<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><!--StartFragment--><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="6"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 19px;">Methodology, Consciousness and Class</span></font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="6"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 19px;"><br></span></font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:Helvetica">Dear
Margaret, Brian, Mark, Sean, all,<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:Helvetica"> <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:Helvetica"> <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:Helvetica">I’m
several posts behind and in the middle of moving for the summer so will likely
get further behind this week, but I wanted to respond to some of the points
being raised about method and class and also to express my appreciation for the
brilliance of your engagements here. This is one of the most stimulating discussions I have participated in in some time.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:Helvetica"> <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:Helvetica">First
of all I want to agree with Margaret (and also my understanding of Trebor’s
position on mediological method) that we do need the specifics of case studies
– no doubt about it. So for me the answer to Margaret’s question regarding deductive and
inductive approaches to the socio-political analysis of media formations,
“Don’t we need both?” is “Yes, emphasis on <i>both</i></span><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:Helvetica">.” My objections to case studies
have never been to considering the specific aspects of any form of
interactivity – indeed much of my own work utilizes close textual analysis and
semiotics – in other words the very specific treatment using a set of codes
applicable to certain media received in the context of specific and
historically institutionalized modalities of interface. The real target of my
statement against some types of case-studies that I have come across is the
boosterism that comes with certain brands of platform fetishism. The
celebratory tone of too many sentences about media innovation smack of the
lusty greed of would-be capitalists, of writers who are talking to a super-ego
that is their hypostasis of the market itself – these are folks who would sell
out if they only could. Such an approach, which is easier to sustain if you are
just looking at clean people and their clean machines, posits once again the
hegemony of capitalist society. Such a position is, of course, perfectly
ordinary and completely normal, which is part of the reason why it is among the
most heinous and insidious blights on our “profession.”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:Helvetica"> <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:Helvetica">I am
not here accusing anyone of the wholesale embrace of these qualities. In fact
my purpose here is more to detail the tendencies and temptations that also lay
claim to our own creative power, even as we are called by the marginal, the
subaltern and the oppressed. If we take the claims being made about cognitive
capitalism seriously, then it is precisely along these vectors (among others)
that revolutionary creativity is being channeled off and expropriated.
Methodologically speaking then, I am proposing that the war that we all feel to
be present in some way or another, also reaches us at the level of the utterance.
Without being self-important or overly dramatic, we must be aware of our own
participation in world-making. The politics of our activity is not just in “the
what” of what we analyze, but “the how,” where the how includes the very
dispensation of the figures we generate and the sentences we write.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:Helvetica"> <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:Helvetica">In
the end, these statements don’t amount to much more than the not too surprising
conclusion of a recent psychological study of pedagogical practices that shows
that people are less likely to make racist statements when they are speaking in
a multi-ethnic context. This study does not say that the presence of racialized
others in a quasi-democratic space such as the classroom cures white people of
their racism, it just emphasizes the intellectual benefits of difference and
the capacity of people to recognize and respond to difference in positive ways
once they are removed from their racially and historically homogenized comfort
zones. No more would the constant and pressing awareness of global suffering
and apocalypse necessarily cure people of their internalized capitalism (in the
ideological-theological sense). Still, it is a start because it may create a
context for the emergence and development of the more radical strains of our
constitutions to take root and become more defined and autonomous.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:Helvetica"> <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:Helvetica">This
particular view of consciousness, which really borrows from Marx’s idea (developed
by Bahktin-Volosinov) that language is first and foremost social and that
language <i>is</i></span><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:Helvetica">
practical consciousness feeds directly into some of the issues of class
consciousness that have been under discussion on another string. I was writing
about this a few days ago to post it there, but I may as well tie it in with
what I have already said above.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:Helvetica"> <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:Helvetica"> <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:Helvetica">Not
to be too futurological/Leibnitzian, but as nodes of the world-media system
each of us contains elements of the totality in various proportions, proportions
that vary with our space-time-connections. This may sound far-fetched (fetched
from yonder Neal Stephenson novel?) in the context of a Marxist discussion of
class, but even the people who are close to armed struggle, as members or
allies of the various communist movements, are aware that gender and race are
also operative in the overdetermination of forms of consciousness. For feminism,
Intersectionality was an important term for a few years -- the term specified
not only that there were various schemas of overdetermination that affected
consciousness and experience, but that there were also various coalitional
possibilities that presented themselves in the struggle for rights, welfare and
social justice. From what I understand today’s actually existing communist
movements are at pains to pursue the practical critique of class relations
while transforming their practices to be adequate to recent progress in the
understanding of gender, race and sexuality. Of course, this complexity of
the materiality of the determinations of consciousness creates internal schisms as well both at the level of the party and the individual.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:Helvetica"> <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:Helvetica">At
present in the realm of the popular, I think we need to reckon with an exponential increase in the number
of schemas that organize what we think we are, and also endeavor to understand
that these self/communal/other understandings are often also ideal expressions of the
dominant material relationships -- in other words, as Sean only half-ironically
alluded to in an early post, we have the understanding that knowledge
formations/general intellect/the chrornicles of lived experience are a means of
production, and the question of class must be considered along lines that are
partially produced by these machines. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:Helvetica"> <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:Helvetica">We
might consider that even as we have a multiplication of templates of
intelligibility (from race, gender, nation to Sims avatars, to “Emo,” to next top model, to spectacular
“terrorism”) that can be occupied sequentially or simultaneously for purposes
of identification/disidentification, etc., we also have a homogenization of
modalities of interface. If approximately 90% of Americans think they are
middle class, they might well be, at least part of the time, caught as they are
between abjection and bare life on one side, and fascistic ego-maniacal,
military-industrial, electronic-spectacular capitalist power on the other. This
does not mean that the guy making 20K and the girl making 200K are the same,
but they may have more in common with each other than they do with the one
living on 2K or the one living on 20 Million. Adorno, theorist par excellance
of the culture industry, commented that the subjective differences between the
classes are far less than the objective-material ones.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:Helvetica"> <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:Helvetica">In my
view this suppression of difference by means of infinite differentiation is
possible because the cinematic/televisual/electronic mediations are there to
help us to produce this "class unity," for both “our own good” the
good of “the economy” and we are exhorted to produce this “false community” as
Debord called it, through our participation in a combinatory of separation and
homogenization. We all do our own stuff, locally, linguistically, genderedly,
ethnically, sexually and even nationally inflected, and we all do it on
screens. That fact in itself provides no basis for a revolution, even if it
does indicate something about our "class." (With ironic apologies to any
screen addicted billionaires in the discussion group.)</span><span style="font-family:Helvetica"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:Helvetica"> <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:Helvetica">Of
course, none of this means that the screen class does not help to produce the
plutocracy through their living labor, nor that it does not feed itself off the
misery of the impoverished. What it does mean -- beyond the fact that the
condition of possibility of both extremes beyond the screen is the screen
itself -- is that the structures of
recognition, identification, affiliation, commune-ication that might reveal the
real relations of production in terms intelligible through the language of
identity or self-constitution are among the sights of struggle. Alongside the illumination of knowledge it is the pulse
of the sensorium, the flights of conscience, the organization of desire that is
the domain of politics. For its is precisely these sensual and congntivie
registers that have themselves been utilized to produce the complacency,
disavowal and normalization that, while still perhaps an incomplete project, threatens to
realize the real Orwellian warning: the totalitarian foreclosure of the future
by means of the liquidation of the relevance of consciousness. Such a
realization would be only a continuation and an advance of the catastrophe that
has already befallen a huge, indeed unconceptualizeable portion of our species,
which is to say, us.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:Helvetica"> <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:Helvetica">Brian
Holmes asked me if since the CMP I have<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:Helvetica"> <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span style="font-family:Helvetica;color:#2B50AE">gotten
further toward a<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span style="font-family:Helvetica;color:#2B50AE">mode of
articulation that can open up some resistant<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span style="font-family:Helvetica;color:#2B50AE">activity
_inside the belly of the whale_, which may not be<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span style="font-family:Helvetica;color:#2B50AE">where we
belong but is certainly where we are today?</span><span style="font-family:
Helvetica"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:Helvetica"> <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:Helvetica">I
hope what I have said here will serve as a partial if overhasty answer to that
question. I largely agree, Brian,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</span>with your assessment in your prior post, both of the centrality of consciousness to
political projects and furthermore that the answers to the fundamental problems
of our time are not going to be found in squaring philosophical circles (a
habit, particular now to only to writers from or identified with only a few
relatively small European countries that still feel they need to read only
themselves). I think that what I have been saying above concurs with your
suggestion: <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span style="font-family:Helvetica;color:#2B50AE">Isn't
now the time to begin<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span style="font-family:Helvetica;color:#2B50AE">developing
research strategies that include a specific kind<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span style="font-family:Helvetica;color:#2B50AE">of
address, one that can elicit some socially cooperative<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span style="font-family:Helvetica;color:#2B50AE">response
to the failures of the Anglo-American political<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span style="font-family:Helvetica;color:#2B50AE">economy
of the last 30 years?</span><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:Helvetica"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:Helvetica">This
proposal, for me at any rate, has everything to do with what I have been
talking about as the politics of the utterance as well as with the efforts to
locate the media instance in the context of the totality of social relations
and hence hierarchical society and world history. To the case for
consciousness, I would want to add that we need to know more about viscerality
and affect and also to see these registers as zones for our own critical
activity. Lastly, for now, I would want to emphasize the urgency of all this: The
short version -- and it speaks directly to what Sean’s invocation of Heidegger
and humanity as standing-reserve – is that humanity en toto has become the
substrate of all expression: the very medium of thought and feeling. How can
what we say and do be adequate to that abiding reality?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<div class="MsoNormal"> <o:p></o:p></div>
<!--EndFragment-->
<div apple-content-edited="true"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Jonathan Beller</div><div>Professor </div><div>Humanities and Media Studies</div><div>and Critical and Visual Studies</div><div>Pratt Institute</div><div><a href="mailto:jbeller@pratt.edu">jbeller@pratt.edu</a></div><div>718-636-3573 fax</div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Times" size="4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px; "><br></span></font></div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div></div></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></div></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></div></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></div></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"> </div><br><div><div>On Jun 28, 2009, at 4:01 AM, Margaret Morse wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div>Dear Brian and Jonathan,<br>The only post I've made so far was bounced, so I doubt it is playing any role at all in this discussion. However, I'd like to correct an assumption made here--that there is an either/or at stake in two methodologies suggested here. Do they not amount to deductive and inductive reasoning? Don't we need them both? Seeking out examples and making distinctions via case studies and the like is not trying for a "free pass" or attempting to "get off the hook" (of what?). There is something terribly wrong going on in our internet work and playground that was so usefully compared to enclosure and I begin to see some ideas getting stronger and gelling. Please let's not get distracted by polarizing assertions.<br><br>Re the "standing reserve" and human as "biomass" all I can think about was what I saw on Friday on a field trip to "Mittelbau Dora," now a memorial to an extreme example of the relation between high technology and labor as profound human degradation. I will hazard briefly mentioning a few of the things I saw and heard remembered inside the remains of an underground factory and slave labor camp inside a gypsum mountain near Nordhausen, Germany. In 1943 inmates of Buchenwald were taken by train to Nordhausen to dig out what could be thought of as a 6 kilometer long assembly line (via train, not belt) for assembling V1 and V2 rockets. Inmates lived and worked and died in the mine; 1000 per bay slept together in unending darkness while the second shift was working around them. They were exposed to the flying debris and particulates from blasts they themselves set. The idea was that particularly the skilled labor left in their bodies could be extracted without cost beyond the food wastes like potato peels they were fed; their labor and their extermination were the same thing. The story goes on, of course and some people do survive through pure power of will. The experience of being in this place is unlikely to ever leave my thoughts.<br><br>There is a whole lot of difference--as is being pointed out with other examples between this extraction of labor power and on the internet. This is not to minimize "playbour" but it helps me to set a benchmark.<br><br>Margaret Morse<br><br><br>On Jun 27, 2009, at 7:19 PM, Brian Holmes wrote:<br><br><blockquote type="cite">Jonathan Beller wrote:<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">As Mark says, "the server farms might better be described<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">as server<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">"factories" -- spaces where the productive aspect of<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">monitoring is<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">separated out from the range of monitored activities. The<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">fact that<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">these spaces are private, commercial ones, is neither<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">natural nor<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">necessary, but is the legacy of historical forms of<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">enclosure -- the<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">continuation of enclosure as a form of separation (of<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">users from their<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">date, data producers from the means of data processsing),<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">what Massimo<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">De Angelis has described as a process of continuous<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">enclosure."<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"> (...)<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">As far as I am concerned, this statement also answers one<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">of the major<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">methodological questions pre-occupying this list serve --<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">the one that<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">would focus solely on the specific case-studies and would<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">do so in an<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">effort to imply that there are certain non-exploitative<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">forms of<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">interactivity. For the moment it seems that progress is<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">not foreclosed,<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">certainly, not all agency or organizational practices are<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">the same -- by<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">no means-- but it seems to me that none are entitled to a<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">free pass,<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">none of us are going to get off the hook so easily.<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">Thanks, Mark and Jonathan, for your remarks which together<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">made a very welcome read for me. Indeed, none of us are<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">going to get off the hook so easily, because we are all<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">involved in a society which exalts predatory relations<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">("healthy competition") and simultaneously tries to mask<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">them as the realization of human potential ("creativity,"<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">"excellence," etc.).<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">Throughout this decade, as mega-gentrification transformed<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">cities for the exclusive use of those with access to the<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">wealth-effects of financial capital, it was obvious that the<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">so-called creative industries were one of the masked faces<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">of the predatory principle, either offering artists and<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">other cultural producers the chance to be deluded into<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">thinking they too could take a share of profit, or<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">explaining that private-public partnerships would now<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">provide the opportunity of wonderful cultural interaction to<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">everyone for free. For example, according to Jean Burgess in<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">a recent post here, YouTube would provide "a more effective<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">vehicle for the popular memorialisation of television,"<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">essentially allowing people to freely construct monuments to<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">their own servitude! Now that the extent of the Ponzi<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">schemes and the insider trading has been revealed, why<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">should one trust the creativity consultants or any of the<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">characteristic forms of governance that emerged from the<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">late 1990s onward, or indeed, from the early 1980s onward,<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">when neoliberalism began?<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">To be sure, the continuing eagerness to believe in such<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">things is largely explained by the self-interest of the<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">believers. But it poses a real problem, the fundamental<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">problem of our time: How to help generate a political<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">consciousness -- a "class consciousness," to bring up the<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">terms of a previous discussion -- that can resist the<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">interlocking structures of ideology and self-interest that<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">have paralyzed the capitalist democracies and kept all of us<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">locked into a mode of development that is clearly a dead end?<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">It seems to me that a contemporary reply to Marx's program<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">of class consciousness is the highest challenge to which one<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">can aspire, and the real reason for living as an engaged<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">intellectual. To take Christian's approach and to define a<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">class in itself, as an object of exploitation, will produce<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">some necessary knowledge of the processes whereby we are all<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">conducted to an increasingly predictable disaster; but from<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">my view it does not even make sense to carry out that kind<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">of work without any political horizon, without any address<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">to potential agents of transformation. I understand how Sean<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"> can be led by the panorama of contemporary social reality<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">to Heidegger's sad old idea of humanity as a standing<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">reserve; but it's still a sad old idea, and the chances of<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">our fellow men and women effecting a metaphysical purge of<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">3,000 years of Western ideas, as Heidegger demands, are<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">pretty slim. More promising to my eyes are the chances that<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">large numbers of people will resist the cultural enclosure,<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">immiseration, food poisoning, police repression, war and<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">ecological collapse that are now the visible signposts on<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">"the road ahead" of informational capitalism. For many<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">years, leftist intellectuals in the Anglo-Saxon countries<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">have been totally isolated by the rising credit-fuelled<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">prosperity of the middle classes, which continually opened<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">up spaces of professional neutralization for all but the<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">most committed and the most alienated fringes of those who<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">managed to get some kind of education. Now the situation is<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">somewhat different, as the pillage of the economy by the<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">predatory corporate state, in Britain no less than the USA<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">(and I wonder about Australia?), is such that current<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">generations are actually waking up to some degree, even as<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">the prospect of continuing sinecures for radical thought in<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">the university system goes down. Isn't now the time to begin<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">developing research strategies that include a specific kind<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">of address, one that can elicit some socially cooperative<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">response to the failures of the Anglo-American political<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">economy of the last 30 years?<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">I wonder, Mark, if this is a concern for you. Your recent<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">book strikes me as among the best in the domain of<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">surveillance studies, because instead of engaging in the<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">usual liberal "yes, there is some abuse, but you've got to<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">understand the reasons, the justifications, the necessities,<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">etc.," you instead home right in on the multiple and<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">converging trends toward the objectification of populations<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">through the data-mining and analysis of the vast quantities<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">of informatic traces that we now leave everywhere on our<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">journey through life (and not only through our heavily<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">fetishized uses of the Web). At the end of the book iSpy (I<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">always read the end first) you do not just make the usual<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">rhetorical appeal to reform, but you lay out a minimal<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">program for the achievement of democratic interactivity.<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">Good enough, but do you think it is good enough? Could you<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">imagine developing a different research strategy that would<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">retain the gains of critical paranoia -- the only approach,<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">imho, that allows one to begin perceiving the contours of<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">reality -- but not generate the dismal feeling of no exit<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">which, at this point in the game, tends increasingly to<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">reinforce the post-political paralysis of the consumed<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">societies?<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">I have a similar question for Jonathan, whose book The<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">Cinematic Mode of Production is probably the most original<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">work of Marxist aesthetics to be written in America since<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">Jameson's The Postmodern Condition. To convince yourselves<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">of that, just read the introduction that Jonathan sent in<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">his second post. The chapter on Vertov is extremely<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">inspiring, showing the Soviet filmmaker's attempt to render<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">the industrial production process conscious and available<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">for both critique and informed participation by the entire<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">population that partakes in it. Someone with a knowledge of<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">both global logistical processes and radical net culture<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">over the last twenty years could write a companion essay and<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">then we would at last have the feeling of living with open<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">eyes and beating hearts in the present! Of course, most of<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">the book is devoted instead to the zombie condition imposed<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">on people by a cinematic mode of consciousness that does<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">everything to obscure its own (and therefore, our own)<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">conditions of production. You write, with reference to<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">Adorno and the Frankfurt School, "Thus far, only the<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">negative dialectic allows us to think the political economy<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">of the visual and hence the paradigm of a global dominant.<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">Negation, however, has very serious limits that ultimately<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">may include it as among the psychopathological strategies<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">modulated by Hollywood." Have you gotten further toward a<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">mode of articulation that can open up some resistant<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">activity _inside the belly of the whale_, which may not be<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">where we belong but is certainly where we are today?<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">all the best, Brian<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">_______________________________________________<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">iDC -- mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity (distributedcreativity.org)<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><a href="mailto:iDC@mailman.thing.net">iDC@mailman.thing.net</a><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><a href="https://mailman.thing.net/mailman/listinfo/idc">https://mailman.thing.net/mailman/listinfo/idc</a><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">List Archive:<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><a href="http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/">http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/</a><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">iDC Photo Stream:<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/idcnetwork/">http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/idcnetwork/</a><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">RSS feed:<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><a href="http://rss.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc">http://rss.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc</a><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">iDC Chat on Facebook:<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><a href="http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2457237647">http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2457237647</a><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">Share relevant URLs on Del.icio.us by adding the tag iDCref<br></blockquote><br><br>Dr. Margaret Morse<br>Direktorin, Studienzentrum der Uni Kalifornien<br>Professorin, Film and Digital Media<br>University of California Santa Cruz<br><a href="mailto:memorse@comcast.net">memorse@comcast.net</a>, <a href="mailto:morse@ucsc.edu">morse@ucsc.edu</a><br><br>University of California EAP<br>Gosslerstr. 2-4<br>Berlin 14195<br>+49 (0) 30 838 57092<br>Handy/cell Cell +49 (0) 171 99 00008<br><br><br><br><br></div></blockquote></div><br></body></html>