Vilem Flusser (1920-1991) was, after Marshall McLuhan, one of the most important media theorists of the late 20th century. He’s still not very well known in North America; but I find him far more profound and rewarding than, say, Baudrillard or Virilio (let alone Neil Postman or Paul Levinson).
Towards a Philosophy of Photography, originally published in 1983, is a brief and trenchant discussion of how photography (even before it became digital) serves as the prototype for a fully programmed, post-industrial, post-historical, informationcentric world. Flusser is less sentimental and melancholy than Roland Barthes (Camera Lucida), and more concise and rigorous than Susan Sontag (On Photography). He argues that photography represents a higher degree of abstraction than the writing which it has to a great degree supplanted, even as writing represents a higher degree of abstraction than the painted and drawn images that it supplanted several thousand years ago. Photographs do not render the real; rather they transform it into a highly codified sort of “information.” A photograph doesn’t represent the scene, person, or object being photographed, so much as it represents, and fulfills, the program of the photographic apparatus itself, a program that (like any entity under conditions of Darwinian competition) seeks nothing more than its own perpetuation and extension. Where handmade images promoted magical thinking, and writing promoted conceptual and historical thought, photography and all the technical forms of reproduction that have arisen in its wake actually work to program thought, to anticipate it ,and to mimic and contain it in advance. To simulate thought, in sum.
But unlike other critics of the rule of simulacra, Flusser evidences no nostalgia. He has no Baudrillardian yearning for a “real” that would have supposedly existed prior to photographic reproduction. And he explicitly criticizes the Frankfurt School, for the humanist nostalgia behind its attempts “to unmask the [class] interests behind the apparatuses.” Such approaches merely seek to reinstate the humanistic subject that photography and other post-industrial technical apparatuses have destroyed once and for all.
For Flusser — and this is part of what is so great about him — the only way out is the way through. “A philosophy of photography must reveal the fact that there is no place for human freedom within the area of automated, programmed, and programming apparatuses, in order finally [italics mine] to show a way in which it is nevertheless possible to open up a space for freedom.” It is only possible to invent a new practice of freedom, in other words, when we plumb technical programming (starting with photography, and moving on, today, to digital computing and communications) to the depths; when we take the full measure of what it has accomplished; when we give up our illusions of recovering a supposed pre-photographic, pre-technological mode of being.
Vilem Flusser (1920-1991) was, after Marshall McLuhan, one of the most important media theorists of the late 20th century. He’s still not very well known in North America; but I find him far more profound and rewarding than, say, Baudrillard or Virilio (let alone Neil Postman or Paul Levinson).
Towards a Philosophy of Photography, originally published in 1983, is a brief and trenchant discussion of how photography (even before it became digital) serves as the prototype for a fully programmed, post-industrial, post-historical, informationcentric world. Flusser is less sentimental and melancholy than Roland Barthes (Camera Lucida), and more concise and rigorous than Susan Sontag (On Photography). He argues that photography represents a higher degree of abstraction than the writing which it has to a great degree supplanted, even as writing represents a higher degree of abstraction than the painted and drawn images that it supplanted several thousand years ago. Photographs do not render the real; rather they transform it into a highly codified sort of “information.” A photograph doesn’t represent the scene, person, or object being photographed, so much as it represents, and fulfills, the program of the photographic apparatus itself, a program that (like any entity under conditions of Darwinian competition) seeks nothing more than its own perpetuation and extension. Where handmade images promoted magical thinking, and writing promoted conceptual and historical thought, photography and all the technical forms of reproduction that have arisen in its wake actually work to program thought, to anticipate it ,and to mimic and contain it in advance. To simulate thought, in sum.
But unlike other critics of the rule of simulacra, Flusser evidences no nostalgia. He has no Baudrillardian yearning for a “real” that would have supposedly existed prior to photographic reproduction. And he explicitly criticizes the Frankfurt School, for the humanist nostalgia behind its attempts “to unmask the [class] interests behind the apparatuses.” Such approaches merely seek to reinstate the humanistic subject that photography and other post-industrial technical apparatuses have destroyed once and for all.
For Flusser — and this is part of what is so great about him — the only way out is the way through. “A philosophy of photography must reveal the fact that there is no place for human freedom within the area of automated, programmed, and programming apparatuses, in order finally [italics mine] to show a way in which it is nevertheless possible to open up a space for freedom.” It is only possible to invent a new practice of freedom, in other words, when we plumb technical programming (starting with photography, and moving on, today, to digital computing and communications) to the depths; when we take the full measure of what it has accomplished; when we give up our illusions of recovering a supposed pre-photographic, pre-technological mode of being.
I’ve long felt a bit ambivalent about Bruno Latour, and I feel all the more that way after reading his book Pandora’s Hope. (I’ve previously read We Have Never Been Modern, plus a good number of essays).
I like the way Latour focuses on the details of actual scientific practice, and how he uses these details to argue for a complex set of mediations and links in the course of which humans are bound together with nonhumans – a model that he cogently argues is far preferable to the common one that simply confronts a linguistic statement, or a mental model, with a state of affairs in the world, and asks whether the statement representationally corresponds with, or accurately points to, the state of affairs. Latour is right to say that this dualistic, correspondence theory of truth (or its inversion, the deconstructionist abyss of language that cannot reach out beyond itself to the world) ignores the way that things like scientific theories, statements, and models are themselves actions or events or performances in the world. Latour is not the first thinker to resituate language in the world in this way, but he is the one who has applied it to the understanding of science, and specifically scientific practice.
Latour thus cuts the Gordian knot of the dispute between realism (‘the facts of science exist independently of us’) and constructionism (scientific entities are “socially constructed”). He says that the fallacy shared by both sides to this dispute is to think that “constructed” and “real” are opposites, when in fact they go in tandem: the more something is “constructed” (socially or otherwise) the realer it is, because the more it is interconnected with other things, the more it operates with and upon, and affects, other things, and so on. This seems to me exactly right
(It’s also a point that is consonant with Ian Hacking’s arguments, in The Social Construction of What, about the use of the phrase “social construction.” Hacking shows how many different meanings this phrase has; he suggests that it really functions as a marker of difference. We say that gender is “socially constructed” in order to argue against claims that it is entirely “in the genes”; we do not say that a bridge is “socially constructed,” because nobody argues that the Golden Gate Bridge somehow arose by itself).
Nonetheless, I am enough of a realist that I am made uneasy when Latour says, for instance, that yeast did not cause lactic acid fermentation until 1864, when Pasteur established this action in the laboratory. I agree that Pasteur’s experiments did not just reveal an always-existing truth; since those experiments mobilized the yeast, made it interact with human interests, both by establishing new scientific doctrine, and by making the commercial exploitation of the fermentation process possible on a scale and in a manner that it was not before. In pragmatist terms, Pasteur’s experiments, and his theoretical extrapolation from those experiments, made it possible for us to predict and control the fermentation process, and the life history of yeast, for the first time.
But it still seems disingenuous to me for Latour to say that it was only after 1864 that the process took place, or (to put his point as precisely as possible) that it is only after 1864 that the process of fermentation by the action of yeast (rather than fermentation as a byproduct of organic decay, as was previously believed) can be said to have taken place before 1864. In one sense, Latour’s statement is a tautology; but I think that Latour is trying to pull a fast one, by using this tautology to insinuate a deeper meaning, according to which the change in the world that took place in 1864 affected something more than certain instrumental activities of human beings with yeast.
Latour says that he is simply including yeast as well as human beings in history, rather than seeing yeast as unchanging and ahistorical “in and of itself.” But this begs the question of how the actions of yeast in fact affected human beings well before Pasteur mobilized yeast into what Latour calls the “collective.”
Latour’s sleight-of-hand becomes a still more serious matter when he presents his grand view of science and politics. He wants to repeal what he calls the modern “settlement” that radically separated subject from object, as well as Truth from Opinion, Knowledge from Power, Right from Might. He cleverly suggests that the Platonic and Cartesian dictatorship of Reason shares common assumptions with the view of the Sophists, of Hobbes, and of Nietzsche, that would seek to deconstruct it. He suggests that both Socrates and his opponents, and more recently both the scientific rationalists and Nietzsche, both the positivists and Foucault, distrust the “people” or the “mob”, and disagree only on whether the violent imposition to reign in this “mob” should be that of a hypostasized Reason or that of a more naked Power.
It’s not that I would want to defend a renewed elitism against Latour’s populism here. But Latour idealizes what a fully engaged politics (as opposed to one governed from without by the forceful imposition of scientific reason) would actually be. He idealizes and sentimentalizes the civility and consensus of a “body politic” uninfected by the dictatorship of an abstract Reason. One can observe the intractability of many human disputes and political conflicts (having to do with such things as class and other forms of privilege, wealth, and prestige, or with the control of the regime of productivity and the distribution of whatever social surplus there may be) without believing, as Latour accuses defenders of rationalism from Socrates to Steven Weinberg of doing, that “scientific” objectivity is the one thing that saves humankind from descending into barbarity and a Hobbesian “war of all against all.” One can agree that the rage of modernist iconoclasm often produces the very dehumanizing phenomena that it claims to be waging war against, without sharing Latour’s piety towards “fetishes” and “icons.”
In making “modernism” and its “settlement” his enemy, Latour can’t help reproducing modernity’s own logic, in the form of an idealized depiction of that which preceded the modern. Although he rightly says that the unalienated “pre-modern” is nothing but a modernist fantasy, he himself reproduces the very same fantasy, in his picture of a world uninfected by modernism, as well as in his assertion that “we have never been modern,” that modernity has only given greater scope to nonmodern “mixtures” in practice, by refusing them admission into theory.
In short: we must add to Latour’s account the additional awareness that we have never not been modern, that we have never been free of modernist divisions and impositions.
(This is a more Derridean conclusion than I wanted to get to; I think the way out is to ask different sorts of questions, and indeed this is what Latour says we should do; but Latour doesn’t ask the right different questions. He doesn’t quite succeed in pointing the way to his self-confessed goal, a Whiteheadean account that does justice both to science and to other modes of human experience of the world).
I’ve long felt a bit ambivalent about Bruno Latour, and I feel all the more that way after reading his book Pandora’s Hope. (I’ve previously read We Have Never Been Modern, plus a good number of essays).
I like the way Latour focuses on the details of actual scientific practice, and how he uses these details to argue for a complex set of mediations and links in the course of which humans are bound together with nonhumans – a model that he cogently argues is far preferable to the common one that simply confronts a linguistic statement, or a mental model, with a state of affairs in the world, and asks whether the statement representationally corresponds with, or accurately points to, the state of affairs. Latour is right to say that this dualistic, correspondence theory of truth (or its inversion, the deconstructionist abyss of language that cannot reach out beyond itself to the world) ignores the way that things like scientific theories, statements, and models are themselves actions or events or performances in the world. Latour is not the first thinker to resituate language in the world in this way, but he is the one who has applied it to the understanding of science, and specifically scientific practice.
Latour thus cuts the Gordian knot of the dispute between realism (‘the facts of science exist independently of us’) and constructionism (scientific entities are “socially constructed”). He says that the fallacy shared by both sides to this dispute is to think that “constructed” and “real” are opposites, when in fact they go in tandem: the more something is “constructed” (socially or otherwise) the realer it is, because the more it is interconnected with other things, the more it operates with and upon, and affects, other things, and so on. This seems to me exactly right
(It’s also a point that is consonant with Ian Hacking’s arguments, in The Social Construction of What, about the use of the phrase “social construction.” Hacking shows how many different meanings this phrase has; he suggests that it really functions as a marker of difference. We say that gender is “socially constructed” in order to argue against claims that it is entirely “in the genes”; we do not say that a bridge is “socially constructed,” because nobody argues that the Golden Gate Bridge somehow arose by itself).
Nonetheless, I am enough of a realist that I am made uneasy when Latour says, for instance, that yeast did not cause lactic acid fermentation until 1864, when Pasteur established this action in the laboratory. I agree that Pasteur’s experiments did not just reveal an always-existing truth; since those experiments mobilized the yeast, made it interact with human interests, both by establishing new scientific doctrine, and by making the commercial exploitation of the fermentation process possible on a scale and in a manner that it was not before. In pragmatist terms, Pasteur’s experiments, and his theoretical extrapolation from those experiments, made it possible for us to predict and control the fermentation process, and the life history of yeast, for the first time.
But it still seems disingenuous to me for Latour to say that it was only after 1864 that the process took place, or (to put his point as precisely as possible) that it is only after 1864 that the process of fermentation by the action of yeast (rather than fermentation as a byproduct of organic decay, as was previously believed) can be said to have taken place before 1864. In one sense, Latour’s statement is a tautology; but I think that Latour is trying to pull a fast one, by using this tautology to insinuate a deeper meaning, according to which the change in the world that took place in 1864 affected something more than certain instrumental activities of human beings with yeast.
Latour says that he is simply including yeast as well as human beings in history, rather than seeing yeast as unchanging and ahistorical “in and of itself.” But this begs the question of how the actions of yeast in fact affected human beings well before Pasteur mobilized yeast into what Latour calls the “collective.”
Latour’s sleight-of-hand becomes a still more serious matter when he presents his grand view of science and politics. He wants to repeal what he calls the modern “settlement” that radically separated subject from object, as well as Truth from Opinion, Knowledge from Power, Right from Might. He cleverly suggests that the Platonic and Cartesian dictatorship of Reason shares common assumptions with the view of the Sophists, of Hobbes, and of Nietzsche, that would seek to deconstruct it. He suggests that both Socrates and his opponents, and more recently both the scientific rationalists and Nietzsche, both the positivists and Foucault, distrust the “people” or the “mob”, and disagree only on whether the violent imposition to reign in this “mob” should be that of a hypostasized Reason or that of a more naked Power.
It’s not that I would want to defend a renewed elitism against Latour’s populism here. But Latour idealizes what a fully engaged politics (as opposed to one governed from without by the forceful imposition of scientific reason) would actually be. He idealizes and sentimentalizes the civility and consensus of a “body politic” uninfected by the dictatorship of an abstract Reason. One can observe the intractability of many human disputes and political conflicts (having to do with such things as class and other forms of privilege, wealth, and prestige, or with the control of the regime of productivity and the distribution of whatever social surplus there may be) without believing, as Latour accuses defenders of rationalism from Socrates to Steven Weinberg of doing, that “scientific” objectivity is the one thing that saves humankind from descending into barbarity and a Hobbesian “war of all against all.” One can agree that the rage of modernist iconoclasm often produces the very dehumanizing phenomena that it claims to be waging war against, without sharing Latour’s piety towards “fetishes” and “icons.”
In making “modernism” and its “settlement” his enemy, Latour can’t help reproducing modernity’s own logic, in the form of an idealized depiction of that which preceded the modern. Although he rightly says that the unalienated “pre-modern” is nothing but a modernist fantasy, he himself reproduces the very same fantasy, in his picture of a world uninfected by modernism, as well as in his assertion that “we have never been modern,” that modernity has only given greater scope to nonmodern “mixtures” in practice, by refusing them admission into theory.
In short: we must add to Latour’s account the additional awareness that we have never not been modern, that we have never been free of modernist divisions and impositions.
(This is a more Derridean conclusion than I wanted to get to; I think the way out is to ask different sorts of questions, and indeed this is what Latour says we should do; but Latour doesn’t ask the right different questions. He doesn’t quite succeed in pointing the way to his self-confessed goal, a Whiteheadean account that does justice both to science and to other modes of human experience of the world).
Apropa’t, by Savath and Savalas, is the latest album by Scott Herren, who is better known for the music he releases under the name Prefuse 73. (You can purchase it digitally from Warp Records online, for considerably less than it costs as a CD. Also, the download is in the form of unencrypted mp3 files).
This music is very different from Prefuse 73. It’s slow, dreamy, and somewhat folkish, with no glitches and not much of a beat. Herren is collaborating here with vocalist Eva Puyuelo Muns, who sings ethereally in Catalan and Spanish.
What I love about this album is how it evades attention,and never quite coalesces. The lovely melodies never quite come into focus. The music slips and slides right past my center of awareness. It’s as if I’d been (oxymoronically) hypnotized into distraction. And no, I haven’t the faintest idea how, musically speaking, Herren accomplishes this.
Apropa’t, by Savath and Savalas, is the latest album by Scott Herren, who is better known for the music he releases under the name Prefuse 73. (You can purchase it digitally from Warp Records online, for considerably less than it costs as a CD. Also, the download is in the form of unencrypted mp3 files).
This music is very different from Prefuse 73. It’s slow, dreamy, and somewhat folkish, with no glitches and not much of a beat. Herren is collaborating here with vocalist Eva Puyuelo Muns, who sings ethereally in Catalan and Spanish.
What I love about this album is how it evades attention,and never quite coalesces. The lovely melodies never quite come into focus. The music slips and slides right past my center of awareness. It’s as if I’d been (oxymoronically) hypnotized into distraction. And no, I haven’t the faintest idea how, musically speaking, Herren accomplishes this.
Catherine Hardwicke’s Thirteen, about the sex and drugs experiences of a 13-year-old girl, is a powerful movie, with great acting and interesting, lively direction. Digital camera, often handheld and shaky, lots of pans, lots of quick edits, manipulation of color to be supersaturated in druggy, decadent scenes and washed out in tragic family ones: these are all the kinds of things that many critics condemn as facile and gimmicky, but for me it works, it crackles and jumps, it moves; although it seems at this point less like auteurial expression than a style as codified as classical Hollywood ‘invisible’ editing ever was.
But I was bothered, finally, by how conservative and moralistic Thirteen is, once you get past its lurid will to shock (or, perhaps, such moralism is the inevitable correlate of a lurid will to shock). The film presents its thirteen-year-old protagonist’s giddy experiences (hedonism as a mask for despair) as a veritable descent into hell: Pleasure Is Bad For You. (Nothing she does would be all that shocking for a 16-year-old white girl in southern California: pot, beer, sniffing aerosol cans, heavier drugs only on rare occasions; shoplifitng, slutwear, piercing; going down on slightly older boys who — oh my god — are black; and a little scarification when the pain gets too great; but the movie wants to magnify it all by playing on our thoughts that thirteen is way too young).
And the anatomy of why she does what she does is pretty cliched, once you look past the great performances: broken home, a mom who doesn’t spend enough time with her daughter, an absent father, a manipulative slut of a best friend, etc: a “family values” analysis that is totally consonant with the Republican Party platform.
The film probably gets the teen slang and mores down (as far as I can guess; no way I could really know, since I’m 50 and my daughter is only 1 1/2). But alas, there is no Bataillean excess here. And as a portrait of teen girls’ folie a deux, Thirteen is far inferior to Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures (his best movie, LOTR notwithstanding) or Rafal Zielinski’s almost entirely unknown and utterly brilliant Fun.
Catherine Hardwicke’s Thirteen, about the sex and drugs experiences of a 13-year-old girl, is a powerful movie, with great acting and interesting, lively direction. Digital camera, often handheld and shaky, lots of pans, lots of quick edits, manipulation of color to be supersaturated in druggy, decadent scenes and washed out in tragic family ones: these are all the kinds of things that many critics condemn as facile and gimmicky, but for me it works, it crackles and jumps, it moves; although it seems at this point less like auteurial expression than a style as codified as classical Hollywood ‘invisible’ editing ever was.
But I was bothered, finally, by how conservative and moralistic Thirteen is, once you get past its lurid will to shock (or, perhaps, such moralism is the inevitable correlate of a lurid will to shock). The film presents its thirteen-year-old protagonist’s giddy experiences (hedonism as a mask for despair) as a veritable descent into hell: Pleasure Is Bad For You. (Nothing she does would be all that shocking for a 16-year-old white girl in southern California: pot, beer, sniffing aerosol cans, heavier drugs only on rare occasions; shoplifitng, slutwear, piercing; going down on slightly older boys who — oh my god — are black; and a little scarification when the pain gets too great; but the movie wants to magnify it all by playing on our thoughts that thirteen is way too young).
And the anatomy of why she does what she does is pretty cliched, once you look past the great performances: broken home, a mom who doesn’t spend enough time with her daughter, an absent father, a manipulative slut of a best friend, etc: a “family values” analysis that is totally consonant with the Republican Party platform.
The film probably gets the teen slang and mores down (as far as I can guess; no way I could really know, since I’m 50 and my daughter is only 1 1/2). But alas, there is no Bataillean excess here. And as a portrait of teen girls’ folie a deux, Thirteen is far inferior to Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures (his best movie, LOTR notwithstanding) or Rafal Zielinski’s almost entirely unknown and utterly brilliant Fun.
Another brilliant Johnny To film: The Mission. This one is less extravagant than the others I’ve seen; but it has the same fragmented narrative, and the same gorgeously oblique nighttime cinematography. Only this one is more about things that don’t quite happen, about waiting for things to happen. A team of bodyguards is assembled to protect a crime boss from assassination. They succeed; the boss remains safe, and the rival responsible for the assassination attempts is found. But then, the group has other problems to face….
The memorable parts of this film are those poised on the brink of action. It’s all about waiting. The bodyguards frozen in posture, waiting for the next assault; or bored, since nothing is happening, they idly kick around a wadded-up ball of paper as if it were a soccer ball.
The assassins may come from anywhere; gunfire breaks out suddenly, with no chance of preparation. A sniper shoots from the top of a tall office building. Or shots ring out, seemingly from nowhere, in a largely deserted shopping mall. Or an ambush is launched from a seemingly deserted warehouse.
Johnny To sets up these scenes, their angles of vision and of shooting, with all the precision of John Woo (and before him, of Peckinpah, of Fuller, of classical action cinema); but the spaces in which these sightlines and shotlines are so precisely articulated, are the topologically twisted, non-Cartesian spaces of postmodernity.
Time is contorted as well as space; the moments of action are almost evanescent, you can’t keep them in mind, as they are surrounded and engulfed by the motionless stretches of before and after.
This is not the modernist waiting for a future that never arrives (as was the case in Waiting for Godot, in Blanchot’s novels, and for that matter in Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo); it’s more that the action itself forms part of the waiting, the future is already enveloped in the present time of waiting, so that you are not waiting for something to happen that never does, but rather waiting precisely because it already is happening, it is here, it is now, and you have to wait in order to play your appointed part in it.
Another brilliant Johnny To film: The Mission. This one is less extravagant than the others I’ve seen; but it has the same fragmented narrative, and the same gorgeously oblique nighttime cinematography. Only this one is more about things that don’t quite happen, about waiting for things to happen. A team of bodyguards is assembled to protect a crime boss from assassination. They succeed; the boss remains safe, and the rival responsible for the assassination attempts is found. But then, the group has other problems to face….
The memorable parts of this film are those poised on the brink of action. It’s all about waiting. The bodyguards frozen in posture, waiting for the next assault; or bored, since nothing is happening, they idly kick around a wadded-up ball of paper as if it were a soccer ball.
The assassins may come from anywhere; gunfire breaks out suddenly, with no chance of preparation. A sniper shoots from the top of a tall office building. Or shots ring out, seemingly from nowhere, in a largely deserted shopping mall. Or an ambush is launched from a seemingly deserted warehouse.
Johnny To sets up these scenes, their angles of vision and of shooting, with all the precision of John Woo (and before him, of Peckinpah, of Fuller, of classical action cinema); but the spaces in which these sightlines and shotlines are so precisely articulated, are the topologically twisted, non-Cartesian spaces of postmodernity.
Time is contorted as well as space; the moments of action are almost evanescent, you can’t keep them in mind, as they are surrounded and engulfed by the motionless stretches of before and after.
This is not the modernist waiting for a future that never arrives (as was the case in Waiting for Godot, in Blanchot’s novels, and for that matter in Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo); it’s more that the action itself forms part of the waiting, the future is already enveloped in the present time of waiting, so that you are not waiting for something to happen that never does, but rather waiting precisely because it already is happening, it is here, it is now, and you have to wait in order to play your appointed part in it.
DJ Danger Mouse‘s Grey Album is, at the very least, an audacious conceptual coup. DangerMouse combines the unchanged vocal tracks of Jay-Z’s Black Album with instrumentals derived from the Beatles’ (so-called) white album.
Musically, I’m not convinced this re-engineering really works; voice and music don’t really go together convincingly, but neither do they clash in ways that seem particularly meaningful. There’s no real “dialectical interaction” here; and, as a commentary on race, or on black and white music, nothing in the actual sounds goes beyond the initial idea.
Still, the results are weird enough to deserve a couple of listens. The Beatles material is cut up and rhythmically manhandled, in order to line up with Jay-Z’s raps.
Predictably, Danger Mouse received a cease and desist order from EMI Records for this stunt. Yet another example of the way that copyright is inimical to creativity. Sampling and recombination are what music (and culture in general) is about right now. The paradox of art today is that originality comes out of repetition: from altering, and doing violence to, what already exists. To ban sampling is not to protect original art, but to make sure that only derivative and unimaginative works ever get made.
Fortunately illegal art still has the album for download.
DJ Danger Mouse‘s Grey Album is, at the very least, an audacious conceptual coup. DangerMouse combines the unchanged vocal tracks of Jay-Z’s Black Album with instrumentals derived from the Beatles’ (so-called) white album.
Musically, I’m not convinced this re-engineering really works; voice and music don’t really go together convincingly, but neither do they clash in ways that seem particularly meaningful. There’s no real “dialectical interaction” here; and, as a commentary on race, or on black and white music, nothing in the actual sounds goes beyond the initial idea.
Still, the results are weird enough to deserve a couple of listens. The Beatles material is cut up and rhythmically manhandled, in order to line up with Jay-Z’s raps.
Predictably, Danger Mouse received a cease and desist order from EMI Records for this stunt. Yet another example of the way that copyright is inimical to creativity. Sampling and recombination are what music (and culture in general) is about right now. The paradox of art today is that originality comes out of repetition: from altering, and doing violence to, what already exists. To ban sampling is not to protect original art, but to make sure that only derivative and unimaginative works ever get made.
Fortunately illegal art still has the album for download.
Strictly Kev’s “Raiding the 20th Century” (warning: 54MB download; site is often down) is an amazing mash-up, or rather meta-mash-up. That is to say, this almost-40-minute-long mixtape doesn’t only sample multiple sonic sources at once; but the sources it samples are themselves mash-ups, composed of multiple samples at once (e.g., it doesn’t sample James Brown, but Double Dee and Steinski’s James Brown mix; it doesn’t sample Eminem, but the Freelance Hairdresser’s mix of Eminem with a ragtime piano). It’s sonically dense, in a way that repays multiple listenings: I’ve been playing it over and over for the last couple of weeks, and I still discover fresh things each time, that I hadn’t noticed before.
“Raiding the 20th Century” works in a variety of ways: 1)by moment-to-moment juxtapositions, in a sort of manic free association; 2)by recurring motifs, as sonic landmarks old and new (from the Beatles to Beyonce) keep on returning in varying combinations; 3)by suggesting a sort of narrative, with suggestions of chronology from the invention of mixing in the mid-20th century through the digital developments at that century’s end (though the chronology is not strict and is often violated, there’s enough of it there to reinforce the suggestion that some sort of story is being told: we start with the brute fact of the tape recorder, mixing sounds promiscuously; then at about 14 minutes into the set, we are invited back to the origins of taping, and from there we progress forward to the present; 4)by the insertion of various voices discussing the art of the mixtape (William Burroughs discoursing on the cut-up method with tape recorders; John Lennon being interviewed on how he put together “Revolution 9″; fragments of McLuhan’s ‘The Medium is the Massage” recording, etc.).
“Raiding the 20th Century” is emotionally gripping as well as intellectually challenging: it is exhilarating like I imagine a ride in a space ship would be. Beyond the game of identifying fragments (that’s Jimi Hendrix! that’s Kelis! that’s … it is so familiar but I can’t quite put my finger on it), it powerfully suggests a continuum through time (if not quite space: it is nearly all Ango-American, with little or no “world music”), a Celestial Jukebox in which patterns of musical invention jostle one another without being bogged down by ownership, copyright, and other barriers to (even if they are supposed to be rewards of) creativity.
Strictly Kev’s “Raiding the 20th Century” (warning: 54MB download; site is often down) is an amazing mash-up, or rather meta-mash-up. That is to say, this almost-40-minute-long mixtape doesn’t only sample multiple sonic sources at once; but the sources it samples are themselves mash-ups, composed of multiple samples at once (e.g., it doesn’t sample James Brown, but Double Dee and Steinski’s James Brown mix; it doesn’t sample Eminem, but the Freelance Hairdresser’s mix of Eminem with a ragtime piano). It’s sonically dense, in a way that repays multiple listenings: I’ve been playing it over and over for the last couple of weeks, and I still discover fresh things each time, that I hadn’t noticed before.
“Raiding the 20th Century” works in a variety of ways: 1)by moment-to-moment juxtapositions, in a sort of manic free association; 2)by recurring motifs, as sonic landmarks old and new (from the Beatles to Beyonce) keep on returning in varying combinations; 3)by suggesting a sort of narrative, with suggestions of chronology from the invention of mixing in the mid-20th century through the digital developments at that century’s end (though the chronology is not strict and is often violated, there’s enough of it there to reinforce the suggestion that some sort of story is being told: we start with the brute fact of the tape recorder, mixing sounds promiscuously; then at about 14 minutes into the set, we are invited back to the origins of taping, and from there we progress forward to the present; 4)by the insertion of various voices discussing the art of the mixtape (William Burroughs discoursing on the cut-up method with tape recorders; John Lennon being interviewed on how he put together “Revolution 9″; fragments of McLuhan’s ‘The Medium is the Massage” recording, etc.).
“Raiding the 20th Century” is emotionally gripping as well as intellectually challenging: it is exhilarating like I imagine a ride in a space ship would be. Beyond the game of identifying fragments (that’s Jimi Hendrix! that’s Kelis! that’s … it is so familiar but I can’t quite put my finger on it), it powerfully suggests a continuum through time (if not quite space: it is nearly all Ango-American, with little or no “world music”), a Celestial Jukebox in which patterns of musical invention jostle one another without being bogged down by ownership, copyright, and other barriers to (even if they are supposed to be rewards of) creativity.
I was interviewed about my new book on the Seattle municipal channel on local cable TV. For what it’s worth, you can find a Real Video feed of the interview here.
I was interviewed about my new book on the Seattle municipal channel on local cable TV. For what it’s worth, you can find a Real Video feed of the interview here.
Steven Johnson is always a lucid, thoughtful, and insightful science writer, and his new book Mind Wide Open, if not quite as rich as his previous book Emergence, is nonetheless quite thought-provoking.
Johnson gives us a brief tour through recent discoveries and technologies in neuroscience, with special emphasis on their pragmatic implications. There are chapters on neurofeedback and MRI scans, on the brain circuits involved in the fear response, on hormones and neurotransmitters (and the drugs that closely mimic them), and on the psychophysiology of laughter and of attention. In each case, Johnson asks what these technologies or discoveries can tell us about ourselves: more specifically and autobiographically, he spells out what they helped him to learn about himself.
Though Johnson gives too much credit, I think, to the fantasies of evolutionary psychology and cognitive science, the two great pseudoscientific superstitions of our age, his emphasis is mostly on those aspects of recent psychology that actually do have a solid experimental and scientific basis: studies of the chemistry and the neural architecture of the brain.
Two aspects of the book particularly interest me. The first is where Johnson writes about “recreational” neurofeedback and neurochemistry. Most of the technologies he discusses are being developed for medical use: to help people with Attention Deficit Disorder or with Parkinson’s, for instance. But understanding how brain wave patterns and neurotransmitter levels affect mood, judgement, comprehension, and even creativity, and learning ways to alter one’s own patterns and levels at will, is potentially valuable for people in everyday situations as well. There are times when an adrenaline rush is useful, and other times when it just gets in the way; times when acute concentration might lead to a creative breakthrough, and times when distraction might be more helpful. Drugs are relatively crude tools, in comparison to being able to more precisely modulate one’s own neurochemical balances.
The second part of Mind Wide Open that especially interested me was Johnson’s conclusion, where he writes about how Freud stands up to recent neurobiological discoveries. Rather than indulge in fashionable Freud-bashing, he paints a rather nuanced picture. Contemporary brain science shows that Freud was right that much mental activity is unconscious, and that the seeming unity of the self is largely an illusion, since mental activity is made up of multiple, and often mutually contradictory, processes or “modules.” On the other hand, the part of Freud that Johnson rejects (or says that recent discoveries ought to lead us to reject) is the whole theory of repression. Instead of Freud’s “dynamic” model of the psyche, where energies get bottled up and need release, Johnson suggests that the new neuroscience leads us to “another metaphor: the brain as Darwinian ecosystem, instead of steam engine” (198). Understanding the mind is a matter of “pattern recognition instead of code breaking” (207): there is no deep, repressed meaning, no hidden censored core, behind the pattern of symptoms, and into which that pattern needs to be translated.
In one way, I find this an attractive demystification. But in another way, I wonder if it isn’t a cop-out, or an overly comforting idealization. For one thing, the metaphor of a “Darwinian ecosystem” is itself problematic. “Darwinian” implies struggle and competition, the brutal “survival of the fittest”, ultimately “nature red in tooth and claw” (which arch-Darwinist Richard Dawkins regards as a fair and accurate description of natural selection). An “ecosystem,” on the other hand, suggests balance, mutuality, a federation of parts each of which is necessary to a whole that is thereby greater than the sum of its parts. The two words reflect two different biological visions, between which theoretical biologists are indeed antagonistically split today. They both probably represent partial truths, but reconciling them as Johnson implicitly does is something of a sleight-of-hand.
The deeper problem is that, in dispensing with Freudian repression, we are left with too much of a functionalist account of the brain or mind. Even the mind’s conflicts and dissonances serve a useful purpose; “in the Darwinian model, failures are a sign of success” (200). From the point of view of the all-embracing ecosystem (if not of the species that go extinct in the struggle) all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.
There’s not enough room in this picture for the nearly infinite perversity, whimsicality, self-defeating stubbornness, willful blindness, and obsession of which human minds are capable. While I don’t necessarily believe that Freud’s theories (castration, Oedipus, the death drive) are the best account, or even a good account, of why and how these things happen, I think that any theory that would relegate them to minor exceptions, or to failures of “normal” development — which is what a functionalist theory inevitably does — is unacceptable. Function needs to be explained in the larger context of dysfunction, rather than dysfunction being seen as only a deviation from, or failure of, otherwise ubiquitous function.
Steven Johnson is always a lucid, thoughtful, and insightful science writer, and his new book Mind Wide Open, if not quite as rich as his previous book Emergence, is nonetheless quite thought-provoking.
Johnson gives us a brief tour through recent discoveries and technologies in neuroscience, with special emphasis on their pragmatic implications. There are chapters on neurofeedback and MRI scans, on the brain circuits involved in the fear response, on hormones and neurotransmitters (and the drugs that closely mimic them), and on the psychophysiology of laughter and of attention. In each case, Johnson asks what these technologies or discoveries can tell us about ourselves: more specifically and autobiographically, he spells out what they helped him to learn about himself.
Though Johnson gives too much credit, I think, to the fantasies of evolutionary psychology and cognitive science, the two great pseudoscientific superstitions of our age, his emphasis is mostly on those aspects of recent psychology that actually do have a solid experimental and scientific basis: studies of the chemistry and the neural architecture of the brain.
Two aspects of the book particularly interest me. The first is where Johnson writes about “recreational” neurofeedback and neurochemistry. Most of the technologies he discusses are being developed for medical use: to help people with Attention Deficit Disorder or with Parkinson’s, for instance. But understanding how brain wave patterns and neurotransmitter levels affect mood, judgement, comprehension, and even creativity, and learning ways to alter one’s own patterns and levels at will, is potentially valuable for people in everyday situations as well. There are times when an adrenaline rush is useful, and other times when it just gets in the way; times when acute concentration might lead to a creative breakthrough, and times when distraction might be more helpful. Drugs are relatively crude tools, in comparison to being able to more precisely modulate one’s own neurochemical balances.
The second part of Mind Wide Open that especially interested me was Johnson’s conclusion, where he writes about how Freud stands up to recent neurobiological discoveries. Rather than indulge in fashionable Freud-bashing, he paints a rather nuanced picture. Contemporary brain science shows that Freud was right that much mental activity is unconscious, and that the seeming unity of the self is largely an illusion, since mental activity is made up of multiple, and often mutually contradictory, processes or “modules.” On the other hand, the part of Freud that Johnson rejects (or says that recent discoveries ought to lead us to reject) is the whole theory of repression. Instead of Freud’s “dynamic” model of the psyche, where energies get bottled up and need release, Johnson suggests that the new neuroscience leads us to “another metaphor: the brain as Darwinian ecosystem, instead of steam engine” (198). Understanding the mind is a matter of “pattern recognition instead of code breaking” (207): there is no deep, repressed meaning, no hidden censored core, behind the pattern of symptoms, and into which that pattern needs to be translated.
In one way, I find this an attractive demystification. But in another way, I wonder if it isn’t a cop-out, or an overly comforting idealization. For one thing, the metaphor of a “Darwinian ecosystem” is itself problematic. “Darwinian” implies struggle and competition, the brutal “survival of the fittest”, ultimately “nature red in tooth and claw” (which arch-Darwinist Richard Dawkins regards as a fair and accurate description of natural selection). An “ecosystem,” on the other hand, suggests balance, mutuality, a federation of parts each of which is necessary to a whole that is thereby greater than the sum of its parts. The two words reflect two different biological visions, between which theoretical biologists are indeed antagonistically split today. They both probably represent partial truths, but reconciling them as Johnson implicitly does is something of a sleight-of-hand.
The deeper problem is that, in dispensing with Freudian repression, we are left with too much of a functionalist account of the brain or mind. Even the mind’s conflicts and dissonances serve a useful purpose; “in the Darwinian model, failures are a sign of success” (200). From the point of view of the all-embracing ecosystem (if not of the species that go extinct in the struggle) all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.
There’s not enough room in this picture for the nearly infinite perversity, whimsicality, self-defeating stubbornness, willful blindness, and obsession of which human minds are capable. While I don’t necessarily believe that Freud’s theories (castration, Oedipus, the death drive) are the best account, or even a good account, of why and how these things happen, I think that any theory that would relegate them to minor exceptions, or to failures of “normal” development — which is what a functionalist theory inevitably does — is unacceptable. Function needs to be explained in the larger context of dysfunction, rather than dysfunction being seen as only a deviation from, or failure of, otherwise ubiquitous function.
Amy Ziering Kofman’s and Kirby Dick’s Derrida documentary is actually not bad, by which I mean that it is at least somewhat illuminating, and that the things about it that annoyed me are the same things that annoy me about Derrida himself.
Rather than trying to explain Derrida’s philosophy, or to tell his story (to the extent that he has one), the filmmakers are content to humanize him, and that is fine. So we see Derrida in everyday life, eating his breakfast and putting on his jacket and getting his hair cut, and we also hear him explain that this is not a “true” representation of his everyday life, because that life is itself changed by the presence of the camera.
The film shows rather well, I think, that Derrida has never been about making destructive arguments, or chopping logic for its own sake, but that his thought has always been about contingency and mortality; about the fragility and yet inescapability of the self; about how the basic experience of life involves being confronted with an Other — that is to say, with that which is not oneself and cannot be assimilated to oneself; about responsibility and forgiveness; about how the present relates to the past and to the future. Many of the great philosophical subjects, in short. And there is a certain wisdom in the careful and heavily qualified things Derrida says about all these subjects, in his simultaneous desire for clarity and meaning, and unwillingness to simplify and generalize.
The film also shows, and shares, Derrida’s extreme narrowness about these subjects. His main limitation as a philosopher, I think, is that he forever remains too narrowly just a philosopher, too much a part of the great Western tradition to ever venture outside it. He is never willing to open the windows and let in some fresh air.
When asked, for instance, whether he finds elements of deconstruction in Seinfeld, his response is categorical and uncomprehending: “deconstruction is not a sitcom,” he says. He is not horrified by the comparison, the way an older sort of high-culture snob would have been; but he is absolutely unable to grasp how it is possible that anyone would choose to watch an episode of Seinfeld in preference to reading a page of Heidegger.
Again, when the interviewer asks Derrida what he wishes he could ask one of the great philosophers of the past, Derrida rather charmingly replies that he’ d like to be able to ask Heidegger or Hegel about his sex life. He then spars coyly with the interviewer over the issue of whether or not he’d reveal anything about his own sex life (he encourages her to ask him, but says that he wouldn’t answer). But Derrida somewhat spoils the effect of all this when he says that, of course, he’s not thinking of “a porno of Hegel or Heidegger,” but rather something more dignified: that they admit that they cannot totally separate their thought from their private lives.
Me, I’d much rather witness the grotesque spectacle of Heidegger and Hannah Arendt fucking than read another essay by either of them.
Amy Ziering Kofman’s and Kirby Dick’s Derrida documentary is actually not bad, by which I mean that it is at least somewhat illuminating, and that the things about it that annoyed me are the same things that annoy me about Derrida himself.
Rather than trying to explain Derrida’s philosophy, or to tell his story (to the extent that he has one), the filmmakers are content to humanize him, and that is fine. So we see Derrida in everyday life, eating his breakfast and putting on his jacket and getting his hair cut, and we also hear him explain that this is not a “true” representation of his everyday life, because that life is itself changed by the presence of the camera.
The film shows rather well, I think, that Derrida has never been about making destructive arguments, or chopping logic for its own sake, but that his thought has always been about contingency and mortality; about the fragility and yet inescapability of the self; about how the basic experience of life involves being confronted with an Other — that is to say, with that which is not oneself and cannot be assimilated to oneself; about responsibility and forgiveness; about how the present relates to the past and to the future. Many of the great philosophical subjects, in short. And there is a certain wisdom in the careful and heavily qualified things Derrida says about all these subjects, in his simultaneous desire for clarity and meaning, and unwillingness to simplify and generalize.
The film also shows, and shares, Derrida’s extreme narrowness about these subjects. His main limitation as a philosopher, I think, is that he forever remains too narrowly just a philosopher, too much a part of the great Western tradition to ever venture outside it. He is never willing to open the windows and let in some fresh air.
When asked, for instance, whether he finds elements of deconstruction in Seinfeld, his response is categorical and uncomprehending: “deconstruction is not a sitcom,” he says. He is not horrified by the comparison, the way an older sort of high-culture snob would have been; but he is absolutely unable to grasp how it is possible that anyone would choose to watch an episode of Seinfeld in preference to reading a page of Heidegger.
Again, when the interviewer asks Derrida what he wishes he could ask one of the great philosophers of the past, Derrida rather charmingly replies that he’ d like to be able to ask Heidegger or Hegel about his sex life. He then spars coyly with the interviewer over the issue of whether or not he’d reveal anything about his own sex life (he encourages her to ask him, but says that he wouldn’t answer). But Derrida somewhat spoils the effect of all this when he says that, of course, he’s not thinking of “a porno of Hegel or Heidegger,” but rather something more dignified: that they admit that they cannot totally separate their thought from their private lives.
Me, I’d much rather witness the grotesque spectacle of Heidegger and Hannah Arendt fucking than read another essay by either of them.