Posted: March 23, 2012 | Author: Dan | Filed under: playing with reality, Technology | Tags: Culture, culture studies, DCRC, post-digital |
Yesterday at Blast Theory’s ACT Otherwise workshop I dropped the term post-digital in the middle of a set of deliberate provocations. It’s a term that has drifted occasionally around the DCRC over the last year, and seems to be in the process of Arriving. My arguments have been that digital cultural research (which the centre does) should all now be contextualised as post-digital research.
So what do I mean by post-digital? Because just like post-structuralism and post-modernism it is easy to get caught up in the concept of it being reactionary or negative as opposed to developmental. I’m also not entirely sure I mean one thing by it myself.
My simplest explanation however, now that I’ve had a little time to think about it, is that post-digital is when the categories of digital and non-digital become meaningless. There is a point where the two so thoroughly infuse each other that they are not two separate domains. I.e. that there is no sense in talking about digital media and non-digital media when they are all now just media. Digital production techniques so thoroughly infuse what might be seen as traditional media, that it is not the same anymore. The digital is now already there, not becoming, and false binaries keep us in the past, if they even ever existed as clear dualities. And this extends to cover synonymous debates such as virtual vs real or online vs physical. These are all already hybridised.
When I dropped this concept of the post-digital yesterday Andy Field did a nice little example/summary of post-digital when talking about how the nature of reading a book has changed. And I’m paraphrasing his words in my language, because it is not that books have physically changed, but that they’ve managed to stay a (meta)stable form in a network of changing production and consumption technologies. But I think some of the reaction to the concept of going post-digital are common in foregrounding the digital as a simple transformational force. People get stuck and struck with the sheer wonder of the changes “Did you know that digital/technology has fundamentally changed X?” And the answer is yes and…? How do we get on with stopping marvelling at the fact that it is changing things and work out what we do with that?
Matt Locke’s talk after mine was about post-digital attention. It wonderfully charted that pre to post trajectory and did end up asking that question of “what next?” His central argument is that contemporary technologies now allow content producers to experience the attention of their audiences. But he doesn’t end there, he asks, in a beautifully embodied way, “What does that feel like?” and “How does that change the practice of producing worK?”
I co-opted and twisted Matt Adam’s metaphor (or maybe it was a challenge) about technology development as an explosion that has already happened, and said that I thought technology had exploded, taking it beyond the sense of explosion as growth to explosion as blown apart. And I still like that, it has exploded and the little pieces are everywhere, embedded in the quotidian. It is time to stop being awed by the explosion and look at the fragments.
Posted: April 1, 2011 | Author: Dan | Filed under: playing with reality | Tags: Culture, culture studies, DCRC, economics, marxism, pervasive games, Pervasive Media |
Recently I’ve been reading more Lefebvre and from that getting onto some Althusser, Marcuse and Gramsci. I have to say it has been leading me in some new and interesting directions, the upshot of which is that I’m going to radically change my PhD direction. Starting with retitling it “A Contribution to the Critique of Pervasive Economy.”
Starting with an analysis of Pervasive Gaming as a cultural superstructure which represents and reflects an underlying socio-economical base we can see that there is a fundamental global shift shift currently occurring. There is a dominant techno-political hegemony which results in the emergence of things such as the internet and ubiquitous computing. These technologies are mobilised into oppressive structures, but they are merely a result of larger scale economic changes.
In this world the techno-bourgeoisie controls the means of aggregation, they control the rules of the game-overlay. However the users do control the means of content generation and through this the inequality can be overthrown.
Using various continental philosophers I’ve plotted the eventual social evolution or development, and postulated a world in which the technology can be distributed equally and everyone can have a jail-broken iphone.
Users of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your 3G contracts. The revolution will not be televised, it will be downloaded via bittorrent.
To this end I’ve started writing down some of my thoughts in a little book. The biggest question of the revolution is, “What colour should it be?”
Posted: October 13, 2010 | Author: Dan | Filed under: learning | Tags: Critical Debates, Culture, culture studies, marxism, practice, williams |
Week 3 of the Critical Debates in Cultural Theory course. This week is the historical view on cultural studies.
Williams, R. (1991) Base and superstructure in Marxist cultural theory. Rethinking popular culture: Contemporary perspectives in cultural studies, 407-423.
The notion of base (production, social activity…) and superstructure (culture, politics…) in a more traditional sense would seems to be anathema to cultural studies. If it is always determined by economic and sociological practice then it will always play second fiddle (or piano). Which seems ironic given the firm marxist basis cultural studies has.
Williams tries to qualify the idea that the base determines the superstructure, by saying that it is a lot more complex and inter-related. Not just one determining the other. He seems unwilling to give it up, even though he seems to want to in the article. Moving to either a more complex construction, or more nuanced understanding seems the way forward. I’m reminded of Bourdieu’s fields or Stiegler’s technicity as better places to start. Though each of these brings their own problems.
His other three arguments in the piece seem non-controversial and straightforward.
- Cultural Hegemony is complex and not a conscious conspiracy
- Culture is historical and political. In the wider cultural picture there are residual, emergent, alternative and oppositional cultures
- That culture studies should be focusing on practices of culture, not the cultural artifacts themselves, ie objects or texts.
Hall, S. (1996) Cultural studies and its theoretical legacies. Stuart Hall: Critical dialogues in cultural studies, 262–275.
Less a history, than a personal narrative or reminiscence on the relationship between cultural studies (I’ll probably refer to it as CS for short) and theory, basically marxism, over the last 60 years. His description of the circling between marxism and CS in the early days is enlightening, and as he says, they had all the same problems that I’ve also spotted. But in the end reinterpreted Marx did good theoretical work for them, though mostly through the writings of Gramsci.
So it seems that the long marriage of the two had a very bumpy start. The other two collisions he quickly describes is the arrival of the feminists and questions of race, which lead to some deep reinterpretations of power (the personal is political). He only deals ever so briefly with the arrival of textuality and deconstructionism.
It is interesting that he also reflects on the value of culture studies. Why do we need it? That in the light of global catastrophies (AIDS is contemporary for him) CS seems to be marginal and ephemeral. It is only through keeping CS truly political that it can be valid as a discipline, though keeping modest about this.
I do think there is all the difference in the world between understanding the politics of intellectual work and substituting intellectual work for politics.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1997) The culinary triangle. Food and culture: a reader, 28-35.
The analysis and methods do some good work to begin with, but on the last page he goes a bit mental and tries to fit all cooking into his triangle. Apart from other issues with where he ends up, I think this is a good (bad) example of ignoring the practice and focusing purely on the symbolism.