Check out this CFP

CULTURE MACHINE 9 (2007)
http://www.culturemachine.net

CALL FOR PAPERS: RECORDINGS
Editors for this issue: Paul Hegarty and Gary Genosko

What is the current state of aural art media in ‘an era of digital reproduction’? Which trails were followed in order to reach the present of online and/or digital (sub)versions? Due consideration needs to be given to the residues of technologies, the anachronisms, the failures, the less-than-excellent, the dated, the outmoded, and even the yet-to-work. Once we take into account the material (or dematerialised) art object, what about collecting cultures, recycling, destroyed and broken media (the TV thrown from the window….), new broadcast media, turntablism, noise, radio and its avatars, podcasting, any casting, the range of material ‘supports’ (vinyl, the 8 track, betamax, different audio files). Still, has the digital and informational swamped the world in a mass encoded simulation? What and where are the resistances? Are they within or outside of the digital? In the junk heap of analogue machines? In Ebay dreams? What are the material forms/formats that offer critical models, avant-gardism, metacommentary and so on? What is the status of the art commodity, non-commodity or hypercommodity? Contributions on any of the above are welcomed, from any theoretical or historical perspective. Whilst sound is very important, due to its apparent disappearance in ubiquity, submissions are invited to consider other media (notably video art, DVD, streaming), provided it addresses some of the above ideas.

Recommended length: 4000 – 7000 words

Submission deadline date: 1 Feb 2007.
All contributions to Culture Machine are refereed anonymously. Authors should follow the Culture Machine Style Manual in preparing their articles: http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/papers.htm#submissions.

Contact:
Editors for this issue: Paul Hegarty, University College Cork, Ireland
Email: phegarty@french.ucc
Gary Genosko, Lakehead University, Canada
Email: genosko@tbaytel.net

Contributing to Culture Machine
Culture Machine publishes new work from both established figures and up-and-coming writers. It is interactive, fully refereed, and has an International Advisory Board which includes Robert Bernasconi, Lawrence Grossberg, Peggy Kamuf, Alphonso Lingis, Meaghan Morris, Paul Patton, Avital Ronell and Nicholas Royle. Among the distinguished contributors to the first eight editions of Culture Machine are Mark Amerika, Alain Badiou, Geoffrey Bennington, Bifo, Oran Catts, Simon Critchley, Jacques Derrida, Diane Elam, Johan Fornäs, Henry A. Giroux, Lawrence Grossberg, Stevan Harnad, N. Katherine Hayles, Peggy Kamuf, David Kolb, Ernesto Laclau, J. Hillis Miller, Anna Munster, Michael Naas, Mark Poster, Melinda Rackham, Tadeusz Slawek, Bernard Stiegler, Ted Striphas, Kenneth Surin, Gregory L. Ulmer, Hal Varian, Cathryn Vasseleu and Samuel Weber.

Culture Machine welcomes material from Britain, Australia and the United States, and is particularly interested in acquiring contributions from those working outside the usual Anglo/Australian/American nexus that currently seems to dominate so much of Cultural Studies/Cultural Theory. Appropriate unsolicited articles of any length from academics, post-graduates and non-academics will all be accepted for publication, as will contributions which respond to or seek to engage with work previously published in Culture Machine. So-called ‘inter-active’ texts are welcomed, as are any forms of contribution that take advantage of and explore the uses and limitations of digital technology.

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Dr Gary Hall
Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies, Middlesex University
Co-editor of Culture Machine http://www.culturemachine.net
Director of the Cultural Studies Open Access Archive: http://www.culturemachine.net/csearch
My website http://www.garyhall.info

Tone down the meta

I always look forward to the fall.

I excitedly anticipate the start of each new school year, often to the point of insomnia, and I love experiencing the change of seasons as the harsh summer gives way to the more mellow autumn. The fall also means the start of another new season--the television season. This week and the preceding one have seen a deluge of new and returning shows.

I'm most intrigued by the new Aaron Sorkin production, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Sorkin, you may recall, wrote and created The West Wing (before his ouster) and is widely regarded as a doyen of "quality television." I caught a rerun of the Studio 60 premiere last night on Bravo, and I'm looking forward to seeing episode #2 tonight on NBC. The show revolves around a television writer-director team played by Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford, who return to a Saturday Nigh Live-esque show after having been fired several years before by an uptight network executive.

The premiere featured an extended rant by Judd Hirsch, who plays (or played) the longtime producer of the fictitious show-within -the-show, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. After having received word from network standards and practices that one of the night's skits wouldn't fly, Hirsch breaks into the broadcast and kvetches about how television programming has gone down the toilet, to the point of "lobotomizing" the television audience--an audience that doesn't seem to care, for example, that a global war's been going on for years. All the TV audience seems to care about anymore, he inveighs, are programs about marrying one's sister.

I was both thrilled and saddened by what I'll henceforth call "the rant." I was thrilled because, though I don't necessarily agree with the arguments about the decline of "quality" television, it's rare that television writers get to indict or critique the medium within which they're working to the extent Sorkin appears to have. The show's "meta" dimension works quite well, as it were, in terms of talking about the possibilities and limitations of our existing televisual system on TV. By the same token, I get the sense that Studio 60 may, in the end, be too "meta." The rant was followed later by fictitious news coverage, which likened the monologue over and over to the famous "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!!!" speech from the 1976 film, Network. That coupled with the fact that Perry and Whitford's characters seem to embody key elements of Sorkin himself seem to me to make the show, at least at this early stage, just another TV program that aspires to little more than announcing itself as "postmodern" or self-aware of itself as TV. And that's just not all that interesting to me.

I'm going to give Studio 60 a shot, though. It's remarkably high production values, clever writing, and potential make it worth watching. Let's just hope that Sorkin can tone down the meta.

P.S. While I'm on the subject of TV, a quick follow-up to my summertime post about Rockstar: Supernova. Despite the fact that Dilana clearly was the better front-person, the band took the easy way out and picked--surprise, surprise--a guy to lead them, Lukas Rossi. The band claimed in the finale that their decision was based on the call-in and online voting. It's depressing to me how people can't seem to get their heads around the fact that women can rock. I might well have purchased Supernova's album had Dilana recorded with them, but now there's not a chance.

Happy birthday, D&R!

Maybe it's cliched to say this, but how quickly a year goes by! On September 14th, 2005, I launched Differences and Repetitions. To tell you the truth, I didn't have any idea at the time what I was doing or if I'd even sustain my interest in blogging. One year later and I'm happy to report a solid, engaged readership, and as of this writing 62 posts. Not too shabby, if I do say so myself.

As I said, it took me some time to figure out what D&R would be about--almost a month, really. In October 2005 I wrote what amounts to the D&R manifesto (people don't write enough manifestos anymore), which, if you're new to the site (or you simply don't remember what I think I'm up to), you can access by clicking here. No doubt, in the next year, D&R will continue to evolve in unexpected ways, and perhaps I'll have to write a new manifesto. If nothing else, the last year has brought a mix of political, intellectual, and more light-hearted posts. I imagined this blog to be pretty serious, and indeed it often is, but I'm glad my readership has helped me to loosen up a bit.

Speaking of readers, THANK YOU! Without your reading and commentary, there wouldn't be much point to my doing what I'm doing here. I'm especially grateful to those of you who've pushed me on some of my opinions and insights, which, admittedly, are perhaps somewhat raw when I put them out here. I really imagine D&R as a public forum in which to think out loud--something I find fewer and fewer people in the academy seem to do these days, at the risk of seeming intellectually unpolished. Thank you, all of you, for indulging me.

Please continue to spread the word about D&R, and please keep reading, responding, and cajoling. It's been a great year, and I look forward to many more with all of you.

Becoming intense, becoming Haraway

Tonight I had the good fortune of seeing Donna Haraway deliver a lecture here at Indiana University. Her talk, "We Have Never Been Human: When Species Meet," was the keynote address at IU's first-ever Kindred Spirits conference, which is taking place here today, tomorrow, and throughout the weekend. It promises to be a remarkable event interrogating the relationship between human and non-human animals. The lineup even includes (among other notables) Carole Adams, whose The Sexual Politics of Meat is a remarkable, thought-provoking book about vegetarianism.

I'm writing, though, to talk about Haraway's relationship to the work of Deleuze and Guattari. Judging by the title of the talk, perhaps it comes as no surprise to hear that one of her objects of interest was Deleuze and Guattari's chapter from A Thousand Plateaus, "Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible" (chapter 10). She began by noting that many had suggested to her over the years that her work was Deleuzo-Guattarian in spirit, and so after some time she decided, finally, to read them. She also noted many of Deleuze's individual writings (most notably one of my favorites, Difference and Repetition), and generally seemed laudatory toward his larger body of work. (I'm not sure how she feels about Guattari, who was the self-avowed environmentalist of the duo.) ATP chapter 10 was another story, however. She described it as something to the effect of, "the 50 pages that deserved to be burned at the inquisition." Ouch. If I gather correctly, she most objected to their celebrating the wolf pack and denigrating the image of the lone, older woman walking her dog.

From a feminist standpoint, I can certainly understand the objection. I also agree that D&G are wrong to dismiss the significance of the woman-dog scene, which, as Haraway pointed out, is a deeply complex moment of interspecies encounter. As a dog parent (see the photo above-left of my canine companion), I intuitively "get" what she was getting at. What's intriguing to me, though, is how, in a way, Haraway seems to shoot out the other side in trying to achieve an ethics of interspecies interaction. To me what's so significant and interesting about D&G's discussion of the wolf pack is precisely the absence of people in that moment, or their implicit suggestion that philosophy/critical theory need not always return in some moment to the human in order to address broad ontological questions. Haraway, in the end, seems to want to understand the human through the non-human and vice-versa, which I take to be a different kind of project--a new humanism, I think, rather than a Deleuzo-Guattarian ahumanism. And for my part, the latter continues to be a more compelling project, precisely because it doesn't demand that human beings always dwell within the philosophical proscenium.

I don't plan on lighting any fires at the inquisition anytime soon, in other words. I should say, though, to be fair, that Haraway's talk was provocative, engaging, and nothing short of amazing--precisely the kind of work people have come to expect from her. I was lucky to have had a chance to see her in person.

V for, "Does it really matter?"

Last weekend I rented V for Vendetta, the Natalie Portman/Hugo Weaving vehicle that's based on comic book impresario Alan Moore's graphic novel. For those of you who haven't seen the movie, it's set in the not-too-distant future and is about the people's struggle against a totalitarian state--Britain, to be exact. V, the main character, is a modern-day Guy Fawkes who inspires the oppressed masses to rise up and to confront the homophobia, religious intolerance, fear-mongering, and lack of civil liberties that have beset jolly-old England.

What's abundantly clear is that the film is a warning about the slippery slope countries like Britain and the United States find themselves on these days. The future Britain it portrays--where copies of the Koran are banned, sexual minorities must live underground, art is suspect, and eavesdropping on the populace is the order of the day--is, in some respects, embodied in our present, though perhaps not in quite those extremes.

You might say that the film offers a scathing critique of the current policies of the British and U.S. governments, especially many of the initiatives that have begun under the auspices of the "war on terror." My question is this: Does it really matter?

Perhaps I've been out of the loop, but I don't get the impression that V for Vendetta has sparked much of a serious public dialogue about democracy's slide toward totalitarianism in either country. Perhaps that's asking too much from one film. But for me it raises a larger question: to what extent are the media genuinely effective in producing concrete shifts in governmental policy? Another way of putting this would be to say: to what extent is cultural politics able to change formal governmental politics or policy anymore?

V, for me, is an intriguing test-case. To the extent that it hasn't seemed to produce much public outcry (or effective public outcry), my inclination would be to say that the power critics once attributed to cultural politics may be on the decline. Don't get me wrong. I still believe cultural politics matters. By the same token, a film like V suggests to me that cultural politics may not matter in the way that it once did.

Lame

Okay...I'll admit it. My last post was a bit lame. It raises an important topic--the politics and intellectual worth of social constructionism--but it doesn't really address it. I wanted to post something to D&R since I hadn't in awhile, but in the end I didn't have the mental wherewithal to do more than raise a too-open-ended question.

Where did I want to go with that question? I had intended to talk about Deleuze and Guattari's contributions to what, for lack of a better term, might be called the philosophy of knowledge (and I'm purposefully trying to avoid using the word "epistemology" here). They develop this line of work both individually and collaboratively, though their most pointed statement comes in their final venture together, What Is Philosophy? If I'm reading WIP? and other works (e.g., Deleuze's Proust and Signs) correctly, concepts (what epistemologists might call "knowledge") inhere in things, and it's up to philosophers and other cultural workers to extract and articulate them.

I'll say that I'm seduced by this notion, though I'm uncomfortable with the kind of "reading" practice it seems to imply. Theoretically, from a Deleuzo-Guattarian standpoint, one is affected in such a way by a thing that she/he can be moved to extract whatever concept or concepts happen to inhere in it. Perhaps. But isn't that a hop, skip, and a jump away from the kind of literary reading--of feeling the meaning of a literary work "on your pulse"--that defined the work of people such as F. R. and Q. D. Leavis and others? How is Deleuzo-Guattarian knowledge production not, at some level, a sort of virtuoso protocol for reading culture?

That question seems to me less lame, and honestly it's one I'm going to need some time to work through. For now, because this has been a fairly heady entry (most of my summer posts admittedly have been on the lighter side), I figured I'd end with an image my colleague John Lucaites sent me from somethingawful.com. Sony, like many these days, apparently is becoming Deleuzo-Guattarian..... ;)

The end is nigh

My research leave is nearly at an end. I can tell that by the dramatic upsurge in responsibilities related to on-campus life that I've been feeling for the last few weeks: preparing and copying syllabi; orientation sessions; meetings with colleagues and students; prepping for classes; and more. I'm at once anxious for the school year to start and sad to bid farewell to what's been a remarkably peaceful and productive time for research and writing.

That's not really why I'm writing, though. I'm writing to draw D&R readers' attention to a hilarious and brilliant skit called "Wikiality" that ran recently on Comedy Central's mock news program, The Colbert Report. You can access the piece on You Tube.

For those of you who haven't seen it, Colbert pokes fun at the online Encyclopedia, Wikipedia. The site, I'm sure most of you know, allows people like you and me to author entries, thereby participating actively in the constitution of knowledge. Wikipedia's been both praised and condemned for this kind of openness: praised, because it facilitates collaborative, more or less democratic knowledge production; and condemned, because, as Colbert and others have noted, if enough contributors agree on something as true, then it becomes true on Wikipedia.

What's remarkable to me about the Colbert piece, and about the debates over Wikipedia more generally, is how in part they reflect debates about the usefulness of "social constructionism"--that is, the doctrine that humans produce meanings, values, and institutions (realities) that we then come to inhabit as though they were necessary and given. The left's embraced social constructionism and put the idea to use in quite critical, politically efficacious ways. What the Colbert piece shows clearly, though, is how the politics of social constructionism are not inherent to social constructionism. He jokingly suggests, for example, that people should access Wikipedia and insist that Africa's elephant population is increasing. (Some, apparently, have followed through on the gag.)

"Wikiality"--both the skit and the notion--underscore how the left needs to do better. It can't simply continue pointing out how knowledge (and what follows from it) is constituted socially, or how people come to inhabit specific regimes of truth. The question--and I'm hardly the first to pose it--is, If devolving into an untenable relativism is undesirable, then what's the alternative to social constructionism?

Space

I work in a box.

Actually, I work in a cinderblock building that was constructed originally to house GIs returning to college after the Second World War. It's since been converted into an office building, though it still maintains many of the trappings of a dormitory. I'm particularly amused by the built-in closets in my office, which have been converted into makeshift bookshelves.

Right now the university is in the midst of tearing down all the buildings in my complex to make way for new high-rise student housing--that is, with the exception of my own. The university's promised to build my department what's called a "generic office building," since we're ostensibly in the way of the looming construction project.

Our current building is configured in such a way that all rooms are pretty much discrete. Each of the faculty has a private, enclosed office with one to two windows that open toward the outside. The classrooms--what few we have--are all self contained. Judging by the name, I suspect that our proposed "generic office building" will reflect a similar architectural disposition.

In some ways, I like my existing building. There's plenty of privacy, and I happen to have a corner office. By the same token, a conversation with a friend of mine in computer science reminded me of just how much difference office space can make when it comes to fostering a certain kind of work environment. He described a lab to me in which seminar spaces are open, as are most of the offices. Conference rooms all have windows facing both the interior and the exterior of the building, which further helps to engender a sense of openness. As a whole, the lab's designed to encourage spontaneous, collegial interactions and to foster the culture of collaboration that's typical in computer science.

I wonder if a similar kind of floor plan would be appropriate to a humanities-based department like mine. Indeed, I've always been struck by the humanities' critique of individualism, a critique that doesn't really get reflected in our work, the vast majority of which consists of single-authored articles and books. Could changing our architecture help foster a more collaborative humanities, one that better practices what it preaches?

Two great new blogs

Apologies for the hiatus. I was away again, this time traipsing around the remarkable Yellowstone National Park. I also was busy finalizing some aspects of my book, which now has a new title: The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture From Consumerism to Control.

I'm writing, though, to promote two great new blogs. The first is Gil Rodman's Revolution on a Stick, which he launched about a month ago. You may know Gil from his wonderful book Elvis After Elvis: The Posthumous Career of a Living Legend and from his co-edited collection, Race in Cyberspace. Like D&R, Revolution on a Stick is about culture, politics, and stuff. Right now Gil's featuring his paper from the recent Crossroads in Cultural Studies conference in Istanbul, Turkey, and knowing his work, it's sure to be both insightful and funny.

The other new blog is J. Macgregor Wise's Ain't Got Time to Blog, which has been up and running for a few weeks now. Greg's the author of Exploring Technology and Social Space and the co-author of both Culture and Technology: A Primer and the second edition of Media Making. He says that his is Ain't Got Time to Blog will be "an occasional sort of thing, random thoughts, some about work, writing, ideas, some about life." Despite his modesty, though, he's already posted some interesting pieces on media collecting and LP records.

Definitely check them out!

Television & New Media

My essay "Disowning Commodities: Ebooks, Capitalism, and Intellectual Property Law" was just published in the August 2006 issue of Television and New Media. Here's a copy of the abstract and a link to the table of contents:

This article explores the changing social function of commodities in the United States by exploring the conditions of possibility of electronic books, or "ebooks." By juxtaposing the history of printed books and consumer capitalism on the one hand and the history of ebooks on the other, this article maps an emergent configuration of capitalism, technology, and intellectual property law. Together, these histories evidence how the widespread private ownership of mass-produced consumer goods has grown increasingly problematic from the standpoint of capitalist production—an understanding embedded in many, if not most, commercially available ebook texts and devices. In addition to showing how the category of "private property" is destabilized in relationship to ebooks and other digital technologies, this article strategizes how best to articulate a vital, progressive politics in light of changing material and economic conditions.

My blank page

It is done.

Well, a solid draft of it, at any rate--a draft of my book. Having (nearly) completed what amounts to a Herculean amount of writing in just the last few months, I figured now would be an appropriate time to reflect a little on my writing process.

I don't know about you, but whenever I write, I hear in my head the voices of dozens of friends, mentors, and teachers, all of whom have given me writing advice over the years. Let me say right off the bat that much--probably most--of it's been invaluable. I'm grateful to all of my formal and informal writing teachers who've made words such an integral part of my life.

The other shoe has to drop, of course, so here it comes. Inasmuch as I value their advice, I find at times that all the rules I've learned through the years can stifle my writing. I get so caught up sometimes on what not to do, that I have a tremendous amount of difficulty producing any writing at all. Here are just a few examples of "the rules":

Never split a verb infinitive (e.g., don't say, "to better explore...")

Never leave a dangling participle (e.g., don't say, "the store I left my wallet in."

Never end a sentence on a linking verb (e.g., don't say, "She's better than he is.)

Avoid the construction, "is that..."

Avoid using passive voice constructions (e.g., don't say, "The gift was given to them...")

Avoid using the presumptive "we"

Don't use contractions

Don't start a sentence with the conjunction, "and"

Don't use the word "this" without following it directly with a noun

Don't address your audience using the direct or implied "you"

Minimize your use of the pronoun "I" and avoid it where possible

I'm sure there are dozens more, but these most immediately come to mind. The funny thing about these "rules" is that, the more I write, the more I find myself violating them. (See--I just broke the "is that" rule right there.)

In Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, Gilles Deleuze talks about the art of painting as an art of chasing away all the cliches that occupy any unpainted canvas. I feel the same way when I write: my blank page is full of prosaic statements that challenge me constantly to write something poetic, insightful, moving, or otherwise meaningful. Yet, I also feel as though my blank pages is filled with all the writing advice that's been given to me over the years, advice that sometimes makes it hard for me to say anything at all.

The most excruciating--and perhaps best--writing advice that was ever given to me came from my 9th grade English teacher. I recall her making the class write highly structured paragraphs, including topic sentences, support, evidence, and clinchers. Any deviation from "the form" would result in lost points. As much as I may have resented the structure at the time, today I often find that when I have trouble writing, I return to this, my base. Interestingly, it's one of the few affirmative pieces of writing advice that I've received--a far cry from all the "don'ts," "avoids," and "nevers."

For those about to rock...

Well, the writing continues apace. The introduction of my book now is in hand, which leaves just the conclusion between me and a completed manuscript draft. The intensity of the writing has kept me from blogging of late, unfortunately, though I have managed to squeak in some TV time. One of my favorite returning shows is CBS's Rockstar, the latest installment of which features a search for the lead-singer of the band, Supernova.

Supernova, if you haven't heard, consists of cast-offs from Motley Crue (drummer Tommy Lee, a.k.a. "Rocker Tommy Lee"), Metallica (bassist Jason Newsted), and Guns 'n Roses (guitarist Gilby Clark). They're looking for a lead-singer, and, like INXS last year, they decided to find one through the reality television program, Rockstar.

First things first: I like the show a great deal. Last year's installment surprised me, in fact, because it ended up having quite a bit of heart. INXS unexpectedly lost its lead-singer, Michael Hutchence, several years ago and found a worthy replacement on Rockstar in J.D. Fortune. Their new album, aptly titled Switch, is quite catchy.

INXS, though undoubtedly a "serious" band, always had a certain pop-ish dimension to it. At minimum they were more radio-friendly than were Motley Crue and, in their early days, Metallica. As such, it didn't seem so surprising to me that they'd turn to a reality TV show--ostensibly a singing contest--to find a new singer. I'm more surprised to find Supernova doing this. I remember the days when metal acts used to anchor their authenticity in a kind of cool, underground status, whether real or perceived. Supernova clearly doesn't have any such pretensions.

I realize that Rockstar promotes the band and gives its members an opportunity to see which contestant the largest audience will embrace well in advance of their having to make a final selection. The show's an enormously clever marketing and market-research campaign, to say the least, but to tell you the truth, I kind of miss the days when a singing contest would have been uncool for a metal band.

Thank you, President Gore

I just had the good fortune of seeing An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary about global warming as presented by Al Gore. It's a must-see.

Though I'm not a student of global climate change, I consider myself to be someone who's reasonably well-informed. After having seen An Inconvenient Truth, however, I've discovered that I'm not. The film is chock-full of information about the phenomenon, one that's disputed, apparently, only by those outside of the scientific community. There, there's a clear consensus: it's happening, and something needs to be done--yesterday. One of the most provocative moments of the film for me occurred near the middle, where Gore contrasted scientific and popular views on global climate change. Despite the fact that more than 900 scientific studies confirm the existence of global warming without a dissenting voice, more than half of all news stories appearing in the popular media dispute its existence.

Gore attributes this disparity of views, and the government's refusal to take more positive steps toward a solution, to those who cast doubt on the phenomenon--those who work, for example, in P.R. firms in the employ of energy profiteers. And here I need to make what's admittedly a strange leap to talk about cultural studies. I find, as I finish my own book, that a great deal of what I do as a practitioner of cultural studies is precisely that--to cast doubt. Part of what I try to do, too, is to tell a different, better story about whatever it is I'm trying to talk about, whether it's books, intellectual property, cultural studies, or something else entirely. But I find in my own work, and in at least some work in cultural studies, that we don't move sufficiently beyond casting doubt. I can't help but think that at least sometimes, my own work supports a culture of unhealthy skepticism.

An Inconvenient Truth shines, though, in that it puts forth a vision of a more environmentally sustainable word and explains how change could be made at the level of the everyday and beyond. The film offers a normative, forward-looking vision of the world, the kind of thing that I think cultural studies would do well to offer, too.

A second-rate discipline?

This post has been brewing for some time, and I suppose now's the moment in which to put it out into the world. It's about the discipline of communication--my own discipline--and people's perceptions of it.

I'll start with a few anecdotes:

(1) I recall attending a panel at the National Communication Association annual convention a few years ago, in which the panelists reflected on the discipline's wellbeing. One of them, I remember, commented on how the association's newsletter, Spectra, always included a list of books and articles that communication scholars had published in venues outside the discipline. He attributed the list to the discipline's self-consciousness about itself and, more specifically, to a latent sense in which the "real" work was taking place in disciplines other than our own. (I may be mistaken, but I think Spectra has since discontinued the list.)

(2) I've met with editors at various university and commercial-scholarly presses who've all commented on their ambivalence toward the communication discipline. Generally, they seem to feel as though there's a handful of scholars in the discipline whose work is exciting, but as for the rest of it.... Friends and colleagues who work outside of the communication discipline, or who are in it but don't identify with it, have expressed similar feelings to me.

(3) I wish I had a dollar for the amount of times a student said to me, "I wanted to major in business, but I couldn't get into the business school. That's why I decided to major in communication." (FYI, that's happened less frequently here at IU, where the department calls itself Communication & Culture.)

Enough with the anecdotes. By now you're hopefully getting the drift. There seems to be a pervasive sense in which communication is a second-rate discipline, one that's: discomforted with its being relatively young; perceived by many to be intellectually unstimulating; and imagined by some students to be their fallback to a more challenging--and presumably more rewarding--career in taking over the world.

The odd thing is, many of the most rigorous, imaginative scholars I know work in communication departments--and that's not only because I mostly know communication scholars. Beyond that, though, it's surprising to me to see how much weight both the idea and practice of communication are given in contemporary society. It seems strange that the communication discipline hasn't become the discipline of our age, or at least one of them. Maybe that's because every discipline seems to "do" communication in one form or another. I'm always struck, for example, when literary scholars publish research about, say, the internet, "communicative production," or immaterial labor (which often includes at least some communicative aspect).

In any case, it's clear that the communication discipline finds itself in an odd place. While its subject-matter unquestionably is important, the discipline doesn't seem to be perceived as equally important. The question remains, why?

Italian detours

Well, finally, I'm out from under the yoke of Harry Potter. I've been trying to finish my chapter on Harry Potter impostors, look-alikes, and knockoffs for some time, and for some reason it just kept slipping away. It probably had something to do with the shear volume of Potter doubles out there, not to mention his rights holders' bizarre efforts to make them all disappear. Anyway, the chapter's wrapped up, which means all that's left of my book, Equipment for Living: Everyday Book Culture in the Late Age of Print, is the introduction and conclusion.

This post isn't about Harry Potter, however. It's about my recent trip to Italy. I spent two weeks there last May (part of the reason for the delay in tying up loose ends in the HP chapter) and got a crash course in Italian history, culture, and politics. I'll spare you the photos of me at the Coliseum, the Vatican, and all the other usual tourist hot-spots, though I have to confess to being rather impressed across the board. Overall, the trip was just fantastic.

I also went on something like a Marxist "detour" while I was there, too. The image at left is one I took in Rome; it's of a political poster for the Italian Communist Party. That in itself wasn't interesting to me. What was interesting, though, was what it seemed to be espousing--within the limits of my admittedly spotty Italian, free culture and broad intellectual property rights. Though I think the idea of free culture does have its problems (I'm particularly leery of its libertarian dimensions), it was so refreshing to see a political party campaigning, in part, on a policy of open access to ideas, words, and things.

This next image is a photo of me at the gravesite of Antonio Gramsci, the brilliant thinker and activist who contributed so much to cultural studies' (and other field's) understanding of hegemony. His ashes are interred at what's called the cemetery for non-Catholics. (Sometimes it's referred to as the Protestant cemetery, though there are Jews and members of various Eastern Orthodox faiths buried there, too.) It's a lovely place--for a cemetery--and it also plays "home" to poets Keats and Shelley. What was intriguing about the cemetery, beyond the "celebrities" buried there, was the fact that Gramsci, apparently, was one of its main attractions.

Next time I'm in Italy, I suppose I'll have to track down Toni Negri or something....

Open access

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS

CULTURE MACHINE
http://www.culturemachine.net

Recent figures suggest that research published as "open access" is between two and four times more likely to be read and cited than if it is published in print-on-paper form only.

With this in mind, Culture Machine is seeking contributions to an open access archive for cultural studies and related fields (communication and media studies, visual culture, literary, critical and cultural theory, post-colonial theory, women's studies, new media ...). The archive, called CSeARCH, which stands for Cultural Studies e-Archive, is
completely free to both download from and upload into.

You can find CSeARCH at: http://www.culturemachine.net/csearch

This will let you browse the archive as well as read and download its contents for free. It already contains over 500 books, book chapters, journal issues, articles, interviews and lectures by everyone from Adorno, Agamben, Badiou, Baudrillard, Deleuze and Foucault, through Hebdige, Laclau, Latour, McRobbie and Mouffe, to Nancy, Negri, Poster, Stiegler, Virilio, Virno, Williams and Zizek, to mention just some of the most well known names.

To upload work into the archive go to the "Submit" page. Fill in the brief details and you'll then be sent a login name and password via e-mail together with a direct link. Click on the link and you'll be there--no need to login at that point the first time. (The password just ensures no one but you can edit your entries.) It's really quick and easy.

We realise it's going to take a little time to grow. But one of the ideas behind open access archives of this kind is that if everyone deposits a digital copy of their published material in the archive, then it means all the (in this case) cultural studies research is going to be available for students, teachers, lecturers and researchers to use anywhere in the world, for free, for ever (as opposed to being restricted solely to those individuals and institutions which can afford to pay for access to it in the form of journal subscriptions, book cover prices, interlibrary loans, photocopying charges etc.).

Obviously anything that is already in digital form, be it Word, pdf and so on, can be uploaded easily. If anyone does have early texts in cultural studies and related fields, including out of print books, book chapters, journal editions or articles they can scan in or otherwise make available, that would be great, too.

However, the idea of the archive is not just to preserve documents from the past but to make widely available recent and even current work: both that which is already published and that which is awaiting publication.

More information about CSeARCH, including how to include books, book chapters and journal articles which have already been published elsewhere, or which are due to be so in the future, without infringing copyright, is available in: "The Cultural Studies e-Archive Project (Original Pirate Copy)," Culture Machine 5, 2003.

If you have any questions or problems, just send me an email: gary.hall@connectfree.co.uk

Thanks, Gary Hall

Sadness

I'm saddened to report that James W. Carey, one of the most important contemporary figures in communication, media, and cultural studies, has died. He passed away on Monday, May 22nd in Rhode Island as a result of complications from emphysema. He was 71. You can read his complete obituary online at The Rhode Island News. Columbia University, where Carey was CBS Professor of International Journalism, also has set up a website and discussion forum for those wishing to share their thoughts about Professor Carey's life. You can access it by clicking here.

Carey taught for many years at the University of Illinois before moving on to Columbia. Titles and appointments, though, don't capture the depth of Carey's intellect, creativity, and passionate commitment to democracy. His writings on space, time, and communication have had an inestimable impact on my own work in media studies and communication theory, as I'm sure they have on the work of countless other people in these and related fields. He balanced history and theory as gracefully as could be, and never once let dogmatic commitments or intellectual trends cloud his vision of how this strange, modern world of ours worked communicatively. Always, the empirical led his writing and research, even as he was one of the most vociferous opponents of an unreconstructed empiricism. Carey's scholarship and mindful disposition are models for us to follow.

I had the good fortune of meeting Professor Carey twice--once when he gave a lecture at the University of North Carolina, and later on a panel I organized for the National Communication Association's annual convention a few years back. (There was a third time, when I stood behind him on a hotel registration line, though I didn't know him at the time and, to my regret, ended up not talking to him.) He was gracious, patient, and engaged, and if the testimonials of his many students are any indication, these and other qualities were precisely what made him such an extraordinary mentor.

He will be sorely missed, even by those who barely knew him.


Addendum: Here is a link to the Poynter Institute website, which has more to say about Carey's life, work, and passing.

Cracking the code

A confession: I'm obsessed with Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. I haven't read it, to tell you the truth, or at least much of it (I bought the book for my sister and browsed the first few pages), but my work on book history and intellectual property has led me to develop what's fast becoming a compulsive interest in it. Mostly, I'm riveted by the recent court case in Britain, in which the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail accused Brown of stealing key ideas and the "architecture" of their book. I won't burden you with the details, but a few weeks ago Justice Peter Smith found in Brown's favor.

Inasmuch as I'm excited by intellectual property law and jurisprudence, on their own they're usually not enough to get me this worked up. What's got me excited is the text of the judge's ruling, which evidently contains its own hidden code--"The Smithy Code." You can read about it by clicking this link to an article that ran recently in The New York Times.

You'll have to read The Da Vinci Code and The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail to crack The Smithy Code, and since I'm already behind in that department, I'm going to leave it to others to do so. For now, kudos to Justice Smith not only for handing down an intriguing decision, but more importantly, for embodying some of the principles and affects at stake in the case in the text of his ruling. I would, to be honest, like to see more scholarship--and jurisprudence, for that matter--adopt that kind of creative disposition. I've been trying to do this recently in my own work, specifically in my chapter-in-progress on Harry Potter counterfeits and knockoffs, for I find that letting the form of one's writing reflect that of its content can provide for a more engaging kind of academic discourse.

P.S. Read boldly.

Leggo my Lego

I grew up playing with Legos, and now I'm a professor of media and cultural studies. What better way to join my two interests than with Lego Theorists, the latest "release" from theory.org.uk? The sets feature such luminaries as Judith Butler, Anthony Giddens, Stuart Hall (at left), and Angela McRobbie, among others, and each comes equipped with a Lego scene appropriate to her or his work.

Before you get too excited (or put off) by the prospect of Lego Theorists, I gather that the sets don't really exist--though I suppose, if you're innovative enough with some off-the-shelf Legos, that you could build one yourself. Nevertheless, there is a growing body of academic/celebrity/activist paraphernalia out there, such as the Karl Marx and Michel Foucault finger puppets I have in my campus office. (I bought them at a local novelty store here in Bloomington, Indiana.) Part of me has always been bothered with my having purchased them, since, at some level, they represent making a commodity of individuals who had grave misgivings about a commodity-driven life. Yet, there is a certain, well, novelty about them, and if nothing else there's an odd kind of thrill in knowing that scholarly work can produce some kind of public recognition and impact. In part that's why I do what I do, although I'd be hard-pressed to imagine what I'd look like as a finger puppet, much less as a Lego character.

Deleuze conference

Deleuze: Texts and Images

The 9th Annual University of South Carolina Comparative Literature Conference

5th - 8th April, 2007

Over the past two decades, readers of the works of Gilles Deleuze have had several opportunities to participate in international conferences held at Trent University and organized by Constantin V. Boundas. In that tradition, we announce the organization of a conference to take place on the campus of the University of South Carolina (Columbia, SC, USA), between April 5 and 8, 2007, sponsored by the Program in Comparative Literature, the English Department, and the College of Arts and Sciences.

The conference theme, "Gilles Deleuze: texts and images," is meant to be understood inclusively rather than exclusively. That is, while recognizing theconference's focus on the work of Gilles Deleuze, the organizers encourage broad and comparative interpretations and commentaries from Deleuzian perspectives on subjects such as literature, philosophy, painting and film, as well as exegeses of Deleuze's body of work that engage with ontological and epistemological concepts and problems. Presentations by the invited plenary speakers--Eric Alliez, Ronald Bogue, Constantin V. Boundas, and Elizabeth Grosz--will be supplemented by speakers in parallel sessions.

The conference will be held on the historic campus of the University of South Carolina (http://president.sc.edu/history.html). The weather in April will be mild, and the campus will be in bloom. Columbia is mid-sized city with a major airport and is easily accessible. It is the capital of South Carolina and has many fine restaurants. Conference participants will be lodged on campus at the new Inn at USC (http://www.innatusc.com/); rooms have been reserved at a special conference rate of $116.00 for those making their reservations by February 20, 2007. There are also other hotels nearby.

Those interested in speaking at the conference should send a title, a 750-word abstract, and a 250-word bibliographical biography to delcon2k7@yahoo.com as a Word or RTF attachment no later than October 1, 2006. Additional details will be available at http://www.cas.sc.edu/DLLC/CPLT/activities/9thannucon.html.

Organizing Committee:

Eugene W. Holland, Ohio State University
Paul Allen Miller, University of South Carolina
Daniel W. Smith, Purdue University
Charles J. Stivale, Wayne State University

Reality television: the lonely crowd

I had the good fortune of visiting my teaching assistants' Introduction to Media classes this week and was fascinated by the discussions I was privy to on reality television. I'll confess that I'm hooked--especially on shows like Top Chef, Project Runway, Blow Out, and American Choppers, all of which give you a behind-the-scenes look at how people do things. I now wish I were a better cook, learned to sew, cut hair, and took metal shop, but that's another story.

Anyway, one of the instructors whose class I visited asked his students to reflect on the characteristics that might define reality television as a genre. One of them provocatively suggested, "isolation." Now, of course, not every show isolates its cast, but many of them--Survivor, Big Brother, Unan1mous, and to some extent programs like America's Next Top Model and The Real World--do. Indeed, in the case of Top Model, I recall seeing a behind-the-scenes show in which past cast members reflected on their not having had access to a telephone other than the one provided by the producers, been allowed to go out, read a paper, pick up a book, or, ironically, watch television. I don't mean to suggest that isolation is an absolutely necessary, generic condition of reality television, but I'd argue (following my teaching assistant's insightful student) that it certainly represents a dominant tendency within the genre. The question then becomes, what are the larger implications of this paradoxically public form of social isolation?

I'll need to ruminate on that question a bit, and perhaps I'll return to it at a later time. For now, I'd say there's an interesting connection to be made here between reality TV and the horror genre.

...and philosophy?

It had to happen one of these days....

"It" is my having purchased one of those ...and Philosophy books--Harry Potter and Philosophy: If Aristotle Ran Hogwarts, to be exact. I did so reluctantly. One of the chapters of my forthcoming book on book culture, Equipment for Living, concerns the global proliferation/circulation of Harry Potter volumes and, in part, attempts to think through the philosophy of reproducibility in light of them. Given the subject matter, I figured I ought to own what's probably the only publication currently out there to lay claim to "Harry Potter" and "philosophy."

It's clear that the book, and I assume the ...and Philosophy series as a whole, is intended for an introductory undergraduate audience. That's not a criticism. In fact, the idea behind the series seems to me consonant with cultural studies' commitment to "meeting people where they are." In this case, the "where" clearly is the terrain of the popular; the Potter book joins volumes on The Matrix, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Woody Allen, The Simpsons, Star Wars, Seinfeld, and a whole host of other ...and Philosophy titles. The book is pretty boiled down, however, and to my mind tends to underestimate its audience more often than not. What's peculiar about the volume, moreover, is that some of the chapters read to me much more like run-of-the-mill cultural criticism (which is not to say cultural studies) than philosophy per se. Chapter 8, on discrimination, indifference, and social justice in Harry Potter, is a standout in that regard.

I don't know to what extent the Harry Potter volume is representative of the ...and Philosophy series, so I'm reluctant to make generalizations about the books and their intentions. I guess I'm inclined to say that I appreciate the spirit of the series, though I'm unsure of the depth of its content. I'd be curious to hear what D&R readers think about the series and/or specific volumes. I assume many of you, like me, have an interest in philosophy, cultural studies, and the popular and have been intrigued at some level by these books--books which seem to be taking up more and more of the scant shelf space in the philosophy section of my local bookstore.

On "communication"

Years ago I had something to say about this topic at the National Communication Association convention, and I find myself returning to it again. "It" is communication and what Deleuze and Guattari have had to say on the subject.

Anyone who's read A Thousand Plateaus, What is Philosophy? or pretty much any of their other individual or collaborative writings knows that D+G have little complimentary to say about communication, at least as the idea's tended to be conceived within modern Western thought. They get impatient when interminable conversation becomes the sum-total of philosophy or politics, and while there may be grounds for disputing their reduction of communication to talk (or signification or...), they nonetheless have a point: "communication" tends to be both an overworked and a poorly-theorized concept.

I mentioned the work of Harold Innis in my previous post, and here I want to do so again. What's fascinating about Innis' understanding of communication is that he uses it to encompass not only modern communication apparatuses and infrastructure (e.g., phones, radio, TV, etc.), but also such things are roadways, sea ways, canals, rivers, and more. There is, in other words, a remarkable materiality in his vision of communication that's linked solidly with the earth and the environment.

Now, it would be ludicrous to suggest that Innis and D+G offer anything approaching a similar perspective as each understands (and criticizes) the idea of communication. They do share a common interest, however, in the material facticity of communicative events, as well as a grounding relationship in the geos--the Earth. Like Innis, in other words, D+G are among the very few who to take seriously the communicativity (if that's even a word) of the natural world. That focus seems to me vital if "communication" is to remain a serviceable concept in contemporary political and intellectual life, especially if we take seriously the charge of de-centering North Atlantic modernity.

The Anti-Oedipus Papers

Yes, I know...it's been awhile. I've been plodding away on my book, feverishly trying to finish my chapter on Oprah's Book Club. I'm near to wrapping it up, thankfully, and so now seems like as good a time as any to write. Thanks for bearing with me. I know it seemed as though D&R had gone dark.

A few weeks ago, I was thrilled to receive Felix Guattari's The Anti-Oedipus Papers (Semiotext[e], 2006). Admittedly, I haven't yet found the time to give it a thorough read. My own book's just taken too much of my energy. I have managed to read some of it, however, and I've given all of it at least a thorough skim for now. The book's brilliant--but not for the reasons you might think.

What's striking to me about the book is the look it affords into both Deleuze and Guattari and Guattari's own process. What's also striking is the welcome, vulnerable portrait of Guattari that emerges in The Anti-Oedipus Papers. Anti-Oedipus, and indeed most of Guattari's individual and collaborative work is so forthright, declarative, and argumentative. I don't fault him for that; indeed, part of what makes that body of work so compelling is precisely its tone, not to mention the way in which tone helps convey the creativity of D+G's ideas. At the same time, though, I'm pleased to see here Guattari's more tentative, perhaps even insecure side, in addition to the experiments-in-action of such an experimental thinker. The book that I think most closely resembles this one is Harold Innis' Idea File, which likewise consists of half-baked ideas, thoughts, quotations, random stream-of-consciousness, and other such things that lend insight into how a voracious thinker works. You really have to be pretty bold to put your "process" out there like that.

I'm also pleased to see how both the introduction and Guattari himself draw attention to the work of Fanny Deleuze, Gilles Deleuze's partner. Too often, the significant contributions women have made to the production of landmark texts have gotten systematically erased. I'm glad to see at least a palimpsest beginning to form here.

I'd be curious to hear how others are responding to the book, as well as to Deleuze's latest release, Two Regimes of Madness.

...and still more chatter

Since my previous post--heck, it was just a few hours ago--more people have chimed in on the piece Siva Vaidhyanathan's penned for Kembrew McLeod and my special issue of Cultural Studies. Here are some links to the discussion, courtesy of Kembrew:

Liberal Education Today

Virtualpolitik

Funferal

ACR Log

Simong

People are talking...

I just caught wind of the fact that people already are talking about the special issue of the journal Cultural Studies Kembrew McLeod and I co-edited on the politics of intellectual properties. The buzz thus far mostly has concerned Siva Vaidhyanathan's Afterword to the issue, in which he talks about an emergent field he calls "Critical Information Studies." You can check out what's been said on Siva's Blog. It contains some links to Boing Boing and other sites where the conversation has been happening. I should mention that the rest of the issue is fantastic, too, and definitely worth checking out.

The funny thing is, I don't think the issue's actually out. I haven't received my copy of the journal yet, nor have I gotten a hold of any offprints. (I haven't even received the preceding issue, for that matter, but that's another story....) Needless to say, I'm eagerly anticipating seeing the issue, especially now that it's starting to create something of a stir.

Help

Last November, I posted a short piece called "Will the future unfold?" It concerned Lawrence Grossberg's latest book, Caught in the Crossfire: Kids, Politics, and American's Future (Paradigm Publishers, 2005). If you haven't read it, please make sure to. It's a fantastic piece of scholarship.

I'm writing now to ask for your help. I've been charged with composing a letter nominating Caught in the Crossfire for one of the National Communication Association's annual book awards. (NCA, for those of you who don't know, is the major professional organization for communication research and scholarship in the United States.) I'm thrilled to do this, obviously, because I'm convinced everyone ought to be reading the book. The trouble is, I'm not able to speak very well to its reception. It was published just this past May, and to the best of my knowledge it hasn't yet been reviewed or widely commented on. That's where you come in. If you've read and enjoyed Caught in the Crossfire, would you mind leaving a comment, below, along with your name and where you're writing from? If you do, please know that I might include your response, or an excerpt thereof, in my letter to NCA. I'd like it to reflect a wide, international readership, so comments from people both inside and outside the U.S. are welcome.

Please post your comments by no later than March 21st. Thanks in advance for your help!

Culture Machine

CULTURE MACHINE 8 (2006)
http://www.culturemachine.net

COMMUNITY
Edited by Dorota Glowacka

In recent years, the notion of community has emerged as an important but also contested field of enquiry. The ‘new’ discourse of community has challenged the understanding of community as related to the nation-state, and as an ‘imagined’ cultural and political artifact that provides a collectivity with the sense of unity, continuity, and closure. Jacques Derrida has insisted that such circumscribed articulations of community conceal but also perpetrate foundational violence that underlies the collective myth. Philosophical investigations of this myth by Jean-Luc Nancy, Maurice Blanchot and Giorgio Agamben have opened up the concept of community onto a broader politico-ethical and cultural context. Here, Nancy’s call for the disbanding of the immanent community has been especially influential. According to him, community as the dominant Western political formation, founded upon a totalizing, exclusionary myth of national, racial or religious unity, must be tirelessly ‘unworked’ in order to accommodate more inclusive and fluid forms of Being-in-common, of dwelling together
in the world.

The contributors to this issue of Culture Machine navigate multiple tangents of community as a socio-historical, politico-ethical, and cultural construct. The authors comment on the nascent virtual or networked communities as the forum for cultural avant-garde and politically progressive forces but also as, potentially, the mainstay of political conservatism. They ask about the function of community in rapidly shifting geo-political contexts, of which the European community
is a fecund if also volatile contemporary example, as is the plethora of post-colonial, post-Western articulations.

The ‘Community’ issue features:

* Editorial, 'Community: Comme-un?'

* Kuisma Korhonen, 'Textual Communities: Nancy, Blanchot, Derrida'

* Ignass Devisch, 'The Sense of Being(-)with Jean-Luc Nancy'

* Marie-Eve Morin, 'Putting Community under Erasure: Derrida and Nancy
on the Plurality of Singularities'

* Dorota Glowacka, 'Community and the Work of Death: Thanato-ontology in
Hannah Arendt and Jean-Luc Nancy'

* Timothy J. Deines, 'Bartleby the Scrivener, Immanence and the
Resistance of Community'

* Angela Mitropoulos and Brett Neilson, 'Cutting Democracy's Knot'

* Paulina Tambakaki, 'Global Community, Global Citizenship?'

* Daniel H. Ortega, '"En Cada Barrio": Timocracy, Panopticism and the
Landscape of a Normalized Community'

* John Paul Ricco, 'The Surreality of Community: Frederic Brenner's
Diaspora: Homelands in Exile'

* Jake Kennedy, 'Gins, Arakawa and the Undying Community'

* Petra Kuppers, 'Community Arts Practices: Improvising Being-Together'

* Natalie Cherot, 'Transnational Adoptees: Global Biopolitical Orphans
or an Activist Community?'

-------------------------

CONTRIBUTING TO CULTURE MACHINE

Culture Machine publishes new work from both established figures and up-and-coming writers. It is fully refereed, and has an International Advisory Board which includes Robert Bernasconi, Lawrence Grossberg, Peggy Kamuf, Alphonso Lingis, Meaghan Morris, Paul Patton, Avital Ronell and Nicholas Royle. Among the distinguished contributors to the first seven editions of Culture Machine are Mark Amerika, Alain Badiou, Geoffrey Bennington, Bifo, Simon Critchley, Jacques Derrida, Diane Elam, Johan Fornäs, Henry A. Giroux, Lawrence Grossberg, Stevan Harnad, N. Katherine Hayles, Peggy Kamuf, David Kolb, Ernesto Laclau, J. Hillis Miller, Anna Munster, Michael Naas, Mark Poster, Melinda Rackham, Tadeusz Slawek, Bernard Stiegler, Kenneth Surin, Gregory L. Ulmer, Hal Varian, Cathryn Vasseleu and Samuel Weber.

Culture Machine welcomes original, unpublished submissions on any aspect of culture and theory. All contributions to Culture Machine are refereed anonymously. Anyone with material they wish to submit for publication is invited to contact:

Culture Machine c/o Dave Boothroyd and Gary Hall
e-mail: g.hall@mdx.ac.uk and d.boothroyd@kent.ac.uk

All contributions will be peer-reviewed; all correspondence will be
responded to.

For more information, visit the Culture Machine site at:

http://www.culturemachine.net

Pathetic

Did you watch the Oscars? I'll say that, on the whole, I was pleased with the winners. I was most excited to see Ang Lee win a long-overdue best director award, and inasmuch as I was sad that Brokeback Mountain didn't take home the best picture honor, at least another socially-conscious movie, Crash, did. Still, I was bothered....

I'll admit that the stage set was quite nice, decked out as it was in the look of a resplendent art-deco movie palace. The scrolling movie posters were a nice touch, as was the dynamic overhead marquee that displayed the winners' names. By mid-broadcast, though, it was clear that the set design was more than just elaborate window-dressing. It was part of a rather heavy-handed--and frankly pretty sad--effort on the part of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences to convince viewers of the enduring virtues of theatrical movie-going.

Jake Gyllenhaal led the charge during what can only be described as a painfully awkward monologue in which he impugned portable DVD players--doubtless at the Academy's request. It was clear from his body language and the way he stumbled through his lines--I think he nearly laughed once--that he didn't believe what he was saying. Gyllenhaal was followed by Academy President Sid Ganis, who dragged out the tired old saw about how nothing's better than seeing a movie on the big screen, with the sound coming at you from all sides, and how the DVD home theater experience simply doesn't compare.

I have to admit to being baffled by these anti-DVD philippics. Sure, box-office receipts were down this year. But you'd think the movie industry would embrace the fact that DVD sales have become its cash cow, given how they've now more lucrative than theatrical movie-going. (See Charles Acland's brilliant Screen Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes, and Global Culture, if you haven't already.) So why dis the DVD? Why not simply own up to the fact that Hollywood needs to figure out how to make DVDs and theatrical movie-going lead an even more complementary and compatible existence? Is this just nostalgia for silver screens and celluloid, or is there something more at stake here?

The greediest guys in the room

Last night, I had the good fortune of seeing the documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. I'll say right off the bat that I would like to have heard more from the workers whose pensions and retirement plans got scuttled along with the company. Beyond that, though, the documentary provides a pithy look into the world of unmitigated corporate greed.

First, I'm just fascinated by Enron's use of "mark-to-market" accounting, which essentially allowed it to claim earnings on investments that hadn't yet generated any revenue--and in many cases never generated any revenue at all. As it happens, a few days ago I happened to be reading over one of Amazon.com's annual shareholder reports. (No...I'm not a shareholder. I was referring to it for book-related research.) There I discovered--and the company doesn't try to hide this fact--that it's remained afloat in part through infusions of venture capital, but also, and more importantly, by maintaining positive cash flow. It's done so by keeping a "negative operating cycle," which, I gather, means that the company collects on payments from customers weeks before it ever has to make payments on its loans. Essentially, Amazon gets a free, short-term cash "loan" every time someone makes a purchase.

So where's all this going? I'm beginning to believe that those of us interested in cultural studies need to become more mindful of these kinds of accounting tactics. They seem to me part and parcel of the new capitalism, and any political-economic analysis that doesn't "get" modern accounting is likely to come up short in the end. It's not, for example, all about bio-power and affective labor, as important as those "public" activities might be. I'm not saying that we need to become accountants, but we do need to understand the extent to which accounting constitutes knowledge work integral to capitalism's continued wellbeing. We need, in effect, a better understanding of what goes on in capitalism's back office.

The other thing that struck me about the documentary was what it had to say about "free market" economics. Evidently, there's no such thing. Enron and others pushed hard for California to de-regulate its energy market, claiming that government only stultified possibilities for keeping prices down and letting profits soar. Yet, the documentary clearly showed how Enron intervened in the California energy market to manipulate electricity supply and demand, with the intention then of inflating prices. Those who champion the "free" market, it seems, really want to pull the market's strings themselves.

Copyright Criminals remix contest

Kembrew McLeod asked me to post this announcement to D&R. He and the copyright activism organization, Creative Commons, are holding a contest in conjunction with a documentary Kembrew's co-directing and producing. Here's the information.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
COPYRIGHT CRIMINALS CONTEST EXTENDED UNTIL MARCH 14
New Samples from Chuck D and George Clinton Available for Use

Creative Commons, along with filmmakers Kembrew McLeod and Ben Franzen, today announced that due to overwhelmingly positive response, the Copyright Criminals Remix Contest has been extended by two weeks, ending on March 14. Additionally, new vocal samples from influential rapper Chuck D (of Public Enemy) and pioneering funk musician George Clinton (of Parliament-Funkadelic) have been made available for use in the competition.

Winners will be chosen according to the same criteria as originally announced; no other contest details are changed.

The Copyright Criminals Remix Contest encourages producers, DJs, and remixers from around the world to use audio snippets from the upcoming documentary film Copyright Criminals in new, original songs. One winner will have his/her music featured prominently in the final edit of Copyright Criminals. The winning track, along with 11 runners-up, will be included on the film's companion CD. The contest is going on now at http://ccmixter.org/.

Drawing from more than fifty interviews with prominent musicians, artists, scholars, lawyers, and music industry representatives, Copyright Criminals looks at the development of sound collage (also known as sampling). The film explores the complicated impact that copyright law has had on the creative practice of sampling and studies the conflicting opinions artists and others have about appropriation.

Samples of dialogue by artists like De La Soul, DJ Qbert, Matmos, Coldcut, and members of Negativland – all taken from interviews conducted for Copyright Criminals – are available online at the popular remix community ccMixter.org for use as source material to be included in entrants' songs. Entries will be judged by McLeod, Franzen, and author/producer Jeff Chang. Contest rules and details are available at http://ccmixter.org.

About the judges

Kembrew McLeod is a professor at the University of Iowa and an award-winning independent documentary filmmaker. McLeod has written music criticism for Rolling Stone, the Village Voice, and MOJO; and has authored two books, most recently Freedom of Expression®: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity (Doubleday).

Ben Franzen is an Atlanta-based artist who owns an independent production company called Changing Images LLC, which specializes in video, photography, and multimedia. Franzen edits the animated TV program Squidbillies, which appears as part of the Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim line-up.

Jeff Chang is the author of the American Book Award-winning Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation. In 1993, he co-founded and ran the influential indie hip-hop label, SoleSides (now called Quannum Projects), helping launch the careers of DJ Shadow, Blackalicious, Lyrics Born, and Lateef the Truth Speaker. He has helped produce over a dozen records.

About Creative Commons

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that promotes the creative re-use of intellectual and artistic works by empowering authors and audiences. It is sustained by the generous support of the Center for the Public Domain, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Omidyar Network, and the Hewlett Foundation. For more information, visit CC's Web site.

Contact:

Eric Steuer
Creative Director, Creative Commons
eric@creativecommons.org

Kembrew McLeod
Co-director, Copyright Criminals
kembrew@kembrew.com

Deleuze: The new Lacan?

Last week, the review section of The Chronicle of Higher Education contained an intriguing piece by Krin Gabbard entitled, "Cinema and Media Studies: Snapshot of an 'Emerging' Discipline." He just came off a stint as program chair of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS), which is the major professional organization representing scholars in those fields. The piece makes a pitch for the Council of Learned Societies' formally recognizing media studies as a discipline. Even more intriguing to me, however, was his discussion of trends he saw in programming for the upcoming SCMS convention. He had this to say:

The work of [Laura] Mulvey and those who extended her theories on the gender politics of representation is hardly forgotten, but it is no longer front and center. Indeed, Mulvey's name is nowhere to be seen in the stack of proposals for the 2006 conference. And I found only one mention of Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst who was a major influence on Mulvey. . . . Lacan is no longer a central figure. Even Slavoj Zizek, the flamboyant theorist who revived Lacan in the 1990s, is absent from the proposals. The one theorist who pops up repeatedly in the proposals is Gilles Deleuze, another Frenchman, but one with little patience for the old therapeutically based models of psychoanalysis and cultural politics.

I was at once thrilled and saddened to read these words. When I taught my graduate seminar, "The Problem of the Media in Deleuze and Guattari," last term, I felt like my class and I really were on the cutting-edge of work in media studies. I still think we were. On the other hand, I'm somewhat bothered by the prospect of such cutting-edge work going mainstream. What put me off more than anything in Gabbard's Chronicle piece was his subsequent explanation of Deleuze's work, which (a) reduced it merely to the concept of the rhizome, and (b) forgot that Guattari was an integral party involved in advancing that concept.
I worry that, like Lacan before him, Deleuze might be spawning something of an industry. And here I'm reminded of Ken Wark's prophetic words in his Hacker Manifesto:

D+G [Deleuze and Guattari] describe in somewhat formal, general terms the space of possibility of hacker thought. But their version of escape from history can easily take on an aristocratic form, a celebration of singular works of high modernist art and artifice. These in turn are all too easily captured by the academic and cultural marketplace, as the designer goods of the over-educated. D+G all too easily become the intellectual's Dolce and Gabbana. (n. 91)

Is a Deleuze industry something to be welcomed or something from which to recoil in horror?

MJ on IP

The centerfold of Mother Jones magazine always is worth checking out, the one included in the March/April 2006 issue especially. It's devoted entirely to the politics of intellectual properties and contains some intriguing bits of information. A few highlights:

Someone evidently owns the rights to "The Internationale," the anthem of global communism.

The recording industry has sued about 16,000 people thus far in its campaign to stop file sharing.

The latest-greatest in IP are "sensory trademarks"--you know, like the Pillsbury Doughboy's creepy giggle.

Companies like rentamark.com now go prospecting for common words and phrases to copyright and trademark. Once they claim the rights, others will have to pay them for royalties.

Okay...so maybe those aren't highlights; they're lowlights. You get the picture. Now go buy the magazine.

Give that man an Emmy

Last night, intellectual property scholar and darn good guy Siva Vaidhyanathan appeared on Comedy Central's The Daily Show With John Stewart. Correspondent Demetri Martin interviewed him, for a "Trendspotting" segment on social networking technologies like Facebook. The segment has been posted on TDS's website.

I have to say, Siva impressed. He held his own very well, despite being called "an old guy" (I can't imagine) and getting teased for using the word "paradox." Critics everywhere are describing his performance as "a triumph," "a must see," and "one of the year's 10 best." I hear he might even be nominated for an Emmy.

Dangerous minds

Last December I posted some information about an undergraduate student who was harassed by the FBI, ironically for having researched totalitarianism at his college library. Well, today I learned about conservative "activist" David Horowitz's new book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America. In the spirit of continuing a public dialogue about academic freedoms, I feel compelled to talk about the book--much as I'm loath to publicize Horowitz or his cause.

First things first: usually I include pictures of the books I discuss and links to places to buy them. Not this time. In fact, I haven't read the book. I find the concept so objectionable, and its premise so inclined to fear-mongering, that I cannot stomach even cracking it. I do know a few of the figures he talks about, though, and I suspect his characterizations of them--who they are, what they do, and the content of what they teach--are nothing short of unfair.

Rather than singling out "dangerous" people working in traditional and so-called "pseudo-disciplines" like queer studies, whiteness studies, race studies, and so forth, wouldn't it be more compelling to identify academics who are in fact dangerous: people who, for example, accept millions of dollars in grant money from chemical companies to justify toxic pollution? or those who work closely with the U.S. War Department on weaponry? I could go on. The point is, the professors whom Horowitz seems to be singling out in most cases probably aren't all that dangerous. Or, more to the point, he's offering up a very skewed perception of what constitutes a "danger" in academe.

The final thing I'll say is that, last week, North Dakota's House of Representatives passed an "intellectual diversity" bill, which is an offshoot of Horowitz's higher education "reform" campaign. I'm terrified about it, on the one hand, since it would demand that state University employees teach a "balanced" curriculum--something like one page of Adam Smith for every page of Karl Marx. On the other hand, I have this vision of, say, physics departments having to implement curriculum reform in which the cosmology of Indigenous peoples would need to be taught alongside the big bang theory. Of course, that's never going to happen, since "balance" only applies to those crazy humanities professors.

Enough. I've ranted for too long. These are trying--and depressing--times. These are precisely the times that call for better, more effective cultural studies. Does that make me a danger?

P.S. I'm surprised that Lawrence Grossberg didn't make the list. After all, he's a Marxist cultural studies professor who likes kids....

Deleuze and high culture

As D&R readers might know, last term I taught a graduate seminar called, "The Problem of the Media in Deleuze and Guattari." Their philosophy was, needless to say, very much on my mind at the time, and my seminar provoked a lot of issues that I tried to work through here.

I'm on a teaching leave this term to write my book, and although it engages tangentially with Deleuze and Guattari's individual and collaborative writings, it's hardly a Deleuzo-guattarian project in any obvious sense. Perhaps that, in conjunction with my not teaching this term, explains why D&R has taken a turn away of late from D+G. All that's just a longwinded way of saying that it's time again for me to revisit their work.

I've been re-reading Deleuze's Logic of Sense for fun (sick, I know), and in the course of reading something occurred to me. Deleuze's engagement with the writings of Lewis Carroll is one of the few examples I can think of in which he engages with might be called "popular" artifacts. (I also vaguely recall D+G making a passing reference to actor Robert De Niro's "becoming crab" somewhere in A Thousand Plateaus.) Now, I realize that in many places Deleuze discusses fiction--the writings of Proust, Melville, Kafka, Woolf, and others. Those, however, arguably are canonized works of Literature--not "popular culture" in any obvious sense. What's also striking to me is the utter contempt Deleuze seemed to hold for television, as evidenced most of all in Cinema 2.

Now, I'm pretty sure someone else writing about D+G already has addressed the issue of Deleuze's tendency to extrude his philosophy from "high" cultural artifacts. If D&R readers could remind me of who that is, I'd be appreciative. Even so, I want to raise the matter again, for two reasons. First, I want to affirm how radical Deleuze's philosophical method is, despite his propensity to turn to "high" culture. His project of seeking the philosophical in the "non-philosophical" is quite compelling, and indeed it adds a nice dose of humility to a discipline that once put forth the idea of the philosopher-king. Second, I want to pose a question: what might a Deleuzian-inspired philosophy look like, were it more oriented to popular artifacts? I see the work of people like Charlie Stivale and Brian Massumi responding to this question, at least in part, though I do think it could be explored further. Are there philosophical concepts waiting to be extruded from, say, a mainstream TV program like Cold Case? Or a popular artifact like the TV itself?

Lawrence Grossberg live

Early last November, I wrote about Lawrence Grossberg's book Caught in the Crossfire: Kids, Politics, and America's Future, and made a plea for people to read it. I hope people have been reading it, since it's a significant piece of scholarship. As a follow up to that post, I thought D&R readers might be interested in the latest issue of Bad Subjects, in which Jonathan Sterne interviews Grossberg about the book. It's an excellent interview (kudos, Jonathan), because it revisits Caught in the Crossfire's key themes and insights, extends them, and provides useful context on the book's genesis. Check it out.

When?

Am I the only one who's getting tired of waiting for the third installment of Lefebvre's Critique of Everyday Life to be released? By chance I happened to check my account on Amazon.com, and found that I had pre-ordered COELvIII almost two-and-a-half years ago! Last I heard, the publisher, Verso, was aiming for a January 2006 release date--which obviously has been pushed back several times already. Given that it's the 27th today, I'm not very optimistic about their chances of getting it out before the month ends. Does anyone have any information on what's delayed the book for so long, or on when it might actually come out? Sigh....

Say my name

Nobody--understandably--knows how to pronounce my surname, "Striphas." The name's of Greek origin, but it's been Anglicized like nobody's business. The worst pronunciation I ever heard occurred when I was a small boy, at my pediatrician's office. I remember the nurse calling out, "Ted 'Strip-ass?'" It was, needless to say, embarrassing.

So, drawing some inspiration from Siva Vaidhyanathan's blog, I decided to add a link (at right) to an mp3 file of me saying my name. I'm sure people still will get it wrong, and that's okay, since maybe a few more people will get it right.

All together now....

Pieces of Shatner

Here I am, writing about the problem with "presence" and "traces," only to hear the latest story about actor William Shatner (of Star Trek, and more recently of Boston Legal, fame). Apparently he auctioned off a kidney stone (yes, thankfully, it had been passed) for US$10,000. He donated the proceeds of the sale to Habitat for Humanity, a charitable organization that builds homes for the needy.

Let's just hope he never needs to have a whole kidney removed.

The first rule of cultural studies

I realize it's been awhile since I last posted. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I'm in the process of writing my book about changes in the US and global book industries. I "reward" myself for a good writing week with blogging. I know, I know--it sounds incredibly masochistic to reward intensive writing with more writing, but I guess that's what having a passion for writing means. Anyway, I'm here because I've made progress.

The January 6, 2006 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education contained a cartoon on p. B6 of the review section. I wish I could reproduce it here, but because of copyright considerations I'm sure I'd get my butt whupped (though it arguably could fall under the "criticism" proviso of the US fair use exception, but that's another story...). Anyway, it depicts two Sex & the City-ish women in what appears to be an upscale bistro, sipping martinis. Both look rather wealthy and aloof. The caption? "What happens in Cultural Studies stays in Cultural Studies."

I'm not sure what to do with this. On the one hand, I couldn't help but laugh, mainly because I cannot understand why people make such a big deal about why cultural studies (I don't use capital letters) has a specialized language. Doesn't anthropology? Mathematics? Physics? Literary studies? So why single out cultural studies--yet again--to suggest it's some kind of insular and exclusive (fight?) club? Given its pervasiveness in the humanities, why are these kinds of criticisms still circulating?

Maybe I'm just being too sensitive. At least the cartoon foregrounds two women, and as we all know women too often are under-represented at all levels of academe, in cultural studies or otherwise. On the other hand, there's a clear sense in which the cartoon seems to be suggesting that cultural studies is, at the end of the day, a martini-sipping, petit bourgeois discipline.

What do you think about this?

How to do things with words

I have two confessions to make. First, I'm addicted to Scrabble^(TM). Second, I'm not particularly good at it. I think I've scored over 400 points only a couple of times, and cracking 300 still constitutes a good game for me.

Nevertheless, because I'm fascinated with the game and with words more generally, I was given a copy of Stefan Fatsis's book Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players (Penguin, 2002). The book offers a thoughtful, observant look into the history of the popular board game and into the lives of key figures who make up the world of competitive Scrabble play. It also contains some interesting bits about how players and Hasbro (Scrabble's current owner) have struggled for control of the game. Players, if nothing else, have been instrumental in developing dictionaries, strategy sheets, and more, in effect adding value to a game whose trademark is coveted by, and produces significant profit for, its corporate parent.

Though the book only mentions this in passing, I'm intrigued by the fact that some of the best English-language Scrabble players in the world are individuals who barely know English. I read more about this phenomenon in an article published recently in The Chronicle of Higher Education, which profiled a Thai Scrabble player scheduled to compete in--and favored to win--the 2005 World Championship. Though he did not ultimately win the tournament, his success at the game raises interesting questions about the semiotic dimensions of language. In the world of Scrabble, meaning apparently is a hindrance, as Fatsis's book shows even of native English-language speakers. Those who know what words mean, or who try to play interesting, cheeky words to demonstrate their intelligence or command of language, often are among the worst competitive Scrabble players. (Yes--that's me.)

Those who succeed at Scrabble know how to do things with words, to recall J. L. Austin's memorable phrase, rather than getting bogged down in the depths of meaning and symbolicity. Scrabble is a game about words, power, space, and, yes, chance, this despite its being passed off by the uninitiated (and Hasbro) simply as a "word game." As competitive Scrabble players will tell you, theirs is a game they think ought to be on par with chess, Parcheesi, go, and other games valorized for their intellectual and philosophical dimensions. I'm beginning to agree.

Sly & the family Stallone

From the annals of strange intellectual property disputes...

I just read a short blurb in Newsweek magazine about action star Sylvester Stallone's most recent venture, a health and fitness magazine for 50-something men called Sly (always a creative force to be reckoned with, that Mr. Stallone). The funny thing is, Sly--both the actor and the mag--were sued by an internet publication for shoe fetishists bearing the same name. The judge ruled in the actor's favor, saying that the potential for confusion between the two mags was minimal.

Sly indeed.

Fishing expedition

Yikes--it's been a few weeks since my last post. (Now doesn't that sound confessional?) Sorry for not keeping things fresher. The holidays got the better of me, and I'm only now getting caught up. Ironic, isn't it, how much work goes into--and comes out of--trying to take a little break? Sigh.

Anyway, I have a teaching leave this semester. With it I'm gearing up to complete my book manuscript about how the book industry changed (and remained the same) in the 20th and 21st centuries, Equipment for Living: Everyday Book Culture in the Late Age of Print. You can read more about the book by clicking on this link to my website: http://www.indiana.edu/~bookworm/research.html.

I'm writing today because I'm bogged down in historical minutiae--important historical minutiae. More specifically, I'm in the process of researching two figures who, I imagine, most of you have never heard of but who nonetheless were key shapers of the book industry we now know: Charles Montgomery (C.M.) Barnes, one of the progenitors of the Barnes & Noble bookselling chain; and Orion Howard (O.H.) Cheney, who conducted the first systematic economic survey of the book industry's structure and functioning.

I know it's a long, long, longshot, but if any of you reading this have any information on these fellows, or know of good sources that might turn up some leads, I'd appreciate hearing from you. You will, of course, get an acknowledgment in my book!

Happy New Year to all of you reading D & R. More to come. . . .