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: August 10, 2011 | Author: Dan | Filed under: BT Residency, playing with reality | Tags: blasttheory, brighton, Culture, DCRC, liminal |
Here are a couple of pics from the seafront. The west pier on Tuesday night and about half a day later on Wednesday. The pier is a bit hard to see at night. But interestingly, and also hard to see, there are couples in just about the same spot, looking out to the pier. It seems like it would be a popular place for reflection.
The West Pier is in a very liminal state, it is betwixt and between. Since being abandoned it has never quite been in use although there have always been schemes about to bear fruit. There are now plans for a tower to be built on the site.
Piers themselves are interesting examples of liminal spaces (as well as seaside resort towns in general, see Rob Shields Places on the Margin). They are zones of carnival and play, symbolically sitting on the border between land and sea, jutting out excitingly over the sea. They evoke, both in their presence and their rides, a sense of what Caillois would call vertigo, a dominant feeling, but mixed in with competition, chance and mimicry. Just by walking out on the pier one engages in a very sensual engagement with gravity and the elements.
Sitting watching the West Pier from the shore, one is reminded of all that without being able to take part. Sitting on the beach you are now separated by a true boundary from what was a liminal space and is now a symbol of the dead carnival. It is very similar to the ancient Egyptians looking across the nile to the tombs on the west bank and seeing a threshold, the routes to the lands of the dead, the routes to the afterlife.
Posted: August 3, 2011 | Author: Dan | Filed under: BT Residency, game studies, playing with reality | Tags: Anthropology, Culture, DCRC, game studies, games, huizinga, play, ritual, Turner |
In game studies returning to Huizinga has a slightly religious quality about it. Like going back to the source, or font of wisdom. Quoting from Huizinga is a little like quoting from scripture, his work has that place in the discipline and authors expect it to have the force of gospel. It is also like scripture in that there is a poetry to it and everyone gets their own thing out of it. My turn.
Now in myth and ritual the great instinctive forces of civilized life have their origin: law and order, commerce and profit, craft and art, poetry, wisdom and science. All are rooted in the primaeval soil of play. (Huizinga, 1949, p5)
In Homo Ludens, he charts the parallels between ritual and play. He shows that many of the key formal characteristics are similar and quite definitely says that ritual comes out of play. If play is to be taken as performance and mimicry then that goes against what Turner says in the Anthropology of Experience, in that ritual doesn’t come out of performance, but out of redressive social activity. Which leads on to Chapter 3 of Homo Ludens, where Huizinga discusses play in its function to explore and construct social structures. This works nicely with Turner’s take on ritual being a place to break down social structure and experience relations through the anti-structure of communitas.
Huizinga’s first characteristic of play is that it is free and voluntary. Which makes it unlike a rite of passage according to Turner. Play becomes liminoid rather than liminal in that there is a choice as to whether you do it or not.
His second characteristic of play is that it is outside “ordinary” life in its character, duration and location. This is exactly the liminal aspect that rituals achieve and so there is functional similarity here.
Play creates order and there are rules to play by. Having a three year old makes me very aware that so called paidia, or free play, has very definite and unbreakable rules. Again rituals have very set, symbolic structures that give them power and practicality. Turner’s anti-structure is intended to be the set of rules that function inside liminal processes, not just the negation of structure.
Finally play has no material interest, or the achievement inside a game does not carry over into the real world. This is always a hotly debated aspect of games, and has largely been debunked. Ritual by its very nature causes a real world change in the participant(s). They go from one life stage to another, experience crises or cross the boundaries between seasons. The effects of ritual is very closely tied into the real world. However liminoid experiences are those that are only expected to make a change in the individuals perceptions and not have a wider social-structural effect.
In Homo Ludens, Huizinga hit on some interesting similarities, but was too quick to jump in to equating play and ritual as having similar social functions. Through Turner’s communitas, anti-structure and liminoid distinctions the similarities and differences can be discussed in a more nuanced way. Turner never mentions Huizinga, but I would be surprised if he had not encountered the work, and I would be interested in knowing his opinions.
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 28, 2010 | Author: Dan | Filed under: playing with reality | Tags: Critical Debates, cultural studies, culturalism, Culture, DCRC, experience, marxism, PhD, structuralism |
Over the last week I’ve been churning away at the relationship between experience and culture as viewed through the lenses of marxism (specifically cultural materialism) and structuralism. Which is very important for my PhD because I’m interested in the experience of “pervasive gaming” and probably need to take some form of informed theoretical stance on this. I keep approaching it methodologically and theoretically and it keeps escaping.
In marxism, experience creates culture, in fact culture is what is created through the practices of lived reality. In structuralism, culture is the system of symbols and language that determine how we can experience the world. Marxism says experience creates culture, structuralism says culture determines experience.
This is overly simplified, but a useful, if violent, boiling down of the distinction. The nuances, the century long tradition, and things like marxist structuralism all complicate this. Also that these views are different, but certainly not opposite, not necessarily mutually exclusive and also not the only ways to conceptually produce the relationship between experience and the problematic term culture.
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.
Posted: October 4, 2010 | Author: Dan | Filed under: learning | Tags: Anthropology, Critical Debates, Culture, DCRC, PhD, philosophy, Process |
As part of my PhD I get the opportunity to take a couple of appropriate modules. This year I’ve just started Critical Debates in Cultural Theory. Week one kicks off with some unpacking of the term culture.
A couple of great quotes from Raymond Williams.
Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English Language.
I don’t know how many times I’ve wished I’d never heard that word.
He has a great etymological perspective. The english word Culture has developed from the Latin noun cultura, meaning: inhabit, cultivate, protect, honour. Basically the husbandry of natural growth.
Culture in all its early uses was a noun of process.
It is only later, and largely through academic disciplines, that the term comes to mean material culture. This quote ties in nicely with my reading of Turner, et. al. when they are talking about a turn to the experience, and not the transmission of culture. It also resonates wonderfully with the the Process Philosophy of Whitehead, Pierce and Dewey, to which I am drawn, but am woefully under read.
Which I suppose is where the whole post-structural critique steps in and gives structuralism a kick in the ahistorical.
How do you solve a problem like Culture?
How do you catch a cloud and pin it down?
How do you find a word that means Culture?
A flibbertijibbet! A will-o’-the wisp! A clown!