Rust Simulating Decay (On Jean Baudrillard)

This short essay has the following components:

1. An exploration of the lineage and sources for Jean Baudrillard’s very powerful and influential notions of simulation.
2. Some comments on time and decay and history.
3. A few modest reflections on the power of images, imagescapes and image-worlds.

Let me begin by saying that one way of understanding Baudrillard is to take a careful look at Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord. I have not got the time in this piece to examine and distill this relationship, suffice to say that Debord’s notions of commodity, spectacle and social organization appear and reappear in Baudrillard and have been a significant influence on Baudrillard’s very strategic manner of writing and speaking.

Debord and the Situationists with whom Debord worked have had an important influence on French cultural theory and philosophy, and this influence is acknowledged from time to time, but not with enough depth and certainly not to the degree that is deserved.

Time slow simulating change

I will mention one crucial aspect of Debord’s approach and that centers on his assertion that time is turned into a commodity within Capitalist societies. As a commodity, time becomes consumable and in so doing becomes one of the foundations for the transformation of everyday life into spectacle.

The key point is that we not only participate in this but simultaneously become viewers of our own lives. In this sense, we cease to have a direct relationship to experience and instead are caught up in a cycle of increasing mediation and loss. Debord and his group grew to prominence during the May 68 period in France. It is not an accident that some of the most important work of the structuralists had appeared by that time, in particular, the work of Levi-Strauss, Barthes and Foucault with contiguous work by Althusser and Derrida.

The intersection of structuralism and situationism is an important part of Baudrillard’s epistemological framework. In Situationist philosophy, the word pseudo appears and reappears as a trope for what is wrong with Western societies. The English translation, however, doesn’t catch an important additional element to what Debord is saying. I quote in French and I will explain:

Le temps pseudo-cyclique n'est en fait que le déguisement consommable n de la dimension qualitative.

Time as we measure it has the quality of the cyclical attached to it, but this is a false quality because in reality it disguises the ways in which time has become commodified, one of many different consumable items in our society.

Time is a commodity because the production process within Capitalist societies transforms time, gives it a homogeneous character and suppresses its qualitative characteristics.

Pseudo, false, suppression, the victory of commodification over quality and the overwhelming effect of capitalist modes of production on the very definitions that can be made of subjectivity, these are all fundamental to Debord and are foundational to Baudrillard. Debord creates an opposition between the natural order and pseudo nature that is dependent on his definition of time. Debord collapses all the various relations among work and leisure into pseudo time exemplifying the increasing distance and alienation that humans experience as a consequence of their transformation into commodities. Not only do the rhythms of capitalist society work against the best interests of participants, they also transform subjects into objects — the needs of production override the needs of producers with the outcome that the masses become silent witnesses to their own oppression.

This combination of Herbert Marcuse, Marx, Heidegger and the critical theorists of the 1930’s like Adorno characterize all of Debord’s work, although one major difference is the anarchist impulse in Debord and his followers.

Since Debord’s death, the anarchist movement has taken Debord as a spokesman and most of his writings are freely available on their Internet sites. Debord’s approach to writing is aphoristic and quite programmatic. Baudrillard reproduces this approach in many of his books, but most notably in America.
I have not treated Debord with the depth that he deserves, not because he was unimportant. Rather, what interests me is his core assumption that culture is in fact pseudo culture, or false culture. It is not too much of a jump to simulation, but before I deal with simulation, let me suggest that Debord viewed the silence of the masses as a sign of their resistance to Capital and that Baudrillard took up that issue in a piece that he published entitled, “In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities?

This initially creative understanding of silence as resistance was not sustained however in large part because the Situationists witnessed the failure of May 68 to generate a broad-based revolution in France. Their disappointment with the “populace? led to increasing cynicism about any form of revolt to the point where they questioned if the people would ever awake from their stupor.

(to be continued......)

40.5 M for Canada's first Digital Media Graduate Program

Vancouver - The Province of B.C. has allocated $40.5 M in one-time funding for Canada’s first professional digital media master’s program, at the Great Northern Way Campus (GNWC) in Vancouver, to help ensure that B.C. students can access employment opportunities in this rapidly growing sector, says a leading force behind the initiative.

“There is no other graduate program like this in the country and only a few in the world? says Bruce Clayman, President and CEO of the GNWC. “Funding this program will ensure that students have access to world-class education right here in B.C. and our close partnership with industry, through New Media BC, will result in valuable job opportunities for our graduates. We are grateful to the Province for providing this critical support.?

The Great Northern Way Campus is a unique partnership of SFU, UBC, BCIT and the Emily Carr Institute. The collaboration allows creation of programs that leverage the strengths of all four institutions. The one-time government funds will help attract the best faculty members in the world, meet the capital costs of constructing labs and classrooms, and create an endowment to help meet ongoing operating costs. The first intake of students is slated for September 2007. Approximately 200 students are expected to graduate by 2010.

Reflections on New Media (9)

This is the second part of my presentation at the [Refresh Conference in New Media](http://www.mediaarthistory.org) at the Banff Centre

So, the resistance to the appearance of different media forms may explain why media were renamed as new media. It may explain why someone like Lev Manovich relies on the trope of the cinema to explain the many complex levels that make up media landscapes and imageworlds. New in this instance is not only an escape from history, but also suggests that history is not important.

There is another important question here. What makes a medium specific discipline a discipline in any case? Is it the practice of the creators? Is it the fact that a heritage of production and circulation has built up enough to warrant analysis? I think not. Disciplines are produced through negotiation among a variety of players crossing the boundaries of industry, academia and the state. The term New Media has been built upon this detritus, and is a convenient way in which to develop a nomenclature that designates in a part for whole kind of way, that an entire field has been created. But, what is that field? Is it the sum total of the creative work within its rather fluid boundaries? Is it the sum total of the scholarly work that has been published? Is it the existence of a major journal that both celebrates and promotes not only its own existence but also the discipline itself?

These issues of boundary making are generally driven by political as well as cultural considerations. They are often governed by curatorial priorities developed through institutions that have very specific stakes in what they are promoting. None of these activities per se may define or even explain the rise, fall and development of various disciplines. But, as a whole, once in place, disciplines close their doors both as a defensive measure, but also to preserve the history of the struggle to come into being.

I am not suggesting by any means that things have not changed. I am not saying that digital media are simply extensions of existing forms of expression. I am saying that the struggle to define the field or discipline of media studies has always been an ongoing characteristic of both artistic and scholarly work in media. The permanence of this quasi existential crisis interests me. For the most part, for example, media studies ran into a wall when cultural studies appeared as an extension of English Departments, and when Communication Studies grew into an important discipline in its own right in the late 1950’s. Why? Suddenly, everyone was studying the media, commenting about popular culture, appropriating (mushing and mixing) intellectual traditions in a variety of different and often anarchic ways. But, somehow, the discipline as such grew into further and further levels of crisis. Which intellectual model works best? Does one use structural or post-structural modes of analysis? How can we factor in the linguistic, semiotic and ethnographic elements, and also bring in the contextual, political components? So, this is where I return to vantage point.

Juxtapose the following: The film, The Polar Express by Robert Zemeckis, which bridges the gap between digital worlds and the human body and tries to humanize an entirely artificial world; The American election of 2004 which relied on the Internet both for information and misinformation; the spectacular growth of web sites, like Friendster.com, which extend the way humans interact, communicate and develop relationships; the growth of Blogs, which have pushed publishing from the corporate world to the individual; the growing importance of search engines and popular discussions of how to engage with a sea of information; and finally, the spectacular growth of games, game consoles and on-line gaming.

Together, these and many other elements constitute image-worlds, which like a sheath cover the planet, allowing and encouraging workers in India to become office employees of large companies in the West and Chinese workers to produce goods and manage inventories on an unimaginable scale. These image-worlds operate at micro and macro levels. They are all encompassing, a bath of sounds and pictures immersing users in the manipulation of information both for exchange and as tools of power.

Picture these image-worlds as millions of intersecting concentric circles built in pyramidal style, shaped into forms that turn metal into messages and machines into devices that operate at the nano-level. Then imagine using a cell phone/PDA to call up some information that locates humans on a particular street as was done during the crisis in Louisiana and you have processes that are difficult to understand let alone see without a clear and specific choice of vantage point.

Can I stand, so to speak above the fray? How do I escape from this process long enough to be able to look back or ahead? Does Google represent the vantage point? Since historical analysis is by its very nature retrospective and since time is at best an arbitrary metaphor for continua, am I left with a series of fragments, most of which splay off in different directions? It is an irony that the thrust of this conference has been so archeological, trying to pick up the pieces, show what has been missed, connections that have not been made, as if retrospection is suddenly adequate irrespective of politics, conflict and ethics. Most interesting from my point of view is the use of the cognitive and neurosciences, dominated as they are by positivism and empiricism. Even more to the point, and to give you a sense of how important vantage points are, take the best example of all, the computer sciences which until very recently had transformed subjectivity into that insidious term user and for whom the cybernetic dream of linking input and output has determined the shape and form of most computer programs.

The digital age or perhaps better put, the algorithmic age, makes these issues all the more urgent because if the fundamental tropes for human subjectivity can so easily be reduced to terms like user, then not to understand the origins of the research in engineering that went into the trope pose many dangers. Tor Norretranders brilliant book, The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size (1998) investigates this problem in great depth and it is clear to me that richer paradigms of computer/human interaction are needed if we are to move beyond the limitations of mechanical modes of thinking about digital technologies and their impact on human consciousness. Yet, “ user is also an outgrowth of devalued models of subjectivity within media studies itself, a confluence of the media’s own evaluation of its viewers (ie the couch potato metaphor) as well as the challenge of studying viewing itself. This is perhaps the greatest irony of the ebb and flow of analysis in media studies. At times, particularly in the early to mid-seventies with the advent and growth of feminism, subjectivity became a site of contestation with a variety of methods from psychoanalysis to sociology to linguistics used as avenues into analysis, criticism and interpretation. All of that heterogeneity is now built into the analysis of new media with varying degrees of success and often with no reference to the historical origins of the intellectual models in use. Subjectivity remains a site of contestation as a concept, explanation and framework for understanding what humans do with the technologies and objects they use.

The conflation of user with experience, the reduction of subjectivity to action and reaction, is only possible if theory and analysis put to the side the far more complex side of human thought and that is the imagination. Digital experiences are highly mediated by technology but imagination, fantasy and daydreams increase the levels of complexity and add many more levels of mediation to the rich interrelationships that humans have with their cultures. All of these levels need to be disentangled if a variety of vantage points are to be constructed. Perhaps then, media studies can begin to make some claims about a paradigm shift of enough strength to warrant the use of the term new…..

Reflections on New Media (8)

This is the first part of my presentation at the recent Refresh Conference in New Media at the Banff Centre . For those of you who have read my book, there is a wonderful discussion taking place in Professor Dene Grigar's graduate class at the Texas Woman's University

Moments in time — is that what remains of each event that the media covers? There is no giant archive in the sky or database on earth that could possibly record, organize and present the extraordinary wealth of information that now processes itself through every day, every instant, in tandem with every breath that humans take (with all due respect to Google). The flow of information is both circular and endless. To me this flow is an inherent part of what I call imagescapes and imageworlds. The challenge is how to find one or many vantage points that will facilitate analysis, interpretation and description and that will permit imageworlds and imagescapes to be understood beyond a simple phenomenological scrutiny of their surface characteristics. What methods of analysis will work best here and which methods have become less relevant? I would suggest that method (the many ways in which the analysis of phenomena is approached, analyzed and synthesized) is largely dependent on vantage point, which is a concept that is closely related to perspective and attitude. This means that not only is the phenomenon important, but also position, placement, who one is and why one has chosen one form of analysis over another (ideological, philosophical or personal) needs to be transparently visible.

The continuum that links real events with their transformation into images and media forms knows few limits. This is largely because of the power of digital media and digital mediation and is something that has been commented upon in this meeting. It is perhaps not an accident that terrorists, governments and corporations all make use of the same mediated space. We call this the Internet, but that now seems a rather quaint way of describing the multi-leveled network that connects individuals and societies with often-unpredictable outcomes. Networks, to varying degrees, have always been a characteristic of most social contexts. But, the activity of networking as an everyday experience and pursuit has never been as intense as what we have now, nor have the number of mediated experiences been so great. This may well be one of the cornerstones of the new media environment. However, new media as a term, name, or metaphor is too vague to be that useful. There are many different ways of characterizing the creative process, many different methods available to talk about the evolution of networks and technologies and the ways in which creative work is distributed, and the extraordinarily intense way in which communities and individuals look for and create connections to each other. The activities that are encapsulated by the term media are broad and extend across so many areas, that the danger is that no process of categorization may work. Typologies (of which we have been shown many at this conference) become encyclopedic so that what we end up with are lists that describe an evolving field but no vantage points to question the methodological choices being made. What distinguishes one list from another?

To understand why New Media may have been convenient for both scholars and artists one need only look at the evolution of media studies. Although humans have always used a variety of media forms to express themselves and although these forms have been an integral part of culture, and in some instances the foundation upon which certain economies have been built, the study of media only developed into a discipline in the 20th century. There are many reasons for this including and perhaps most importantly, the growth of printing from a text-based activity to the mass reproduction of images (something that has been commented on by many different theorists and practitioners). The convergence of technology and reproduction has been the subject of intense artistic scrutiny for 150 years. Yet, aside from Museums like MOMA the disciplines that we now take for granted, like film, photography, television and so on, came into being in universities only after an intense fight and the quarrel continues to this day. The arguments were not only around the value of works in these areas, (photography for example, was not bought by serious art collectors until the latter half of the 20th century which may or may not be a validation of photography’s importance), but around the legitimacy of studying various media forms given their designation as the antithesis of high culture. Film was studied in English Departments. Photography was often a part of Art History Departments. Twenty years after television started to broadcast to mass audiences in the early 1950’s there were only a handful of texts that had been written, and aside from extremely critical assertions about the negative effects of TV on an unsuspecting populace (the Postman-Chomsky phenomenon), most of the discourse was descriptive. The irony is that even Critical Theory in the 1930’s which was very concerned with media didn’t really break the scholarly iceberg that had been built around various media forms. It took the convergence of structuralism, semiotics and linguistics in the late 1960’s, a resurgence of phenomenology and a reconceptualization of the social and political role of the state to provoke a new era of media study. In Canada, this was felt most fully through the work of McLuhan and Edmond Carpenter and was brought to a head by the powerful convergence of experimentation in cinema and video combined with the work of artists in Intermedia, performance and music. Another way of thinking about this is to ask how many people were studying rock and roll in 1971? After all, rock and roll was disseminated through radio, another medium that was not studied seriously until well after its invention (sound based media have always been the step-children of visual media).

Part Nine…

The Age of Six Feet Under (2)

In today's New York Times, Joan Didion describes her shock and grief at the sudden death of her husband John Gregory Dunne. It is a very moving article about pain, loss and the ways in which the death of a loved one bring memories and feelings to the surface that are often buried and sometimes inaccessible until the shock of death rears its head. In an age (zeitgeist) which as a friend of mine recently said, pathologizes everything that is related to the body, health and death, Didion's piece brings personal confession, the confessional into the foreground. As she explores the confusion, the sheer magnitude of death and the finality of everything that surrounds it, Didion tries to bring the craft of writing forcefully into play while also recognizing that nothing she says will fully explain the complexities of what she is going through. At one point, she mentions a strong urge to make a film, to create images as a way of explaining what is happening to her.

Most of the plots of Six Feet Under centred on confessions of guilt, pain, incomprehension and of course, death. The personal became public — emotions otherwise hidden away in the private worlds that we all inhabit were brought to the surface. This confessional mode is audience-centric. Confessions reveal that which is normally hidden. But confessions are only possible if someone is listening. Didion's piece is as much for us as it is for her husband. We are the transitional listeners who allow her to regain some control over the loss. In a fictional TV show the dead can be brought to life and can listen and react to their loved ones. It is that fiction which is at the heart of all confessions, because they are ultimately for the living, for the living who still have memories.