Summer Reading List, 2013

You know the drill by now: Every year I ask my readerly and writerly friends for their reading recommendations for the summer. New contributors to the list this year include Janet Murray, danah boyd, Rick Moody, Steve Jones, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Richard Kadrey, Benjamin Bratton, Brad Vivian, and Lily Brewer. Usual suspects holding down the tradition include Lance Strate, Alex Burns, Howard Rheingold, David Silver, Mark Amerika, Jussi Parikka, Dominic Pettman, Gareth Branwyn, Peter Lunenfeld, Patrick David Barber, and myself. Read on.

Lily at Powell's

As always, the book links will lead you to the book’s page on the Powell’s site unless otherwise noted.

danah boyd

One of my favorite unexpected delights this year was Natasha Dow Schüll’s Addiction by Design (Princeton University Press). This book provides an eloquent analysis of Las Vegas’ gambling Addiction by Designmachines, revealing how data and design are used to manipulate people for profit and pleasure. Addiction by Design offers a necessary critique of the economics-driven rhetoric that implies that technology use is simply about individual choice.

This was also a year where many friends of mine produced amazing books covering topics that are deeply important to me. In particular, three recent books provide complementary perspective on the intersection of technology and society:

Biella Coleman’s Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking (Princeton University Press) is an ethnographic account of the free and open source movement that untangles the values and practices of hacking.

Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green’s Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (New York University Press) examines how information flows through social media.

Ethan Zuckerman’s Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection (W. W. Norton & Company) highlights the importance of understanding not just how information flows but also how people connect, laying the foundation for rethinking what global citizenship can and should be.

Rick Moody

I am all about the backlist these days, partly because I just finished teaching a course on narrative art before Cervantes at NYU, but also because that is sort of where my attention goes, so you might try a few of these if you haven’t already:

The Golden AssAupuleius, The Golden Ass, translated by Sarah Ruden (Yale University Press), which is the most profane, irreverent, and fascinatingly digressive text of antiquity, it seems to me, and which has lots to say about mystery cults, too. No reading experience of the last year has touched me as much.

The Sagas of Icelanders, various translators (Penguin Classics): These are the crime fictions of pre-Renaissance literature. Grim, violent, only fleetingly magical, and so hard to put down. The sagas about visiting North America are particularly fascinating. They did not have such a good time in Greenland.

The Ramayana, adapted by R. K. Narayan (Penguin Classics): Narayan’s edition is a mere portion of this 20,000 line Indian epic, and reflects a modern, twentieth century impulse, but it’s also a delight. Spare, funny, wry. The gods are virtuous, but inexplicable, and love is always a disaster, even, it seems, for the good guys.

Francois Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, translated by M. A. Screech (Penguin Classics): An elegy to scatology, early modern ideas of the body, and alcoholism, funnier than almost any other book ever written, and a sly indicator of what was to come from the Marquis de Sade. Almost no one, it seems, read Rabelais anymore. Not one writing student in my class had read it, few had even heard of it, but this text sure turned some heads.

Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote, translated by Edith Grossman (Harper Perennial): The greatest, mostly lovely, tender, and knowing book about the folly of humans, in an engaging, accessible, and literary translation. Everything comes from this book, despite what the Richardson scholars would tell you, except that everything in this book comes from some earlier origin (grailing literature, etc.). Whatever it is, this epic, it is imperative to the novel and how the novel would develop from here on out. And did you know that Shakespeare and Cervantes died on the same day? What a bad day that was art made out of language.

Lance Strate

It’s summertime, and the readin’ comes easy, and time itself is a topic of great interest for me. I was thrilled to learn of the recent publication of Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), by physicist Lee Smolin, where he argues for a position I’ve long held to be true, that time is more fundamental than space. On a similar theme, but coming from a very different angle, I also plan to read Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History (ACLS Humanities) by our greatest living world historian, William McNeil.

On the subject of media and culture, I have lined up Oral Tradition and the Internet: Pathways of the Mind (University of Illinois Press) by the late John Miles Foley; I saw him give a talk on this topic a few years ago at an annual meeting of the Media Ecology Association, and know that he makes an important contribution to our understanding of media environments. I am very interested in how the electronic media undermine print-based concepts of identity, which is why The Digital Evolution of an American Identity by C. Waite (Routledge) is a must read as far as I’m concerned. Present ShockReturning to the theme of time, Douglas Rushkoff‘s latestPresent Shock: When Everything Happens Now (Current) is high up on my list of priorities. And looking back to an earlier time, the origin of monotheism, related as it is to the introduction of the Semitic alphabet, is another subject of significance for me, which is why my list includes From Gods to God: How the Bible Debunked, Suppressed, or Changed Ancient Myths and Legends (Jewish Publication Society) by Avigdor Shinan and Yair Zakovitch.

Having been absolutely blown away by the new Hannah Arendt film by Margarethe von Trotta, which I highly recommend as an excellent audiovisual supplement to any summer reading list, I want to return to her final work, The Life of the Mind (Mariner Books), which was edited by her best friend, the novelist Mary McCarthy (who plays a significant role in the film). I’m also planning on digging into The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound by Roberto Mangabeira Unger (Harvard University Press).

Last year, at the Players Club in New York, I heard the late M. Z. Ribalow do a reading from his outstanding novel, Redheaded Blues (NeoPoiesis Press), and I have been looking forward to sitting down with the book for a long time now. Back on the subject of time, I know I’ll be enjoying Paul Levinson’s latest time travel novel, Unburning Alexandria, (JoSara MeDia). And when it comes to graphic novels, there is no question that I am going to devour Vol. 18 of The Walking Dead (Image Comics). I have grown increasingly more fascinated at the way the plot of the television series diverges from the story told in the comics.

One of the great summertime pleasures is picking up a book of good poetry, and This Poem by Adeena Karasick (Talonbooks) promises to be a literary, aesthetic, and intellectual delight, judging by all of the rave reviews that it’s received. And finally, I’m not making any promises, but I have this copy of John Milton’s The Complete English Poems (Knopf) waiting to be read…

Janet Murray

I am giving a talk in the UK in July so perhaps that is why two novels written by English women were at the top of my iPad queue: Kate Atkinson, Life After Life (Reagan Arthur Books) which I read as soon as our semester ended, which at Life After LifeGeorgia Tech means early May. It turned out to be quite a revelation for how far what I call the “Replay Story” has made it into mainstream serious fiction.Atkinson is as inventive as Borges or Eco or as Ursula Le Guin was in Lathe of Heaven, but this is not a self-conscious literary experiment or a sci-fi fable; she is working much closer to lived experience, with realized characters in recognizable historical circumstances, yet offering multiple possible lives for the same character. It was odd to read this multisequential story on my iPad with a hyperlinked Table of Contents that was incidental to the structure, not designed for it but suggestive of an evolving digital form. I wound up blogging about the lessons it offers us about narrative structure in interactive formats.

Next up is Jane Gardam, Last Friends (Europa Editions) — the third novel in a trilogy told from each of three members of an unlikely love triangle but I may have to go back and review the other two which came out years ago. I absent-mindedly ordered this in both paper and electronic form, but I am keeping both because I want it on the shelf next to the other two but I also want to read it anywhere.

I also hope to make a dent in that perennial pile of books I have been meaning to read including several at the intersection of cognition and culture — notably, Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body (University of Chicago Press) and Michael Tomasello, Constructing a Language (Harvard University Press). I never miss Emily Nussbaum’s weekly TV criticism in the New Yorker, and I’ve just found Kathryn’s Shulz’s equally smart and well-written book review column in New York Magazine and found myself ordering Americanah by C. N. Adiche (Knopf), a Nigerian born novelist whom I had not heard of before, on the basis of Schulz’s review. Of course the summer will be shorter than I anticipated and will be very busy with administrative work and travel and family visits so I will probably be cutting and pasting this when you ask me again next year.

Steve Jones

I’m about to begin reading Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker (Random House). Summer reading, for me, generally involves reading for pleasure, though it always somehow circles back to my intellectual interests, and in this case the idea that time, literally, physically, slows, strikes a chord. Abbey Road to Ziggy StardustSpeaking of chords, I’m finishing up Ken Scott’s Abbey Road to Ziggy Stardust (Alfred Music), which, as a huge Beatles fan I’d love anyway, but as a history of the recording of popular music it’s unparalleled. There is plenty of technical detail, and the narrative is well written. Rather than try to tell his story chronologically, Scott largely goes artist by artist, to great effect. Somehow I keep coming back around to my earliest scholarly fascination with how musicians, engineers and producers talk about music and recording, and how that discourse is influenced by, and influences, recording technology.

The next books on the table are George Packer’s The Unwinding: An Inner History of America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and Michael Burlingame’s two volume Abraham Lincoln: A Life (Johns Hopkins University Press). I have noticed lately that quite a few pundits seem intent on noting that the present political era in the U.S. is neither different from, nor worse than, many in the past. While I think such comparisons are interesting and potentially useful, the more interesting thing to me is that the country continues to muddle along. Whether this is from inertia, from lack of alternatives (a civil war seems somehow unimaginable, even though the last civil war veterans died in the 1950s, not so long ago in historical terms), or from the rapidity with which election cycles seem to come and go and provide illusions of alternatives, I don’t know, but I’m particularly interested in juxtaposing these books.

I’d like to get to Charles Emmerson’s 1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War (Public Affairs), but it seems unlikely given that it is already June. I still don’t feel as if I have a good grasp of World War I and its consequences for modernism, and from reviews I’ve read Emmerson may provide some illumination.

Richard Kadrey

I’ll be writing my new Sandman Slim this summer, so reading will have to fit around my writing schedule. There are four books I know I’ll get to.

I’m really looking forward to Charlie Huston’s Skinner (Mulholland Books). I’ve read all of Huston’s work, starting with the Henry Thompson crime books and his Joe Pitt vampire series. I’m looking forward to Huston’s take on the intelligence business and terrorism.

The Ocean at the end of the Lane by Neil Gaiman (William Morrow) is a bit of a cheat. All the Young DudesI read an early copy and enjoyed it immensely. It’s a book about childhood and terrifying magic, but it’s also about the horror of being young, the casual cruelty of adults, and the terror of remembering or worse, not remembering. I want to go through the book again, slower this time. It’s fun watching Gaiman crank the gears.

Another book I’m looking forward to is Edge of Dark Water by Joe Lansdale (Mulholland Books). Some of the chatter around it seems to pitch it as a young adult title, probably because of its young protagonists. However, like Gaiman’s book, young characters don’t necessarily add up to a kid’s book. I’m a sucker for all things Lansdale and a dark and murderous road story sounds just right for the summer.

Mark Dery has a new ebook called All the Young Dudes: Why Glam Rock Matters. Dery is a cultural critic with a keen eye for the secret meanings and influences of pop culture. All the Young Dudes is the first book from bOING-bOING, the culture, politics, and tech site. If Dery is their first author, I think we can look forward to more interesting work coming from them.

Benjamin H. Bratton

With an eye toward what I will be writing about in the Fall, Summer is usually a time when I inhale a lot of books, starting more than I finish. Two books at the top of my pile concern architecture’s relationship to computational materialism.  Luciana Parisi’s Contagious Architecture: Computation, Aesthetics, and Space (The MIT Press), draws on Alfred North Whitehead to develop an open-ended theory of algorithms as a “mode of thought,” more than just a mode of drawing or fabrication. Her take is a welcome alternative to the simplistic reductionism on offer by some of the perspectives closely associated with Parametricism. Architecture Xenoculture is a special issue of eVolo, guest edited by my friend, Juan Azulay, along with Benjamin Rice. It is a wild collection of works, ideas, and provocations from Reza Negarestani, J. G. Thirwell, Hernan Diaz-Alonso, Perry Hall, Terry Riley, and many others. It’s a good approximation of what a posthuman, postdisciplinary architecture would look like today.

Red PlentyMy favorite novel I’ve read in the last few months is Red Plenty (Graywolf Press) by Francis Spufford. Through a series of interwoven vignettes, it recounts the dreams and failures of Soviet cybernetics and its plans to realize the State as a universal platform-of-platforms. It’s clear (at least to me) that there is no way to imagine a genealogy of Google’s informational cosmopolitan ambitions without including this era as a key antecedent (I suppose, for better or worse, it would be impossible then to think about the contemporary fate of ‘communism’ without including Google’s own Gosplan.) Beyond States and markets, what ties this novel’s protagonists to Google’s is a belief in the power of the platform to organize the world in its image. Ideally it should be read in conjunction with Alexander Bogdonav’s Red Star (Indiana University Press), a 1908 Sci-Fi novel about a communist utopia on Mars, and Steven Levy’s (equally utopian) history of Google, In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works and Lives (Simon & Schuster).

Every summer I try to more or less systematically re-read something of significance to me. Sometimes it is a major work, several works by one author, or some group of books that form some kind of cluster. Recently, I had the pleasure of listening to Kim Stanley Robinson and Jonathan Lethem geek out with one another for an hour or so about their favorite Philip K. Dick works. Inspired, I am making my way back through 6 or 8 key PKD novels in more or less chronological order, starting with The Man in the High Castle (Mariner), then Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (Mariner), Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Del Rey), UBIK (Mariner),  Flow My Tears the Policeman Said (Mariner), A Scanner Darkly (Mariner), and VALIS (as well its little brother and a personal favorite, Radio Free Albemuth, the first PKD novel that I happened to read). There are certainly so many other great ones, but for a refresher, these will suffice to scratch the surface. As a companion I will read Laurence A. Rickels I Think I Am: Philip K. Dickbook of commentary on Dick’s work, I Think I Am: Philip K. Dick (University of Minnesota Press). Rickels is an extraordinarily interesting writer, and a former professor of mine. His other books, dealing with California, vampires, and Nazi psychoanalysis, etc. are also recommended. The Case of California (University of Minnesota Press) in particular makes for excellent beach reading, actually. No joke.

Lastly, I have become interested in issues in and around the philosophy of biology (in a open, non-disciplinary sense) especially as it pertains to fuzzy boundaries between living and non-living matter, strange systems, inhuman time and so forth. Recently I’ve read, or have it planned to read, a handful of titles that may be of interest. Hypersea: Life on Land (Columbia University Press) is a mad book by Mark McMenamin and Dianna McMenamin that starts with the question, why is a greater diversity of life on land than in the sea? Their answer is nested parasitism: animals living inside of animals living inside of animals. Life Explained (Yale University Press) by the French Biologist, Michel Morange, is a nice overview of contemporary issues ranging from molecular genetics to astrobiology, and beginning with the fundamental question of what is and is not “life” exactly? I’ve been looking forward to reading Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Photography and the Media of Reconnaissance (Zone Books) by Hanna Rose Shell, for some time. As the title suggests, it develops a theory of camouflage from evolutionary biology to aerial warfare. Lastly, I picked up a well-loved copy of the 1987 book by Steven Jay Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time (Harvard University Press). It discusses how, through geological science in the 17th through 19th centuries, it became possible to think the “Deep Time” of the Earth: billions of years, not thousands.

(P.S.- for those with a strong constitution and an oblique sense of humor, you may want to grind through Agenda 21 (Threshold Editions), the novelization of America’s eco-totalitarian future, ghost-written for Glenn Beck. I often find that that the paranoid Right imagines a political Left that is much more interesting that the Left that actually exits. In Beck’s world the Left is programmatically coherent, stealthy, and dominant. FEMA camps for climate criminals? If only!).

Lily Brewer

During school months I build monuments of books to the Summer Break gods, do a frustrated rain dance of tears around them for spring semester’s end, then begin my reading tribute to myself after a year of finished school work. Thus commences the happy dismantling of the towers three or more at a time. I’ve grabbed a few and put them here.

China Mieville is always begrudgingly on my summer list, even though Un Lun Dun, The City & the City, and Perdido Street Station (Del Rey), as grunge-ily elaborate and adventurous as they may be, fall flat at the critical moment. Despite our tenuous relationship I can’t get away from China and will be finishing Embassytown, Lesabendio(an absolutely brilliant, linguistically twisted story, but I hate the protagonist so badly and don’t care what happens to her). Railsea is also on my list, and I’m optimistic with my bout with these newer additions to his fantastical and other-worldly repertoire. Another SF pick, Lesabéndio: An Asteroid Novel (Wakefield Press), by Paul Scheerbart is the first German Expressionist utopian Science Fiction novel from 1913, (perhaps the only one?). An oblong and elastic inhabitant of a planet in a binary star system, Lesabéndio is a happy relationship between technology and nature. And the characters move around like bouncy balls. Walter Benjamin recommends it. My last fictive pick is Cloud Atlas (Random House) because David Mitchell was in desperate need of vindication. Without going into detail of how miserable the movie made me for three hours, and even though I picked this one up out of frustration and pity, so far I’m impressed (and relieved) with Mitchell’s inspired, paradoxically parallel and interwoven threads through space and time. (This opus deserves another post entirely.)

I always forget I’m a student of history, so I’ll also be spending much of my time in Howard Zinn’s captivating and, alas, so far depressing A People’s History of the United States (Harper Perennial), for which my 11th grade American History teacher John Irish would be ecstatic, along with I Bernard Cohen’s Science and the Founding Fathers: Science in the Political Thought of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams & James Madison (W. W. Norton & Company). Both books detail the pushed-under-the-rug histories of the U. S. that allow my roguish self think of my studies in art and design history under a darker, scandalous light. Walter Isaacson’s Einstein: His Life and Universe (Simon & Schuster) I hope, will complement like colors my interest in the history and philosophy of science along with these, as well as Linda Henderson’s newly republished The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (The MIT Press), the latter for which I’m particularly stoked.

I’ve almost finished The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography by Simon Singh (Anchor). According to Singh, “Codebreakers are linguistic alchemists,” from Mary Queen of Scots to the Navajo code talkers to quantum computers. With this summer’s special edition of Scientific American, “Extreme Physics: Probing the Mysteries of the Cosmos” (with heroes such as Steven Hawking, David Deutch, and the baddest boy on black holes and String Theory, Leonard Susskind) and Deutsch’s article on Constructor Theory, I’m pretty optimistic I’ll have a great historical and quantum-ly foundation for when I return to art school in the fall. I’m comfortable in the contrast.

Howard Rheingold

Big DataVictor Mayer-Schoenberger and Kenneth Cukier, Big Data: A Revolution That Will Tansform How We Live, Work, and Think (Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt): Yes, the title sounds like a concatenation of buzzwords, but both the subject matter and style of writing are compelling: The ability to collect ALL the data about phenomena, made possible by sensors and extensive computation power, rather than sampling data the way scientists have done thus far, is making it possible to know things that we couldn’t know before, and to approach the idea of knowing the world in new ways. When Google crunched billions of searches against 450 MILLION algorithms, they came up with Flu Trends, which can predict influenza outbreaks weeks before the Center for Disease Control. It’s not just about selling things, dataveillance (don’t forget that the NSA is building a million square foot server farm to look for patterns in trillions of phone calls, text messages, emails), or predicting epidemics. It’s a new way of studying the world.

Mark Amerika

More than ever, this summer my reading will be endlessly contaminated by my writing and vice versa. What I mean is that I am finishing two books, or not books per se, although they will end up looking like books, but two long performance art works that disguise themselves as books, even though they are really durational achievements.

The first book constructs a fictional narrative around Marcel Duchamp’s Green Box featuring imaginary characters who go by the names Walter Whitman Benjamin and Virginia Wolff. It’s hard to explain, but you can be sure that I have to read a lot of material about Duchamp’s Large Glass a.k.a. The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even. Honestly, it’s my pleasure.

Locus SolusThe second book is my remix of an auto-translation of Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus (Alma Books). This means I will read-write the French-to-English auto-translation of Roussel’s novel that I conduct myself by employing mediocre online tools. The end result is already looking like a very mangled version of Roussel’s original book since I will not be reading any sanctioned (verifiable, legit, published) English translation and do not read, write, or otherwise comprehend any texts written in the French language. Having said that, I will be reading, rereading, writing and rewriting Roussel through Duchamp’s Green Box. This ongoing read-write process is what I mean by the term remixology (the subject of my last book, remixthebook).

Will there be time for any other reading? Last year, my friends published so many wonderful books that I could not get to those books written by relative strangers. This year I’ll try to get to take hold of those that I let go last year because I did not have the time as well as a few others that have since popped into view: possible contenders include Sheila Heti’s How Should A Person Be? (Picador), Claire Donato’s Burial (Tarpaulin Sky Press), Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers (Scribner), Vanessa Place’s Boycott (Ugly Duckling Presse), and Lidia Yuknavitch’s Dora: A Headcase (Hawthorne Books).

I’ll also finish two excellent art history books: Branden Joseph’s Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage (Zone Books) and Judith Rodenbeck’s Radical Prototypes: Allen Kaprow and the Invention of Happenings (The MIT Press). These latter two titles are meant to trigger new thoughts about what it would be like to develop a new Graduate arts program in collaborative / experimental / experiential / emerging / inter / media art practices. I would like to find a way to integrate expanded and electronic forms of writing into this program as well and imagine it will even include a PhD component.

As you can imagine, my reading list changes, daily. For instance, ten minutes ago another book just came to my attention and may have to wait but I really hope to get to it by September 21st: Pay for Your Pleasures: Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Raymond Pettibon (University of Chicago Press), by Cary Levine. And three minutes ago, I received an email from Ulises Mejias inviting me to read his just-released Off the Network: Disrupting the Digital World (University of Minnesota Press). Quickly scrolling through the online version, I can see that I will take him up on his offer.

Will I also have enough time to start dipping my nose into Bruno Latour’s An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence (Harvard University Press)?

And I haven’t even touched upon on all of the other pdfs I have loaded on my iPad.

Bradford Vivian

I will be using the summer to gain momentum on a new research project about time and politics, so I’m reading David Ewing Duncan’s The Calendar: The 5000-year Struggle to Align the Clock and Heavens—and What Happened to the Missing Ten Days (Fourth Estate) as a broad background text.  Duncan chronicles the profound difficulty to establish a reliable clock throughout the (mainly) Western tradition, from the dawn of so-called civilization forward.  His account shows the repeated ways that forms of authority (kings, religions, early democratic or republican governments) invested themselves in the use of time as a means of ordering human society and consolidating power in the process.

Architectures of TimeSanford Kwinter’s Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture (The MIT Press) focuses on questions of time as a central formative component of modernity.  Kwinter draws heavily from Nietzsche, Bergson, and Deleuze and Guattari (who are likely the prime lens through which he accesses the former two figures) to argue that all the various, and at times contradictory versions of Western modernity, find common roots in efforts to radically rethink time not as a stable backdrop against which events occur but, rather, as the productive force through which phenomena come into being and exist in their continual becoming.

In addition to these and other books on time and its many manifestations, I will attempt to tackle Cormac McCarthy’s novel Suttree (Vintage). After first encountering his work in The Road, I have gradually been working my way through his corpus from first to last.  I find McCarthy’s prose stunning for its highly disciplined economy of pacing, precise but still haunting descriptive powers, uncannily vivid dialogue, and distinctive capacity to suggest the contours of an intimate psychological world through external, worldly details.

Dominic Pettman

Summer means novels. Lots and lots of novels.

Once more unto the beach!

Ross MacDonald, The Blue Hammer (Vintage): I really enjoy MacDonald’s mid-century California-noir atmospherics, and try to read at least one title of his a year.

Charles McCarry, The Miernik Dossier (Gerald Duckworth & Co.): I’ve only just discovered McCarry, but apparently this is considered by many to be the best Cold War era thriller by an American.

Charles Willeford, The Shark-Infested Custard (Vintage): Pure pulp, apparently in the most flagrant and unironic way possible.

The FlamethrowersGerald Murnane, Barley Patch (Dalkey Archive): A recent and well-received title by one of Australia’s most interesting and elusive writers.

Anna Kavan, Ice (Peter Owen): I don’t know much about this, except the author is an under-appreciated modernist, and the minimal title beckons me.

Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers (Scribner): Clearly the buzz-book of the Summer, highly recommended by several people I trust.

Shirley Hazzard, Transit of Venus (Penguin): I’m ashamed to have snoozed on this one for so long.

Kawamata Chiaki, Death Sentences (University of Minnesota Press): Translated by the brilliant Renaissance man, Thomas LaMarre, by a schoolchum of the guy who made the Ringu series, and working off a similar premise.

In terms of theory and/or non-fiction:

Siddhartha Deb, The Beautiful and the Damned (Faber & Faber): An award-winning portrait of modern India by one of my colleagues.

Margret Grebowicz, Why Internet Porn Matters (Stanford University Press): Well, don’t you want to know? Margret will no doubt bring a far more nuanced and critical eye to all those pink pixels flowing through the modemsphere.

Carla Nappi, The Monkey and the Inkpot (Harvard University Press): I saw Carla present a creative piece inspired by her research at the New Museum a few months ago, and now her book on “natural history and its transformations in modern China” is high on my list.

How to Wreck a Nice BeachRoland Barthes, How to Live Together (Columbia University Press): If anyone can respond to such a self-imposed title, it’s RB.

Dave Tompkins, How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from WWII to Hip Hop (Stop Smiling): I read a short piece by Tompkins which was so good that I instantly bought his book.

I will also be catching up with recent issues of Cabinet magazine (subscribe, if you don’t already!).

Plus pretty much everything put out by Univocal Publishing.

My project for the whole year, extending beyond Summer, is Giacomo Leopardi’s epic Zibaldone (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), finally being published in English in its entirety mid-July.

Jussi Parikka

My summer reading is going to be sporadic, but hopefully I get to attend to some texts that have been on my radar.

One certain is Rosi Braidotti’s The Posthuman (Polity). She is just fantastic in her affective energy as well as a pioneer of new materialism. Compared to her, the more recent discussions of the nonhuman are really latecomers. The new book promises some good chapters on death as well as on the future (and non-future?) of humanities.

24/7Besides Braidotti, I will definitely check out another one of my idols, Jonathan Crary’s, new book, 24/7: Terminal Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (Verso). Crary’s Suspensions of Perception (MIT Press) was my go-to book for a long time, and finally there is some new writing out from him. For me, someone who has had sleeping problems the past year, the topic is perfect. And he ties it with the increasing colonialization of our most private spheres by capitalism, so even more perfect.

If and when time, there is a bunch of German media theory waiting to be read. It includes two new hefty volumes from Wolfgang Ernst on time-criticality (Chronopoetik and Gleichursprünglichkeit, both from Kulturverlag Kadmos).

As well as Till Heilmann’s book on computers as text machines, a sort of a media archaeology: Textverarbeitung. Eine Mediengeschichte des Computers als Schreibmaschine (2012) . I have been slowly reading novels again and should one day finish Paolo Bacigalupi’s fantastic The Windup Girl (Night Shade Books) and pick up some Richard Powers I think (at least I was recommended to).

Matthew Kirschenbaum

My summer reading plans are as ambitious as anyone’s and cluster around media archaeology, military affairs, and game history. While there are a whole lot more university press titles in the stack now I suppose the basic mix hasn’t changed all that much since I was fourteen, making bad interactive fiction on my Apple II and listening to Rush albums while reading Tom Clancy and the Monster Manual. (Yes, I was that kid.)

Right now I’m finishing Robert Bolaño’s Third Reich (Picador), his posthumously published first novel recently serialized in The Paris Review. The title comes from the Avalon Hill tabletop simulation game, Decline and Fall of the Third Reich; the novel’s protagonist, Udo, sets this game up obsessively as he vacations at a beach resort on the Costa Brava (is the whole setting a sand table?), playing out his relationship with his girlfriend and brooding on history (his own, Europe’s), spinning scenarios (both ludic and life-altering), and baking his reptilian brainstem in the heat-soaked setting. It is an oppressive strong novel and will not be to everyone’s taste, though it offers a rare extended fictional portrayal of an old school hex and counter game (Bolaño himself was an improbable aficionado of the genre).

Speculate This!I will also be making time for Speculate This!, the enigmatic new e-book from Duke University Press attributed to the otherwise anonymous collective who call themselves “uncertain commons.” (A note in the text glosses the membership as “a group of scholars, mediaphiles, and activists who explore the possibilities of collaborative intellectual labor.”) “The future has been sold,” the first screen reads. “Parceled, bundled, and securitized.” This! becomes a site of affect and resistance. It may in fact find some odd if inverse kinship with the Bolaño, focused as it is on futurity rather than historicity and forms of scenario-making less about prediction and perfection than the creative calculus of difference.

Media archaeology encompasses a loose constellation of scholars and theorists, many of them non-American, that grounds its excavations of media history in strange loops, weird machines, and code forks not followed, with a heavy dose of techno-fetishism and Foucauldian obsession for the archive. Texts I would place in this category from my pile include Finn Brunton’s Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet (MIT Press), Cornelia Vismann’s Files: Law and Media Technology (Stanford University Press), Ben Kafka’s The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paper Work (Zone Books; notice a trend here?), and Goto80’s Computer Rooms, (lulu) which is a print-on-demand photo documentary of “what computer culture really looks like.” Media archaeologists like it gritty, and so one final item is a David A. Mindell’s older monograph Between Human and Machine (Johns Hopkins University Press), which examines the history of pre-cybernetic feedback mechanisms and analog computing through the lens of naval gun control and automated fire direction, a nexus of topics newly relevant in the face of drone technology once again raising questions about human actors, non-human systems, and the protocols of war.

Speaking of which, I am about halfway through Mark Mazzetti’s The Way of the Knife (Penguin), a well-sourced look at the 21st century’s most significant development in American war-fighting strategy, the tactical The Way of the Knifeconjoining of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command in the wake of 9/11. This is the deep military (and defense policy) history behind the drone wars, as well as the now-routine global deployments of “black” units like the much mythologized SEAL Team Six.

Other reading may include Matt Jockers’ Macroanalysis (University of Illinois Press) and Ann Blair’s Too Much to Know (Yale University Press), The latter is the deep historical study James Gleick’s much-hyped The Information (Vintage) could never be, and although it’s now been out for several years I am overdue for some time with it. I am also looking forward to Roger Whitson and Jason Whittaker’s Blake and the Digital Humanities, a Routledge hardcover with a price-point set by Urizen.

I have both of Ken Wark’s volumes on the Situationists on deck, The Beach Underneath the Street and the latest, The Spectacle of Disintegration (Verso). Guy Debord, by the way, was himself a player of games, and designed a “war game”—Kriegsspiel—that would have done Bolaño’s protagonist proud. Jon Peterson’s Playing at the World: A History of Simulating Wars, People, and Fantastic Adventures From Chess to Role Playing Games (Unreason Press) is a self-published 700-page tome that very much treats its subject, tabletop gaming, as media—by which I mean material instruments for focalizing and amplifying abstractions—offering up the most carefully researched, loving, and impeccably documented history of Dungeons of Dragons we are surely ever going to see. It’s a book that publishers presumably wouldn’t touch, a simultaneously indulgent and authoritative book our world would be a dimmer place without.

Finally, my ongoing research on the literary history of word processing has introduced me to Len Deighton, whose 1970 novel Bomber (Sterling) is likely the first novel ever written on a machine that qualifies as such. Deighton was famous for his brutal yet urbane Cold War espionage thrillers—neither Ian Fleming nor John le Carré —and I’d like to get to some of them. Spy Story (HarperCollins) features a clandestine computer center dedicated to simulating the next world war, one move at a time. After Mazzetti’s contemporary spy stories, this reads now as pure nostalgia for an obsolete end-game.

David Silver

Most of my summertime reading will come straight from whatever’s on the coffee table — a New Yorker article, some section of the Sunday Times, a cookbook or two from the public library.

Few, if any, of the books I will read this summer will contain footnotes.

Most of the books I will read this summer will be gardening and cookbooks which I don’t really read but rather strategically strike: grab, look up, consult, skim, and scan.

The book I hope to read, start to finish and from every which way, is Deborah Madison’s Vegetable Literacy (Ten Speed Press).

Most likely, the only books I will begin and actually finish this summer will be children’s books — read to and with Siena. I will find these books browsing the kids section of my local public library (Berkeley Public – Claremont Branch), reading the children’s column of the Sunday Times‘ book review section, and searching through the database of the Jane Addams Children’s Book Awards.

During summer, as well as fall, winter, and spring, these books are always read socially.

David and Siena

Gareth Branwyn

Kevin Evans, Carrie Galbraith, John Law, Tales of the SF Cacophony Society (Last Gasp): A group of San Francisco artists, creatives, and lovable malcontents in search of “experiences beyond the pale” – that was the M.O. of the SF Cacophony Society, begun in 1986 and active ’til the turn of the century. Tales… chronicles their many adventures in urban exploration, elaborate costume events, the birth of Burning Man, and more. May this book spawn new generations of urban absurdists and culture jammers.

Lauren Beukes, The Shining Girls: A Novel (Mulholland Books): I met Lauren at last year’s Comic-Con and was mortified to admit that I hadn’t read any of her well-regarded novels. I’ve since become something of a fanboy and am looking forward to reading her latest, The Shining Girls, this summer. This genre-bender is about… you’ll never guess… a time-traveling serial killer. Lauren seems to be one of those authors who exfoliates more creativity than most of us have to begin with.

Richard Kadrey, Kill City Blues/The Sandman Slim novels (Harper Voyager): In Kadrey’s Sandman Slim series, he repeatedly sends us and the main character, James Stark (aka Sandman Slim), to hell and back again. Back being LA. Four books in and it’s hard to decide which locale is worse. In fact, by book four, Kill City Blues, they basically overlap. And it’s this psychogeography of the series, its mash-up of the familiar and the occult, and it’s relentlessly violent, always clever and cocky narrative, that make it stand far above other darlings of the genre like Jim Butcher.

Hard Art DC 1979Lucian Perkins, Alec MacKaye, Hard Art, DC 1979 (Akashic Books): The pictures in this lovely book, by well-known DC photographer Lucian Perkins, perfectly evoke the unique magic of its time and place – the DC punk scene of 1979. Bands like Trenchmouth, Teen Idles,  Slickee Boys, and the incomparable Bad Brains, played shows in sketchy galleries, squat-clubs, and even inner city housing projects, where punks (frequently in all-white bands) played for all-black audiences unsure of what they were standing in front of. An urgent narrative by Alec MacKaye (Untouchables) and an essay by Henry Rollins provide a backstory to these potent images.

R. U. Sirius Timothy Leary’s Trip Thru Time (Futique Trust): In this timeline-formatted book and free ebook, 90s countercultural iconoclast R. U. Sirius paints probably the most accurate picture to date of 60s counterculture iconoclast Tim Leary. People seem quick to love him or hate him, but best of luck just trying to find Timothy Leary, the actual man entangled in the myth. Like the mercurial Aleister Crowley before him (the early 20th century occultist whom he greatly admired and emulated), Leary seems to be all of the great and terrible things said about him, and none of them. Trip Thru Time is a fine attempt at teasing out the truth behind this (anti)hero of the 20th century.

Peter Lunenfeld

Now that I’ve passed the half-century mark, I was thinking that this summer I might revisit my high school English syllabus, including The Great Gatsby (Scribner), 1984 (Plume), Brave New World (Harper Perennial), and Victory (Double Day) to see how and if they and I have held up. Continuing on with fiction, I’ve already read James Salter’s All That Is (Vintage) and Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Asia (Penguin; which are oddly similar in their attention to men making it, albeit in different eras and places), so for the summer I’ll move on to fiction of and by Angelenos. These include native son and Industry scion Matthew Spektor’s epic about Hollywood, American Dream Machine (Little Brown); East German Christa Wolf’s (that’s how she identifies herself) dyspeptic City of Angels: Or, the Overcoat of Dr. Freud (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers (Scribner), which though about the New York and Italian art worlds of the 1970s is written by an Angelina; and Summer of Hate, partially set in Southern California, by Chris Kraus. n.b. Kraus’s seminal LA intellectual tell-(not)-all-(but some) I Love Dick (Semiotext(e)) has been invoked a lot lately in relation to internet alt-lit demi-celebrity Marie Calloway’s blog-post-a-clef/short story “Adrien Brody.”

Veering away from fiction, this summer I’m hoping to engage more fully with the amazing publishing program The Inner Life of Video Sphof Geert Lovink’s Institute of Network Cultures (all of which are available as print-on-demand books and pamphlets or as free .pdfs from the site). I’m particularly interested in going through the Un-Like Us Reader, and the two Video Vortex readers. The first is on social media, the others on YouTube and online video. I read Andreas Treske’s pamphlet, The Inner Life of Video Spheres, an expansion of his Video Vortex work, and it’s prompted me to finally sit down and tackle Peter Sloterdijk’s Bubbles: Spheres Volume I: Microspherology (Semiotext(e); pithy titles are obviously not big in German media philosophy at the moment).  Pithier to be sure, and reissued and updated after more than two decades, is the second edition of Brenda Laurel’s groundbreaking Computers as Theatre (Addison-Wesley; with the added bonus of an awesome new cover designed by Martin Venezky).

Speaking of design, I’ll be re-reading The Electric Information Age Book: McLuhan/Agel/Fiore and the Experimental Paperback by Jeffrey Schnapp and Adam Michaels (Princeton Architectural Press). Jeffrey sent me a pre-release .pdf of the book when he and I were working on Digital_Humanities (The MIT Press), but I want to revisit it in print. I won’t be reading so much as browsing Artur Beifuss and Francesco Trivini Bellini’s Branding Terror: The Logotypes and Iconography of Insurgent Groups and Terrorist Organizations (Merrell Publishers). I hope the mere possession of this book doesn’t put me on NSA and TSA watch lists, but if I do get stopped by airport security this summer, I’ll make sure to have a copy of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King (Back Bay) with me, because I read DFW so slowly and with such pleasure.

Patrick David Barber

About a year ago I read Dave Eggers’ A Hologram for the King (Vintage) start to finish on one lovely day at a campsite in Tillamook National Forest. The book is quintessentially Eggers and also a great summer read: engaging and fast-moving but with enough dark undertones to keep it interesting and relevant.

Last weekend we camped for Solstice and I brought along Edward Lee’s new cookbook Smoke & Pickles (Artisan). I don’t usually think to bring a cookbook for campsite reading, but this was a perfect choice. Lee writes appealingly of his interest in food and of the intersecting influences that brought him to where he is today: a Korean-American New Yorker, running a restaurant in Kentucky that manages to bring all of that together. I’ve yet to try any of these recipes, but, hey, you had me at “Korean-Southern fusion.” Of particular note are the four seasonal kimchi recipes, the variety of rice bowls, and the bourbon-pickled jalapeños.

Edward Lee book in action. (photo by Patrick David Barber)

Alex Burns

Jeff Madrick Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present (Vintage): Madrick is editor of Challenge magazine, a contributor to The New York Review of Books, and a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis, The New School. His detailed reportage examines how corporate and regulatory battles created new economic and political elites. Age of Greed spans Walter Wriston’s revolt as CEO of First National City bank to Angelo Mozilo’s demise as CEO of Countrywide Financial. There are new, devastating details about the AOL Time Warner merger negotiations; the Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken cases; Alan Greenspan’s Federal Reserve; and fiscal, monetary and regulatory policy in the Carter and Reagan administrations. I liked Age of Greed so much that I bought hardback, paperback, and Kindle copies to study Madrick’s writing style more closely.

Mary S. Morgan The World In The Model: How Economists Work and Think (Cambridge University Press): Morgan is Professor of history and the philosophy of economics at the London School of Economics and the University of Amsterdam. She provides a detailed conceptual history of key theoretical economists, including David Ricardo, John Maynard Keynes, John Nash, and Max Weber. This is a book about how to think about model-building and simulation; what models do and don’t do; how models are used; and under what conditions models can fail. Gillian Tett’s reportage in Fool’s Gold (Little, Brown) provides an example of how J.P. Morgan became a market-maker for credit default swaps and other financial engineering which contributed to the 2007-09 global financial crisis.

Machine LearningPeter Flach Machine Learning: The Art and Science of Algorithms that Make Sense of Data (Cambridge University Press): Flach is editor-in-chief of the Machine Learning journal and is a Professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Bristol, United Kingdom. This is an accessible introduction to machine learning: “the systematic study of algorithms and systems that improve their knowledge or performance with experience” (p. 3) such as email spam filters. Topics include binary classification; concept learning; tree, rule, and probabilistic models; and model ensembles. Flach uses equations and illustrations to explain the major concepts involved. For more advanced research, I recommend David Barber’s Bayesian Reasoning and Machine Learning (Cambridge University Press) and Kevin P. Murphy’s Machine Learning: A Probabilistic Perspective (The MIT Press).

Barry Johnson Algorithmic Trading & DMA: An Introduction to Direct Access Trading Strategies (4Myeloma Press): Charles Duhigg broke the news about high-frequency trading (HFT) systems in a New York Times article on 24th July 2009. Then the Flash Crash happened at 2:45pm on 6th May 2010. Since then, there is a mini-industry of HFT-oriented topical books (both pro and con); and publisher updates to pre-HFT titles on algorithmic trading. Johnson’s self-published book is a detailed introduction (for institutional investors and HFT system developers) that requires a working knowledge of market microstructure (orders and price structure) and quantitative finance. He alludes to trading strategies yet discusses the equally important transaction and execution costs. For a HFT and algo history, see Scott Patterson’s Dark Pools (Crown Business). For a basic, accessible overview of alpha, risk, portfolio, transaction and execution systems see the revised edition of Rishi K. Narang’s Inside The Black Box (John Wiley & Sons). Publishers have a slate of new HFT and algo books out later this year, starting with Robert Kissell’s The Science of Algorithmic Trading and Portfolio Management (Academic Press). You will have to do further work to understand the major asset classes and trading strategies like mean reversion, momentum, trend-following, volatility, distressed debt, and event arbitrage.

Alan N. Fish Knowledge Automation: How to Implement Decision Management in Business Processes (John Wiley & Sons): James Altucher, Sal Arnuk, Jaron Lanier, Evgeny Morozov, Joseph Saluzzi, Charles Hugh Smith, Kanye West, and others agree: The internet is hollowing out the middle class. Norbert Wiener foresaw this outcome with The Human Use of Human Beings (1950) on cybernetics and robotics. Fish combines three areas—decision management (predictive analytics and business rules); business process management systems (activity sequences); and service-oriented architecture (loosely coupled, reusable software services)—to explain how to automate many business functions, or to alter organizational decision structures. It should give you some tools to self-disrupt your current job if you need to—and stay ahead of the reengineering curve. The savings and scalability involved often flow to Chrystia Freeland’s Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else (Penguin).

Memory MachinesBelinda Barnet Memory Machines: The Evolution of Hypertext (Anthem Press): Barnett is a colleague and lecturer at Swinburne University, Australia. Memory Machines will probably be the definitive conceptual history of hypertext, and the influence of Vannevar Bush’s Memex, Doug Engelbart’s NLS, Ted Nelson’s Xanadu, and Andries Van Dam’s File Retrieval and Editing System on the internet’s evolution. Barnett combines a rich, scholarly understanding of the historical literature and interviews. She provides background on Nelson’s philosophy that will interest readers of Jaron Lanier’s recent Who Owns The Future? (Penguin), which also explores Nelson’s insights.

Don Webb Overthrowing the Old Gods: Aleister Crowley and the Book of the Law (Inner Traditions). There have been a flurry of new and thoughtful books about the English magus Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) and his aeonic word Thelema (Will). Webb provides a trans-aeonic interpretation of Crowley’s Liber Al vel Legis (1904) and its influence on contemporary occulture. Readers will learn from Webb’s Egyptological and Classical research, and the self-change insights from his extensive magical/initiatory work. For a contemporary, psychological view of Thelema see Roy F. Baumeister’s research program on self-regulation and ego-depletion, summarized in Baumeister and John Tierney’s Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength (Penguin).

Michael A. Aquino MindWar (CreateSpace): The Aquino/Vallely concept paper “From PSYOP to MindWar: The Psychology of Victory” (1980) had a much-debated reputation amongst far right New World Order conspiracy theorists, before Vallely became a CNN commentator during the 2003 Iraq War. Aquino provides a corrective in this self-published book to conspiracy-driven disinformation. He articulates a ParaPolitics meta-ethical philosophy influenced by Plato’s noesis and Club of Rome philosopher Raghavan Iyer’s Parapolitics: Toward the City of Man (Oxford University Press). He goes beyond the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act and Military Information Support Operations to articulate a different approach to military force structure and joint coordination: PhysWar (Combat), MindWar (Psychological Operations), MetaForce (Special Operations), and ParaPolitics (Civil Affairs). He provides a glimpse of a personal research program involving experimental psychology. For the appropriate context to understand Aquino’s MindWar and what it responds to, see Martin van Creveld’s The Culture of War (Ballantine Books); the revised edition of William C. Martel’s Victory In War: Foundations of Modern Military Policy (Cambridge University Press); and, as one comparative view to Iyer/Aquino’s ParaPolitics, Johan Galtung’s TRANSCEND method in peace studies. On the potential “ethics of use,” I also suggest you consider the relevant ethical and research program guidelines from the American Psychological Association (particularly Divisions 3, 6, 19, and 56); the Experimental Psychology Society; the Society of Experimental Social Psychology; and the International Society of Political Psychology.

The Roots of EvilJohn Kekes The Roots of Evil (Cornell University Press): Kekes is Professor Emeritus of philosophy at the University of Albany. He considers moral, political and theological dimensions of evil, and then evaluates possible causal factors (internal and external conditions). Case studies include the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars; the French Terror of 1793-94; Franz Stangl the Kommandant of the Treblinka concentration camp in Nazi Germany; Charles Manson; Argentina’s Dirty War of 1976-83; and the psychopath John Allen. Kekes then evaluates four different explanations: external-passive, external-active, internal-passive, and internal-active. This is a subtle, nuanced book on moral philosophy that deserves re-reading and mindful reflection.

Neil Fligstein and Doug McAdam A Theory of Fields (Oxford University Press): Fligstein is a Professor of sociology at University of California, Berkeley. McAdam is a Professor of sociology at Stanford University. This book develops a conceptual model of Strategic Action Fields as a mesolevel construct in which different actors collectively shape and change societies. Fligstein and McAdam contrast microfoundation and macrofoundation insights; consider methodological aspects; and provide two case studies: United States debates about race (1932-1980) and the mortgage securitization industry (1969-2011). This book exemplifies how to present new conceptual frameworks and theory-building for an academic audience.

Roy Christopher

Steve Aylett recently sent me a pile of new stuff I’ve been itching to get into: Smithereens, Novahead, and Rebel at the End of Time (Scar Garden Press). Reading Aylett is like reading a videogame in a blender, so I’m anxious to see how these three play, but there are a few ahead of them:

Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (Dutton): I’ve had this book for ages and read it years ago. I’m revisiting it this summer because I found a clean copy of it recently, and it’s just so weirdly prescient. Published in 1970 (now available online), Expanded Cinema discusses the extensions of humans through the evolution of cinematic language. Youngblood writes of the “global intermedia network” and image-riddled “post-mass audience age.” Bucky Fuller wrote the Introduction, but it could just as easily have been written by Marshall McLuhan, Jean Baudrillard, or Paul Virilio. Youngblood is somewhere among them, even if a bit more sober. Couple this book with Anthony Wilden’s widely overlooked 1972 book, System and Structure (which I mentioned on last year’s list), and you’ve got a whole new set of ways to see the possible present(s).

ViralityTony D. Sampson, Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks (University of Minnesota Press): Reevaluating the work of old theorists in light of new developments (much like I suggest with Youngblood and Wilden above) is often fertile ground for new seeds of thought. Sampson does this in Virality with the work of French sociologist Gabriel Tarde, and Gilles Deleuze‘s interpretation thereof. The tack can have its limitations though, and I’m anxious to see which way Sampson’s book leans.

I finally read Bruce Sterling‘s The Hacker Crackdown (Bantam), as well as his storm-hacking novel from the same era, Heavy Weather (Bantam), as a part of a short reading list of hacker-themed books I’m either finally reading or re-reading. Something about Sterling’s recent talk on fantasy prototypes and “real” disruption crossed with a mild interest in criminology (from sporadic classes during my undergraduate studies and watching glorified cop shows like Veronica Mars and Lie to Me) spurred a renewed interest in hacking. I’m reading Steven Levy’s Hackers (O’Reilly) right now alongside Katie Hafner and John Markoff’s Cyberpunk (Simon & Schuster) and Parmy Olson’s We Are Anonymous (Back Bay). Then I’m rereading Ken Wark’s A Hacker Manifesto (Harvard University Press) to reestablish the larger, philosophical context.

Speaking of Ken Wark, I have two new ones by him that I’ve barely started. Telesthesia: Communication, Culture and Class (Polity) and The Spectacle of Disintegration (Verso) continue his adept analysis of the media milieu and what Guy Debord and the Situationists can still teach us about it. I’m hoping to cover these soon.

I also just finished Daniel Suarez’s latest novel, Kill Decision (Signet), which Paul Saffo mentioned on last year’s list. Its autonomous-drone tale is germane and terrifying. Oh, and if you haven’t read his previous two novels (Daemon and its sequel, Freedom), you should add them to your list. Theirs is an amazing, scary story with lots of crazy already-existing technology.

What are you reading this summer?

Beyond the Body with Rosi Braidotti

Once declaring that an individual is a “montage of loosely assembled parts,” and furthermore that when “you are on the phone or on the air you have no body” (p. xxix), Marshall McLuhan (1962) dismembered the body. Our media might be extensions of ourselves, but they’re also prosthetics, amputating parts as they extend them, turning us into cyborgs. If we are and always have been cyborgs (Clark, 2003), then where does the body end and the media begin?

Judith Butler (1990) reassembles the body as “culturally intelligible” (p. 167). That is, as one that is recognized by the members of its society, what Sandy Stone (2001) calls the “legible body” (p. 195). On the phone, on the air, or online, you are “read” as a member. Stone also postulates the “illegible body” that exists “quantumlike in multiple states” (p. 196): “Their social system includes other people, quasi people or delegated agencies that represent specific individuals, and quasi agents that represent ‘intelligent’ machines, clusters of people, or both” (p. 196). Bringing Bulter, N. Katherine Hayles, and Donna Haraway Body Drifttogether, Arthur Kroker’s Body Drift: Butler, Hayles, Haraway (University of Minnesota Press, 2012) tackles these theorists and their theories in turn. His “body drift” is not just the fragmentation of the body into different codes and constructs, as Stone does (e.g., gendered, sexualized, augmented, virtual, etc.), but also the fact that concerns about the body haven’t been marginalized by technological evolution as largely predicted. Just as telecommuting de-emphasizes place (i.e., we can work from anywhere) as it reemphasizes it (i.e., where we are matters more), not having a body or having a technologically mediated one now matters in a different way. Under the themes of contingency, complexity, and hybridity, Kroker provides an introduction to and synthesis of the thought of three major feminist critics and what it means for the body to drift.

Even from a steadfastly feminist stance, we tend to focus on the narratives and discourses surrounding issues of the body more so than their material systems and conditions (Rotman, 2008). The Others lurk in the structures of modernity, and as Haraway (1990) puts it, “The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self” (p. 163): Cyborgs are “simultaneously entities and metaphors, living beings, and narrative constructions” (Hayles, 1999, p. 114). In such a meddled milieu, the control of these analogies and their boundaries is where the power lies.

The PosthumanAnother term for the feminist in Haraway is the posthuman (Howell, 1995), and Rosi Braidotti pushes the analogies and boundaries of the body past postmodernity in her latest book, The Posthuman (Polity, 2013). Hayles (1999) defines the posthuman using the externalization of our knowledge, writing, “When information loses its body, equating humans and computers is especially easy…” (p. 2). Cybernetics defined humans as “information-processing systems whose boundaries are determined by the flow of information” (p. 113). Braidotti pays special attention to these flows, building from three areas of thought: moral philosophy, science and technology, and anti-humanist philosophies of subjectivity. Globalized network culture decentralizes the humanist subject’s stability in space and time. The upending of anthropocentrism upsets the hierarchy of the species and the technologically mediated subject problematizes body normativity. All of which Braidotti employs toward a “move forward into multiple posthuman futures” (p. 150). She continues:

We need an active effort to reinvent the academic field of the Humanities in a new global context and to develop an ethical framework worthy of our posthuman times. Affirmation, not nostalgia, is the road to pursue: not the idealization of philosophical meta-discourse, but the more pragmatic task of self-transformation through humble experimentation (p. 150).

Braidotti praises interdisciplinary scholarship within the Humanities (e.g., feminist studies, media studies, environmental Humanities, Digital Humanities, etc.) as an “expression of its riches, not of its crisis” (p. 155), but she calls for more fragmentation, not less, writing that the dis-unity of the Humanities “points to over-abundance, not lack” (p. 156). The posthuman research agenda is not a unified “grand theoretical discourse” (p. 157) but a call for “specific theory” (Lyotard, 1984), one that is “grounded, accountable but also shareable and hence open to generic applications” (p. 157). Braidotti concludes by outlining her methodological golden rules not only as building blocks for posthuman critical theory but also as a way to bridge the Two Cultures via mutual respect. The Posthuman is an important and generative step toward new theories and scholarship and a welcome addition to Braidotti’s already formidable canon.

Moving beyond the body (as we know it) means subverting any extant grand narrative or theory of The Human and any attempt at a new one. It means rejecting the demonization of science and technology. It means embracing the nonlinearity of our posthuman times, the further fragmentation of our selves, and the permeability of our bodily boundaries. Haraway (1990) writes, “It means both building and destroying machines, identities, relationships…” (p. 181). It means rethinking the lines we’ve drawn through the ones we’ve crossed.

References:

Butler, Judith. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.

Clark, Andy. (2003). Natural Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence. New York: Oxford University Press.

Haraway, Donna J. (1990). Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge.

Hayles, N. Katherine. (1999). How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Howell, Linda. (1995). The Cyborg Manifesto Revisited: Issues and Methods for Technocultural Feminism. In Richard Dellamora (Ed.), Postmodern Apocalypse: Theory and Cultural Practice at the End. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 199-218.

Kroker, Arthur. (2012). Body Drift: Butler, Hayles, Haraway. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Lyotard, Jean François. (1984). The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis, MN: University of MInnesota Press.

McLuhan, Marshall. (1962). The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Rotman, Brian. (2008). Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Stone, Allucquère Rosanne (Sandy). (2001). Will the Real Body Please Stand Up? In David Trend (Ed.), Reading Digital Culture. Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 185-198.

Keep Your Distance Close: Maps and Monographs

I grew up moving around. From my birth to my high school years, my family moved at least once every two years. There’s no way to gauge how much that forced mobility shaped me as a person, but it certainly made me unafraid to pick up and go somewhere else.

The day after my last final of my undergraduate studies, I moved out of my parents house, from the bucolic plains of southeast Alabama to the Cascadian coast of the Pacific Northwest. I’ve moved more times than there have been years since then and even more than I did growing up. Seventeen of those twenty-odd treks have been state-to-state moves.

Map Bookshelf by Ron Arad

There are certain things you learn from a life on the road. You learn to keep your life lean (except perhaps for the literary indulgences; books tend to be the bulk of any of my many moves), you learn to pack what you keep efficiently, you learn to make new friends and keep in touch with old ones, and you learn how to read a map.

The Faraway NearbyIn The Faraway Nearby (Viking, 2013), Rebecca Solnit addresses all of the above with the intricacy and intimacy for which she is known. Even the books, about which she writes, “Before writers are writers they are readers, living in books, through books, in the lives of others that are also the heads of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone” (p. 61). And in another passage that deserves quoting at length, she writes,

This is the strange life of books that you enter alone as a writer, mapping unknown territory that arrises as you travel. If you succeed in the voyage, others enter after, one at a time, also alone, but in communion with your imagination, traversing your route. Books are solitudes in which we meet (p. 54).

There are several intertwining allegories threading through The Faraway Nearby. One is about a windfall of apricots rotting slowly on the floor of Solnit’s bedroom, and that story is connected to the very dire story of the diminishing mind of her mom. Overall though, the book is about moving, about going, coming, and becoming, the crisis of living where cartographers have yet to tread, losing your way and finding it again. Every time it feels like the story of her troubled relationship with her mother is getting more alienating than engaging, Solnit drops a paragraph like this one:

My survival depended on mapping her landscape and finding my routes out of it. We are all the heroes of our own stories, and one of the arts of perspective is to see yourself small on the stage of another’s story, to see the vast expanse of the world that is not about you, and to see your power, to make your life, to make others, or break them, to tell stories rather than be told by them (p. 29).

Her ability to connect the mundane to the monolithic is time and again why she’s one of the more reliable voices in cultural history and criticism and remains one of my very favorite writers.

Close Up at a Distance

“What size is representation?” Solnit asks, “No size at all, for we get used to seeing satellite photographs of continents the same size as snapshots of babies” (p. 92). If Solnit’s book is about the territory of living itself, then Laura Kurgan’s Close Up at a Distance (Zone Books, 2013) is about the representation, the technologies, the map itself. And it’s beautiful in a completely different way. Kurgan, who runs the Spatial Information Design Lab, directs the Visual Studies program, and is an Associate Professor of Architecture at Columbia University, is not only close with mapping technologies but also quite critical of their shaping how we see the world. “The consumers of generally available satellite imagery,” she writes, “or even the ones who download images for a price from a commercial satellite database, will never know who has tasked a satellite to take a picture (unless they did it themselves) in order to see something close up, but from far away” (p. 20).

The problems of perspective that Solnit mentions above are evident in Kurgan’s critiques. As much as they reveal, remote sensing and imaging technologies remove us from the grit and grind of the realities on the ground. Kurgan investigates these processes through nine case studies, from the images of earth shot from space (i.e., Earthshine and Blue Marble) to satellites over Manhattan on 9/11. Kurgan writes, “The ease with which we can conduct these experiments often hides the reasons for the existence of the images in the first place,” (p. 20), military purposes often being the most nefarious. As Braun (2005) puts it, “…media should never be understood only through their superficial characteristics or merely as interfaces: Certain ideas of reality, society, and subject are always encoded in them” (p. 73). The assumed objectivity of these images is suspect, as they mediate (i.e., insert themselves into) our view, obscuring our ability to accurately interpret what we see.

What the map cuts up, the story cuts across. — Michel de Certeau

However tempting it might be to call Solnit’s book the micro-view and Kurgan’s the macro-, or one about life lived up close and the other at a distance, both are intimate narratives of their subject matter. New books, new stories, new places, new cities can all be a challenge, but dealing with them is manageable and fun. You learn the characters, learn the tropes, learn the plot, learn the map, learn the landmarks, learn the major thoroughfares and cross-streets, and learn when it’s okay to get a little lost.

References:

Braun, Reinhard. (2005). From Representation to Networks: Interplays of Visualities, Apparatuses, Discourses, Territories, and Bodies. In Annmarie Chandler & Norie Neumark (Eds.), At a Distance: Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp. 72-87.

de Certeau, Michel. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, p. 129.

Kurgan, Laura. (2013). Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics. New York: Zone Books.

Solnit, Rebecca. (2013). The Faraway Nearby. New York: Viking.

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Many thanks to Ken Wark for suggesting I review these two titles in tandem.

Ill Communication: Gary Genosko on Models

“The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place,” playwright George Bernard Shaw once quipped (quoted in Caroselli, 2000, p. 71). Whether Shaw was being silly or snarky, the impossible exchange of meaning and messages is troublesome for communicators and communication scholars alike. Critiquing the standard Shannon and Weaver model of communication, Jean Baudrillard (1981) wrote, “We must understand communication as something other than the simple transmission-reception of a message, whether or not the latter is considered reversible through feedback” (p. 169). The model was originally published by Shannon in 1948 in the July and October issues of the Bell System Technical Journal (and the next year in his book with Weaver), yet it still lingers in communication studies theories, textbooks, and other models.

Remodelling CommunicationIn Remodelling Communication: From WWII to the WWW (University of Toronto Press, 2012), Gary Genosko tackles the Shannon and Weaver model as well as just about every other widely accepted model of communication. Stuart Hall, Roman Jakobson, and Umberto Eco undergo the pressure of scrutiny as well. Genosko also uses Baudrillard to critique other communication theory, from McLuhan and Marx to Deleuze and Guattari. “For Baudrillard,” he writes, “technology’s role is to ‘operationalize’ everything, including philosophical concepts, so that ‘nothing ever really takes place, since everything is already calculated, audited, and realized in advance'” (p. 82). Like the promise of so-called “big data” turned against us, we just become fields in a spreadsheet, bits in a box. Dominic Pettman (2013) terms it a “claustrophically overcoded – thus predictable – world” (p. 63), from which he suggests using a rabbit totem to escape. These collected concerns – of technology obscuring even the possibility of communication – illustrate just how outmoded the models we’ve been using have become.

With my own remodeling aspirations close at hand, I read this book with intense interest. Having read two of Genosko’s previous books, Undisciplined Theory (Sage, 1998) and McLuhan and Baudrillard: The Masters of Implosion (Routledge, 1999), I knew this would be a wide-ranging and deeply thoughtful text. I often find the indecipherable academese of Genosko’s forebears (e.g., Félix Guattari has been the topic of several of Genosko’s books in the meantime) needlessly complex and often downright annoying. Even Baudrillard, whom I rather enjoy, frequently fails at being anything close to clear. Genosko avoids that here for the most part, but, for instance, he writes in his concluding chapter,

The historico-technological arc from WWII to the WWW sketched the transit into a post-representational configuration of communication in a controlled encounter with what might seem to be chaotically de-territorializing, but that ensured no easy recourse to the metaphysical certainties of existing communication models (p. 131).

I realize that sentence is taken out of context, but I can’t help but think there’s a simpler way to articulate those same ideas. This is a book about communication. As lively and interesting as it is, the book falls short of remodeling much of anything. It does, however, provide an excellent survey and critique of existing communication models and a mostly clear parsing of some rather dense communication theory. Genosko is not for the faint of mind, but Remodelling Communication is a perfect introduction to his substantial and growing body of work.

References:

Baudrillard, Jean. (1981). For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. St. Louis, MO: Telos Press.

Caroselli, Marlene. (2000). Leadership Skills for Managers. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Genosko, Gary. (2012). Remodelling Communication: From WWII to the WWW. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

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

Shannon, Claude E. & Weaver, Warren. (1949). The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.

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Is the double-L in “remodelling” here the Canadian spelling?

Vintage Vantage Points: Steampunk and Such

I’m not much of a collector. I move too much to lug around vast amounts of anything except books, but in the last few years I’ve amassed an archive of Omni Magazines. For the uninitiated, Omni was the weird precursor publication to magazines like Mondo 2000 and Wired. It also serves as a bridge between the old order of science fiction (i.e., space ships, interstellar exploration, cold-war oppression, etc.) and the brink of cyberpunk (i.e., networked computers, chip implants, nanotech, etc.), the latter of which emerged during the periodical’s print run (from October, 1978 to Winter, 1995). I hoard and read Omni for the same reason I read old computer books, hacker histories, and science fiction at all, for that matter, and I’m not alone.

Omni Magazines

Besides the sheer historical function of my stacks of Omnis, which provide an archive of thoughts hardly thinkable now, one of the reasons I enjoy digging through them is the alternative futures featured in their pages. Omni often asked Big Thinkers of the time for predictions. Most of the target years for these prophecies have come and gone, so looking back to look forward is fun, funny, and informative. For instance, in the January, 1987 issue, David Byrne is among 14 thinkers asked about technology 25 years ahead, in 2007. Some of the others include Bill Gates, Timothy Leary, and George Will. In the retro-future sprit, Matt Novak’s Paleofuture, another great source of alternative futures, posted Byrne’s pessimistic predictions in 2011.

Vintage TomorrowsLooking back to look forward, speculating about what might’ve happened had history taken a different turn is largely the premise of steampunk. Sometimes called allohistory, sort of a retro version of design fiction, it’s all about exploring an alternative take on how things have happened. In Vintage Tomorrows (Maker Media/O’Reilly, 2013), James H. Carrott and Brian David Johnson, a historian and a futurist respectively, take their opposing backgrounds on a journey through steampunk culture. Though usual suspects China Miéville, William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and Cory Doctorow all show up in its pages, Vintage Tomorrows is less about the literature and more a global, ethnographic exploration of the whole culture. The gadgets, the costumes, and the reasons are all here in a highly readable, adventure-style form. Oh, steampunk is serious business, but fun is a big part of the focus. “Steampunk strikes me as the least angry quasi-bohemian manifestation I’ve ever seen,” says Gibson, “For god’s sake, it’s about sexy girls in top hats riding penny-farthing bicycles. And they’re all sweet as pie. There’s no scary steampunk.”

With that in mind, here’s an excerpt from my dissertation advisor Barry Brummett’s talk, “Jumping Scale in Steampunk: One Gear Makes You Larger, One Duct Makes You Small,” delivered on October 3, 2012 at our own The University of Texas at Austin [runtime: 4:34]:

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You might think collecting outmoded, outdated magazines is silly, that looking back to look forward seems completely wrongheaded, but, as Henry Jenkins points out in the foreword to Vintage Tomorrows, Christopher Columbus sailed west to get east. Looking back to find paths not taken can yield interesting results. New lands await.

Tales Rabbits Tell: Dominic Pettman’s New Book

Welsh naturalist Ronald M. Lockley spent a large chunk of his life on the rabbit-riddled island of Skokholm just southwest of Wales. When he found he could do better writing about rabbits than catching and breeding them, he wrote The Private Life of the Rabbit (Macmillan, 1964). The book, which is a detailed account of all rabbit activities and proclivities, has become the manual on rabbit life. It informed Richard Adams’ novel, Watership Down (Rex Collings, 1972), which is the rabbit adventure tale, about the ways and mores of leporid life. Fiver, the runt-rabbit guide embodies the spirit animal that bunnies have become in many mythologies, pop cultural contexts, and other great stories.
Rabbit
Rabbits extend far outside of the hillsides, downs, and Easter baskets in which we we typically envision them. Examples I can think of without too much effort include Bugs BunnyGreg the Bunny, the Playboy Bunny, the Ray Johnson documentary How to Draw a Bunny (2002), Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit, 8 Mile‘s B. Rabbit (played by Eminem), the rabbit hole of Lewis Carroll, Bambi’s pal Thumper, Echo and the Bunnymen, the Watership-Down mythology of Fall of Efrafa’s Warren of Snares, and the out-moded rabbit ears of broadcast television. As Susan E. Davis and Margo Demello (2003) write in their definitive Stories Rabbits Tell (Lantern, 2003),

…besides inhabiting forests, fields, backyards, and homes, they inhabit the realm of representation–in folklore and photos, on television and film, in gift stores and in literature. These fabricated rabbits may not tell us much about the lives of real rabbits, but they do tell us a great deal about how we think about rabbits and their place in society (p. 129).

Look at the BunnyLook at the Bunny: Totem, Taboo, Technology by Dominic Pettman (Zer0 Books, 2013) uses the rabbit as totem as a trope through which to interrogate our relationship with technology. Pettman explores the Heideggerian being-toward-death of the pooka in Harvey (1950) and Donnie Darko (2001), the overwrought sexuality of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988), and the spectral haunting of the rabbits in David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006). Like Frank the bunny in Donnie Darko, Pettman reads the rabbits both Of Mice and Men and Watership Down as guides: Looking at the bunny is looking into the future.

Skipping ahead, however, is not always a promising prospect. The Cassandra conundrum of seeing imminent catastrophe and having no one in the present believe you follows the prophet–rabbit or otherwise. The vagabond rabbits of Watership Down led by the frequently hysterical Fiver, Lennie, George, and Candy in Of Mice and Men led by a rabbit-ridden future vision, Donnie Darko led by his daylight hallucinations of Frank, and Elwood led by his imaginary Harvey are all held suspect by their peers. “The list of lapine totems, no doubt, could go on and on–which is partly my point,” Pettman writes (p. 63). Moreover, two more rabbit holes he mentions early in the book include “the bunny plot” and “the Easter egg.” The former is a nagging idea that won’t leave you alone until you write it out of there, and the latter, of course, refers to the hidden treats of media: DVD menus, websites, etc. Pettman writes,

Indeed, the notion of the Easter egg can be employed to reflect on the nature or possibility of significant surprises in a claustrophically overcoded – thus predictable – world. A world seemingly bereft of alternatives. Perhaps we need to enact rituals designed to encourage the magic bunny to break the tedious cultural algorithms that restrict every day – in the West at least – to a smooth series of anticipated rhythms. (After all, a predictable consumer is a docile and productive citizen.) Perhaps we should be finding inspiration from the temporal tricks of this particular totem to get access not to the material Easter eggs of fetishized commodities, but the hidden, virtual gift of the “something else”: an unprecedented experience, a unimagined possibility, an unanticipated alliance, and so on (p. 63).

A future seen eliminates the element of surprise. For the living being, it’s an ontological issue, one that Pettman explores from virtual rabbits to software, citing everyone from Eugene Thacker, McKenzie WarkWilliam Gibson, Marshall McLuhan, and N. Katherine Hayles, to Slavoj Žižek, Deleuze and Guattari, Vilém Flusser, and Giorgio Agamben. Make no mistake, this rabbit hole is deep.

Concluding, Pettman sums it up, writing,

The rabbit, Orc, penguin, avatar, angel, pixelated lover – even Paradise itself – all make appearances in the idiosyncratic virtual montage fashioned by this book. They are neototems for an era in which the monolithic notion of Nature is finally giving way to an understanding of ecology that includes computers as much as whales, and in which humans are just as likely to be sheep as shepherds (p. 164).

Far from the private life of the rabbit, its many public representations can show you the way. Totems can help us see the world with fresh eyes. So, next time you’re lost in the media matrix, wake up and follow the rabbit.

References:

Adams, Richard. (1972). Watership Down. London: Rex Collings.

Davis, Susan E., & Demello, Margo. (2003). Stories Rabbits Tell: A Natural and Cultural History of a Misunderstood Creature. New York: Lantern Books.

Lockley, R. M. (1964). The Private Life of the Rabbit. New York: Macmillan Publishing.

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

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Rabbit drawings by Roy Christopher.

How Soon is Now? The Perpetual Present

When I was growing up, the year 2000 was the temporal touchstone everyone used to mark the advances of modern life. Oh, by then we’d be doing so many technologically enabled things: Cars would fly and run on garbage, computers would run everything, school wouldn’t exist. We were all looking forward, and Y2K gave us a point on the horizon to measure it all by. When it came and went without incident, we were left with what we had in the present. In Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (Current, 2013), Douglas Rushkoff argues that the flipping of the calendar to the new millennium turned our focus from the future to the never-ending now. “We spent the latter part of the 20th Century leaning towards the year 2000, almost obsessed with the future, the dot-com boom, the long boom, and all that,” he tells David Pescovitz, “It was a century of movements with grand goals, wars to end wars, and relentless expansionism. Then we arrived at the 21st, and it was as if we had arrived.”

“We spent centuries thinking of hours and seconds as portions of the day,” he continues, “But a digital second is less a part of greater minute, and more an absolute duration, hanging there like the number flap on an old digital clock.” A digital clock is good at accurately displaying the time right now, but an analog clock is better at showing you how long it’s been since you last looked. Needing, wanting, or having only the former is what present shock is all about. It’s what Ruskoff calls elsewhere “a diminishment of everything that isn’t happening right now — and the onslaught of everything that supposedly is.” As the song goes, when you say it’s gonna happen “now,” well, when exactly do you mean?

Michael Leyton (1992) calls us all “prisoners of the present” ( p. 1), like runners on a temporal treadmill. He argues that “all cognitive activity proceeds via the recovery of the past through objects in the present” (p. 2), and those objects often linger longer than they once did thanks to recording technologies. In 1986 Iain Chambers described the persistence of the present through such media, writing,

With electronic reproduction offering the spectacle of gestures, images, styles, and cultures in a perpetual collage of disintegration and reintegration, the ‘new’ disappears into a permanent present. And with the end of the ‘new’ – a concept connected to linearity, to the serial prospects of ‘progress’, to ‘modernism’ – we move into a perpetual recycling of quotations, styles, and fashions: an uninterrupted montage of the ‘now’ (p. 190).

Present ShockNeedless to say that the situation has only been exacerbated by the onset of the digital. In one form or another, Rushkoff has been working on Present Shock his whole career. In it he continues the critical approach he’s sharpened over his last several books. Where Life, Inc. (Random House, 2009) tackled the corporate takeover of culture and Program or Be Programmed (OR Books, 2010) took on technology head-on, Present Shock deals with the digital demands of the now. A lot of the dilemma is due to the update culture of social media. No one reads two-week old Tweets or month-old blog posts. If it wasn’t posted today, in the last few hours, it disappears into irrelevance. And if it’s too long, it doesn’t get read at all. These are not rivers or streams, they’re puddles. All comments, references, and messages, and no story. The personal narrative is lost. It’s the age of “tl; dr.” The 24-hour news, a present made up of the past, and advertising interrupting everything are also all about right now, but our senses of self maybe the biggest victims.

“Even though we may be able to be in only one place at a time,” Rushkoff writes, “our digital selves are distributed across every device, platform, and network onto which we have cloned our virtual identities” (p. 72). Our online profiles give us an atemporal agency whereon we are there but not actually present. On the other side, our technologies mediate our identities by anticipating or projecting a user. As Brian Rotman (2008) writes, “This projected virtual user is a ghost effect: and abstract agency distinct from any particular embodied user, a variable capable of accommodating any particular user within the medium” (p. xiii). Truncated and clipped, we shrink to fit the roles the media allow.

Mindfulness is an important idea cum buzzword in the midst of all this digital doom. Distraction may be just attention to something else, but what if we’re stuck in permanently distracted present with no sense of the past and no time for the future? If you’ve ever known anyone who truly lives in the moment, nothing matters except that moment. It’s the opposite of The Long Now, what Rushkoff calls the “Short Forever.” Things only have value over time. Citing the time binding of Alfred Korzybski, the father of general semantics, Rushkoff illustrates how we bind the histories of past generations into words and symbols. The beauty is that we can leverage the knowledge of that history without going through it again. The problem is that without a clear picture of the labor involved, we risk mistaking the map for the territory.

James Gleick summed it up nicely when he told me in 1999,”We know we’re surrounding ourselves with time-saving technologies and strategies, and we don’t quite understand how it is that we feel so rushed. We worry that we gain speed and sacrifice depth and quality. We worry that our time horizons are foreshortened — our sense of the past, our sense of the future, our ability to plan, our ability to remember.” Well, here we are. What now?

The existence of this book proves we can still choose. In the last chapter of Present Shock, Rushkoff writes,

…taking the time to write or read a whole book on the phenomenon does draw a line in the sand. It means we can stop the onslaught of demands on our attention; we can create a safe space for uninterrupted contemplation; we can give each moment the value it deserves and no more; we can tolerate uncertainty and resist the temptation to draw connections and conclusions before we are ready; and we can slow or even ignore the seemingly inexorable pull from the strange attractor at the end of human history (p. 265-266).

We don’t have to stop or run, we can pause and slow down. Instant access to every little thing doesn’t mean we have to forsake attended access to a few big things. Take some time, read this book.

References:

Chambers, Iain. (1986). Popular Culture: The Metropolitan Experience. New York: Routledge.

Leyton, Michael. (1992). Symmetry, Causality, Mind. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Morrissey, Steven & Marr, Johnny (1984). How Soon is Now? [Recorded by The Smiths]. On Hatful of Hollow [LP]. London: Rough Trade.

Rotman, Brian. (2008). Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Rushkoff, Douglas. (2013). Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now. New York: Current.

Remix Redux: Transformative Appropriation

Scholars, researchers, and journalists have had a tumultuous relationship with Hip-hop in general and the cultural practice of remixing specifically (McLeod, 2002). Some, seemingly refusing to contend with Hip-hop at all, trace the practice back to the collages of the Dadaists, the détournements of the Situationists, or the cut-ups of Burroughs and Gysin. Regardless, there’s no denying that Hip-hop brought sampling, scratching, and manipulating previously recorded sounds to a global audience. Along with allusion, quotation, and interpolation, sampling is now standard among the tools of the modern media maker (McLeod & DiCola, 2011). It’s one more option in what Joanna Demers (2006) calls “transformative appropriation, the act of referring to or quoting old works in order to create a new work” (p. 4).

Even so, some use such appropriation as an opportunity to either critique or dismiss the idea of originality altogether. In 1985, Eleanor Heartney complained that “we have finally reached the stage where the very notion of artistic originality is suspect” (p. 26). Others want to spread the practice out, to see it everywhere. As Simon Reynolds puts it, appropriately citing the worst misuses of the concept yet,

“We use the old to make the new and the new is always old.” Much the same idea crops up in Austin Kleon’s Steal Like an Artist, a sort of self-help manual for modern creatives. Kleon moves quickly from “every new idea is just a mashup or a remix of one or more previous ideas” to insisting that “you are the sum of your influences” and that “you’re a remix of your mom and dad.”

Remix TheoryEverything is not a remix, and putting two things together does not a remix make. To say that all such combinations, appropriations, and amalgams are remixes is to lose sight of what makes remix a unique concept of its own. Eduardo Navas remedies this line of thinking with a nuanced, discursive approach to remix culture. In his Remix Theory: The Aesthetics of Sampling (Springer, 2012), Navas lays out a systematic way to think about the cultural history and controversial layers of remix, grounded in the “concrete form of sampling,” and focusing on “conceptual strategies used in different forms of art, media, and culture” (p. 6). These include photography, art, and, of course, music. The latter form of remix being rooted in Jamaican dub and defined by three actions: extending, selecting, and reflecting.

Extending the break is the original form of Hip-hop remix, but those roots reach back not only to Jamaica but also to Jazz. When the written melody ended, Jazz players would improvise over the chord changes to keep the dancers moving (Byrne, 2012), just as the original Hip-hop DJs did in the park. Selective remix is just what it sounds like: a new composition created by adding and subtracting elements from the original piece, heightening or downplaying its salient aspects. Reflexive remix extends, adds, and subtracts but also allegorizes the original composition. That is, it is its own thing, but also maintains the original’s “spectacular aura” (Navas, 2012, p.66) and displays “distorted reflections” (Hebdige, 1979, p. 26) of its source material. It is allusive, revealing its sources through a warped, funhouse mirror. In more general terms, Navas contends that remix is the cultural adhesive that holds our current culture together. Remix Theory is as erudite as is is readable and deftly demonstrates how remix applies far outside its origins.

Groove MusicTaking a more specific tack, Mark Katz’s Groove Music: The Art and Culture of the Hip-hop DJ (Oxford University Press, 2012) explores all of the practices of the Hip-hop DJ including remix. With his stethoscope firmly pressed against its chest, Katz listens closely to what Rob Swift calls “the heartbeat of Hip-hop culture.” Groove Music is as definitive a cultural history of sampling, scratching, and remixing you’re likely to find. The art of the DJ proves that it ain’t all final on black vinyl, but Katz has it all down in black and white. From the early 1970s to the early 21st century, it’s all in here. Groove Music along with Joseph Schloss’s Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-hop (Wesleyan, 2004) and Katz’s previous book, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (University of California Press, 2004), will get you a long way to understanding the cultural production of music in the 21st century.

For the most part, Hip-hop DJs and producers don’t think about remix the way that scholars, researchers, or journalists do. Heartney (1985) continues, “Appropriation is culture with an omnivorous appetite, gobbling up every image that wanders across its path” (p. 28). While any DJ might agree with that, their reasons will vary. Are they always making a statement with their sampling choices? Nah, sometimes certain sounds just sound dope together (for one example, see Schloss, 2004, pp. 147-149). As Steinberg (1978) puts it, “there is as much unpredictable originality in quoting, imitating, transposing, and echoing, as there is in inventing” (p. 25). Indeed, cutting and pasting pieces of the past together can yield work as original as any other act of creation.

But you don’t need me to tell you that.

References:

Byrne, David. (2012). How Music Works. San Francisco: McSweeney’s, p. 21.

Demers, Joanna. (2006). Steal This Music: How Intellectual Property Law Affects Musical Creativity. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.

Heartney, Eleanor. (1985, March). Appropriation and the Loss of Authenticity. New Art Examiner, 26-30.

Hebdige, Dick. (1979). Subculture: The Meaning of Style. New York: Routledge.

Katz, Mark. (2012). Groove Music: The Art and Culture of the Hip-hop DJ. New York: Oxford University Press.

McLeod, Kembrew. (2002). The Politics and History of Hip-hop Journalism. In Steve Jones (ed,), Pop Music and the Press. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, pp. 156-167.

McLeod, Kembrew & DiCola, Peter. (2011). Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, p. 55.

Navas, Eduardo. (2012). Remix Theory: The Aesthetics of Sampling. New York: Springer.

Reynolds, Simon. (2012, October 5). You Are Not a Switch: Recreativity and the Modern Dismissal of Genius. Slate.

Schloss, Joseph G. (2004). Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-hop. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Steinberg, L. (1978). The Glorious Company (of Horse Thieves). In J. Lipman & R. Marshall (Eds.), Art About Art, (pp. 21-32). New York: Dutton.

Enjoy the Silence: Jonathan Sterne’s Sound Studies

Though considered the absence of sound, an entity defined by lack, silence is its own swollen signifier. We often find it awkward in social situations, public forums, on the radio. Anywhere we expect the sound of a voice, silence is suspect. “Uncomfortable silences,” Mia Wallace complains in Pulp Fiction (1994), “Why do we feel it’s necessary to yak about bullshit in order to be comfortable?” We fill every space with sound. But, as the sultan of silence, John Cage (1991), taught us, “[S]ilence is not acoustic. It is a change of mind, a turning around” (p. 59)

The most successful ideological effects are those which have no need of words, and ask no more than complicitous silence.
— Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice

Orfield Lab's Anechoic Chamber

Silence indicates unheard voices, both figuratively and literally. In The Sound Studies Reader (Routledge, 2012) edited by Jonathan Sterne, Mladen Dolar writes, “The absence of voices and sounds is hard to endure; complete silence is immediately uncanny, it is like death, while the voice is the first sign of life” (p. 540). Orfied Laboratories’ Anechoic Chamber, built by Eckel Industries and pictured above, is a foam room within a room, built on i-beams and springs, surrounded by steel. The outer room is encased in foot-thick, concrete walls. There’s a running bet at the lab offering a case of beer to anyone who can stay in it with the lights off for over 45 minutes. In a rather psychological example of what Douglas Kahn (1999) calls the “impossible inaudible” (p. 189), no one’s been able to stay inside for more than half an hour. Its death-like silence makes its Guinness Book of World Records award as “The Quietest Place on Earth” seem sinister.

The Sound Studies ReaderIn her investigation of silence in fiction, Alix Ohlin (2012) notes, “Silence, created through ellipsis, white space, and repetition, is another form of erasure; it tells the reader of a pain that is too great to bear, yet must be borne” (p. 58). As Susan Sontag (1969) writes, “Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech” (p. 11). The complaint is often hidden until heard. Breaking the silence is the first step to its resolution. Tara Rodgers’ essay in Sterne’s collection, “Toward a Feminist Historiography of Electronic Music,” also equates silence to a unspoken grievance, quoting poet Adrienne Rich: “The impulse to create begins–often terribly and fearfully–in a tunnel of silence… [T]he first question we might ask a poem is, What kind of voice is breaking the silence, and what kind of silence is being broken?” (p. 478). Similarly, in “The Audio-Visual iPod,” Michael Bull equates it with isolation. Silence makes an uneasy companion.

 Air has so much to say for itself. Sound is just bugged air.
— McKenzie WarkDispositions

Bugging the air and bugging the airwaves, sound surrounds us. In his essay, “The Auditory Dimension,” Don Ihde phenomenologically relates hearing to seeing, the silent to the invisible. Rephrasing the age-old, tree-falling-in-the-forest question, he writes, “Does each event of the visible world offer the occasion, even ultimately from a sounding presence of mute objects, for silence to have a voice? Do all things, when fully experienced, also sound forth?” (p. 27).

MP3: -The Meaning of a FormatTackling the presence of no object, Sterne’s other new book, MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Duke University Press, 2012), investigates the evolution and epistemology of our prevailing sound format. Originally intended as a way to transfer sound over phone lines, the MP3 has become a case study in the digital reorganization of an industry. “Chances are,” Sterne writes, “if a recording takes a ride on the internet, it will travel in the form of an MP3 file” (p. 1). Identifying the internet as its native environment, the “dot-mp3” file extension was born on July 14, 1995. “At some point in the late 90s,” says Karlheinz Brandenburg, whose Ph.D. work in 1982 landed him in the middle of the development of the format, “MP3 was technically the best system out there, and at the same time, it was accessible to everybody.” These two aspects gave the MP3 an early foothold, it was patented in 1989, and now every device that plays digital audio files can play one (Wikström, 2009). With the introduction of the first portable MP3-player in 1998, the record industry’s early-eighties nightmares were coming true (Coleman, 2004), and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) started its ongoing legal battle against the digital revolution. Once online file-sharing and the iPod came online around the turn of the millennium, the floodgates were open, and music was liberated not only from the dams of physical formats but also physical spaces. What once took rooms of equipment and stacks of physical media to enjoy is now in everyone’s pocket.

Where the printing press gave us “an eye for an ear” (McLuhan, 1962, p. 27), the MP3 gave us all an endless, solitary soundtrack. The visual is still culturally privileged over the audible (Kahn, 1999), but studying sound has never been more imperative. The Sound Studies Reader and MP3: The Meaning of a Format, along with Sterne’s earlier book, The Audible Past (Duke University Press, 2003), provide a solid foundation.

Without sound, celebration and grief look nearly the same.
— Sam in Ben Marcus’s The Flame Alphabet

Sharing silence can be the ultimate sign of intimacy. The unspoken solace of a loved one close by manifests a complicit quiet. Mia Wallace continues, “That’s when you know you’ve found somebody special. When you can just shut the fuck up for a minute and comfortably enjoy the silence.” Amen.

References:

Bourdieu, Pierre. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice. New York: Cambridge University Press, p. 188.

Cage, John. (1991, Winter). An Autobiographical Statement. Southwest Review, 76(1), 59.

Coleman, Mark. (2004). Playback: From the Victrola to MP3, 100 Years of Music, Machines, and Money. New York: Da Capo.

Kahn, Douglas. (1999). Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Marcus, Ben. (2012). The Flame Alphabet: A Novel. New York: Knopf, p. 181.

McLuhan, Marshall. (1962). The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Ohlin, Alix. (2012, December). “I Am In Here”: On Silence in Fiction. The Writer’s Chronicle, 45(3), 56-63.

Sontag, Susan. (1969). Styles of Radical Will. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Bender, Lawrence (Producer) & Tarantino, Quentin (Director/Writer). (1994). Pulp Fiction [Motion picture]. United States: A Band Apart.

Wark, McKenzie. (2002). Dispositions. Cambridge, UK: Salt Publishing.

Wikström, Patrik. (2009). The Music Industry. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

The End of an Aura: Replicant Memories

Early in the 21st Century many media technologies and their attendant corporations advanced cultural co-option to a nostalgic phase. With the spread of mass media and technological artifacts, memories once firmly rooted in places in the past now float free of historical context, their auras lost, their eras unknown. “By replicating the work many times over,” writes Benjamin (1968), “it substitutes a mass existence for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to reach the recipient in his or her own situation, it actualizes that which is reproduced” (p. 221). Benjamin argued that the reproduction of art democratized its experience but also rid a work of its aura. With the mass mediation of cultural artifacts since Benjamin’s time, nostalgia has become its own aura.

"It's too bad she won't live..."

The memories are priceless. You lean on the memories.
— R.L. Osborn, Generation F

In his book Culture Jam (1999), Adbusters Magazine founder Kalle Lasn describes a scene in which two people are embarking on a road trip and speak to each other along the way using only quotations from movies. We’ve all felt our lived experience increasingly slipping into technological mediation and representation (Debord, 1994). Based on this idea and the rampant branding and advertising covering any surface upon which an eye may light, he argues that our culture has inducted us into a cult. “By consensus, cult members speak a kind of corporate Esperanto: words and ideas sucked up from TV and advertising” (p. 53). Indeed, we quote television shows, allude to fictional characters and situations, and repeat song lyrics and slogans in everyday conversations. Lasn (1999) argues, “We have been recruited into roles and behavior patterns we did not consciously choose” (p. 53).

Lasn writes about this scenario as if it is a nightmare, but to many of us, this sounds not only familiar but also fun. Cultural allusions invoke a game of sorts. They create a situation that one gets or one doesn’t. To get it is to be in on the gag. Our media is so saturated with allusions that we scarcely think about them as such. A viewing of any single episode of popular television shows Family Guy, South Park, or Robot Chicken yields references to any number of artifacts and cultural detritus past. Their humor relies in large part on the catching and interpreting of allusive references, on their audience sharing the same cultural memories. Hip-hop, with its rife repurposing of sounds via sampling and lyrical allusions, is a culture built on appropriating cultural artifacts and recognizing shared memories.

BLade Runner: Rick Deckard

Memories… You’re talking about memories.
— Rick Deckard, Blade Runner

In Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), the advanced humanoid androids, known as Replicants, base their “human” past on implanted memories. Their intelligence is impressive but not grounded in a larger cognitive context. They are programmed with memories to make them more human (Bukatman, 1997). As CEO Dr. Eldon Tyrell explains to Deckard,

We began to recognize in them strange obsession. After all they are emotional inexperienced with only a few years in which to store up the experiences which you and I take for granted. If we gift them the past, we create a cushion or pillow for their emotions and consequently we can control them better.

The cushion of nostalgia buoys us all. We often feel not only justified but emboldened by superior claims of previous times, even if we don’t quite remember them the same. “Of course things used to be better!” we think. “The past is not the issue at all,” writes Norman M. Klein (1997), “it serves merely as a ‘rosy’ container for the anxieties of the present” (p. 11). In the face of current complications, much like the Replicants in Blade Runner, we long for times we never knew. Lasn argues that this makes us victims of corporate commodification of culture. We’re no better than Replicants, walking around with implanted memories courtesy of the mass media, and its rampant reproduction of artifacts. To most of us though, the sharing of memories, of cultural allusions, bonds us together, gives us a sense of belonging. A lot of this togetherness is due to the technological reproduction of media. As Benjamin (1968) writes,

…technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself. Above all, it enables the original to meet the beholder halfway, be it in the form of a photograph or a phonograph record (p. 220-221).

Replicants are obsessed with photographs. Where the Replicants can’t be sure of what they know (Tosca, 2005), the pictures provide a visual totem, a physical connection to the implanted “cushion” of their memories (Bukatman, 1997; Heldreth, 1997). Where such photographs, as well as phonograph records, are reproductions of scenes and sounds respectively, those forms have given way to digital reproductions of both. Another layer removed lies the manipulation of the digital to replicate its previous analog form. Their remediation represents a crisis of context when filters on digital photos that make them look old and a digital effects that make recordings sound like scratchy vinyl (Katz, 2004). It’s not only longing but also the undermining of that longing.

Because the search for authenticity is a well without a bottom.
– Vanessa Veselka, Zazen

Like Lasn, whether mass culture is a site of exploitation or emancipation was a crucial concern for Benjamin as well (Scannell, 2003), but he was equally concerned with authenticity. “The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity,” he writes (1968, p. 220). The empty nostalgia of our implanted memories holds no original and no original context. Benjamin continues,

The whole sphere of authenticity is outside technical–and, of course, not only technical–reproducibility. Confronted with its manual reproduction, which was usually branded as a forgery, the original preserved all its authority; not so vis à vis technical reproduction (p. 220).

All of these tribulations may seem trivial, but, as Jaron Lanier (2008) writes, “…pop culture is important. It drags us all along with it; it is our shared fate. We can’t simply remain aloof” (p. 385). If pop culture is just recycling plastic pieces of the past, where exactly it is dragging us? Simon Reynolds (2011), who calls our obsession with the past, “retromania,” draws a parallel between nostalgic record collecting and finance, “a hipster stock market based around trading in pasts, not futures” (p. 419), in which a crash is inevitable: “The world economy was brought down by derivatives and bad debt; music has been depleted of meaning through derivatives and indebtedness” (p. 410-420). In such a scenario the “original” is even more revered (i.e., maintains its aura) not only in spite of but also because of its replication. It’s hard to be a purist when nothing is pure.

Popular culture is the testbed of our futurity.
– Kumayama in William Gibson‘s Idoru

Nostalgia is now its own aura. The digital reproduction of cultural artifacts, images, sounds, events, and moment-events has rendered authenticity irrelevant. With an empty past to fill with greatness unattainable, context has become a floating concept. Technological mediation does a great deal of its work by manipulating context through the replication, reproduction, and circulation of moment-events. For example, quotation, which, by definition is to use something deliberately astray of its original context (Schwartz, 1996), is the most transparent form of allusion. All of the pieces of the process are present: the allusion itself, its source, and its appropriation. Allusions work by mapping one context to another. By translating something from one context to another, a new meaning is brought to bear. All meaning is in some way mediated by a mapping as such (Hofstadter, 2007). The new meaning is dependent, however, on recognizing both the original and new contexts. George W. S. Trow (1980) writes of television, “The work of television is to establish false contexts and to chronicle the unraveling of existing contexts; finally, to establish the context of no-context and to chronicle it” (p. 82). Debord (1994) said the same about mass media, that it had no historical context, no stable memory. Now media has gone not only digital but also global via the internet, the web, and mobile technologies of all kinds. The aura of the artifact is all but completely disconnected from the artifact’s historical context.

Below the surface of these new media, distinguishing context is even more dodgy. As Clay Shirky (2010) writes, “Since all the data is digital (expressed as numbers), there is no such thing as a copy anymore. Every piece of data… is identical to every other version of the same piece of data” (p. 54). Unlike most analog media, there’s no such things as an original in the digital. And like some technological “Funes, The Memorious,” our digital archives hang around to haunt us. They never forget.

Book parts

With this in mind, Abby Smith (1998) emphasizes,

…the need for preservation experts to develop a keen understanding of the context in which non-object based information is used, in order to ensure capture of all the vital data necessary to meaningful retrieval. When all data are recorded as 0’s and 1’s, there is, essentially, no object that exists outside of the act of retrieval. The demand for access creates the “object,” that is, the act of retrieval precipitates the temporary reassembling of 0’s and 1’s into a meaningful sequence that can be decoded by software and hardware. A digital art-exhibition catalog, digital comic books, or digital pornography all present themselves as the same, all are literally indistinguishable one from another during storage, unlike, say, a book on a shelf (p. 6).

Analog media show their wear through patina of use. Books show “shelf-wear.” Vinyl records–even compact discs–display gouges and scratches. Scratches, scrapes, scars, stretches, tears, marks, and grooves: These are analog concepts. Digital artifacts black-box their wear, hiding their story and its context from us. We have to hold it all in our heads.

Implants! Those aren’t your memories. They’re somebody else’s.
— Rick Deckard, Blade Runner

If we are to avoid being or becoming mere Replicants, we have to be more mindful of the contexts floating around us. Being able to translate data into meaning requires our paying closer attention to the banks it bridges.

References:

Benjamin, Walter. (1968). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Illuminations. London: Fontana, pp. 217–252.

Bukatman, Scott. (1997). BFI Film Classics: Blade Runner. London: British Film Institute.

Borges, Jorge Luis. (1962). Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings. New York: New Directions.

Debord, Guy. (1994). The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books.

Heldreth, Leonard G. (1997). “Memories… You’re Talkin’ About Memories”: Retrofitting Blade Runner. In Judith B. Kerman (ed.), Retrofitting Blade Runner. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 308-313

Hodstadter, Douglas. (2007). I Am a Strange Loop. New York: Basic Books.

Lewman, Mark, Jenkins, Andy & Jones, Spike. (2008). Freestylin’: Generation F. Wizard Publications/Endo Publishing, p. 19.

Katz, Mark. (2004). Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Klein, Norman M. (1997). The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory. New York: Verso.

Lasn, Kalle. (1999). Culture Jam: The Uncooling of America. New York: William Morrow & Co.

Reynolds, Simon. (2011). Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. New York: Faber and Faber.

Scannell, Paddy. (2003). Benjamin Contextualized: On “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Elihu Katz, John Durham Peters, Tamar Liebes, & Avril Orloff (eds.), Canonical Texts in Media Research. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Shirky, Clay. (2010). Coginitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. New York: Penguin, p. 54.

Smith, Abby. (1998, May/June). Preservation in the Future Tense. CLIR Issues, (3), 1, 6.

Tosca, Susana P. (2005). Implanted Memories, or the Illusion of Free Action. In Will Brooker (ed.), The Blade Runner Experience: The Legacy of a Science Fiction Classic. London: Wallflower Press, 92-107.

Veselka, Vanessa. (2011). Zazen. Brooklyn, NY: Red Lemonade, p. 31.