This quote probably won’t make the final cut for my MLA 2012 paper. Too long, and more suggestive than providing any real ground for argumentation. But it does suggest the danger I am trying to articulate about placing our faith in media per se. Moreover, Zielinski’s thoughts on “the deep time of media” and the manner in which media is “deeply inhuman” (from which Jussi Parrika commences in Insect Media), suggest that any attempt we make to draw “new media” into the political economy of traditional academia (via peer review, by “counting it like a book” for T&P, by reading it with old methodologies, or by inserting it into an ill-conceived genealogy) will be problematic and ignore any possible future-that-is-not-the-past. In my paper I will tie this issue to Stiegler’s long vs. short circuits (as conceived in Taking Care of Youth and the Generations) and to debates about digital work in the context of T&P.
In any case, here Zielinski writes, with regard to the “inflation” of the definitions of “media” in the 1990s:
Media and future became synonymous. If you didn’t engage with what was then baptized media, you were definitely passé. By adding media to their curriculum, institutes, faculties, academies, and universities all hoped to gain access to more staff and new equipment. In the majority of cases, they actually received it—particularly after, in association with the magic word digital, media systems were established that the decision makers did not understand. This was another reason they called the process a revolution. The digital became analogous to the alchemists’ formula for gold, and it was endowed with infinite powers of transformation. (32)
One of the major components of my Baseball and American Culture class will be student blogs. That’s nothing special, of course, as blogs have been in classrooms and classes for years. And, of course, the blog form is dead now (several times over). Nonetheless, the blog form has transformed the way in which we write, talk, and think about baseball, with the bloggers being the proverbial barbarians at the gate the poor old beat and feature writers must hold off lest we discover that David Eckstein was at best a mediocre baseball player. The tragedy that would be.
In any case, in addition to reading three novels (DeLillo’s Underworld, Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association. . ., and Roth’s The Great American Novel), two non-fiction baseball books (Moneyball and the recently published Cambridge Companion to Baseball), and one book of theory (Barthes’s Mythologies), we will be reading lots of sportswriting. Students must use Google Reader (or a similar RSS Reader–and if blogs are dead, what about RSS, amirite?) to follow blogs, mainly of their own choosing. I have required them to follow four particular blogs, listed here, and made suggestions on several others.
This list is not at all comprehensive. In fact, it’s rather idiosyncratic. There is much here that is quibble-able, but as always it’s place to start.
So here are the instructions.
Here are some suggestions for blogs to follow in Google Reader. You should subscribe to the “Required” blogs and feel free to pick and choose among the rest and find blogs on your own to follow (eg blogs related to your favorite team; try using Google to find other blogs, or ask me if you have an interest in a particular team). Links here often go directly to the blogs RSS or Atom feed. Plug them directly into Google Reader’s subscription function.
Note: you do not have to read every post of every blog you subscribe to. You should read several per day from these various blogs in order to become familiar with contemporary discourses on baseball and to generate ideas for your own blog writing.
Sportswriter extraordinaire. Posnanski publishes several times per week, often about baseball (but also about golf, football, and other topics). He is conversant with stats, but is more interested in telling good stories that conform to the record (rather than creating myths based on nostalgia). Posts are very long, but are often among the best writing you will see on a given day.
Not really a blog. Users submit links at BBTF and thereby generate a place for people to congregate to discuss the news of the day. You can find most of these stories written at or linked from other blogs listed here. The real value of this feed is the comments section at each story, which is almost always intelligent and provides a great deal of insight into various baseball stories from widely divergent points of view (including wdiely diverging statistical points of view).
Group blog hosted by NBC. Some stats, but mainly discussion of the news of the day. Comment section can be interesting at times. Craig Calcaterra and Aaron Gleeman are not to be missed. Multiple posts per day (sometimes up to 25) on all aspects of baseball news.
Neyer was one of the very first baseball writers to work in an online-first capacity. He posts multiple times per day (and also forwards other posts from the MLB part of SB Nation that he finds interesting). Covers most aspects of MLB. Statistically oriented, but not a statistician. Neyer is more interested in thinking about baseball narratives and how numbers can refute or suppost those narratives.
Statistical coverage on a day to day as well as a long term basis. Stories about individual players, teams, contracts, general baseball business, etc. Publishes Multiple posts per day, so short and others medium to long.
Formerly Rob Neyer’s baby. Similar to Fangraphs, but less wonky with regard to stats. Multiple posts per day, often short to medium length. Covers all aspects of baseball.
Here are the course materials for my Spring 2012 course on Baseball and American Culture. Not quite as complete at this stage as the materials for my course on fantasy–I’ve yet to write the assignments for the midterm paper and the final project, but that’s the usual case at this stage.
Here is my proposal (late damnit! I was thinking “Monday! Monday!” because of the end of the month, when it was due Sunday. Ah well, we will see) for Duke’s Marxism and New Media Conference in January.
Benjamin J Robertson
The Political Economy of Digital Media and Education
Proposal for MARXISM AND NEW MEDIA
In For a New Critique of Political Economy, Stiegler summarizes his previous arguments about memory and technics: “all technical objects constitute an intergenerational support of memory which, as material culture, overdetermines learning and mnesic activities. [. . .] A child arrives into a world in which tertiary retention [memory stored in technical objects] both precedes and awaits it, and which, precisely constitutes its world as world.” That this discussion begins Stiegler’s short text on political economy comes as no surprise; much of the first volume of Technics and Time considers the articulation of technics with economics: “there is no work without technics, no economic theory that is not a theory of work, of surplus profit, of means of production and investment.”
Recently at the group blog New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science, John Protevi critiqued a series of posts on the “job market” in philosophy:
I don’t want to criticize the content of the posts; as far as I can tell, the advice has been excellent. But I do want to suggest that we change our frame of reference on these matters, and specify that we have been discussing only a small segment of the complete system of employment for philosophy instruction in institutions of higher education. So I’d like to suggest we call the analysis of the complete system “the political economy of philosophy instruction.”
However specific philosophy instruction and its political economy, Protevi’s new frame of reference provides a means by which to understand the impact of the recent focus on digital media, electronic literature, “digital humanities”, etc. within the narrow confines of English departments as well as in the broader dimensions of various initiatives, schools, professional organizations, and institutions.
Strangely, however “left” and/or free thinking the individuals in such contexts understand themselves to be, and whatever the promises they make for the technical objects they produce and study, far too often (always?), digital media fail to transform academic environments. When the student arrives, she finds waiting for her a world constituted already as a particular world, one in which institutional memories—practices of reading and writing, strategies of argument, limitations of thought—await her. As such, even with the steady increase in job opportunities for anyone working on “the digital”, the political economy of digital media education reduces such opportunities to an outdated system of academic labor. Whatever the promise of the digital humanities for a new way of thinking and doing, it would be quite easy to reverse engineer a human(ist) from a laptop.
When new media can only produce old media—i.e. when the laptop must produce the book, when the word processor must produce the essay—we must reconsider the articulation of old with new. This paper, through a consideration of Stiegler’s political economy, traces the residual and seemingly insurmountable humanism of digital media. Digital media retain many of the limitations of previous technical objects and thus constitute an institutional tertiary retention, one that constrains academic labor.
I’m teaching Liz Grosz’ essay “The Thing” today. Jane Bennett on things next. I am reminded of one of my favorite PSAs ever, “Art. Ask for More.” Here it is:
And below the fold, my thoughts on the video from the introduction to my dissertation. I can’t say that I still LOVE this part of the diss (or any of it), but I still basically agree with it.
Here is the text of my E-poetry 2011 paper. I am taking part in the Sugar City Dialogues part of the program, which calls for five minute “statements” in rapid fire succession. Hence the brevity of the following, and hence its nature, which many of you will no doubt discover on your own. It’s rather unoriginal, in several senses, but I will leave that alone. As I read, I plan to have Joerg Piringer‘s “Unicode” running behind me (or to the side, whatever). Read more about “Unicode” here, or watch below.
The apparatus of digital literature: a stenographic disposition in five minutes or less
Key your present time texts and you will begin to see who you are and what you are doing here. Mix yesterday with today and feel tomorrow your future rising out of old apparatuses. You are a programmed apparatus set to read, select, copy, and write.
Who disposes of you?
Who decides what particles to dis-play back in present time?
Who dis-plays back old humiliations and defeats holding you in predisposed set time?
What I am trying to pick out with “apparatus” is a thoroughly heterogenous ensemble consisting of discourses; institutions; reading practices, close or otherwise; regulatory decisions; laws; administrative measures; letterforms; writing machines; philosophical, moral and aesthetic propositions—in short, the disposed as much as the indisposed. Such is the system of the apparatus. Not only, however, corporations such as Apple and Microsoft and Adobe, departments, schools, conferences, disciplines, tenure processes, the proportional representation of men and women among us, and so forth (whose connection with power is in a certain sense evident), but also the pen, writing, prose, philosophy, verse, code, applications and apps, computers, cellular telephones, e-poetry, and—why not—language itself, which is perhaps the most ancient of apparatuses—one in which thousands and thousands of years ago a chimpanzee inadvertently let itself be captured, probably without realizing the consequences that it was about to interface.
If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here. It would be arrangements of technical images; the rest, fragments of letters, bits of code, lumps of semantics, records of sound, pieces of movement and stasis, phials of odors, plates of food and excrement. Booksellers would consider it quite a novelty; critics would murmur, yes, but is it art, conceptual, representational, or otherwise; and I could trust a majority of you to use it as you would a parlor game. After all, in European printed language it is an automatic assumption that letters forming words are separated by space from other letters forming words, that these letters march (without moving) across the page from left to right, and that the lines so formed—lines of force interacting with curves of visibility and enunciation—are strictly parallel and progress downwards at equal intervals. The hypothesis to be presented here is: Occidental culture is a discourse whose most important information is stored in an alphanumeric code. This code is in the process of being replaced by other, differently structured codes. If this hypothesis were accurate, we would have to count on a fundamental change of our culture in the near future, perhaps the end of the anthropological machine of Western humanism.
For mechanized writing to be optimized, one can no longer dream of writing as the expression of individuals or the trace of bodies—no longer the signature or the traditional image. The very forms, differences, and frequencies of its letters have to be reduced to formulas—now the password or the technical image. So-called humanity is split up into physiology and information technology. When Hegel summed up the perfect alphabetism of his age, he called it Spirit. The readability of all history and all discourses turned humans or philosophers into God.
Speaking of Hegel, if “positivity” is the name that, according to Hyppolite, the young Hegel gives to the historical element—loaded as it is with rules, rites, and institutions that are imposed on the individual by an external power, but that become, so to speak, internalized in systems of beliefs and feelings—we, by borrowing this term (here renamed “apparatus”), take a position with respect to a decisive problem, which is actually also our own problem: the relation between individuals as living beings and the historical element. By “the historical element,” I mean the set of institutions, of processes of subjectification. and of rules in which power relations become concrete.
For we belong to apparatuses and act in them. The newness of an apparatus in relation to those preceding it is what we call its currency, our currency. The new is the current. The current is not what we are but rather what we become, what we are in the process of becoming, in other words the Other, our becoming-other. In every apparatus, we have to distinguish between what we are (what we already no longer are) and what we are becoming: the part of history, the part of currentness. History is the archive, the design of what we are and cease being while the current is the sketch of what we will become. Thus history or the archive is also what separates us from ourselves, while the current is the Other with which we already coincide.
So what is the status of of human freedom with respect to writing with an apparatus, with this transparent, mechanical process? Probably as follows: I know, when I strike a key, that I am dealing with a programmed instrument that reaches into the swirl of particles and packages them into texts. I know that a word processor can do this automatically, a chimpanzee can do it accidentally, and a stenographer can do it by copying an existing pattern, and that in all cases, the same text as mine will appear. I know, therefore, that my keys are inviting me into a determined mesh of accident and necessity. And, in spite of it all, I experience my writing gesture concretely as a free gesture, in fact, free to such an extent that I would rather give up my life than give up my apparatus.
I was so very excited to teach this class, and it has gone very well to date. It does tend toward the “Shit only Ben knows” thing with great frequency, but it’s worked out because the class, for reasons I can’t quite fathom, seemed to put a lot of faith in the idea that “it must be going somewhere.” I think we are all on the same page now, but there were a few moments early on when we were using terms that we had not yet defined (because we were too busy defining other terms) and thus were a bit confused. If you have read Ken Wark’s A Hacker Manifesto you know what I mean. He starts using “vector” in the first chapter, but does not fully define the term until the next to last chapter. Yes, you could skip right to that chapter, but then you won’t know what “class” and “representation” mean. And don’t get me started about “world,” a term you might not even recognize as a term until you get to the last section of the book. In the end, you get it all at once, and that’s often how I teach. I believe that it’s my job to simply put all of the concepts into play. If I do so well, the students will be able to put them together, sometimes in the manner I might, more often in far more exciting ways.
Oh, and you know what else don’t get me started on? The amount of shit I had to go through with the CU Library to get some of these albums on reserve. THEY’RE FREE ONLINE PEOPLE AND THEY HAVE NO REGULAR RELEASE!!!!
In any case, here’s the description:
Benjamin J Robertson Course Description ENGL 3116-001 TOPICS IN ADVANCED THEORY Music, Networks & Digital Media MWF 11:00-11:50, VAC 1B88
Films such as American Grafitti, Apocalypse Now, Forest Gump, and numerous others that follow from the 1960s use music, whether in an ironic or straight fashion, as soundtrack. On one had, that point is obvious, tautological. On the other hand, it is an idea worth investigating in the digital age. The premise of this course is that music no longer operates as a soundtrack, as a meaningful commentary or complement to events (fictional or real). Whereas the 1960s (drawing or earlier traditions of folk and blues) gave the United States and the world the idea that music could create or reinforce the meaning of political movements, cultural moments, or individual experiences, the late 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century demonstrate that the most important aspect of music is no longer its involvement with semantic meaning, but rather its encoding: whether we can play it through an iPod or a Zune, whether it can exist online, whether it can be tracked through p2p networks, whether Apple will allow it into the iTunes store (and how much it will cost according there according to the level of security attached to it). This class will consider these issues and others through readings in music and political economy, music and digital technology, etc. Additionally, we will consider several musical texts produced in the last ten years that explicitly involve themselves with and question processes of encoding and networking.
Partial reading list
Jacques Attali: Noise: The Political Economy of Music
McKenzie Wark: A Hacker Manifesto
Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid: Rhythm Science
—., ed. Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture
Jonathan Sterne: “The mp3 as Cultural Artifact”
Eric Harvey: “The Social History of the mp3”
Partial listening list
Girl Talk: Feed the Animals
The Kleptones: A Night at the Hip-Hopera
djbc: The Beastles and Glassbreaks
Danger Mouse: The Grey Album
Negativland: No Business
Public Enemy: It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold us Back
This is a paper I wrote for a special issue of a journal. It was deemed inappropriate for the issue’s theme. I thought that I might resurrect it, but it seems rather dated at this point–at least in certain of its references; I stand by the overall argument. It’s also a bit strange, at least to me (and no less now than when I wrote it). No doubt it will come back in a somewhat different form in Material Science Fictions, but here it is for now.
Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West can be read as an investigation of the problematic establishment of US jurisprudence upon no other authority but its own. As such, the novel recognizes both the Enlightenment-driven necessity of removing nature and religion as a nominal source of foundation for the state and the potential consequences of this removal. If power was to begin and end with the citizens of the nation, then there could be no appeal to any abstractions in the constitution (the process, not the document) of that nation. However, the self-grounding of power claimed in Article VI of the US Constitution (the document, not the process) exposes the truth that power and authority have never had any foundation in abstract ideas. Thus McCarthy’s great character Judge Holden can claim that “Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn. A moral view can never be proven right or wrong by any ultimate test. A man falling dead in a duel is not thought thereby to be proven in error as to his views” (250). Otherwise put, all of the rationality, all of the morality, all of the human-constructed words that stand behind and comprise the Constitution (both the process and the document) of the United States, matter not at all in the face of material force. In the society of the early twenty-first century, this fact has taken on new importance as our interactions with our environments—our acts of “doing”—are increasingly prescribed by the material force of code.
“To do” is, obviously, predicated on an ability “to do.” As implied above, such ability should not be understood strictly as a function of the user using it. Any consideration of “to do” must include an analysis of the effects of environment, broadly understood, on the user’s ability to use her ability. Regardless of will, there are some things that will always remain outside of anyone’s ability to do, outside of what natural law allows, not because of a lack of pure ability on the part of the user, but because of the inhospitable affordances inherent to the interaction of user and used. For example, even the best runners in the world cannot exert their abilities to do to the same extent when they run on sand as they can when they run on a level, all-weather track. Sand does not afford speed in the same manner that the track does. Only when runner and surface meet (to simplify a complex interaction for the sake of explanation) does “running,” fast or slow, obtain. Similarly, no artist, however great, can create art in the absence of a suitable medium or stylus.
These examples of the function of natural law demonstrate that any ability to do involves a relationship between bodies, between individuals, between things. Moreover, they demonstrate the limits of human power in certain environments or contexts. As the opening scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey reminds us, such limitations are a fundamental fact of existence and overcoming them always involves a process of discovering new ways of interacting with things. The ape’s use of the bone as a weapon constitutes an evolution in the interaction of individual and thing and is, mythically speaking, the first human/machine interface. Furthermore, this use afforded its user greater power and subsequently engendered new relationships between him and his peers as well as between those peers and their environments. Whether we understand the advent of the human/machine interface to be a benefit or a curse for humankind, we cannot deny its continuing effects on the structure of human existence. Moreover, we cannot deny that the material interactions it enacts and affords (or constrains) have greater consequences for future actions than any rule subsequently constructed to regulate them. Historically, the very existence of such rules implies the primacy of that which they rule.
Okay, so that’s a totally clichéd academic title: Strange Phrase: The Things I Will Discuss to Explain the Strange phrase. Anyway. . .
I won’t pretend to be an expert on occasional poetry, but I will bet that Pope did not perform “The Rape of the Lock” past his prime to a bunch of aging baby-boomers who want to party like its 1712. I’m thinking of anecdotal accounts friends once gave me upon seeing Modern English circa 1997. Of course they wrote and performed other songs besides “I’ll Stop the World (and Melt with You)”, but really, who wants to hear them? Also recall Homer Simpson on Bachmann Turner Overdrive: “They were Canada’s answer to CCR. Their big hit was TCB.” When he sees them perform not only can he not wait for “Taking Care of Business,” but he can’t even wait for “the workin’ overtime part.” But I digress, as neither of these examples get to exactly what I mean to discuss.
While we might dismiss the occasional as too rooted in a particular context and therefore not amenable to its own legacy, I would argue that this situatedness makes the occasional all the more important and, presently, all the more rare (which is to say impossible). According to Wikipedia, “Goethe declared that ‘Occasional Poetry is the highest kind.'” Likewise, Hegel had the following to say about it (I can’t believe I am about to agree with Hegel):
Poetry’s living connection with the real world and its occurrences in public and private affairs is revealed most amply in the so-called pièces d’occasion. If this description were given a wider sense, we could use it as a name for nearly all poetic works: but if we take it in the proper and narrower sense we have to restrict it to productions owing their origin to some single present event and expressly devoted to its exaltation, embellishment, commemoration, etc. But by such entanglement with life poetry seems again to fall into a position of dependence, and for this reason it has often been proposed to assign the whole sphere of pièces d’occasion an inferior value although to some extent, especially in lyric poetry, the most famous works belong to this class.
The occasional speaks to a specific moment, to something that had a specific historicity, a particularity, perhaps a singularity. It resists appropriation into a culture of sameness, or at least did. Well, perhaps it never did and I am merely romanticizing what the occasional was. Perhaps better to say that what the occasional could be is a fleeting moment in which representation touches materiality. If considered in an historical manner, the occasional thereby might offer some understanding of its occasion. That is most likely wishful thinking, but I throw it out there.
What the Modern English and Homer Simpson examples begin to demonstrate is the fact that the present United States can in no way deal with occasionality. I see this inability in student essays which rush to declare whatever they are about to be the “greatest poem/modernist poem/novel/postmodernist novel/song/album/etc. OF ALL TIME!” Everything has to be eternal, capable of transmitting meaning to everyone, everywhere, everywhen in the same manner, transparently and without regard to historical notions of reading, epistemology, etc. When we are confronted with something new, we try to make it something old. I think that this desire is a function of nostalgia, which dovetails with the fact that we don’t give a damn about anything Tony Basil has done since “Hey Mickey.”
To be a bit more academic about this issue, let’s just say it’s very much related to Jameson’s lament that postmodernism is bound up with a culture that can no longer think historically.
With that, a screed about contemporary music or, rather, a contemporary song and what it means in terms of contemporary culture.
While I do have some idea what happens in the world of music, I have no idea whether the things I know about are actually part of some kind of social vocabulary. I know Beyonce made one of the best music videos of all time, but I have no idea what the song sounds like. That said, I may be making mountains of molehills here.
That said, I have some issues with Jay-Z’s “Young Forever.” Before I begin, let me say that if Jay-Z wants to use the lyrics and music from an older song to make a million dollars, more power to him. I don’t care and would like to see copyright open up a bit for more of this kind of work (although, given the fact that his use of the song in question is almost certainly controlled by a mechanical license for covering the song and not sampling it, the issue of copyright is not really an issue here).
Nonetheless, because the 80s are on my mind constantly, and because I trace many contemporary cultural and political problems in the United States to that period, I take issue with the manner in which Jay-Z appropriates Alphaville’s 1984 song “Forever Young,” which, thank god, has no relation to the Rod Stewart song of the same name.
Here’s Alphaville:
What strikes me most about this song and video (or, rather, the combination of the two) is the utter lack of nostalgia. To contemporary ears, the title “Forever Young” reads as an ode to a better time, the right now/present when we are as beautiful, fit, and carefree as we will ever be. As I will argue below, Jay-Z seriously (perhaps willfully) misreads the song as such. Of course, it’s not surprising that he does so. A great deal of rock and popular music celebrates youth for one reason or another, and I know more than one person who thinks that The Ramones’ cover of Tom Waits’ “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up” is some kind of punk rock anthem to youth and its fuck-all attitude. (It’s actually a late song that, like Twain’s Huck Finn, is performed by an older person/group who only understands what he/they had in his/their youth by virtue of no longer being youthful. That self-awareness is the price of maturity and exactly what destroys innocence).
I was slated to teach ENGL 2000: Literary Analysis (the basic how-to-read class required for all English majors at CU), but the low enrollment snake bit me and I am now teaching Modern and Contemporary Literature (a non-major class focused on, well, modern and contemporary literature).
For the past two semesters I have taught the class on the 1980s, the decade I am most concerned with in Corruption and Sameness. However, I get rather bored teaching the same class over and over. I varied the texts a bit from Spring 09 to Fall 09, but even so, I can’t get away from Blood Meridian and Watchmen and I can only teach them so often before they start to get stale to me, so I am mixing it up in Spring 10 with a class on the 70s: ENGL 3060-023 & -028: Modern and Contemporary Literature: The 70s: Paranoia, Technology, & Decline. Here is the reading schedule:
It is this false moneyer with his gravers and burins who seeks favor with the judge and he is at contriving from cold slag brute in the crucible a face that will pass, an image that will render this residual specie current in the markets where men barter. Of this is the judge judge and the night does not end.
--Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West
evening redness 