge, culture jamming, and cyberpunking during the 1990s, chronicled in his books Culture Jamming (Open Media, 1993), Flame Wars (Duke University Press, 1994), Escape Velocity (Grove Press, 1996), and The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium (Grove Press, 1999), Mark Dery is back with a collection of essays from the meantime: I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams (University of Minnesota Press, 2012). It’s been twelve years since our last virtual sit-down, so I thought it was time to check in again.

@futuryst “Singing from the same hymn sheet” is a crap metaphor. “Examining the same entrails” is way better (Tweeted March 9, 2012).

I cracked open Dery’s first book in over a decade, and landed on the story about blogging, which, with an adept analysis of all-over-the-map, curiosity-collecting blogs like bOING bOING, explains further the plight of cultural criticism as Dery does it. Realizing I was getting ahead of myself, I backed up to Bruce Sterling‘s foreword, which coincidentally references the one piece I’d read. “This is prescience in conditions of historical inevitability,” Sterling writes about Dery’s blog piece (“World Wide Wonder Closet: On Blogging”). “I learn useful things like this by paying close attention to Mark Dery–not just to his writings, mind you, but to his career” (p. xii). Dery describes the situation himself, writing in 2003,

Years of tabloid media, reality TV, attacking heads, and, more recently, nightly news nightmares of doomed workers leaping from the World Trade Center, hand in hand, or journalists beheaded in your living room by jihadi or the slapstick torture at Abu Ghraib–home movies from hell that employed the visual grammar of porn–have cauterized our cultural nerve endings. Little wonder, then, that ever greater subcultural voltages are needed to shock us (p. 161).

The same laser-focused interrogation and machete-sharp wit that made Dery’s earlier books critical touchstones are here in rapid-fire form. Where his earlier work honed in on one subject or one genre of subjects, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts is all over the place, a sniper-perch on the cultural sprawl where no one and nothing is safe. There are too many stand-out, entrails-examining moments to name, but his outing of HAL 9000 (“Straight, Gay, or Binary: HAL Comes out of the Cybernetic Closet”) is likely to become one of the most talked-about essays. No matter the topic, no one puts together a sentence like Mark Dery.

Appropriately, I believe, Dery’s next project is a biography of gothic artist and writer Edward Gorey for Little, Brown, but I’ll let him tell you about that.

Roy Christopher: Not to be impertinent from the beginning, but where have you been?

Mark Dery: Impertinence will get you everywhere. In 1999, I published The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink, a portrait of fin-de-millennium America—paranoid, violent, economically stratified, ideologically polarized, demographically balkanized—as reflected in cultural phenomena that hyperbolized the zeitgeist: Timothy McVeigh, the Unabomber, the Heaven’s Gate cult, dug-in survivalists, fear-sick suburbanites circling the wagons in gated communities, jittery celebrities installing secret “safe rooms” in their mansions, Disney’s experiment in privatized governance and white-picket nostalgia (Celebration, Florida), apparitions of the evil clown in our media dream life, and the branding of everything, ourselves included. Like Escape Velocity before it, it was generally well-received, critically, although it suffered some critical brickbats, most notably from Pre-Cambrian feminist and professional bean-counter Elaine Showalter, who tallied up my references to women’s issues (whatever those are) and found the book wanting, and Michiko Kakutani at the Times, who had a fit of the vapors over my tendency to name-check Donna Haraway, which upsets the mental digestion of the paper’s readers.

But, contrary to popular belief, the rich pickings of the writing life fall somewhat short of a hedge-fund manager’s annual bonus, so I joined the professoriat, teaching courses in creative nonfiction (“The Popular Essay”) and media theory (“Reading the Media”) in the Department of Journalism at NYU. I toiled in the fields of corporate academe until 2009, when I returned to writing full-time. Teaching has its rewards, chief among them the privilege of rubbing brains with some of the brightest minds around and the unimaginably gratifying experience of hearing former students confess some small debt of gratitude for the writerly wisdom you’ve imparted. And it has its more dubious pleasures, notably: faculty meetings, committee meetings, the territorial threat displays of colleagues of very small brain, and the scenery-chewing hysterics of my department’s resident diva, an aspiring Sontag who dyed her hair an unconvincing magenta and who, in dead seriousness, once compared the department prohibition on holding her class in a communal study room to Nazi regulations in the Warsaw ghetto. Oh, and seeing yourself compared, on some RateYourProfessors-type site, to Snape. (Actually, that last was pure awesome, since Snape is my favorite character in the Potter movies—the only thing that makes them watchable, really. I’m always rooting for him.) In all seriousness, though, I couldn’t manage the trick of balancing the demands of classroom and writing desk. Some of my former colleagues were brilliant in the classroom and productive as writers; I respect them immensely. But teaching ate me up, leaving little time or energy for my writing. And, since my writing is at the heart of my sense of myself—it’s not just what I do, but who I am—there came a point when I had to choose between the financial security of an academic sinecure and the less tangible rewards of the writing life. Full disclosure demands that I say, too, that the politics of the institution conspired against me, but I’ll spare you the petty details of academic bloodletting. Anyway, I’m happy to be back where I belong, scribbling for a living.

RC: Since your books in the 1990s, the odd subjects you covered then have become the everyday. Where does that shift leave your current work? Are you headed further out into the cultural hinterlands?

MD: Well, it leaves The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium looking eerily prescient, I’m immodest enough to point out. I’ve been gratified by posts by apparently young readers, on GoodReads and Amazon, noting how contemporary that book feels. For example, the free-floating paranoia and anti-government conspiracy theories and anti-immigrant nativism of the ’90s militia movement is alive and well in the Tea Party and out on the survivalist fringe. As well, that late-’90s sense of American mass culture as a media-mad Tilt-a-Whirl spinning out of control, and of American society as a place where the center cannot hold and the worst are full of passionate intensity, is still with us, although it waxes and wanes, to be sure.

I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts collects essays from the past decade or so, and in a plot twist I never would have imagined, some of the more recent pieces mark a turn toward a more personal style, by which I do not mean what back-of-the-magazine American essayists typically mean, which is soppy confessionalism, but rather the use of myself as a prism for refracting the cultural dynamics and historical events around me, as, say, Montaigne did in Essais or Didion did in The White Album or Luc Sante does in Kill Your Darlings or Richard Rodriguez does in nearly all of his books. So I’m lighting out for the territories within as a way of making deeper sense of American dread and American dreams, to quote the book’s subtitle.

RC: Unlike other books of its kind, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts is a strangely cohesive examination of America’s viscera over the past fifteen years or so. How much of it was written with the collection in mind?

MD: None of it. Each essay was what McLuhan would call a probe—a nomadic rover, wound up and let loose on the terrain of a media event, a cultural trend, an idea whose time has come, a historical premonition of our moment, the collective unconscious of America, whatever. But as its subtitle—“drive-by essays”—suggests, it’s an armchair version of the philosophical travelog, a tradition that stretches from de Tocqueville to Henry Miller’s Air-Conditioned Nightmare to Baudrillard’s America to Bernard-Henri Lévy’s American Vertigo.

RC: Tell me about the next book project. It seems a perfect pairing of subject and sensibility.

MD: It’s a biography of the writer, illustrator, and inimitable eccentric Edward Gorey. More than that I can’t say, since it’s still in the research stage. I haven’t put pen to paper, but must start soon, since I’ve got to deliver the manuscript sometime next year. Just saying that (“sometime next year”) inspires a thrill of terror so debilitating I may have to go lie down for a while, with a cold compress on my forehead.

RC: What else is coming up?

MD: I’ve just contributed a short essay to Hidden Treasure (Blast Books), an incomparably beautiful compendium “showcasing astonishing and rare” oddities and arcana from the National Library of Medicine: chromolithographs from the Atlas of Skin Diseases, magic lantern slides, Stereoscopic Pictures for Cross-Eyed Children (1942), Health and Hygiene Puzzle Blocks from the Number 10 Shanghai Toy Factory in 1960s “Red China,” an 1839 lithograph illustrating the postmortem examination of a man (?) with sexually ambiguous genitalia, a 1924 German tract extolling the virtues of nudism. It’s a simply breathtaking, a cabinet of wonders between two covers: 450 unforgettable images, accompanied by brief essays, ranging over the intimately alien landscapes of bodies rendered monstrous by injury, disease, or congenital deformity. Also, I’ve got a personal essay-cum-cultural critique of the Rorschach test in the works for The Believer, something for The Awl on Young Americans-era David Bowie as white negro and postmodern minstrel, and an essay on the future of the human body for a museum exhibition catalog.

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The Deleuzian Delusion

Michel Foucault once said that the twentieth century might eventually be considered Deleuzian, and he still may end up being right.  Gilles Deleuze, and his frequent cowriter, Félix Guattari, wrote some unignorable books in the late decades of last century, the two volumes Anti-Oedipus (University of Minnesota Press, 1983) and A Thousand Plateaus (University of Minnesota Press, 1987) being the two most prominent in either’s canon. Each has an extensive body of work in his own right, but Deleuze casts a large shadow over his friend and colleague. Such a shadow in fact, that it prompted Ian Bogost to Tweet the following on March 3rd, 2012:

@ibogost: Earnest, snark-free question: how did Deleuze get so popular? What is it about Deleuze that is so appealing to so many?

Assemblages, rhizomes, bodies-without-organs, repetition, difference… I can’t claim to have an answer to Bogost’s question, as I can’t claim to understand much of the Deleuze that I’ve read (and I’ve read a lot of it, and a lot of it more than twice). I do know that a lot of it is difficult simply by dint of the contrarian angle on subjectivity: These books challenge the fundamental way(s) most of us tend to feel that being in the world works. Holland (1999) opens his book with the obvious: “The Anti-Oedipus is not easy to read” (p. 1). About writing it with his coauthor, Deleuze said, “Between Félix and his diagrams and me with my verbal concepts, we wanted to work together, but we didn’t know how” (2006, p. 238). And about A Thousand Plateaus, he mused, “Now we didn’t think for a minute of writing a madman’s book, but we did write a book in which you no longer know, or need to know, who is speaking…” (quoted in Nadaud, 2006, p. 19). On page 22 of the latter, they even write it out, in black and white: “We are writing this book as a rhizome. It is compose of plateaus. We have given it a circular form, but only for laughs.” How is one to make sense of bastard philosophy such as this?

I once asked my friend and mentor Steven Shaviro what path to take as I embarked upon the plateaus alone for the first time. He suggested using Claire Parnet’s Dialogues (Columbia University Press, 1987) as a sort of crib notes to the two major volumes mentioned above. Dialogues was compiled between the writing of Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. Deleuze talked about the book’s in-betweenness (i.e., its being between both the two books and the three authors), writing that what mattered was “the collection of bifurcating, divergent, and muddled lines which constituted this book as a multiplicity and which passed between the points, carrying them along without going from one to the other” (Deleuze & Parnet, 1987, p. ix). And so it goes. My Deleuzian delusion is that I’ll ever get a handle on this stuff.

Somewhat thankfully, there is now Gilles Deleuze: From A to Z (Semiotext(e), 2012), a three-DVD set of those liminal lines between Deleuze and Parnet. Covering topics alphabetically, from A for “Animal” to Z for “Zigzag,” it’s a rare and interesting look at the man and his letters. Unlike the film Derrida (Jane Doe Films, 2002) on Jacques Derrida, of course, this is not really a documentary. Parnet, a former student of Deleuze’s, knew him well, and director Pierre-André Boutang likens Deleuze and Parnet to a Jazz duo, playing off of each other in an improvisation of concepts and cons, using the alphabet as a grounding framework. “Deleuze had taken into account the fact that each reel lasted ten minutes,” Boutang (2004) wrote, “which produced a rhythm. And the charm of 16mm film is that the sound reel lasts longer than the image. With some people, you cut once the image stops. You don’t feel like doing that with Deleuze” (p. 7). During the discussion about culture (C is for Culture), Deleuze says, “Talking is dirty. Writing is clean.” If you snuggle in to watch this DVD, get ready for four hours of dirty, dirty talking.

Many others have tried to make sense of Deleuze in book form, with various tropes and varying degrees of success. The most recent being Gregory Flaxman. Flaxman is not new to Deleuze: His previous book was The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema (University of Minnesota Press, 2000). His latest, Gilles Deleuze and the Fabulation of Philosophy: Powers of the False, Volume 1 (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), uses the idea of friendship as an initial condition from which to reexamine Deleuze’s philosophy. Covering everything from Deleuze’s apprenticeship with Friedrich Nietzsche to his vow to overthrow Plato, Flaxman reintroduces aesthetics to Deleuzian studies, showing how Deleuze situated fiction in the center of a minor philosophy. He writes, “Deleuze declares no abiding loyalties: not only does he mingle with countless philosophers, but he flirts with just as many writers, filmmakers, and artists” (p. 181). This nomadic “promiscuity” is one more reason that the well of Deleuze’s ideas isn’t likely to run dry any time soon, and Flaxman’s is a deep and welcome reconsideration. Moreover, his focus on friendship is intriguing. Stivale (1998) wrote, “This rapport of friendship lies, I believe, at the very core of these authors’ collaborative engagement…” (p. ix). Nietzsche freed Deleuze from the arid areas of academe, and Deleuze focused Guattari without truncating his thoughts too much (which, if you’ve read any Guattari without Deleuze, you know they needed a trim here and there; though Deleuze might not agree with my assessment: He speaks highly and fondly of Guattari in A to Z [L for Loyalty]).

Speaking of friendship, if you’d like a more personal — and historical — look at Deleuze and his main co-conspirator, there’s François Dosse’s Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives (Columbia University Press, 2010), which, appropriately enough, is 651 pages long. The duo met shortly after the revolts of May, 1968 (to which Anti-Oedipus is largely a reaction: “Initially it was less a question of pooling knowledge than the accumulation of our uncertainties,” Guattari said in Chaosophy [2009, p. 69]). Guattari had just been passed over as Lacan’s successor, which sent him into a deep depression tempered only by throes of mania. With a milder manner and more comfort within his confines, Deleuze was the calm of their storm, a storm that still surges through classes and discussions in philosophy, postmodernism, post-structuralism, cultural studies, film studies, net criticism, and so on. So, what was their beef with Marx, Freud, Plato, and every other thinker (save Nietzsche and Foucault, of course) that preceded them? It’s all here. Dosse’s book is the definitive story of these two major collaborators, thinkers, writers, jokesters, and, perhaps above all, friends.

Desire is under it all, according to the iconoclastic French duo. The capitalism machine creates layers and layers of desires and subsequently splits selves into schizophrenia (hence the subtitle of both volumes of their two-volume work: Capitalism and Schizophrenia). William Carlos Williams (1923) once wrote, “The pure products of America go crazy.” That’s not exactly what they meant, but maybe that’s why Deleuze, along with Guattari, have such a hold on the academy’s mass mind: Our spirits are all spiraling apart in so many separate ways, just as they said they would all those years ago. But maybe, as they were, we can still be friends.

References:

Boutang, Pierre-André. (2004, February). Everything About Gilles Deleuze and Nothing About Gilles Deleuze. RevueVertigo, no. 25.

Boutang, Pierre-André (Director). (2012). Gilles Deleuze: A to Z, with Claire Parnet [DVD]. United States: Semiotext(e).

Deleuze, Gilles. (2006). Letter to Uno: How We Worked Together. In Two Regimes of Madness. New York: Semiotext(e).

Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix. (1983). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, Gilles & Parnet, Claire. (1987). Dialogues. New York: Columbia University Press.

Foucault, Michel. (1995). [front cover copy]. In Gilles Deleuze Negotiations. New York: Columbia University Press.

Guattari, Félix. (2009). Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews 1972-1977. New York: Semiotext(e).

Holland, Eugene W. (1999). Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis. New York: Routledge.

Massumi, Brian. (1992). A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Nadaud, Stéphane. (2006). Love Story between an Orchid and a Wasp. In Guattari, Félix, The Ani-Oedipus Papers. New York: Semiotext(e), p. 11-22.

Stivale, Charles J. (1998). The Two-Fold Thought of Deleuze and Guattari: Intersections and Animations. New York: Guilford.

Williams, William Carlos. (1923). Spring and All.

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I am indebted to Steven Shaviro, Katie Arens, and Ken Wark for what little I understand about the subject(s) at hand.

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Temporary Eponymous Zone: SXSW 2012

SXSW can always be considered an extreme example of the platitude “when it rains, it pours,” but this year, it was a bit too literal. SXSW Interactive weekend was a rainy, sloppy affair like I haven’t seen in my few years in Austin. Someone — nay many ones — downtown likely made a killing on rain boots and umbrellas because they were everywhere, and I know nobody packed those for the trip. Once Interactive was over and the guard changed for Music, the rain had subsided and the sun shone again. The outdoor shows that would have been a drenched disaster went on without weather-induced incident.

I started off my own, soggy SXSW Interactive with a quiet breakfast with Howard Rheingold. He was here to talk about his new book, Net Smart (MIT Press, 2012), and it was his first time at SXSW since he was the keynote speaker for Interactive ten years ago. His book Smart Mobs (Basic Books, 2002) was just out then. Lots has changed around the conference since, but the ideas in that book were prescient (as proven by its echoes in Amber Case’s SXSWi keynote this year). Net Smart will definitely send out the same temporal ripples. Other than books, Howard and I talked about everything from the weather and breakfast to life and careers. It was so nice to sit down with one of my mentors for a face-to-face interaction after over ten years of virtual ones.

Next on the list of rain-limited events was a trip to Red 7 to see my friends Jake Flores, Ryan Cownie, Seth Cockfield, Brook Van Poppelen, Lucas Molandes, Nick Mullen, Blake Midgette, Kath Barbadoro, and others put on some free funny. Now, a show like this is a fairly typical night for me here in Austin, but this line-up is like three really good versions of those nights all put together. We had to go through a wormhole to find the back door to Red 7, and once inside we found our friends in the dark, damp, abandoned-warehouse feel of Red 7’s backside (there was some other event hogging up the inside space). Assorted badges followed us in, but most quickly left. The venue was perfect for the material in play though: dirty, dark, wet, hilarious. For those outside the community, the Austin stand-up comedy scene is one of its best kept secrets. It boasts not only open mics nearly every night of the week, but damn funny line-ups on a regular. Jake’s show was no exception. Against all the SXSW rules, we left early to catch Ume at Stubb’s.

Ume played on the big, outdoor stage at Stubb’s, which left us happily skanking in the mud. Eric Larson was out of town, but Mark Turk filled in nicely on bass, even after only two rehearsals. He and Rachel held down the rhythm and rumble while Lauren brought the flash. Fresh off of a Left Coast tour with Cursive, Lauren kept up her supernova energy (this was also only the second of no less than eleven shows Ume played during SXSW). The last couple of times I’ve seen them, they’ve ended with a new song that sounds like Lauren is singing for Kyuss. The track is thick, heavy and huge. According the Eric, the working title is “Black Stone.” I’m anxious to play it very loud on my headphones. We saw them again on Tuesday at Bat Bar with Eric happily reinstalled. Even with sound issues, they never disappoint.

Ume's Lauren Larson rocking Stubb's. (photo by Lily Brewer)

Monday found me getting my Music badge, which I’d tried to get the previous Friday, but was denied. Credentialed up, I met Alex Burns for lunch. Alex and I have worked in tandem on at least two versions of 21C Magazine as well as several years together on the Disinformation website. Alex is another great mind with whom I’ve been in touch and exchanged ideas for over a decade and finally met IRL at SXSW. People say it every year, but it cannot be overstated: The sidebar conversations that an event like SXSW affords are very often its true value.

Dave Allen, Hank Shocklee, and I hamming it up in the green room. (photo by David Ewald)

While meeting in the green room preparing for our panel “What Happened to the Big Idea in Music Technology?,” Hank Shocklee stopped by to say hello. As one of the sonic architects behind the sound of Public Enemy, Hank has had a profound influence on the way music sounds in the twenty-first century, as well as my appreciation thereof. It felt more than appropriate to run into him before we took the stage. Dave Allen (North), David Ewald (Uncorked Studios), Jesse von Doom (CASH Music), and I had done a version of this talk in San Francisco last September at SF MusicTech Summit. At SXSW Music, we were joined by Anthony Batt (BUZZnet, Katalyst, etc.) and novelist and music critic Rick Moody (author of The Ice Storm, On Celestial Music, and many others). This gathering of minds represented every aspect of the issues we were addressing: From artists to fans and from technologists to journalists, we used everyone’s expertise and experience to express our opinions about the direction music is headed as an industry, a cultural practice, and as a commercial enterprise. Ours is a discussion that will continue as long as people love making and hearing music and other people try to capitalize on that love.

Speaking of music technology, the Vinylrecorder T-560 was on display at the trade show. This device allows one to cut a vinyl record from recordings on a computer. It’s like burning a CD, except it offers the “warmth” of vinyl playback. As many times as events at festivals like this prompt me to question what year they think it is (e.g., Bruce Springsteen? Counting Crows? Billy Corgan? We’re only doomed to repeat history if our elders keep force-feeding it to us.), I have to admit that the idea of pressing my own records looked like the kind of useless fun I often enjoy most. Home recording fun notwithstanding, the back-to-the-future approach of the Vinylrecorder is a great metaphor for many of the attitudes represented in music technology: “How do we use what we have now to get back to the way things were?” they seem to be asking.

This is part of the reason we gathered to talk about these issues. There’s no going back. Technology has lowered the barriers to entry, but you still have to be good at what you do. The internet has made fame much easier and fortune nearly impossible. You have to learn the technology. It’s easier now than ever to get heard, yet harder to stand out. Events like SXSW emphasize just how noisy and cluttered the current music milieu is. How do you cut through it all? If you want engagement, be engaging. Show us something. Doug Stanhope has a joke about how you never see ads for drugs. “If you have a good product,” he says, “people will find it. You don’t need to advertise.” No one owes you a living just because you make music (or Doug as a comedian, or me as a writer, etc.), but if you do something people want, they will find you. Rain or shine.

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Many, many thanks to Dave Allen, David Ewald, Anthony Batt, Jesse von Doom, and Rick Moody for the great discussions both on and off the stage; to Hank Shocklee for the chat; to Rebecca Gates for coming by; to Howard Rheingold and Alex Burns for sharing meals and beers; to Andy Flynn for hooking it all up; to Ume for rocking everything as usual; to Tarryn Lambert and friends for the lively debate; to Brooke Pankey for braving the city streets on a bicycle with us; to Luke and Abby Brewer for walking nine miles even though we couldn’t get their young selves into a show; and special, special thanks to Lily for enduring the whole week with me.

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Fresh Prints: Digitization and Its Discontents

When John Naisbitt was researching his best-selling book Megatrends (1982), he had a file system of shoe boxes. The shoe boxes were labeled according to major trends he had spotted in local newspapers from across the country and filled with the actual clips from those papers. Not only is this method of research rendered obsolete by the all-encompassing web, in light of the web’s ubiquity (especially to the so-called “digital natives” who’ve grown up with the web), it sounds downright silly.

A fraction of Kevin Kelly's library.

Kevin Kelly has a lot of books, and like me, he works with them, adds to them, uses them. But he’s ready to leap into a future without them in their current form. Calling us “People of the Screen” (not his most original idea), he writes on his website,

I work with books. I wrestle with them, play with them, mark them, write in them, dog-ear them, talk to them. I use them. But my books on paper, as gorgeous as they look, are usually bimbos. I can’t search them, clip them, cut and paste their best parts, share their highlights, or my marginalia, link them to my other books, or continue our conversation for very long. That’s why I am moving to digital books as fast as I can.

I have to admit to finding this somewhat troubling. Not so much the move to digital books, which I’ve been toying with myself, but the enthusiasm with which Kelly touts the move. I maintain that the move to digital makes sense for other media–music and movies, where the media themselves require no more than speakers and a screen, respectively–but that books are an example of good design. Compact discs and DVDs are not an examples of good design. A cassette tape or a video tape is not an example of good design. For music, the iPod is an example of good design, one that is far better than any previous music device. There’s no carrying anything else along (e.g., CDs or cassettes). There’s no flipping of the tape, or rewinding or fast-forwarding to find that perfect track. The music just flows, like words on a page.

We’ve discussed these transitions at length in terms of organizing principles, but what we’re really talking about here, especially in the case of the printed word, is delivery systems. The book, as cumbersome and intractable as Kelly’s attitude sees it, is an example of good design. Books are built to last, their batteries don’t run down, most of them are extremely portable in small numbers, and they exist just fine without screens. This last point is one I’ve been thinking on a lot lately. As much as I do not lament the past inconveniences of flipping over of a record or rewinding a cassette tape, I am more and more aware of how the computer has devoured all of our media activities, and part of my anxiety against the leap to bits is the fervor with which we’re putting everything on a screen. I’ve been looking for things that don’t require screens: riding bicycles, skateboarding, walking, face-to-face conversations, and so on. Reading books is still among these activities, but the screen’s threat to that activity troubles me. This cartoon from Reddit user Gordondel illustrates the point:

And this one (source unknown), speaks to the very speed of our increasingly digitized culture, in contrast to the analog methodology of John Naisbitt above:

Again, I do not lament the change in music, especially where discovery is concerned. It’s the best it has ever been for a music fan like myself, and for years I’ve wanted the ability to search my bookshelves with the same ease that I search for music, both new and on my hard drives. I have also discussed this shift on this site ad nauseam, as well as invited my music friends to discuss it here. When it comes to what I do — that is, synthesizing the ideas of others into (hopefully) new insights, like a DJ mixing records (I like to think, in my grander moments) — there is no question that digitizing makes sense. Though, as Alex Burns noted in a recent email to me, citing ebooks has yet to be formalized (i.e., there are no page numbers), tools like DevonThink and Steven Johnson‘s Findings work wonders for locating quotations, citations, and connecting tasty morsels among digitized texts. Limited by the selection of books that exist in the digital future Kelly is cheerleading, our libraries just aren’t there yet. The printed word still carries its own inherent DRM by dint of resisting digitization in a way that other media do not. Where we easily rip(ped) our CDs and DVDs to hard drives and co-located clouds, no one is rushing through their bookshelves with the same fervor. This changes the power structure of the format shift.

To that point, earlier today, Jay Babcock posted a link to an interview with journalist and Free Ride (Doubleday, 2011) author Robert Levine by Ben Watt, DJ, label head, and musician/songwriter with Everything but the Girl. In light of the SOPA/PIPA crisis, their discussion is germane and deserves a wide readership. Digital vs analog discussions inevitably turn to the internet, and furthering the distiction between music and text above, Levine states,

I have a contract with Random House: They gave me an advance that represents a risk to them, since many books don’t sell very well, and they take most of the revenue on each sale to compensate them for that risk. If you pirate my book, I don’t lose all that much money directly, but it definitely affects my ability to get another deal and ultimately — because working on something for two years costs money — write another book. Random House is my partner. Like all partners, authors and publishers have differences of opinion — the former want higher royalties and the latter don’t. But commercial-scale piracy hurts both. As to whether authors and musicians should have publishers or labels, that’s a separate issue.

It’s always more complex than we think. Digitization often undermines our ideas of intellectual property (It should be noted that large-file sharing site MegaUpload was shutdown while I wrote this piece). Levine continues, “the fact that barriers to entry have come down is what’s great about the Internet, and the fact that piracy is rampant is what’s wrong with the Internet, and I think we need to separate them.” The question then becomes: How do we move forward in one way without moving backward in another?

That aside, after debating the all-or-nothing, digital divide of books, I purchased my latest e-reader because I wanted the option of ebooks. Let’s face it, a lot of books are cheaper in digital form. I had to debate the divide remembering that some of my favorite movies are yet to be available on DVD, but once we all decide that we’d rather have ebooks than book-books (what I call “The Tyranny of Adoption”), the latter will go the way of the CD, DVD, and LP.

Recently I was contemplating my next ‘zine project, an archaic practice the physicality of which I still find rewarding in both process and product (much like shopping in brick-and-mortar record and book stores), and I was thinking of making it available for e-readers as well. One of the first things that occurred to me was the lack of a two-page spread in that format. In ‘zines, magazines, and books, the fold between signatures, between pages, provides a landscape view of two pages at once. This expanse of visual real estate is not extant on an e-ink or tablet screen. Much like the one-sidedness of the MP3, the ebook is all fronts.

Let me stop here and attempt to gather the threads unraveled above:

  • Digitization is not inherently a bad thing.
  • Some media thrive in strictly digital format. Others need more nuanced modes of delivery.
  • (That is, some things do not need to be on screens.)
  • Wanting searchable book content does not mean not wanting books.
  • We decide what works for us.
  • No matter what, we still need to reconcile intellectual property with digitization (IP with IP).

New devices and media formats, whether we’re designing them or adopting them, curate our culture. We have to think cumulatively about these changes and decide what we want. Book culture has served us well, and we might be ready to let go of it in its current form (reactions to yesterday’s Wikipedia blackout in protest of SOPA certainly do not support literary culture as we know it). Let’s just be mindful of the culture we’re creating.

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One for Fun: While I was writing this piece, Jason Kottke posted the video below of John Scalzi’s thirteen-year-old daughter Athena seeing an LP record for the first time [runtime: 1:41]. One cannot help imagining the same fate for books:

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Acknowledgements: To be fair to Kevin Kelly, his original post was about digital publishing, and I agree with his points and enthusiasm for that. Given my ebook anxiety, I couldn’t help but take his massive analog library as an opportunity to discuss the readers’ side of the issue. Thanks are due to Dr. Martha Lauzen, who told me the John Naisbitt story during my master’s degree days studying with her at San Diego State University. Gratitude is also due to Alex Burns, Jay Babcock, Steven Johnson, Jason Kottke, Dave Allen, David Ewald, and Lily Brewer for sharing links, lively discussion, and correspondence.

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Sharing Music: Kick Out the Spam…

I spent my undergraduate years working at record stores. Not surprisingly, the lulls behind the counter were largely spent talking about and sharing music. We’d all bring in our small CD cases, each stocked with a dozen or so discs for the shift. There was a lot of judging and clowning, but even more sharing and putting each other on to new sounds.

When I first got an iPod in 2003, I thought the practice would continue. Around the time that I procured my refurbished player, my friend Chang came out to San Diego on tour with dälek. Before a show one day, he was hanging out with some of his old college friends, one of whom had a new boyfriend. Chang snagged the dude’s iPod from her, and was judging her new beau on the merits of his mp3s. Maybe this happens more often than I’m aware, but this case is the rarity in my experience. Ironically, our listening experiences tend to be as insular as the devices that facilitate them.

When the Walkman first came out, it was intended for sharing. The first models released had two headphone jacks. I distinctly remember the first one I listened to having dual jacks. When the initial numbers came back, and they found that no one was sharing the devices, Sony retooled their tack. In the ads, Weheliye (2005) writes that “couples riding tandem bicycles and sharing one Walkman were replaced by images of isolated figures ensnared in their private world of sound” (p. 135). And so it has gone, each of us to his or her own.

There is research on the matter though. Termed “playlistism,” the studies aim to highlight the links between music and identity using the practice of sharing playlists. Assuming that we compile playlists to represent our identities, the sharing of them should show how we present ourselves through music. Citing Brown, Sellen, & Geelhoed (2001), Valcheva (2009) found that sharing via peer-to-peer networks “confounded the traditional way of possessing and sharing music, and thus instigating a shift, on one hand, towards a citizen/leech styled community where music sharing interaction tends to be anonymized.” We don’t use P2P spaces to share in a traditional sense. In contrast, “[P]laylistism is underpinned by the practice of capturing and contributing one’s ‘music personality’ in the form of playlists that are either published online or shared through portable devices.” As one article put it, “We are what we like.”

Now that we listen more from the cloud and less as a crowd, the streaming services have adopted a stance of “social integration.” Similar to what Four Square does with your location when you check in to a place (automatically sending it to your social networks), Spotify does with the song you’re listening to. While Spotify doesn’t require that you share your listening, it does require you to have a Facebook account. Some online publications have adopted the practice as well, letting all of your friends know what you’ve been reading online. The trend is troubling. Social integration is the opposite of sharing. Sharing implies intention, and if your playlists are being broadcast without your curation, well, then they’re just spam in the streams of those who follow or friend you. It’s analogous to signing your friends up to newsletters they might not want or adding their numbers to telemarketers call-lists. There is nothing social about it.

I believe sharing music is a powerful practice. I wouldn’t know about most of the bands I listen to or have ever listened to if it weren’t for the friends who shared them with me. Sharing via automation does not make things social. Real sharing requires attention and intention. No algorithm can replicate that.

References:

Brown, B., Sellen, A. & Geelhoed, E. (2001). Music sharing as a computer supported collaborative application. Proceedings of ECSCW 2001, Bonn, Germany: Kluwer academics publisher.

Gelitz, Christiane (2011, March/April) You Are What You Like. Scientific American Mind.

Valcheva, Mariya (2009). Playlistism: a means of identity expression and self‐representation. A report on a conducted scientific research within “The Mediatized Stories” project at the University of Oslo.

Weheliye, Alexander G. (2005). Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Bring the Noise: Systems, Sound, and Silence

In our most tranquil dreams, “peace” is almost always accompanied by “quiet.” Noise annoys. From the slightest rattle or infinitesimal buzz to window-wracking roars and earth-shaking rumbles, we block it, muffle it, or drown it out whenever possible. It is ubiquitous. Try as we might, cacophony is everywhere, and we’re the cause in most cases. Keizer (2010) points out that, besides sleeping (for some of us), reading is ironically the quietest thing we do. “Written words were meant to evoke heard speech,” he writes, “and were considered inadequate until they did so, like tea leaves before the addition of hot water” (p. 21). Reading silently was subversive.

We often speak of noise referring to the opposite of information. In the canonical model of communication conceived in 1949 by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, which I’ve been trying to break away from, noise is anything in the system that disrupts the signal or the message being sent.

If you’ve ever tried to talk on a cellphone in a parking garage, find a non-country station on the radio in a fly-over state, or follow up on a trending topic on Twitter, then you know what this kind of noise looks like. Thanks to Shannon and Weaver (and their followers; e.g., Freidrich Kittler, among many others), it’s remained a mainstay of communication theory since, privileging machines over humans (see Parikka, 2011). Well before it was a theoretical metonymy, noise was characterized as “destruction, distortion, dirt, pollution, an aggression against the code-structuring messages” (Attali, 1985, p. 27). More literally, Attali conceives noise as pain, power, error, murder, trauma, and youth (among other things) untempered by language. Noise is wild beyond words.

The two definitions of noise discussed above — one referring to unwanted sounds and the other to the opposite of information — are mixed and mangled in Hillel Schwartz’s Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond (Zone Books, 2011), a book that rebelliously claims to have been written to be read aloud. Yet, he writes, “No mere artefacts of an outmoded oral culture, such oratorical, jurisprudence, pedagogical, managerial, and liturgical acts reflect how people live today, at heart, environed by talk shows, books on tape, televised preaching, cell phones, public address systems, elevator music, and traveling albums on CD, MP3, and iPod” (p. 43). We live not immersed in noise, but saturated by it. As Aden Evens put it, “To hear is to hear difference,” and noise is indecipherable sameness. But, one person’s music is another’s noise — and vice versa (Voegelin, 2010), and age and nostalgia can eventually turn one into the other. In spite of its considerable heft (over 900 pages), Making Noise does not see noise as music’s opposite, nor does it set out for a history of sound, stating that “‘unwanted sound’ resonates across fields. subject everywhere and everywhen to debate, contest, reversal, repetition: to history” (p. 23).

Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating.
— John Cage

The digital file might be infinitely repeatable, but that doesn’t make it infinite. Chirps in the channel, the remainders of incomplete communiqué surround our signals like so much decimal dust, data exhaust. In Noise Channels: Glitch and Error in Digital Culture (University of Minnesota, 2011), Peter Krapp finds these anomalies the sites of inspiration and innovation. My friend Dave Allen is fond of saying, “There’s nothing new in digital.” To that end, Krapp traces the etymology of the error in machine languages from analog anomalies in general, and the extremes of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music (RCA, 1975) and Brian Eno‘s Discreet Music (EG, 1975) in particular, up through our current binary blips and bleeps, clicks and clacks — including Christian Marclay‘s multiple artistic forays and Cory Arcangel’s digital synesthesia. This book is about both forms of noise as well, paying due attention to the distortion of digital communication.

There is a place between voice and presence where information flows. — Rumi

Another one of my all-time favorite books on sound is David Toop’s Ocean of Sound (Serpent’s Tail, 2001). In his latest, Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener (Continuum Books, 2010), he reinstates the human as an inhabitant on the planet of sound. He does this by analyzing the act of listening more than studying sound itself. His history of listening is largely comprised of fictional accounts, of myths and make-believe. Sound is a spectre. Our hearing is a haunting. From sounds of nature to psyops (though Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” is “torture-lite” in any context), the medium is the mortal. File Sinister Resonance next to Dave Tompkins’ How to Wreck a Nice Beach (Melville House, 2010) and Steve Goodman’s Sonic Warfare (MIT Press, 2010).

And how can we expect anyone to listen if we are using the same old voice? — Refused, “New Noise”

Life is loud, death is silent. Raise hell to heaven. Make a joyous noise unto all of the above.

———-

My thinking on this topic has greatly benefited from discussions with, and lectures and writings by my friend and colleague Josh Gunn.

References and Further Resonance:

Attali, J. (1985). Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Evens, A. (2005). Sound Ideas: Music, Machines, and Experience. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Goodman, S. (2010). Sonic Warfare. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Hegarty, P. (2008). Noise/Music: A History. New York: Continuum Books.

Keizer, G. (2010). The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want: A Book About Noise. Philadelphia, PA: Public Affairs.

Krapp, P. (2011). Noise Channels: Glitch and Error in Digital Culture. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Parikka, J. (2011). Mapping Noise: Techniques and Tactics of Irregularities, Interception, and Disturbance. In E. Huhtamo & J. Parikka (Eds.), Media Archeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Refused. (1998). “New Noise” [performed by Refused]. On The Shape of Punk to Come: A Chimerical Bombination in 12 Bursts (Sound recording). Örebro, Sweden: Burning Heart Records.

Schwartz, H. (2011). Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond. New York: Zone Books.

Shannon, C.E., & Weaver, W. (1949). The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Sterne, J. (2003). The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Tompkins, D. (2010). How to Wreck a Nice Beach. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House.

Toop, D. (2010). Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener. New York: Continuum Books.

Voegelin, S. (2010). Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art. New York: Continuum Books.