All Tomorrow's Cultures

Apocalypse Now

2012-01-30T03:49:00.000-08:00

Maureen McHugh's 2011 collection of short stories, After the Apocalypse, is a devastating window onto the conditions of bare life--the reduction of self to homo sacer, humans evacuated of any rights until only their bare corporeality remains to be regulated by the State (Agamben 1998). Each of the stories takes up the question of the apocalyptic, but not from the Hollywood perspective--there are no bombs, tsunami, alien invasions. Instead, McHugh explores everyday life in the wake of disaster. And, little by little, we're led from this novum to the realization that we are, in fact, living after the apocalypse: in the wake of successive catastrophes of capitalism, greed and environmental degradation.

This is certainly the case with the second story in the collection, "Special Economics". In a post-bird flu pandemic China, workers are in short supply, and Jieling makes her way from the provinces to Shenzhen to find her fortune in a factory. The foreign bio-tech factory where she eventually finds work, though, isn't just interested in exploiting microorganisms--it also wants to exercise total control over workers.

Jieling said, "I though the government was supposed to help workers. If we get caught, we'll be fined, and we'll be deeper in debt." [ . . .]

"Debt?" Mr. Wei said.
"To the company," she said. "We are all in debt. The company hires us and says they are going to pay us, but then they charge us for our food and out cloths and our dorm, and it always costs more than we earn." (58)

References to bird flu pandemics aside, there is little here that isn't simply based in today's news. Recent scandals involving workers in factories contracting with Apple have underscored the exploitation and coercion of capitalism in the age of globalization.

What's makes McHugh's work a fine piece of anthropological science fiction is this attitude towards apocalypse. "After the Apocalypse" is not about endings, nor even closure. Instead, it directs us back in time to the apocalypses we're living right now. That is, the apocalyptic thinking McHugh develops here is a way of interpreting the present and reflecting on the powerful inequalities, structural violence and exploitation in such a way as to unearth the apocalypse of bare life today. Here, apocalypse is not so much an event as a temporality that moves according to its own progressive calculus of exploitation.

In the final story in the collection, "After the Apocalypse," Jane and her daughter Franny are refugees in an economically broken United States, gradually losing pieces of their middle-class life as they trudge towards Canada. But, as McHugh reminds us, "Things didn't exactly all go at once" (171). The "apocalypse" here is a gradual process of loss and displacement that (formally) starts with a dirty bomb explosion and gradually deepens through power outages and an exodus of refugees. But, with Jane, the apocalypse starts much earlier, in her own experiences with family and boyfriends: the ways she's used people and the ways she's been used. Her eventual abandonment of her daughter is thee culmination of that apocalypse:

She stays out of sight in the morning, crouched among the equipment in the back of the pickup truck. The soldiers hand out MREs. Ted, one of the contractors, smuggles her one.

She things of Franny. Nate will keep an eye on her. Jane was only a year older than Franny when she lit out for California the first time. For a second she pictures Franny's face as the convoy pulls out.

Then she doesn't think of Franny.

She doesn't know where she is going. She is in motion. (188)

That is, the "dirty bomb" apocalypse directs us back along a thread to the apocalypse of middle-class desire, the engine that set in motion growth of the suburban sprawl, with all of its pathological alienations.

In other words, McHugh's collection conjures an apocalypse that leads us back into social critique, but also forward to social alternatives. It's the consciousness of living the apocalypse that leads many of McHugh's protagonists to critique the status quo, as in the story "Honeymoon". Having survived a drug trial gone horribly awry and collected her money as a human guinea pig, Kayla goes with her friends to Cancun on vacation. But it's not enough to soothe her disgust with an economic system that keeps her in a perpetual condition of bare life.

I overheard two girls talking. They were thin and blond, and it was clear that they had never worked in McDonald's in their lives. The one was saying to the other, "I don't know if I want to come back here anymore."

The other one asked where she wanted to go instead, and they talked about Hawaii or Miami or something.

I hated them. I don't know why; they were probably nice enough. But I just hated them. I thought, I almost died to get here. (145-46)

That visceral disgust is a first step in social change; these are the conditions for the organic intellectual.

This is a compelling vision for anthropological science fiction. Developing a hermeneutics of the apocalypse means drawing genealogies of exploitation, markov chains of power, that extend back into history and forward into a murky, dystopian future. In the tradition of anthropology, McHugh develops a way of seeing that is grounded both in critique and in an understanding of everyday life.

#Occupy World of Warcraft

2011-11-15T13:22:00.000-08:00

Ernest Cline's Ready Player One is a satisfying recapitulation of a favorite SF trope--the underdogs pitted against the evil establishment. In this case, Wade (aka Parzival), and his friends eek out a meagre existence in a dystopian near-future while spending most of their time in a vast, online world--the Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation (OASIS). OASIS was the brainchild of an eccentric computer genius (and 1980's nostalgic geek), James Halliday; when he dies without heirs, his will remits his entire online empire to someone who can complete a series of puzzles and quests, find three keys, and win Halliday's "easter egg" (a nod to Warren Robinett and "Adventure"). Of course, finding Halliday's egg becomes an obsession for a generation of children raised on OASIS, but, of course, not just them. The world's largest Internet service provider (Innovative Online Industries) has developed an entire "Oology Division" devoted to researching Halliday and finding the egg. And they're Microsoft-ruthless. The resulting corporate monopoly over both Internet and Internet content would turn "OASIS" into a mirror-image of the corporate oligarchy Wade and his friends inhabit in the real world.

The resulting, fast-paced shenanigans (without giving out any spoilers) will be familiar to SF readers--and to people who watched Cline's "Fanboy" (2009). The novel is drenched--suffocated--by a miasma of popular culture references to the 1980's. For people of a certain age (in other words, people like me), it may bring moments of welcome nostalgia, but I felt agonizing embarrassment as I went through this novel--and yet I read it anyway. Wade and his friends are nothing if not dedicated students of the 1980's: researchers and fans. Much of this tracks the obsessions of the characters in "Fanboy". Wade's success owes much to his exhaustive "research": arcane references to D&D, perfect games of Pac-Man, knowing the entire script of Mont Python's The Holy Grail. Ready Player One is a nerd primer, a gateway drug to cos-play.

But there's another reason to focus on the 1980's: media and commodification. During the 1980s, Ronald Reagan gutted FCC oversight of media, paving the way for the obnoxious, media monopolies that plague us today. In this, the equally desultory 1996 Telecommunications Act was entirely consistent with this pandering to corporate interests (McChesney 2004).   The desolate landscape of mass media in the United States today is testament to the self-destructive path of American late-capitalism, and to the government-corporate collusion which fuels its agonizing paroxysms.

In the midst of the corporate plundering of the public sphere, the growth of the Internet seemed like anarchic panacea. Never mind that the Department of Defense bankrolled it with ARPANET--the hagiography of the Internet is premised on its anarchic beginnings, and the valiant efforts of a select group of digerati to defend those freedoms from corporate takeover (Lessig 2006).

Ready Player One unfolds against these assumptions. OASIS is the ultimate, anarchic space--the biggest MMORPG ever, with "haptic" gear to make the virtual reality co-extensive with our physical selves. The corporations that seek to control it by finding Halliday's egg embody all the characteristics we've come to know and loathe: homogeneity, lack of creativity, outright criminality. It is entirely natural that we would root for Wade and his friends against the faceless, corporate stormtroopers from Innovative Online Industries.

But who are we really rooting for? Wade's hero--the eccentric, gaming tycoon, Michael Halliday, is the archetypal Silicon Valley entrepreneur--the Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg. Those brilliant Ivy-league drop-outs who are the poster children for would-be entrepreneurs, the creative class, critics of higher education, liberals, conservatives: an empty, commodified sign waiting to be filled with our own capitalist desires for success. But, to point out the obvious--aren't these also uber-capitalists with a monopoly death-grip over their respective corners of our information society? Apple is not exactly synonymous with personal freedoms, is it? Unless I'm mis-reading all of those EULA's. Is the question here the "right" kind of capitalist? Do we find some monopolies more palatable than others?

There's a similar string of debate in gaming studies. World of Warcraft (and other MMORPG's) are most certainly capitalist enterprises, with Blizzard Entertainment and Linden Labs profiting off both players and the content they produce. That said, there's still a strong feeling that this is more "free" than, say, if Second Life got bought out by Time Warner.

In a recent article in European Journal of Cultural Studies, Harambam, Aupers and Houtman take on the question of capitalism and gaming, framing the debate as one over successive levels of capitalist penetration, what they term "orders of commercialization". "First-order commercialization" here is the most benign--the "game as a commodity".   Here, players find their autonomy most assured, since they are allowed to pursue their play within the game without overt reminders that they are, in fact, consuming a commodity. But with "second-order" and subsequent levels of commercialization, the heavy hand of neo-liberalism is more visible--in the real world markets that allow one to profit from selling avatars, and in the creation of a virtual space as a commericial space (as in Second Life). But it's what Harambam et al term "fourth-order commercialization" that evokes the strongest, negative reactions from informants: "the plain, open and legitimate colonization of virtual game worlds by 'real' economic powers" (313).

It's this level of capital penetration that Wade and his friends oppose, but it's unclear that they represent a real alternative. Does it ultimately matter if one group controls the monopoly over another? To put it another way: if Wade wins the egg and becomes an instant trillionaire, is the world substantially different? Ultimately, the debate is one over two levels of capitalism--a "lower" level capitalism allowing players the illusion of freedoms, or a "higher" level that reveals the commodification at the heart of the entire gaming enterprise.

But is one really more moral than another? The difference between them comes down to the level of mystification: with higher levels of corporate penetration, the veil between the virtual and the real is lifted. When we can take a break from epic battles to take our avatar shopping at Walmart, then the corporations have won. But wasn't it corporate all along? The only difference is one of strategy, with the overt commodification of the virtual piercing the illusion of corporate-controlled fantasy, but also, perhaps, setting the grounds for its own destruction in the disillusionment of players who realize they've been played.

As Second Life and other virtual worlds witness demonstrations and direct action that parallel that of the occupy movement in our physical world, it's worth asking what alternatives these occupiers are advocating. Outside of rose-colored evocations of LamdaMOO, can we really imagine a MMORPG outside of capitalism? What would that look like?

References

Harambam, Jaron, Stef Aupers and Dick Houtman (2011). "Game Over? Negotiating modern capitalism in virtual game worlds." European Journal of Cultural Studies 14(3): 299-319.

Lessig, Lawrence (2006). Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace, Version 2.0. NY: Basic Books.

McChesney, Robert (2004). The Problem of the Media. NY: Monthly Review Press.

Hurricane Irene, the 7th Sigma and Cyberpunk Futures

2011-09-01T12:12:00.000-07:00

http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9780312877156-0

Last night, I turned the pages of Steven Gould's 7th Sigma--basically a cyberpunk Western set in the arid hills of New Mexico. For me, on Day 4 of no power in post-Hurricane Irene Baltimore, the words flickered in the candlelight and the novel seemed entirely appropriate. In particular, the cyberpunk/steampunk mash-up of pre-industrial technologies with advanced IT--since I was simultaneously checking news and email on an iPhone. Gould's novel, though, is interesting even if you don't live in a area recovering from a natural disaster.

We do not live in a world where technological and economic development move in lock-step. In fact, just the opposite--vast swathes of the planet are locked into miserable underdevelopment; other zones explode into hyperdevelopment. We are used to thinking about a "digital divide" that tracks closely along other forms of inequality: race, class, nationality, ethnicity. But our everyday experience of technology is not particularly consistent, either. In my case, legacies of earlier periods of urbanization (electrical wires mounted on poles) have led to the current, Stygian darkness at my house. But there are lots of other areas of technological dissonance we encounter every day: taking trains, driving, filing papers, mailing letters. Advertisements suggest that this is only a temporary, temporal anomaly, that we are moving inextricably towards an integration singularity that will sync my family with my entertainment system and my laptop. But what if it's not?

What if we considered our technological futures as a palimpsest of different temporalities, the past, present and future cobbled together, with newer technologies overwritten on older ones? There are plenty of people who do this when designing new technologies/ front ends/ use-interfaces for the present. But what if we jettisoned our myths of technological convergence, those assumptions that these temporal discontinuities will all eventually approach equilibrium? If it will never be the case that the technologies we might develop will be in perfect sync with the lives and organizations that antedate them, how might that change the ways people imagine technological futures? Could those legacies move from being considered an obstacle of progress to being exploited in design?

multimedia city

2011-07-04T07:15:00.000-07:00

It’s December of 2010 in Seoul. A woman in her 20’s has taken a seat in the part of the subway reserved for the elderly and physically disabled (noyak chwasŏk). An elderly man approaches, expecting her to relinquish the seat (yangbo) to him. Instead, she refuses. “I’m sitting here—sit somewhere else!” An argument ensues. As luck would have it, a passenger sitting across from the disturbance tapes the whole episode on his cell phone, and within a short time, uploads the video onto the Internet, where it quickly gets cross-posted across hundreds of forums and blogs. Some netizens find her cyworld account (a social media site ubiquitous in South Korea) and start blasting her with abuse until she’s forced to close it down. Others recognize her from school. Someone says that she’s pregnant—and that’s why she deserved the seat. Finally, more established new sources in Korea (e.g., Oh My News) pick up the story—contextualizing the disturbance against societal change in a way not dissimilar (and perhaps all too similar) to what the blogs had been saying just days before. The incident of “Rude-speech Girl” (panmal nyŏ) focuses critique on several perceived problems in Korean society: the alienation of the city, the generational divide, the replacement of the multi-generational household with the nuclear family. But it also opens a door onto a shifting, kaleidoscope city.

It’s been over ten years now since the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai introduced “mediascapes” to anthropology—or not exactly, since anthropologists had engaged media many times before (think Hortense Powdermaker’s work in Hollywood: the Dream Factory). That essay, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” opened up a productive inquiry into an urban ecumene that exceeded geo-political boundaries in significant “scapes” that linked (and decoupled) one place from another.

Built upon these disjunctures (which hardly form a simple, mechanical global 'infrastructure' in any case) are what I have called ‘mediascapes’ and 'ideoscapes', though the latter two are closely related landscapes of images. ‘Mediascapes’ refer both to the distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information (newspapers, magazines, television stations, film production studios, etc.), which are now available to a growing number of private and public interests throughout the world; and to the images of the world created by these media. These images of the world involve many complicated inflections, depending on their mode (documentary or entertainment), their hardware (electronic or pre- electronic), their audience (local, national or transnational) and the interests of those who own and control them. (35)

With Appadurai as provocateur, anthropologists looked to the intersections of people and what Guy Debord called “society of the spectacle”: global media, journalism, internetworked communications. The anthropology of mediascapes as a cottage industry extended anthropological consciousness beyond locality into global spaces.

The city is key to this—indeed, as many have argued, the city’s modernity coincides with the birth of media. Accordingly, the city develops as a particular way of knowing, of desiring, of seeing and of being seen. Photography appears as “an important placebo to the looming problem of cultural memory” (McQuire 2008: 34). Media represents new “forms of cultural display” to a population forever estranged from the medieval city (38). The “imagined community” of the nation is said to be premised on the architecture of print media—as well as the media of the state.

But here is where the bundled metaphors of Appadurai’s mediascapes fall apart—so helpful to think about the extension 19^th century modernity into the mass mediated urban of the 20^th century. Haussmannization means the top-down structuring of the experience of the urban—mediascapes extend that logic of control to mass media. But what to make of “rude-speech girl”? Is the primary function of the social media here representational? Are they about the production of images of reality? Are these “mediascapes” tracing a kind of representational architecture?

Many assumptions about the functions of media are limited by—imprisoned in—their spatial metaphors. The “media city” appears as a series of overlays sitting on top of the physical city, where we “leave” the physical to enjoin the “virtual”. But the multimedia city can’t be reduced to a kind of nonce-space: it’s primary functions are relational, temporal, phatic. Likewise, “virtual” and “real” shift back and forth in a way that resists awkward, “cyberspace” metaphors from Web 1.0 days. Here, “real” and “virtual” endlessly interpellate each other—non-Euclidean topologies, perhaps. Finally, the power relations are a good deal murkier than the media of previous eras of modernity. To be sure, the “rude speech girl” incident shows capital in the ascendent, neo-liberal technologies penetrating deep into the cortex of everyday relationships. But that said, neat algebras of media producers, media consumers, of domination and resistance, fail to describe the messy scrum of productions, reproductions and para-productions. On the other hand, the fault lines revealed in this episode—between older and younger generations, between gender identities—remind us that we haven’t “transcended” anything; indeed, to assume that would be to fall back upon bankrupt, spatial metaphors. That is, far from some break with modernity, “rude speech girl” continues the frisson of modernity into new, recurvate technologies that double back onto older identities and relationships.

Anthropology of the Multimedia City

How do we come to grips with the multimedia city? On the one hand, “rude speech girl” resists totalizing representation—lines of flight extend and multiply media into fractal complexities that cannot be reduced to a single, authoritative account where ultimate significance can be “mapped” against physical and social space. On the other hand, “rude speech girl” is an excess of representation—images, discourse, endless commentary, infinite regress. Finally, “representation” here may be less important than the capacity of multimedia to connect people together: the formation of networks of strong, weak and virtual ties that momentarily congeal around the production/reproduction/dissemination of multimedia. In actually, all of those goals and media effects coincide in behaviors that are as much about the performance of the self as the representation of the other.

The only way to accomplish an anthropology of the multimedia city is to intervene in that efflorescence—the way to the multimedia city is through the multimedia city. When we “intervene” here, it is not to arrest the viral movement of social media, but simply to generate the possibilities for different connections against entropic fields that will proliferate endlessly before finally collapsing on themselves. Not, in other words, to become media “producers” but to generate nodal constellations against those media productions.

Ultimately, the goals of an anthropology of the multimedia city may seem merely tautological: the multimedia city itself. But there’s more to it than that: the production of difference against a field of meaning that is as much about connection as it is about disconnection. That is, people weigh-in, re-post, re-mix, link—but in ways that exclude critiques against a neo-liberal development that atomizes and alienates the human even as it connects people together in novel and profound ways. Anthropological responses should be to enjoin that circulation, but to do so through a critical context that mediates against the totalizations of capital.

References

Appadurai, Arjun (1996). Modernity at Large. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

McQuire, Scott (2008). Media City. Beverly Hills, CA: SAGE Publications.

Anthropology By the Wire: A Public Anthropology?

2011-06-09T12:07:00.000-07:00

At the moment, 12 community college students are sitting in a classroom on our campus getting visual anthropology reports ready for Monday. They are here to work on multimedia anthropology--perhaps the public anthropology of the future.

Our NSF-funded project is an effort to bring together anthropological methodologies with multimedia production and community activism. In that, it seems to fit in well with the tenets of a “public anthropology” which, over the last decade, has transformed the rhetoric (if not the structure) of anthropology in the United States. As Robert Borofsky (who claims to have coined the term) defines it,

Public anthropology engages issues and audiences beyond today’s self- imposed disciplinary boundaries. The focus is on conversations with broad audiences about broad concerns. Although some anthropologists already engage today’s big questions regarding rights, health, violence, governance and justice, many refine narrow (and narrower) problems that concern few (and fewer) people outside the discipline. Public anthropology seeks to address broad critical concerns in ways that others beyond the discipline are able to understand what anthropologists can offer to the re-framing and easing—if not necessarily always resolving—of present-day dilemmas. The hope is that by invigorating public conversations with anthropological insights, public anthropology can re-frame and reinvigorate the discipline.

It is hard to object to these goals; they certainly speak to the desire of many of us to combine our academic interests with our responsibilities as educators to speak out on issues that affect all of our lives today. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to be doing? Let me suggest (and I am not the only one to do this) that there may be a tension between addressing “broad critical concerns” and efforts to “re-frame and reinvigorate the discipline”. The one concerns our duties to contribute to public discourse, the other to draw attention to the discipline itself—or, perhaps, to the work of a select group of elite “public anthropologists”.
So is our project “public anthropology”? Yes, although I think of our effort as distinctly different than the “pundit” model of public anthropology. In other words, this isn’t an effort to become a contributor to the Nation, the Huffington Post and NPR. It is, however, an attempt to utilize anthropology for a critical re-framing.
Let me start with a parable, one that Michel Serres employs to great effect in his “The Parasite”:

A poor man is starving with an empty belly. He approaches the kitchen door of a restaurant. The smells of the fine food inside and finds that his hunger is somewhat sated. An angry kitchen hand come out and demands that the poor man pay for having taken his fill, for the services rendered. An argument
ensues. A third man arrives and offers to settle the matter:
‘Give me a coin, he said. The wretch did so, frowning. He put the coin down on the sidewalk and with the heel of his shoe made it ring a bit. This noise, he said, giving his decision, is pay enough for the aroma of the tasty dishes’ (p.34-5)

This is Serres’s theory of the “third man,” a noise that interrupts a system and transforms discourse. Picture a network map—lines (edges) link together people, ideas and institutions (nodes) in a structured, directed way. This person calls me. I use this form to communicate with this city bureaucracy. I go here on the weekends (but not there). But here comes a “third man”--another node in the network. Perhaps a new idea, new infrastructure, new conditions. These have the effect of transforming the value of all of the “links” (edges)--not, perhaps, in a revolutionary way, but with a measurable impact. The third man shifts emphasis from one path to another, opens up new paths, closes down others.
Multimedia anthropology intervenes in just such a way. Rather than be “transformative” in some absolute sense, anthropology here creates new linkages, new paths, shifting discourse, different understandings. But not in some monolithic way. The new meanings and possibilities only exist as a function of the nodes and edges that went before. They elaborate, qualify, re-connect. Also, this is not another narrative of the anthropologist-as-hero. Here, anthropologists are just more people joining a crowded social and discursive field: one more person to the table, to be sure, but also one who relies on the connections that preceded her. And one, ultimately, beholden to the other people at that table.

And in this, "social media" is both metaphor and medium. "Metaphor" because social media emphasizes the connectedness of what we do--even more, it structures the content of what we say and the way we communicate. "Social media" implies that we are not collecting, interpreting and analyzing in a vacuum. It reminds us that we are connected to many nodes--other people, other anthropologies, other histories--and that the weight of those connections not only shapes what we do, but enables it. And "medium" because a social media anthropology is always already a public anthropology--an anthropology inextricably embedded in an audience.

A Korean multiculturalism?

2011-06-02T10:49:00.001-07:00

A journalist contacted me about race and racism in South Korea, and I summarized some of my thinking (and prognostications) for him. You may not believe it, but I think some of the most interesting (and potentially positive) things are happening right now with attempts to address race and multiculturalism in South Korea.

Is there racism in South Korea? Absolutely, although the real question here is: what is the context for Korean racism? And how is it different than other countries? “Minjok" is a neologism borrowed from the Japanese that refers to a national ethnos. It’s not the same as US operationalizations of race—nor would it be accurate to simply gloss it as “Japanese”. Instead, it needs to be contextualized in the colonialist past—that is, while Korean minjok makes some of the same historical claims as Japanese minzoku (ancient, homogenous lineage, glorious destiny), Korean nationalist/ ethnic discourse develops first in the crucible of resistance to Japanese imperial ambitions, and then again in the wake of US occupation, partitioning (bundan) and the Korean War. This is why you might find heavily nationalist rhetoric on both the Left and the Right—there are both conservative and progressive messages there.

But there’s another kind of “race” as well—this one very much the result of occupation by US forces during the USAMGIK period. This “race” is, perhaps, more familiar to Westerners: the hierarchy of perceived phenotypical differences institutionalized in government, citizenship, employment, media representation, etc. Koreans adopted this system as well.

But prior to the 1990’s, most people outside of Korea had little opportunity to experience either system—the resident foreign population was negligible. But as that population has ticked upwards to 2%, so have opportunities for people to define themselves vis-à-vis racial others, and, in particular, guest laborers (who, whatever the complaints of expat American and Canadian English teachers, really bear the brunt of racism in Korea). People from South Asia or Southeast Asia bear the double, racial burden as being defined both as non-Korean and dark-skinned.

As far as addressing these issues, there are all kinds of things going on right now in Korea, from lots of Korean academics studying multiculturalism, to lots of governmental and non-governmental organizations working to mediate discrimination and prejudice. So I absolutely see things changing in South Korea. But some of the more deep-seated (and hence more serious) problems are probably the same factors that contribute to deep racial inequalities in the US: not the incidence of hate speech itself (which, of course, still proliferates here), but in the access to networks of contacts that, in Korea, are invaluable for anything from education and employment to housing and marriage.

This sounds insurmountable—and it is certainly is challenging to progressive elements in South Korean society. But it’s also exciting, because it means that whatever “multiculturalism” emerges in South Korea will be uniquely Korean—not, in other words, a recapitulation of the sometimes shockingly hollow US-style multiculturalism. That is, it will address not only racial discrimination and differential citizenship, but also the post-colonial relations that reproduce these powerful inequalities.

So, I continue to follow this issue, not just because of my Korean research, but to get some ideas for building a more inclusive society in the US.

The New Anthropological Science Fiction--A Review of Ekaterina Sedia

2011-05-16T12:18:00.000-07:00

Over the past months, I have been trying to decide (if only in my own mind) what anthropological science fiction looks like today. After all, if you're looking for "fully realized worlds" in the style of 1960's and 1970's fiction, you'll not find it. Even authors synonymous with "anthropological science fiction" (e.g., Ursula K. Le Guin) have moved away from that style towards something more like what James Clifford has called "partial truths". "Ethnographic truths are thus inherently partial – committed and incomplete” (7). But, that said, anthropological science fiction still exists, albeit not by that name. Or, rather, what's produced today is a kind of anthropological science fiction under erasure.

That is, rather than the full (and functionalist) anthropological sf of the 20th century, what seems "anthropological" about sf today are exactly those partial, contradiction-ridden evocations of difference and alterity--no easy way to divide the alien other from the self.

Ekaterina Sedia's The House of Discarded Dreams (2010) follows the dream-like adventures of Vimbai and her roommates through a perambulating, mutating house rife with variously mischievous spirits. It is absolutely in the tradition of the mysterious house--the genius of place that exerts its (oftentimes baleful) influence over its residents, from Hawthorne's House of Seven Gables to Lovecraft and beyond.

But when I read Sedia's novel, I had a more contemporary text in mind--Richard Grant's View from the Oldest House (1989). Both, after all, feature disaffected college students discovering GREAT TRUTHS amidst an inexplicable house. In Grant's novel, it's the tiresome Turner Ashenden, a Stephen Daedalus knock-off who is a spiritless foil for the postmodern jouissance that swirls decadently around him.

Sedia's text is certainly in that bildungsroman tradition, and even takes the same mis-en-scene, but with Vimbai, a New Jersey college student with parents from Zimbabwe. Her own relationship to Harare is tenuous--some vague memories of pictures, coloring books, and her grandmother--i.e., a very different place than the Zimbabwe her politically active parents fled.

But the New Jersey beach house she moves into is just the place to explore tenuous memories, ambiguities and contradictions. As the house inexplicably takes to sea, Vimbai and her roommates, Felix and Maya, gradually confront their unresolved conflicts through encounters with various spirits--baleful or beneficent. For Vimbai, a bestiary of Shona folklore, from the appearance of her grandmother as an ancestral spirit (vadzimu) who, fortunately, can cook for the roommates, to the "man-fish" Njuzu, a "Zimbabwean urban legend" (110). The house seems to materialize her ambiguous relationship to her family, to the experience of race and racism in the US, to her education (marine biology) and to her sexuality:

Obedient, Vimbai dreamt, Her dreams were vivid--more vivid, it seemed, than the waking landscapes inside the house. She dreamt of smells and sounds, of saturated solid planes of color. She dreamt of Africa as she had half-remembered it from her trip, half-imagined from the coloring books her mother bought her, and then got upset when Vimbai colored children on the pages pink instead of brown. (142)

Their exploration of the house's "pocket universe" brings Vimbai up against these dreams, and up against a life that she only understands in half-articulated kaleidoscopes of memories inflected with her parent's post-colonial critiques of Mugabe's Zimbabwe.

As she confronts zombie horseshoe crabs stricken with soul loss, the cognitive dissonance is too much:

This collision of worldviews--one that allowed for talking horseshoe crabs and one that hinged on graduate school applications--made her breath catch in her throat, bowled her over, brought her to her knees, and she clutched her head in her hands. (86)

But, eventually, she begins to come to terms with herself qua the contradictory networks that run through her life, connecting her to family, to ancestors, to other women.

With every passing second, the wrinkles on her grandmother's face grew more and more familiar, with the same inevitability as one's face is recognized in the mirror. Soon, the vadzimu and Vimbai would not be able to tell where one ended and the other began. (242-43)

With her grandmother's animus, it is Vimbai who begins to spin her own kind of magic. Telling her own contemporary versions of ngano (pedantic folk stories), Vimbai is able to make peace with the trickster-figure man-fish and bring some semblance of order to her world.

It is an enigmatic novel--certainly as potentially narcissistic as Grant's View From the Oldest House, but never so self-assured. Instead, the house stands at the intersection of global networks that bring together places, cultures, identities, social class, race and sexualities.

"That there are forces in the world," Felix answered. "Forces that run along invisible wires--like phone wires of the spirit, and sometimes you get trapped in them like Peb, and sometimes you stumble in the middle and get caught like a fly in a spider web . . ." (71)

Sailing off into the ocean falls in to that "there and back again" cycle as much Odyssean as Earthsea, but it is also a way of enjoining a world of transitional, sociohistorical connections--a physical movement to mirror the movement of immigrants.

So what kind of anthropological science fiction is this? Perhaps some would place it more with fantasy, but I see here a desire to interrogate the world-making that characterized more assured science fiction in the 1960's and 1970's--think Michael Bishop's early work, but more complex and more uncertain. With Sedia, it is not the experience of culture contact that is at stake, but the open-ended life of a person stretched between different identities, what Lila Abu-Lughod has called a "halfie". Who is self? Who is Other?

And this kind of question cascades into the consciousness of multiple connections puncturing holistic visions of identity: nature and culture, local and global. An animism that takes Sedia's protagonists over and beneath the seas, and one that ultimately undermines our understanding of culture as unified, integrated and autonomously human (in the Cartesian sense).

The Future is a Foreign Country: locating tomorrow’s world in the world of the Other

2011-03-10T11:08:00.000-08:00

It has been almost thirty years since Johannes Fabian published Time and the Other (1983), a scathing critique of the ways anthropologists have slotted the Other into “other” times—the “savages” or “primitives” said to resemble the West’s history. In many ways, his critique is still relevant today; the same kinds of discourse are used to explain contemporary politics in the Middle East with reference to supposedly ancient ethnic conflicts. But there are other temporal machinations at work these days as well. A fairly typical, recent example: a February 22 New York Times article on South Korea’s ubiquitous computing (“ For South Korea, Internet at Blazing Speeds is Still Not Fast Enough”)—years ahead of the United States. Instead of being slotted into the past, here Korea appears as the future—underscoring US fears of being overtaken by Asian economies. In this way, US futures are invoked in comparisons with the demographics, educational institutions, health care and environmental concerns of other nations, and there are other axes of comparison as well, with people in South Korea looking to Singapore or Japan (rather than the United States) for clues to its own future.

In an era of globalization, these “future states” proliferate, part of a perpetual state of crisis that constantly compares self to others, agitating for restructuring, free-market reforms, retraining, mobility. Comparisons and rankings regularly contrast multiple indexes of neo-liberal development. Conditions at home are critiqued, and the warning is clear: we may be overtaken by global futures that continue without us. But unlike other forms of allochronism, these future states are multidirectional and stochastic. While the West represented a privileged modernity at one time, now a diffuse, unsettled capitalism locates the ”the future” in several places simultaneously, along networked lines of flight that link, for example, Asia and the West together at different points. In an age of neo-liberal globalization, images of the future travel along flows of capital, migrants and media, generating representations and desires that are at once diffuse and ecumenical, simultaneously critical and complicit with the present.

Of course, thinking of Iran, South Korea or Singapore as the “the future” is no more credible than looking to other places as representative of the past. Here, we’re just reversing the gaze, while leaving the orientalist architecture in place—fear of “yellow hordes” updated for the age of the smart phone. But there more positive possibilities here as well—call it a “cultural arbitrage” that highlights gaps between people’s expectations for modernity and its unequal realities; that gap can open a window onto contradictory experiences and force us to question the course of our futures. Ultimately, we might question inevitability of neo-liberal globalization itself.

I’m planning to compare discourses on “future states” in the United States, South Korea and Singapore. Through anthropological research on state reports , media, future-oriented events and expos, together with interviews with informants (parents, educators, employers, state technocrats), I plan to explore moments when the future is displaced onto the Other, with particular emphasis on technology, education, multicultural policy and health.

Ultimately, I believe my findings will tell us much about how a relentlessly networked globalization works to colonize future imaginaries. But I also hope it will open up the possibility for alternative futures. That is, in the gap created by what is perceived to be the present and the future purportedly located in another place may constitute what Ernst Bloch called a “utopian surplus”: the possibility for a different global future altogether.

Can A Place Be the Future?

2011-02-01T12:33:00.000-08:00

In a January 26th New York Times op-ed, "25 Years of Digital Vandalism," William Gibson reflects on the Stuxnet attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. As a genuine futurist, Gibson looks to Stuxnet as a sign of the times--and a bellwether for the future. He confesses, "I briefly thought that here, finally, was the real thing: a cyberweapon purpose-built by one state actor to strategically interfere with the business of another." But he's disappointed in the end, to find that Stuxnet is really just another virus--albeit one perhaps appropriated by one government against another. He is ambivalent about the meaning of this for the future of nuclear security.

One of Gibson's strengths is his restless, global search for sites of the future. Here, he looks to Iran, but he is best known for his (highly selective) evocations of Japanese postmodernity. But this is a never-ending quest--the future proves elusively peripatetic. As he commented in a 1989 interview, “I think that at one time the world believed that America was the future, but now the future’s gone somewhere else, perhaps to Japan, it’s probably on its way to Singapore soon but I don’t think we’re it” anymore."

But is this an ultimately pointless quest? To what extent is it useful to think of the future as another place? On the one hand, in an era of globalization, there's a certain temporal relativism at work. One way of thinking of financial arbitrage (and other financial instruments) is precisely that: the exploitation of pricing irregularities that are a function of temporal distance. After a relatively short time, these differences will disappear in a more homogeneous time of globalized capital. But those are short, and necessarily fleeting, temporal distortions.

In a sense, thinking of Iran, Japan or Singapore as "the future"is no more credible than looking to other places as representative of the past, a familiar tactic in 19th century anthropology, and still part of racist, ethnocentric depictions of non-Western peoples as "caught" in the "primitive past." Here, we're just reversing the gaze--now, because of culture, politics or economy, the other place is thought to exist in an accelerated time horizon; looking at their "present" is said to grant us some insight int our future.

But our more quotidian moments are more obdurately Netwonian or, perhaps the better way to think of it is "more Taylorist." That is, after the work of F.W. Taylor, time for us is parsed out according to a unified, commodified form, ultimately synchronized into the monolithic, mechanical timepiece of global capital.

Still, there is a real point to looking past the U.S. or Europe for the future. And not because it opens up onto some magic window onto the next, big thing. Call it "cultural arbitrage"--the gap that opens up between global modernity and the kind of hopes and expectations people have for their lives. Looking somewhere else doesn't mean that our life will become more like their life. But it does open up the possibility for reflecting on similar conditions in the US. That is, the "gap" opens up onto our contradictory experiences and expectations and forces us to question the course of our own futures.

We'll be doing this in August of this year with our study abroad course in Seoul, South korea: Harmony of Modernity and Tradition. We'll be reflecting on exactly those tensions that open up between people's lives and the modernity that we all share. We'll be visiting temples, shrines, factories, shopping meccas, nightclubs. Along the way to making sense of it all, we'll reflect on what it means for us as well. Seoul not as a window onto the future, but as a means for thinking about our mutual futures.

References

Gibson, William (1989). Interview (February) with Terry Gross on "Fresh Air." Washington, D.C.: National Public Radio.

Technologies of Waiting

2011-01-13T07:13:00.000-08:00

I've been reading Orvar Löfgren's and Billy Ehn's
The Secret World of Doing Nothing (University of California, 2010) in preparation for the Spring semester. It's the first time I've used a work of ethnology (i.e., a comparison of different cultures) in the classroom, as opposed to the conventional, in-depth monographs that are the bread and butter of US anthropology.

Lofgren and Ehn explore the cultural and social life of non-events, i.e., those parts of our life that we ordinarily "bracket" as irrelevant--the times we wait in line, or idly stare out a window. There are interesting questions--especially with regards to methodology. How do you do anthropology when no one thinks it's even worth talking about?

Not surprisingly, they find that our experiences of these kinds of phenomena are culturally variable, and that "our" (US and Europe) expectations for non-events are very much conditioned by a modernity which 1) sets up a variety of institutions to organize people into spaces to contain "empty" time: waiting rooms, departure gates and 2) places a premium on "productive" time while making it immoral to "waste" time.

One of the results is an in-built tension between "using" and "wasting" time--a double bind which places people in situations where they must surrender to the "empty" time of waiting while at the same time craving the productive, commodified time of the protestant work ethic. If modernity replaced meaningful time (Biblical, moral, mythological) with time as an empty variable, then it is not surprising that people would find this unsettling. Accordingly, there have been many technologies developed to solve the dilemma of empty time:

The accelerated pace of everyday life in the Western world is often said to have influenced the way people feel about waiting. A whole industry has been built up around diminshing delays. (28)

One of the major successes, of course, has also been the most Pyrrhic--the automobile has both sped up and slowed down--first by raising expectations for speed and crushing them with the multiplication of sprawl around the world. Thanks to this effort to speed transportation (and the concomitant spread of suburbs), commute times are high: The average commute where I live (Maryland, USA) is 31 minutes. China's average commute: 42 minutes. Tokyo workers: 60 minutes. This hasn't stopped the desire for faster transportation at all. Indeed, based on The Secret World, one would have to prognosticate that the future will mean various other devices to accelerate.

Still, thinking about waiting and technology, I can imagine other desires besides acceleration. For one thing, many of the information technologies that we utilize have little to do with "saving" time--in fact, they introduce a number of time effects that include different ways of parsing out time, the frisson of sudden time dilation, the rhythm of turn-taking, etc. This has been a major draw in gaming: the introduction of "game time" (Tychsen and Hitchens 2009). Other IT introduces different time effects, the point being less that they introduce "more" speed, then that they demand that the user enter into the new pace. Social network technologies aren't about speeding up or slowing down along a linear continuum so much as the introduction of different, temporal rhythms. Aren't these temporalizations another reason for their popularity?

To take this back to Lofgren's and Ehn's book, the growing blight of "empty time" in the form of commuting and bureaucratization may give rise to various technologies of speed (in Virilio's sense), but will also stimulate the development of technologies that introduce new time effects. "Empty time" acts as a an abstract table upon which variously commodified, variously meaningful time effects can be overlaid--e.g., the rhythm of text messaging and the dialectic of anticipation and expectation produced in the space of that temporalization. But it's the difference that's important there, not necessarily the speed.

References
Tyschsen, Anders and Michael Hitchens (2009). "Modeling and Analyzing Time in Multiplayer and Massively Multiplayer Games." Games and Culture 4(2).

The Future of Mind

2010-12-21T06:12:00.000-08:00

The New York Times has been adding blog content to its online site. One of the most interesting (and most surprising) additions to the unfortunately named "Opinionator" section has been "The Stone," a forum edited by Simon Critchley, chair of the department of philosophy of New School in New York, that began in May. It's a philosophy blog--a welcome addition, especially compared to the blogged content on other newspapers (sports, crime, consumer news, entertainment).

Over the past couple of weeks, the columns have turned to critiques of neuroscience--or, should I say, a critique of popular representations of neuroscience, where every culture and behavior has its materialist correlate measured in the release of dopamine, the firing of neurons. Which, of course, is on one level entirely true--we are biological creatures, after all. But the results of neuroscience that trickle down intro etiolated newspaper articles present the materialist reduction as "explaining" our complex lives--violence, love, etc.--in a way that seems calculated to shut down curiosity in science by suggesting that everything is on the brink of final explanation.

But "mind", like "body," is instead a perpetual work-in-progress, with room for sociological or even (gasp) anthropological speculations on what may emerge next. In other words, the study of cognition is inherently future-oriented.

A couple of the most recent columns come from one of the more well-known cognitive scientists out there, Andy Clark. He's a popularizer, certainly, but one who has always argued for a more complex model of thinking. In his December 12th column, "Out of Our Brains," he recapitulates the arguments for a "distributed cognition" (somewhat disingenuously described as a "current" movement even though it's been around for decades).

But he extends those argument to ICTs--information and communication technologies:

If we can repair a cognitive function by the use of non-biological circuitry, then we can extend and alter cognitive functions that way too. And if a wired interface is acceptable, then, at least in principle, a wire-free interface (such as links in your brain to your notepad, BlackBerry or iPhone) must be acceptable too. What counts is the flow and alteration of information, not the medium through which it moves.

This is not exactly a revolutionary idea. The example James McClelland and his co-authors gave in their seminal, 1986 paper was a simple arithmetic problem--multiplying 2, three-digit numbers. How many can do it in their head? And how many need a "tool" (e.g., pencil and paper) to "think" this problem through to a solution? And if we accept that the the boundary of cognition can be drawn to encompass the environment (in this case, the pencil and paper) around us, then there is little reason not to consider the information technologies we use in those processes as well. Extrapolating on this to the future of cognition, we can safely predict that new tools will bring new, complex forms and configurations of cognition. As Clark concludes:

At the very least, minds like ours are the products not of neural processing alone but of the complex and iterated interplay between brains, bodies, and the many designer environments in which we increasingly live and work.

Fine. Thank you Andy Clark, for the observation!

But where I begin to become more interested is with the idea that the "interplay" may go the other way as well. We take it as axiomatic that--however extended our cognition is into the cell phones we deploy--"cognition" extends from the the "I" outward, a Cartesian intentionality where "I" am the master of my many tools. But couldn't it happen the other way? Couldn't we be the "tool" of some machine cognition--a pawn, as it were, in the connectivity of our hand-helds? We don't, I think, need to stoop to Hollywood science fiction to imagine this--indeed, this is the whole branch of science and technology studies (Actor-Network Theory and its many spin-offs). Our machines "exert" some of their own priorities onto us, and, rather fittingly, we, accordingly, become more "machine-like" in our thinking. The moment you've moved outside of a room to get a better cell phone connection is the moment you've done your machine's "bidding"! But how has this impacted our conversations and relationships with each other?

We can see this Andy Clark's blog entry itself--"What counts is the flow and alteration of information, not the medium through which it moves." He already conceives of cognition along the lines of information technologies--as quanta of information sent and received. He has become (as have all of us) more "computer-like" in our cognition, just as our current development of multiple social networking platforms has made our social life more "network-like". Or the universality of Graphical Use Interfaces has made us capable (or incapable) of "multi-tasking". That is, not just adding a new word ("multi-tasking") but enabling people to consider cognitive actions as discrete "applications" that can be simultaneously undertaken like opening multiple windows on a computer screen.

For the future, these are the interesting, unanswered questions: if we're doing "cell phone" thinking today, what kinds of cognitions will we be embedded in tomorrow? What machines will we invent to help us think? And how will those machines "think" with us?

References
McClelland et al. (1986) J.J. McClelland, D.E. Rumelhart and the PDP Research Group (eds). Parallel Distributed Processing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Parasitic Twittering at the Anthropology Conference

2010-11-30T06:28:00.000-08:00

I posted this at www.wfs.org as well . . .

I’m back from the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana. As expected, 6000 of us shuttled between two, huge, corporate hotels on Canal Street, soaking up hundreds of panels, poster sessions, round tables and workshops organized according to our association's unique calculus—unpopular panels (like mine) should be held in cavernous banquet halls, while popular topics should be granted a room the size of a bargain berth on a Carnival cruise.

But there was also Twitter. By all accounts, a few thousand tweets from a handful of people before, during, and after our conference. You can see them all archived with the #aaa2010 hash code.

There was “Kerim” (as he is known at the anthropology blog, “Savage Minds” [savageminds.org]), alerting anthropologists to the “Twitter Meetup” at a restaurant near the hotel. “Ethnographic Terminilia” to a party at Du Mois Gallery (uptown). The jazz funeral for Walter Payton, the celebrated New Orleans bassist. A book signing at an uptown bookstore. Hints on getting around town; kvetching about the water “boil alert” (from Friday to Sunday).

Not exactly South By Southwest, was it? It depends on what you were expecting.

Last year, there was an avalanche of blogging about the political power of twitter in Tehran—later (and rather embarrassingly for journalists who ought to have been more skeptical) revealed to be far less of a revolution than originally depicted. But it’s par for the course for our society, where technologies are regularly accorded tremendous power to affect social and political change. Malcolm Gladwell critiqued this tendency towards hyperbole in a recent New Yorker article. He warns,

"It shifts our energies from organizations that promote strategic and disciplined activity and toward those which promote resilience and adaptability. It makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact. The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo. If you are of the opinion that all the world needs is a little buffing around the edges, this should not trouble you. But if you think that there are still lunch counters out there that need integrating it ought to give you pause." (Gladwell 2010)

In many ways, Gladwell is spot-on in his critique. Too many essayists and academics write about Twitter the way people write about iPads or cell phones or whatever—as pivotal, ultimately deterministic technologies that are going to change the world in some beneficial way. This is where marketing and scholarship meet: sales hype finds its hyperbolic echo in academic scholarship. When the reality is less than game-changing, you’d think that these kinds of proclamations would become less common. But the same commentators just move on to the next social media.

Ultimately, this distracts us from considering what social media do, and what they might do in the future. Looking back at the modest twitter presence at the anthropology meetings, it would be hard to suggest that twitter represented an alternative to the main conference. Nothing of the sort, really—most of the tweets were actually commentary, summaries or advertising for papers and presentations at the conference. But the stuff that got retweeted the most were announcements for off-site events: little challenges to the monopoly of the conference site in the form of meet-ups, gallery showings and book signings. In other words, nothing there that represented an actual alternative to the conference (not a new way to conference), but little nudges to conference attendees to consider supplemental events outside.

Here, twitter reminds me of Michel Serres on “parasite logic,” the way that a outside, third party (or media) intercedes in a dyadic communication and opens the possibility for new meanings or new action. As Brown (2002:16-17) writes,

“In information terms, the parasite provokes a new form of complexity, it engineers a kind of difference by intercepting relations. All three meanings then coincide to form a ‘parasite logic’–analyze (take but do not give), paralyze (interrupt usual functioning), catalyze (force the
host to act differently). This parasite, through its
interruption, is a catalyst for complexity. It does this by impelling the parties it parasitizes to act in at least two ways. Either they incorporate the parasite into their midst–and thereby accept the new form of communication the parasite inaugurates–or they act together to expel the parasite and transform their own social practices in the course of doing so.”

Twitter’s power lies in its ability to interrupt, supplement and catalyze different kinds of behavior: a media to impel people to (briefly) diverge from their expected scripts at the conference and, say, take a trolley uptown. This is a powerful potential—one that people like Clay Shirkey have made a career off of extrapolating upon.

But it is, ultimately, a parasite technology, one that requires the presence of more monolithic institutions to function. That is, it supplements the school, the meeting, the demonstration, rather than moves to replace them. More than that, its ontology rests on the presence of these more permanent, more powerful structures. This hardly represents some grand failure on the part of social media—it’s a just a reminder to look to the social contexts of media rather than media themselves.

Doing so can also free us to imagine other parasite technologies—cascades of social media that nudge, prod, intrude, implore. We move to a future where social technologies will consistently fail to be transcendent—will fail to utterly transform the way we exist and communicate. But ultimately, the parasitic itself can prove transformative.

References

Brown, Steven D. (2002). “Michel Serres.” Theory,
Culture & Society 19(3):1-27.
Gladwell, Malcolm (2010). “Small Change.” New Yorker 10.4.2010: 42-49.

The Anthropological RPG

2010-09-29T10:05:00.000-07:00

While looking for the European journal, Anthropos, I stumbled across another Anthropos--this one an anthropologically-informed RPG start-up comprised of a PhD student in anthropology (Calvin Johns) and a linguistics/ literature Ph.D. (Travis Rinehart). It looks like they'll be releasing "Early Dark" soon--although I can't tell whether it will get any kind of distribution or whether it will be strictly print-on-demand (POD). It's a typical, table-top RPG, but with the anthropological twist.

What does it mean to have an anthropologically informed RPG? In a July interview with Park Cooper (posted on the Comics Bulletin column, "The Park and Bob Show"), Rinehart describes their goal as creating "a world that as accurately as possible represents an anthropologically correct vision of human reality (besides magick)," while Johns adds that "We take influence from cultures traditionally demonized, feminized, stereotyped or homogenized in other games." Moreover, players move across a culturally heterogeneous landscape--"each nation in the game (there are no races, because any intelligent person realizes that race is a mythic category that wasn't even an issue in the world until the last 400 years or so) is a blend of at least two other cultures." Basically, anthropology old (the emphasis on systemtic generalization) and new (a multicultural, pluralist vision).

How to avoid staying at the corporate hotel . .

2010-09-26T13:25:00.000-07:00

I blogged a bit about my multi-agent systems-informed theories for de-centralized convention planning at the World Future Society . . .This, as the American Anthropological Association again prepares to meet at a non-union venue.

Blogging . . .Somewhere else

2010-09-12T04:11:00.000-07:00

These days, I've been blogging a bit at the World Future Society. I'm joined there by other future-oriented bloggers . . .

Review of Time Treks by Ashis Nandy

2010-08-12T03:40:00.000-07:00

Ashis Nandy. Time Treks: the Uncertain Future of Old and New Despotisms. NY: Seagull Books, 2008, 228 pp., US$ 34.95 (paperback).

It is easy to assume that we have no future. Not a real one, anyway. Business and government collude to limit our imagination of the future to a catalog of product releases. Within the confines of advanced capitalism, the future can only be The Present 2.0. The alternatives can only be, we’re told, atavistic returns to the “tribe” and to the various parochialisms they imply. As Fredric Jameson complained a few years ago (2005: 281):

The surrender to various forms of market ideology—on the Left, I mean, not to mention everyone else—has been imperceptible but alarmingly universal. Everyone is now willing to mumble, as though it were an inconsequential concession to in passing to public opinion and current received wisdom (or shared communicational presuppositions), that no society can function efficiently without the market, and that planning is obviously impossible.

But there are possibilities, and one of the challenges for cultural critics writing in the West is to attempt to articulate—or at least evoke—the potential for alternative futures, if for no other reason than to open up a space for critical thinking outside of the morally, politically and (now) economically bankrupt “free market”. But it has not been easy for Western intellectuals to mount a Great Refusal against an economic, social and political system which overdetermines consciousness and structures even haptic sensations. Even academic publishing (like media in general) ensures the endless proliferation of certain theorists, keywords and texts, and the complete obfuscation of others—particularly Asian scholars. Like the other products we consume, our scholarship is driven (and delimited) by the market it embraces.

I came to Time Treks looking for just such alternatives and come away intrigued with what I’ve found. Nandy is one of a select few Indian intellectuals whose work is read and reviewed in the West. Of course, he is hardly the only Indian intellectual to be so prolific or so wide in his breadth, but he is one of few to have maintained both a critical and geographic distance from the US and Europe for most of his long career.

Time Treks is a compilation of academic addresses made over the past two decades, ranging over an exceptionally broad terrain—utopias, India-Pakistan relations, urban studies, poverty and development, nuclear arms races. What ties them all together is an incredulity towards the kinds of futures thinking (literally) capitalized on in a globalized world—linear, progressive, teleological.

It is a remarkable feature of our times that so many individuals and collectivities are willing and even eager to forego their right to design their own futures. Some societies do not any longer have a workable definition of the future. They have a past, a present, and someone else’s present as their future. (174)

Here, he joins a number of non-Western intellectuals (e.g., Afro-Futurists) taking aim at the monolithic one-dimensionality of discourses on the future.

And, whatever the target of these essays, his work can be seen in the context of a political psychology extrapolating on Erich Fromm in his sustained critique of Enlightenment rationalism, and, in particular, the way the Enlightenment sets up particular dichotomies of citizen and state, developed and developing, that both determine and contain the course of postcolonial struggle.

In ecology, human rights, and feminism, too, there is the usual aggressive ethnocentrism masquerading as global ethics. In dissent, as in radical social protest. European and proto-European intellectual traditions are often as arrogant as ever about their centrality in the global order of cultures. They continue to see the Enlightenment vision as the ultimate depository of answers to all basic human questions on society and politics. (81)

This is a hard pill for those of us involved in any sort of global activism to swallow, but one that is, I think, ultimately salutary. The question is the extent to which Eurocentric assumptions about politics, society, economics, religion and science limit our imagination about what might be. How do we imagine the future of the multicultural state? It is difficult to challenge the vague cosmopolitanism which forms the basis for many of our hopes and fears. But, as Nandy (162) points out, there is much to be gained by challenging the “singular historical trajectory” at core of writings on the cosmopolitan.

But where do we find this post-colonial, Marcusean challenge? Not in the prognostications of futurists and policy makers, whom Nandy singles out for special critique. Instead, Nandy urges that we look to alternatives in the absurd and even occasionally half-articulated visions of people speaking from the margins.

This is not merely because the absurd and the surreal should have a place in the creative endeavour, but because in a multiethnic, multicultural world they can act as bridges among incommensurable worlds. In a confederational global order of cultures, one’s normal is always someone else’s absurd, and someone else’s surreal is one’s reality. (20)

Here, Nandy is little help in articulating what the visions of such a “global underworld” (109) might be, but this because he self-reflexively includes himself in the set of intellectuals who have been co-opted into Eurocentric imaginings of the future:

It is unlikely that I shall live to see the day, but I am consoled by the thought that I belong to a generation of South Asian scholars whose demise can only hasten the end of the present phase of self-hatred, of our ridiculous attempts to live out some other culture’s history. (39)

But we can, at least, begin to sketch the contours of that vision by following Nandy’s Marcusean negation.

First, a disavowal of Enlightenment teleologies that imbricate our imagining of technology, democracy, progress and change. This can involve a direct critique of institutions, as in Nandy’s characterization of the UN as “only an edited version of the present global nation-state system” (193). But it also means overcoming cherished myths of Western progress and replacing them with more fluid, even heterotopic, possibility:

Perhaps in the present global culture the shaman, taken metaphysically as opposition to the king and the priest, remains the ultimate symbol of authentic dissent, representing the utopian and transcendental aspects of the child, the lunatic, the androgynous, and the artist. In this he remains the least socialized articulation of the values of freedom, creativity, multiple realities, and an open future. (178)

There’s a question here about the ultimate value of something like the “shaman,” itself a Western reification resting on pernicious binarisms of nature/culture, western/non-western, rational/ irrational. But I would argue that Nandy’s shaman is not Castaneda’s shaman (nor Eliade’s, nor Campbell’s). Instead, the “shaman” stands in for a kind of sublimated possibility at the core of globalization—the possibility for unrest, certainly, but also the virtual potentials that have been silenced by the head-long rush into neo-liberal oblivion: “In this he remains the least socialized articulation of the values of freedom, creativity, multiple realities, and an open future” (178). Perhaps here Nandy’s shaman might be compared to Michael Taussig’s, a figure of magic and secrecy, to be sure, but also “a set of tricks, simulations, deceptions, and art or appearances in a continuous movement of counterfeit and feint” (Taussig 2003: 278).

The “shaman,” in other words, is less some exoticized figure standing outside science and rationalism than a place-keeper for the tactics on the margins, involving not only alternatives to present configurations of power/knowledge, but also the heterogeneity of challenges to the center in the oftentimes unrecognized and delegitimized tactics of the powerless.

References
Jameson, Fredric (2005). Archaeologies of the Future. NY: Verso.
Taussig, Michael (2003). “Viscerality, Faith, and Skepticism.” In Magic and Modernity, ed. by Birgit Meyer and Peter Pels, pp. 272-306. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Mars Habs and Anthropology

2010-07-17T04:28:00.000-07:00

One strand of emergent anthropology that I've been following over the years has been the "anthropology of outer spaces," one recently given new life by a few anthropologists, Deborah Battaglia and David Valentine among them, who have begun to theorize space not just as shadow of terrestrial geo-politics, but as "reconstituting humanness and human sociality in the here and now" (Valentine, Olson and Battaglia 2009: 11).

Space is one of the paramount sites for the legitimation of Western configurations of power/knowledge. The kinds of futures people ascribe to space--e.g., the military-technocratic order of Star Trek: the Next Generation--have a lot to do with the apotheosis of colonialism under the auspices of neo-liberal capitalism (Kilgore 2005). But there are different possibilities as well--as Vaelntine et al point out.

But some of these possible, alternative futures are happening right here, in the form of Mars simulations placing groups of scientist-volunteers in a "hab" environment for long periods of time (from a few weeks to, in the case of the ongoing Russia/ ESA project, a few months), during which communications with the Earth are severely truncated and people should "suit up" before going outside, etc. Sure, as Valentine et al point, only 500 people may have inhabited space, but how many thousands more have enacted life in outer spaces?

The Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) has been around for some time--since 2002, and has been joined by other habs as part of the Mars Analog Research Station (MARS) project. Over the last 7 seasons, teams have gone to the station, simkulated their Mars colony, and posted lots of repoprts and updates. Lots of these present and former para-astronauts have left behind their blogs--"Mars, ho!".

OK--some of this looks an awful lot like those dismal Star Trek futures, but there are occasionally intimations of sometghing else. Together, all of these records, journals and reports suggest other possibilities--challenges to race, gender and class. Possibilities for a playful and emancipatory outer space.

References

Kilgore, De Witt Douglas (2003). Astrofuturism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania.

Valentine, David, Valerie Olson and Debbora Battaglia (2009). "Encountering the Future." Anthropology News: December, pp. 11+.

A tale of two futures--North and South Korea at the Shanghai World Expo

2010-05-18T12:23:00.000-07:00

I am deeply disappointed that I can't travel to Shanghai to see the national theater that is the World Expo.

With both Koreas plotting futures in which China plays a pivotal role, both expo pavilions express the shape of future, Korean engagements.

South Korea with a nod to its accelerated program of "cultural content" projected into the future as a longing for Korean culture through variously streamed media (image from the official site). Korean writing (한글) forms the building blocks of a multimedia spectacle--literally, a media ziggurat erected upon Korean culture and language.

The North Korean installation (looking a bit like a carpet discount outlet), expresses an affirmation (an also a desire) for a properly "juche" future where China and the world will look to North Korea for its steadfastness. The juche tower still burns! I don't know what's up with those umbrellas, though.

Review: Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks

2010-04-27T03:59:00.000-07:00

Over the past couple of years, a rising trend: ethnographic explorations of gaming and RPG's. The anthropological ones have been interesting: Tom Boellstorff's Coming of Age in Second Life: An anthropologist explores the Virtually Human and the forthcoming ethnography, My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An anthropologists account of World of Warcraft, by Bonnie Nardi. But it's the para-anthropologies that concern me here--Mark Barrowcliffe's blistering (and ultimately depressing) The Elfish Gene and, most recently, Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: an Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms

All of them (anthropological and para-anthropological) share certain characteristics: they all approach role-playing games from the perspective of the middle-aged outsider, socially distant from the world of the gamer. This is at least methodologically familiar in the academic anthropology. Stereotypically, the anthropologist is always supposed to straddle ironic configurations of engagement and detachment. But for the nonce anthropologists, it is an invitation to indulge in psychologisms about "those" people. What makes those gamers tick? Why are they spending so much time in WoW, anyway?

This is at least partly attributable to the writers themselves. Ethan Gilsdorf begins with the psychodrama of his mother's aneurysm, the trauma of which intensifies his adolescent fascinations with role-playing. In fact, it's Various Issues originating in this that send him into metonymic encounters with other forms role-playing far removed from his childhood D&D campaigns: Live-Action Role--Playing (LARPs), the Society for Creative Anachronism, World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings tourism in New Zealand. Amidst interviews with men and women who game, his own adulthood is never far behind: What does he really believe? Can he let the past go? And can he commit to his girlfriend (or, perhaps, find a new one)?

Of course, it's all about him in the end. At the end of his journey, Gilsdorf finds himself clutching some Lord of the Rings action figures in the shadow of Mount Victoria (site of the "Outer Shire" where Frodo and co. first encounter the Nazgul). Here, he finds both deep embarrassment and, of course, self-revelation:

Goofing around with the figurines had been fun, until it began to feel pathetic. What was I doing, a forty-two-year-old, single, and childless man, traveling on his own, sleeping in youth hostels, and playing with toys?
[ . . .]
I gathered my strength. It was time to leave Mount Victoria and Middle-earth behind. I packed up and headed down the path. Then, I heard a voice.

This is what you're going to do, Ethan. You're going to leave them here.

[ . . .]

You are digging a hole in a hillside in New Zealand, the voice continued. It was hard to turn it off. You are doing something symbolic. This is what it feels like to have an epiphany. (266-67)

But do gamers indulge in the same introspection? I suspect that the vast majority are no more troubled than, say, the modal American (and perhaps considerably less so). But this really isn't a critique of Gilsdorf's otherwise engaging essays. Gilsdorf's relentless pop-psychology and narcissistic navel-gazing seems to be an inextricable part of this genre. In fact, I consider this a kind of popular ethnography, full of interesting interviews and observations--all to the good, I think.

But I wonder if Gilsdorf's book, in the final analysis, is constrained by the same assumptions that enable it in the first place. That is, what animates the book project is the sense that gamers have broken with everyday mores, that they, in other words, are different, odd, noteworthy, iconoclastic: that they require investigation and explanation. Once we've understood their gaming lives, of course, they no longer seem quite so strange after all, do they? What Gilsdorf's book does is to fall into the old anthropological gambit: a) describing the strangeness of gamers; and b) rationalizing that strangeness.

But what if gaming isn't a particularly strange activity? What if, in fact, "gaming" describes a very commonplace experience? Gilsdorf begins to develop this idea towards the end of his book (181):

I noticed gamers playing everywhere, even in my corner cafe. Being online with WoW and other MMOs has become an acceptable use of public space. However, penetrating the MMO subculture proved more difficult than showing up for a weekend event in a purple shirt. Online gaming runs silent. Online gaming runs deep. And it takes place both everywhere and nowhere, and the spaces in between. As I learned more about online gaming, and spoke to players and game developers, nothing seemed black and white. I kept reading stories that linked gaming to either escapism or hedonism, antisocial behavior or community. Both warm fuzzies and red flags kept popping up.

But I knew that alternative electronic identities were a part of life. I'd already participated in online dating, MySpace, Facebook, and e-mail: In my profiles and flirtatious texts, I'd put forth my best, most seductive versions of myself. Safe behind the barrier of a computer screen, I was tempted to rewrite my personal history, or claim to be passionate about something--say, ending world hunger--just to snare a date. Wasn't I already role-playing, even if not in a heroic fantasy realm? But at what expense to me, not to mention the millions of MMO players whose interest in gaming seems to fill a psychic hole in our culture?

And:

I didn't find my Lady Geek. My Rings fanboy was only partly sated. To end with the Dark Lord of the Sith felt like poetic justice. But, as Ethnor-An3 might say, observing the scene in a partial state of inebriation, I was as welcome here as anyone. The great bat wings of Dragon*Con embraced all types. This was the lesson of the con. Even if I personally did not end up embracing anyone.

I trudged back to my hotel, passing through the real Planet Earth, that brash zone of Hooters and Hard Rock Cafes and warring football fans who had descended on Atlanta, or Atlantis, or wherever I was. Folks lingered at tailgator parties in parking lots, each side dressed in matching uniforms--one fandom (Clemson) in orange T-shirts, polos, and baseball caps, the other (Alabama fans) in scarlet. They stumbled about, smashing bottles, trying to find their hotels, clinging to their gods and heroes, no more or less freakish than the rest of us. (239)

I think Gilsdorf is right--gamers are similar to people who spend their time posting on Facebook, or sports fans who tail-gate. They're all investing--lavishing--time and money on their hobby/ avocation. They're all working at their play.

It has become commonplace to look at consumption in the age of Web 2.0 as (after the work of Michel de Certeau) a form of "secondary production," where meanings, social relations and affect shift in the act of appropriation by the consumer. But little, here, on the "relations of secondary production".

As Marx wrote in Contributions to the Critique of Political Economy,

In the social production of their life men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure, the real basis on which rises and legal and political superstructure . . .

Couldn't this also be the case with secondary production? Much of the work on consumer studies implies a separation of the work of producers from that of consumers. Somehow, "leisure" and "consumption" haven't implied the level of alienation and reification that we associate with "real" work. In fact, the opposite has generally been true, with critics in cultural studies characterizing work practices utilizing language and theory cribbed from leisure. That is, work practices get coded as social and cultural expression, rather than the opposite.

But if we consider leisure a form of work, or, rather, if the two have become so interpenetrated in an age of networked capitalism that it is no longer particularly helpful to analytically separate them, then we can see games as work. As Vandenberghe (2008: 884) notes, “With the privitization of the commons, the boundaries between production and communication, production and consumption, labour and leisure, paid and unpaid work disappear. [ . . .] When free time becomes productive, everything becomes work"

This is particularly the case in the more socially networked games that Gilsdorf explores. Without the "free labor" of 11 million WoW adherents, there would be no record-breaking profits for Blizzard Entertainment. Moreover, despite the absence of wages, it seems obvious to me that this is a form of work, similar to other forms of non-remunerated labor.

So what was most interesting to me in Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks were the tales from the trenches, the narratives of labor: how many hours people lavish on costumes, the tales surrounding the acquisition of various artifacts, the hours they drove to LARPing, the time they'd put into DragonCon. A "relations of secondary production" would focus our attention on the conditions of (secondary) work: the relations of (re) production, the alienation of the (re) worker: the proletarianization of the world in the frisson of Deleuzian capitalism.

References

Vandenberghe, Frederic (2008). "Deleuzian Capitalism." Philosophy & Social Criticism 34(8): 877-903.

Notes from the Ethnographic Archive

2010-04-19T03:39:00.000-07:00

Web 2.0 has stimulated ethnographic desire--the archiving of vast records of everyday life in the form of videos and podcasts. The Gamer's Haven is one, hours and hours of role-playing game sessions . . .

Images of Futures Past from Dajeon's 1993 World Expo--꿈의 벽--The Wall of Dreams

2010-03-31T07:28:00.000-07:00

Robert Fletcher on Cory Doctorow

2010-03-19T07:36:00.000-07:00

There's a nice piece on Cory Doctorow by Robert Fletcher in the current issue of Science Fiction Studies (SFS). It surprised me a little to find it there, since Doctorow is not exactly the sf canon, yet, as I have blogged about here, there is really no better example of the current "structure of feeling" than Doctorow--he's right there, blogging constantly, writing for any magazine that will have him, putting a creative commons license on everything but insisting on the profitability of the whole enterprise. In short, it would be hard to find a literary figure who does a better job exploring the tensions and contradictions of the neo-liberal, especially when it comes down to the fluidity of information, the role of the state, the constitution of the individual and, in general, the contradictions of a monolithic yet simultaneously superannuated capitalist system. It's that aspect of his fiction that I find interesting, even when it doesn't quite hold together: the accelerated heteroglossia of a networked era. As Fletcher (81) writes, "Like Dickens's competing roles as artist, advocate, and entrepreneur tell us something about his novels' relations to changing modes of cultural production and to the social organization they entail." And as Doctorow continues to write past the dot.com crash into the depths of our information-saturated, Orwellian state, we'll see more in his work that chronicles the contradictions of our times. One of the best parts about what Fletcher identifies as Doctorow's "networked" identity is the perspective it gives us onto the messiness of figuring things out in the global present. Drawing on the diverse discourses around him to form occasionally refractory assemblages of ideas, and then working those ideas back and forth over the course of several essays, novels and short stories is not only symptom but also synecdoche of the neoliberal present.

Imagining a Unified Korea, Part I--파란 달 아래와 국가의 사생활

2010-02-11T05:41:00.000-08:00

A nation like Korea that has been artificially partitioned (분단) necessarily spends considerable resources planning for unification. Indeed, the governments of both north and south Korea have historically drawn legitimation from their promise of eventual unification. But the scholarship here falls mostly along economic, security and administrative policy lines: the logistics of the unified nation. What's missing from much of this is a sense of the everyday life of a unified Korea, i.e., one that, whatever the course of unification (sudden v. gradual) or the ultimate shape its will take (e.g., one nation, two systems), addresses the way people will live and interact with each other. How do people imagine interacting with the Other on a quotidian level? Indeed, the imagination of everyday life may be the most important factor in the successful unification of the two Koreas.

There are some interesting sites from which one might extrapolate. One is the growing population of North Koreans residing in the South (탈북자, or the more official, '새터민'). As they interact with their southern counterparts, seek employment (a big problem for this small group of people) and render their opinions of life in the South (helped by a fairly relentless crowd of network television and Korean social scientists), we can begin to see at least one shape for a unified Korea.

But, science fiction may give another. There have been a handful of sf novels and stories extrapolating on Korean unification through the eyes of the south, although I expect to see more as the imagination of unfification moves from an emphasis on redressing past injustices (i.e., correcting the distortions of Korea's artificial partitioning and restoring the nation/ethnos (민족) to its rightful patrimony) to the plotting the ascendancy of a Korean future (Korean unification merged into the developmental discourse of the neoliberal state).

Probably the best known of unification sf is Bok Geo-il's (복거일) 1992 novel, 파란 달 아래 (Under a Blue Moon). Originally published serially on a discussion board, Bok's novel traces the unficiation of two lunar bases in the year 2039--the north's Kim Il-sung base, and the south's Jang Yeong-sil base. There is considerable resistance from their respective Earth-bound governments, but, in the context of a strong, lunar independence movement (the Selenites, after H.G. Wells), the possibility for a truly unified ethnos (한민족) gradually becomes possible,

Indeed, we can see Bok's vision as an extrapolation of 1980's minjung (민중) discourse that sought to transcend political and social divisions through transcendental evocations of "folk" Korea, i.e., a critical, oppositional discourse on Korean identity arising "from below" and drawing selectively from agrarian tradition (Bok would return to minjung themes in some of his more recent writings). In this novel, the message is simple: without the interference of government (both domestic and international), Korean unification is a natural tendency. Through Bok's North Korean protagonist, we get both a critique of government brinkmanship, but also a circumspect critique of Western imperialism.

Here, as Grinker points out in Korea and Its Futures, Bok anticipates more official sentiments in exonerating the North's people of any wrongdoing: the tragedy of division lies with the government that has prospered on the back on bundan (분단). The lunar bases literally allow the realization of a minjung utopia from the ground up.

A Little Korean Science Fiction: 카이와판돔의 번역에 과하여 (Concerning the Translation of Kaiwapandom)

2009-12-26T05:09:00.000-08:00

Lee Young-do's "Concerning the Translation of Kaiwapandom" appeared in an anthology of Korean science fiction, Alternative Dream, in 2007. Like many of his sf contemporaries, Lee's work was first available online--with all the advantages and disadvantages that it implies. That medium may be ideal for the world's most wired nation, but it has also served to limit the foreign, scholarly audience for this work. Translators, after all, are less likely to invest their energies in a medium that is, by definition, shifting and protean. So it's nice when presses like 황금가지 (Hwanggeumgaji) publish these collections of stories. As for translators--well, as you see below, I'm not much of one. But I have tried to give you a sense of this interesting story. You can find another translation of the story at Crossroads, an online journal of science and culture published by the Asia Pacific Center for Theoretical Physics. And, in that vein, if you're interested in an English introduction to Korean Science Fiction, you can visit Gord Sellar's blog for a taste of his Korean sf visionquest.

Ultimately, "Kaiwanpandom" is a story steeped in anthropology--a tale about linguistics, language survival and Korean unification--and an ultimately optimistic vision of Korean cultural futures.

The obvious target of Lee's story is the blatant linguistic imperialism in mainstream US- and English sf. How many sf stories hinge on some kind of standard language spoken across a galaxy? How many stories project a future where the people of Earth speak only English? One of the many ironies of golden-age sf is that, in the act of discovering a diversity of intelligent life in the universe, people lose their linguistic and cultural diversity.

Of course, this is a common sense understanding of linguistic hegemony that writers in the US and other English-speaking countries are steeped in and rarely question, a kind of linguistic social Darwinism that not only naturalizes the present dominance of English but also projects it into a future where a monolingual world is an inevitable product of the progress into space.

It is here that "Kaiwapandom" begins. Aliens have made contact with Earth through a kind of receiver system called an "ansible". A dictionary of Galactic Standard has been compiled. But now, the work of cultural translation has begun--starting with mythology (the basics, as it were). After a disastrous attempt to translate one myth (destroying much of California), the alien governing body has initiated an exchange of mythology with the Witanians.

They have sent a kind of alien Cinderella--"Kaiwanpandom". Interpreters around the world are striving to translate cultural texts from the the alien tongue. But, here, there is already the politics of language at stake--it is the "Galactic Standard-English" dictionary that is produced first, after all. Will other Earth languages be swept aside for a single language to communicate with Galactic Standard? Especially since the stakes are so high--the transfer of unimaginable technologies.

But not everyone may view this as a spectacular crisis. As Teacher Lee--the interpreter engaged by some government body to work on the Korean translation in some undisclosed location in the mountains north of Seoul--explains to her bodyguard, Captain Bak (formerly of the North Korean People's Army), you have to take the long view:

We don't know how many viewpoints have disappeared. In reality, other language users take over; in the last century, capitalism was like that, and now it's aliens. Both don't use the languages of other people. [ . . .] When barbarians appear speaking other languages, as a rule they are assimilated or killed off. After this present resistance ends, the Earth will quickly unify under a common language. It's highly possible that will be English. (80)

But there are those that would oppose this change. There's a guerrilla resistance movement to the incursion of alien culture--the "Earthers" (지구주의자). Their goal is to advance a kind of xenophobic agenda--and they have actively tried to stop the translation of the alien myth into Earth languages.

Even though it seems like a long shot that the Earthers would be after the Korean translation, Teacher Lee explains that, since she is the only real authority on Galactic Standard in Korea, knocking her out would eliminate the whole process of Korean translation altogether. So, in the midst of her work on the translation, the Earthers attack. That's where Captain Bak comes in--jumping in defense of both Teacher Lee and of the Korean language in general.

That is, not only is Captain Bak (as her bodyguard) key to her physical survival, he also articulates the importance of Korea's linguistic survival. His first point concerns the widely held opinion (in Korea, anyway) that Korean is the most logical and scientific of the world's languages, one that Teacher Lee pessimistically dismisses.

"Suppose that it comes to light that the easiest language with which to understand Witan is Korean? What then?"

"Manx may be the closest language to Witan. Yahi or Katavaka may be as well. But in the last century capitalism did away with these languages. And there was no problem with the suitability of these languages.

"This is natural law. It doesn't matter how beautiful or how special the languages that have disappeared are, Only power is important. Because this is natural law I don't get angry or try to resist." (84)

But, despite Teacher Lee's defeatist rendition of linguistic history, Captain Bak doesn't give up. As the two escape from the clutches of the terrorists, Bak pieces together a politics of Korean language survival in the age of Galactic standard.

That politics is premised on his own experiences of what appears to have been a one-sided reunification of North and South Korea--i.e., one where South Korea assimilates the North.

"Teacher Lee, what can you understand if you lose the Fatherland (조국) and the language of the fatherland?
[ . . .]
Now I'm Captain Bak. But at one time I was Bak Weon-jin, an officer of the North Korean People's Army (조선인민군). But it's an even more strange evil to remember that when's there's no longer any position from which to use that name.
[ . . .]
I'm sure you're right when you assert that the weak disappear and the strong proliferate. I've suffered this first hand. I'm talking about cultural language. Korean too will disappear. And some day the world and Witan too."
[ . . .]
"Captain Bak, you're talking about an even larger extinction than I was. Given that, doesn't that make it even more useless?"

"It's not so much extinction as giving up. For adults to arrive at that place you have to give up on your children." (88)

In the end, it's Captain Bak who saves them both from the terrorists. And Korean proves important, after all, in conceptualizing gender terms in Witan (92). One of the translation problems dogging them is the existence of three genders--Woman, Man(1) and Man(2)--each of which can be placed together in any combination to produce different, gendered offspring.

Then there are occasions in Witan when different [gender] combinations are possible. Two women coupled together produce a daughter and a woman coupled with a man(1) produced Man(2) sons. If a combination of three people--two women and a man(1)--is achieved, then you can have a daughter and a man(2) son; three people consisting of one woman, one man(1) and one man(2) give birth to boys of each type. Then if Witanians want to reproduce all of the genders, how do they have to combine?"

"You would need a combination of two women, one man(1) and one man(2)." (92)

This ideal combination of four people as a basic unit for reproducing all genders in Witanian society is known as a Kaiwanpandom. Translated, Teacher Lee decides on "온가시버시" (Ongasibeosi) which we might translate into English as "whole couple."

It's important here that they use "온가시버시"--i.e., combining the pure Korean "온" (on) with the pure Korean "가시버시" (gasibeosi) rather than the Sino-Korean 부부 (bubu). Somehow, this is a better translation of Kaiwapandom than one in Sino-Korean (or in English).

The obvious meanings here include both the survival of Korean in a future dominated by powerful and imperialistic hegemons (i.e., the US). But also the sense of a reunified Korea being one that brings together a combination of different peoples and different customs in order to found a whole. In other words, both Teacher Lee (the embodiment of South Korea's knowledge society) and Captain Bak (the representative of the perpetually militarized North) need to come together to found a stronger, lasting Korean peninsula. The last scene finds Captain Bak giving Teacher Lee cigarettes in the hospital--dreams of unified future, after all.

And there's an argument here for linguistic diversity in general. Implicit in "Kaiwapandom" is the idea that the world is better for the different perspectives different languages bring. And even more than this, that linguistic diversity may be one of the best resources we have for adapting to perpetually changing (and perpetually surprising) cultural futures. The other side to this argument is the acknowledgment that a monolingual future is an ultimately impoverished one.

Book review: Cory Doctorow's Makers

2009-12-14T03:25:00.000-08:00

Cory Doctorow should have been an anthropologist; or, rather, he is--a nonce anthropologist of his corner of information society. Doctorow is a veteran activist, best known for his work in electronic media and civil liberties. His technical background, together with his considerable experience in policy and political activism, makes him the ultimate anthropological insider--few writers are as dead-on in their descriptions of geek-dom in general, and his policy writings give his work a level of accessibility that would otherwise be missing.

Makers is in many ways the synthesis of his work in science fiction, activism and what might best be described as self-entrepreneurship. As such it is a profoundly reflexive work: Doctorow blogs on boingboing.net about people who re-combine the dross of consumer society into new forms, clever hacks, ironic parodies. Makers extrapolates on these smaller-scale inventions into a description of a new economic system (the 'new work'), as seen through the eyes of the blogger who loves it (the journalist-cum-blogger Suzanne Church). At the same time, Doctorow is re-cycling and re-using his own materials in Makers, returning to Disney once again (pace Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom), and to 3-D volumetric printing (which appears in at least one of his stories, "After the Siege"). And finally, he's opening his work to re-use and re-mixing through his creative commons licensing, itself an intellectual property hack on par with the inventions of his two protagonists, Lester and Perry.

The "New Work" that Makers introduces expounds on the ethics of re-using and re-mixing, combining technologies, trash, abandoned buildings, polluted factories and everything else in a post-industrial "future" America (that exists in many places right now in the present) and using that to create something else.

It starts with Lester and Perry in their junk-yard laboratory on the borders of an abandoned Wal-Mart in Florida, but then blossoms into rapidly brachiating micro-enterprising fuelling the creative urges of an underemployed and de-skilled lumpenproletariat.

As Lester and Perry later eulogize in a "new work" theme park,

THERE WAS A TIME WHEN AMERICA HELD OUT THE PROMISE OF A NEW WAY OF LIVING AND WORKING. THE NEW WORK BOOM OF THE TEENS WAS A PERIOD OF UNPARALLELED INVENTION, A CAMBRIAN EXPLOSION OF CREATIVITY NOT SEEN SINCE THE TIME OF EDISON—AND UNLIKE EDISON, THE PEOPLE WHO INVENTED THE NEW WORK REVOLUTION WEREN’T RIP-OFF ARTISTS AND FRAUDS.

THEIR MARVELOUS INVENTIONS EMERGED AT THE RATE OF FIVE OR SIX PER WEEK. SOME DANCED, SOME SANG, SOME WERE HELPMEETS AND SOME WERE MERE JESTERS.

TODAY, NEARLY ALL OF THESE WONDERFUL THINGS HAVE VANISHED WITH THE COLLAPSE OF NEW WORK. THEY’VE ENDED UP BACK IN THE TRASH HEAPS THAT INSPIRED THEM

In the end, the company that was bankrolling most of the new work start-ups ("Kodacell") goes bankrupt, throwing everyone out of work again in another paroxysm of “creative destruction,” but the boys trudge on, re-using the wrack of new work in their project. The "new work" may have been beaten by specters of shareholder value, but the entrepreneurial spirit lives on!

Some of the early reviews of this work have applauded the way the entrepreneurial spirit remains unconquered--indeed, the final paragraphs of Makers find Lester and Perry, now at the end of their lives, toiling over their next mash-up invention:

The scene inside the workshop was eerie. Perry and Lester stood next to each other, cheek by jowl, hunched over something on the workbench. Perry had a computer open in front of him, and he was typing, Lester holding something out of sight.

How many times had she seen this tableau? How many afternoons had she spent in the workshop in Florida, watching them hack a robot, build a sculpture, turn out the latest toy for Tjan’s amusement, Kettlewell’s enrichment? The postures were identical—though their bodies had changed, the hair thinner and grayer. Like someone had frozen one of those innocent moments in time for a decade, then retouched it with wizening makeup and hair-dye.

Is this a celebration? Sure, there's something to the idea that human creativity perseveres despite age and economic collapse. But I don't believe Doctorow is so optimistic. The novel, after all, is not just about the "entrepreneurial spirit"--it's about the imagination trammeled under the profit imperatives of a ravenous corporate capitalism that ruins everything it touches, turning the revolutionary hack into the bland recapitulations of the same.

After all, it's the vagaries of the market that sinks the "New Work," Disney lawsuits that ravage the participatory, recombinant "cabinet of wonders", and, finally, the dictees of the market that turn 3D volumetric printing from a tool for hackers and reuse into the catalyst for a renewed era of Disney dominance. It is even the market that turns the "fatkins" treatment--a biological hack applying genetic therapy and pharmaceuticals to speed the metabolism of fat Americans--into a death sentence of organ failure and osteoporosis. At every turn, what begins as potentially liberating--or at least cheeky--techno-tinkering turns into a source of corporate profit, after which Lester and Perry move on.

This is, finally, what drives Perry out of the whole game altogether. Washing his hands of his partnerships, he becomes a bricoleur-drifter, unwilling to stay put long enough to build more tech for the commodity machine.

Lester is less of a cynic, and ends up at what appears to be a kind of Disney think tank. But there, his experiences are little better, and he ends up with the same kind of sad realizations.

“They said that they wanted me to come in and help them turn the place around, help them reinvent themselves. Be nimble. Shake things up. But it’s like wrestling a tar-baby. You push, you get stuck. You argue for something better and they tell you to write a report, then no one reads the report. You try to get an experimental service running and no one will reconfigure the firewall. Turn the place around?” He snorted. “It’s like turning around a battleship by tapping it on the nose with a toothpick.”

That is, rather than the "entrepreneurial spirit," there another spirit altogether haunting this novel: the spirit of money.

As Christopher Bracken writes (only partly in irony) of this omnipotent spirit,

It is the pure potential for appropriation. Hence it is the most powerful kind of spirit there is [ . . .] Although money is a "mere thing," still in some ways it is more human than I am. I possess only some human potentialities. Money possesses them "all." How did it come to have more "human abilities" than humans do? And how did we trade places with a thing?

More than the straw man villains who harry our protagonists (a vengeful journalist and a Disney executive), it is this money spirit that swallows up everything the inventors produce. It is the "third man" in Doctorow's novel--the genius loci that hastens the entropy of ideas. Kettlewell, the venture capitalist, opines in the opening paragraphs of the novel,

“Capitalism is eating itself. The market works, and when it works, it commodifies or obsoletes everything. That’s not to say that there’s no money out there to be had, but the money won’t come from a single, monolithic product line. The days of companies with names like ’General Electric’ and ’General Mills’ and ’General Motors’ are over. The money on the table is like krill: a billion little entrepreneurial opportunities that can be discovered and exploited by smart, creative people.

But, in the end, capitalism is still eating itself. And Lester and Perry manage to hold out longer than most (416 pages in the printed edition!), but they succumb to death and the bottom-line in the end, just like everyone else.

So, in a way, this is Doctorow's most bleak novel yet (and he has drawn on the dystopian muse before)--not the triumph of ideas, but the triumph of capitalism and commodification over ideas. And while we’re meant to feel empathy for the two inventors, there’s some finger-pointing here as well. Why can’t Lester and Perry see that their nerdy coke-can computer ultimately strengthens the system it was supposed to poke fun at? Why don’t they ever come up with a really new work, one that doesn’t end up on a balance sheet? And what would that mean? Can we even conceive of intellectual creativity outside of the market?

References
Bracken, Christopher (2007). Magical Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

The Networked Rise of Network Society: A Review of This is Not a Game by Walter Jon Williams

2009-08-01T10:53:00.000-07:00

We all know we live in a network society. But what does that mean? And what does knowing that mean for networked society? In his latest novel, This Is Not a Game (Orbit Books, 2009), Williams explores several themes, among them massive alternate reality games (ARG) and global capitalism, all in the context of the well-known "small world" thesis--the idea (pioneered by Stanley Milgram, among many others) that all of us our connected to each other along short chains of acquaintances. There have been other novels exploring the "six degrees of separation" idea, of course, but this is the Web 2.0 release--think David Lodge's Small World with more computing power and less spleen.

In Williams's novel, four friends who gamed together at Caltech--Dagmar, Charlie, Austin and BJ--find their futures revolving around a massive alternate reality game called The Long Night of Briana Hall (or, alternatively, Motel Room Blues). The details of the game itself are somewhat obscure. Pace ARG's in general, players traipse across real and virtual space to discover clues, all under the direction of Dagmar in her role as game designer and "puppetmaster" pulling the strings of this emergent narrative.

But, of course, there are problems--Dagmar's boss (and old friend) Charlie seems to be bent on micromanaging her game for his own ends, Austin is mercilessly gunned down by a Latvian assassin, BJ again becomes part of Dagmar's life. In other words, the logical extension of the "This Is Not a Game" design ethic:

TINAG--this is not a game. The game only worked when both players and puppetmasters acted as if everything was real. (138)

But although ARG's are nothing new in fiction (and their presence here is testament to Williams's own experiences and skills as a gamer and game designer), what is interesting in this novel is the way Williams harnesses the network itself as a deus ex machina and novum for his story--the network made up of "millions" of players, an unbelievably tiny number of whom post rather unbelievably literate postings on the game's discussion board, "Our Reality Network".

Here, Williams develops the other idea underlying much of contemporary interest in networks: the strength of weak ties. In a virally popular paper originally published in the American Journal of Sociology, Mark Granovetter argued that the intimate circle of friends with whom we ordinarily "network" is not really useful for something like gaining employment. Your friends are, after all, most likely in the same lousy boat you are viz. employment. Instead, what you rely on are "weak ties"--acquaintances only weakly connected back to your network. And this makes complete sense; after all, opportunity doesn't knock every day. And 'seizing' opportunity involves, by definition, some kind of risk.

This insight becomes especially important in the age of Facebook, when social networking sites stimulate the multiplication of weak ties. In Williams's book, the Long Night of Briana Hall creates a vast network of weak ties to be mobilized by Dagmar for various, utilitarian purposes--saving her life in the first pages of the novel, solving the mystery in the final pages. This is what Dagmar thinks of as:

the Group Mind, lots of little autonomous agents out in the world, each with a skill set and a knowledge set, each with her own motivations, her own joys, her own alternate reality, all networked together in the great gestalt, the great becoming, that was the world. (365)

That is, the online network created by the ARG allows Dagmar access to "short chains" that connect her with resources around the world--highly proprietary financial information, contact with Indonesian para-military groups, etc. Dagmar's network folds and connects in more-or-less believable ways--players know someone who knows someone, resources are mobilized and the plot moves along.

But there's something disingenuous here as well, as one of the posters to "Our Reality network" reflects:

We're used to following the whims of puppetmasters, but puppetmasters with real-world policies are another matter. Is this a good idea? Should we follow anyone who provides what they say is entertainment, even if it comes with an ideology? (365-66)

That is, the vast networks of weak ties that people cultivate today are their own raison d'etre. Do people accumulate hundreds of 'friends' on Facebook with an agenda? Is there an underlying purpose to working on one's room in Cyworld?

As a plot device, the social networking that Williams describes works well, but still, I think, doesn't capture the semi-altruism of social networking, i.e., that it is an end in itself. Or, rather, Williams just gives us one side: the neo-liberal social networking where all of us our reduced to obsessively chasing down our network contacts on LinkedIn, nonce Willy Lomans employed in selling ourselves. But the other side is a strange altruism, where weak ties are their own reward, and where social networking seems to take on the kinds of importance once granted to kinship (not that kinship isn't shot through with utilitarianism).

To me, it's this circular logic that's the most interesting (and perhaps most profound) dimension to social networking. People accord importance to the cultivation of weak ties; they develop countless software applications helping people to cultivate, maintain and and manage weak ties; these networks of weak ties confirm the importance of weak ties.

Book Review, The City and the City: China Mieville and the Revival of Anthropological Science Fiction

2009-06-15T04:15:00.000-07:00

I have often suggested that China Mieville is the best new writer of anthropological science fiction, although appending the word "anthropological" to his stuff suggests the extent to which anthropology has changed in the time since the concept was coined in the 1960's. (Although, see a March 2009 interview Mieville did with Ursula K. Le Guin (posted on her website in the MP3s section)). Mieville's Bachelor's degree is in social anthropology (at Cambridge), and reading King Rat or Perdido Street Station makes me think of Marilyn Strathern's work, with a thick dose of Donna Haraway: lots of hybridity, fecund sites of emergence of new forms of life that combine biological and machinic into fantastic topologies, all shot through with a sense of postcolonial theory and a strong grounding in Marxism. Chad Oliver (my favorite anthropological science fiction ancestor) would, I think, not really have liked his stuff, and I'm not even sure that Mieville himself would particularly identify his work as anthropological. He certainly doesn't in a 2003 interview in Science Fiction Studies with Joan Gordon. There, he includes among his influences 1) his teenage fascination with RPGs; 2) his interest in postcolonial writers; and 3) his commitment to socialism. If anything, anthropology is presented as a negative dialectic leading him to reject postmodernity (then still fashionable in anthropology), and embrace a broader critique of capitalism.

But readers of The City & The City will find this his most anthropological to date--theoretically rich, critical, and ultimately subversive of contemporary militancy. The story (and I will not include spoilers here) concerns two cities (Beszel and Ul Qoma) that co-exist, one interpellated into the other at various, fractal places. Not surprisingly, a variety of institutional orders exist to police the sites where the two cities "cross-hatch," including educational programs to "unsee" the other city as well as a mysterious, vaguely para-human force (breach) to police unlawful incursions into one place from another.

That this is absolutely believable is testament to the 21st century explosion of "spaces of exception"--all of variously enfeoffed "zones" that proliferate along the edges of capital and empire, marking off places for foreign capital investment, for the suspension of one governing system for another (think Kaesong industrial complex at the border of North and South Korea), for the suspension of citizen rights or even (after Agamben) human rights: refugee camps, the chicanery of international "internship" visas, etc. When we hear, as we have now daily for years, about Bagdhad's "Green Zone," Guantanomo on the edge of Cuba, occupied territories, what we're really doing is witnessing the ability of law and politics to create hybrid spaces within nations--what Mieville calls in the context of his novel "interstitial" spaces.

Take a conventional topographic narrative--say Dickens' Tale of Two Cities--and then fold it on itself like a Mobius strip. That's the theory behind Mieville's novel (although his narrative takes a more familiar, linear form). But, in a real sense, it's also exactly the situation for much of the world's population today, all of whom, and with varying degrees of choice, shift between legal, political, social and cultural orders in a world where borders are mobile, but still very real. So: in the grand tradition of sf dating back to at least More's Utopia, Mieville describes the present through his oeuvre. And really, only through sf is this kind of description of hyper-reality possible (Mieville, I think, would not appreciate the Baudrillard reference).

The underlying message in this is the question of the ends of interpretation, the goal of analysis. Should we frolic in the interstices of global capitalism (a la postmodern jouissance) or should we solve its crime. It's no whim that leads Mieville into this uneasy amalgam of sf, fantasy and detective fiction. The city, as Poe and Benjamin knew, demands a detective--the desire to follow the thread of the crime back to its source. In the figure of Inspector Tyador Borlu lies the moral imperative to expose the workings of power beneath the phantasmagoria of interpenetrating boundaries and identities.

It is a clarion call for us to investigate the interstices of our own cities--to "breach" the ideologies that naturalize the logic of exception, and follow the crimes back to the powerful forces behind them.

My interest in anthropological futures

2009-03-06T07:22:00.000-08:00

My own entry into anticipatory anthropology started with my dissertation work, research that forms the basis for my forthcoming book, Library of Walls: Contradictions of Information Society at the Library of Congress. In the 1990s, the Library of Congress was just beginning its “National Digital Library” program, involving, among other things, the large-scale digitization of multimedia collections and their placement online. This was a technically formidable project, but it also served to telescope the hopes and fears of Library staff and users at the Library for the future. Examining my informant’s narratives about what the coming “digital library” would mean for their work and research revealed a great deal of ambivalence about both the project’s viability and its relationship to information society in general. But these did not simply fall into neatly contained categories of “computopian” and “computropian” (these are David Hakken’s terms), optimistic technophile and sullen Luddite. Instead, people were keenly aware of both the new connections this experiment in information society would enable as well as the ways in which it would lead to new forms of inequality and disenfranchisement. This was a much more complex projection for information society—considered not as the autochthonous development of information technologies but as multifarious shifts in work, social life and culture—an ultimately deeply contradictory prognostication that, over the past ten years since my original field research, has largely come to pass.

I have taken this more nuanced approach to the future of information society in a variety of settings. One of the most fruitful has been my collaborations with computer scientists and robotics engineers—researches undertaken to utilize anthropological ideas to interrogate and critique linear and one-dimensional models of technologically-informed human futures. Our lives are being profoundly shaped (albeit not deterministically) by our interactions with a variety of non-human agents—including the many variously intelligent agents that guide (or goad) us along in the Internet. And yet, most working on the development of these non-human agents have utilized only crude (and even procrustean) models of human behavior grounded in what they believe to be “universal” attributes (cognitive, psychological, social and cultural) of Homo sapiens. One of my goals in collaborating with these engineers has been to act as a catalyst for the generation of alternative (e.g., less ethnocentric and less androcentric) models of the human in order to suggest new human agent/non-human agent hybrids, hybrids that we begin to explore in Handbook of Research on Agent-Based Societies.

In my mind, this is one of anthropology’s greatest resources—the ability to question (if not entirely overcome) hide-bound assumptions in order to open up the space for the imagination of alternatives to an ethnocentric present people assume will continue into an endless future. Accordingly, I began to explore the way anthropology has dealt with the “future,” not just as a theme in anthropological writings, but as a site for the interaction of anthropologists with non-anthropologists in futurology, political science and public policy. The result is my All Tomorrow’s Cultures: Anthropological Engagements with the Future, part historic review of anthropological futures, part plea for redoubling our efforts to impact the ways the future is imagined in government, international relations and other parts of the academy. Whether I’m discussing Margaret Mead’s or Reed Riner’s contributions to anthropological futures or critiquing nineteenth century “survivals” in anthropological writings on the future of race and multicultural society, my goal in the book is to both demonstrate the centrality of the future to anthropology and to salvage some of the our insights in order to stimulate futures premised on difference and diversity.

I have tried to do the same thing in the classroom, and have utilized a variety of methods (including simulations and highly abbreviated forms of Delphi and Ethnographic Futures Research) to elicit narratives about the future from my students, texts that we then have used less to actually predict than to critique the kinds of assumptions people bring to their expectations for the future, assumptions that rest on remarkably homogeneous ideas about the continued geopolitical dominance of the United States and the inevitability of Huntington’s “clash of civilizations”. Moving towards possible alternatives means interrogating these assumptions for what they are—bland recapitulations of the ideological present imprisoning us in ethnocentric (and tempocentric) assumptions that have already proven disastrous for our world.

Here, my experience in the classroom has informed my current research: ethnographic futures research on Korean reunification. I ran similar future elicitations with college students and adult informants in Seoul when I was there on a Fulbright from 2006-2007. Those narratives revolved around the possibilities and pitfalls of reunification and, in particular, the kind of imagined future of a unified Korea, a future with one leg in an imagined past. Examining these narratives suggests the idea of a nation grounded in the “old” Joseon Dynasty (that last dynasty before the Japanese colonized Korea in 1910) while at the same time projecting a new, national space where “distortions” introduced in the colonial era will be resolved and Korea will (re)attain its rightful place among nations in the world. While the policy work and economic studies of institutions such as South Korea’s Ministry of Unification are, of course, vital to the success of a united peninsula, it is, I believe, the quotidian imagination of a unified Korea which will have the greatest impact upon the eventual shape of a north-south agreement, conceived, not just as a treaty or a series of policy initiatives, but as a social fact.

Tomorrow, Networks!

2009-02-09T07:24:00.000-08:00

Laney reaches up and removes the bulky, old-fashioned eyephones. Yamazaki cannot see what outputs to them, but the shifting light from the display reveals Laney’s hollowed eyes. “It’s all going to change, Yamazaki. We’re coming up on the mother or all nodal points. I can see it, now. It’s all going to change. (William Gibson, All Tomorrow’s Parties, 1999, p. 4)

Two of William Gibson’s science fiction novels—Idoru and All Tomorrow’s Parties—feature Colin Laney, a online researcher whose particular talents allow him to identify networks on the cusp of becoming, the “nodal points” where people, ideas and technologies from disparate corners of the globe come together in surprising, paradigm-shattering ways.
Gibson’s networks are the speculative shadows of the more quotidian networks capitalized on by entrepreneurs of computer mediated social networking, each of whom attempts to cash in on the “network” as an object to be constructed, maintained. And yet, as the Gibson quote suggests, “networks” always simultaneously exist in the penumbra of becoming—we can attempt to describe their parameters, but their ultimate configuration is in a process of continuous becoming. From the perspective of activists trying to intervene in the world in order to bring together
“Networks” are the perfect example of the “boundary object” for the information age. They are “real” in that we can characterize them qualitatively and quantitatively, but they are also shifting, protean, temporary and chiasmic. “Networks” are the preferred form of social life and social interaction in an ICT-mediated world, yet they represent utopian alternatives to the present arising “from below” and self-organizing through horizontal chains rather than more vertical forms of governmentality. In a world still dominated by verticality, networked socialites represent possibilities for other kinds of realities—at once more participatory and more democratic.

Previewing Post-Capitalism

2009-01-27T12:46:00.000-08:00

How many books are there (in anthropology and elsewhere) describing/advocating/conjuring up "post-socialism"? I'm looking at one right now entitled, appropriately enough, "Post-Socialism" by Maruska Svasek (Berghahn Books, 2006). But, as lay-offs continue and plans to nationalize industries multiply, where are the texts on "post-capitalism"? I don't know about you, but it's sent me scurrying to my bookshelf to re-read my Kim Stanley Robinson! For most, "post-capitalism" refers to a miscellaneous theories for either "next" stages (a la Drucker), or alternatives to corporate capitalism (like various tracts on "participatory" economies). But perhaps the more anthropological take on this would be an economy of "shreds and patches" (to commit unspeakable violence to Robert Lowie) made up of the residue of dominant capitalism together with a thousand heterogeneous practices that make up the barely sublimated unconscious of economic life--in short, just the sort of bricolage that anthroplogists explicate every day in the lives of actual people who find themselves on the receiving end of IMF structural adjustments and other forms of economic violence.

This is the kind of post-capitalism I'd like to see elaborated, and, despite Robinson's own penchant for utopian system-building, not far off from what he does in the Mars triology, which--in a kind of Baconian way--takes the kinds of reciprocities and exchanges common to scientific communities as a starting point for a Martian economy.

The Polygenism of Science Fiction

2008-12-21T03:57:00.000-08:00

I just finished reading Ben Bova's Mars Life, largely because of its enigmatic dedication to the former polygenist, Carleton S. Coon. Coon was the last of a long, if disgraced, line of anthropologists at Harvard who promoted the "American school"--the idea that races evolved separately. Needless to say, these theories, long superseded by data in population genetics, were utilized to justify any number of racist policies, including (but not just limited to) slavery in the US and apartheid in South Africa.

The anthropologist in Bova's novel, Carter Carleton, seems to embody what I imagine Coon to have been like--curmudgeony and atavistic (he, of course, may not have been). Pace the general characterization of anthropologists in fiction, he's a sexual brute; falsely accused of rape on Earth, he is nevertheless aggressive in his attempts to bed women he meets on Mars--the male version of the sexualized female anthropologist stereotype based on Margaret Mead. Thoroughly unpleasant in all respects, Carleton fails to even discover physical remains of Martians; rather, he takes the credit from a young colleague who stumbles on to the site.

Of course, given this ambivalent characterization of the anthropologist, this still begs the question--why Carleton S. Coon? Well, Coon was in some ways the darling of science fiction anthropology in the 1950's and 1960's, contributing to the 1968 edited volume of anthropological science fiction, "Apeman, Spaceman." The reasons are obvious--the "hard" science fiction of the time espoused a kind of galactic polygenism, still preserved (like a fly in amber) in Star Trek episodes, where different "races" populate the universe, each originating on a separate planet, with plots hinging upon the mechanics of "racial" conflict between these different groups. If it looks vaguely Victorian, that's because it is--the supposed conflict of nations/races that legitimated empire building in the 19th century, most recently given new life by Samuel Huntington.

On the one hand, this "racial" understanding of the alien other is just so much space opera, providing a patina of Gernsback-ian "wonder" to tales of space travel. But, on the other, it projects a conservative, even procrustean, understanding of races as separately developing, conflicting "types" to our future encounters and ultimately works to legitimate racist reactions to other peoples and other cultures today. Without polygenism as a body of theory in anthropology, what would epic science fiction have been like? Can we imagine a science fiction without it? What would that be like? Can we, for example, imagine an alien that was never separate from the non-alien . . .The galactic equivalent of mitochondria?

Bova, of course, is not advocating polygenism, nor, I suppose, is he really suggesting that we pick up the Carleton S. Coon again. His somewhat ambiguous rationale is described in the "Biology in Science Fiction" blog. I see it as an interesting form of reflexivity. The antiquated Carter Carleton, by excavating the Martians, is simultaneously excavating the polygenism of the genre, the history of science fiction that has never been separate from the constellations of power/knowledge that supported it.

On the Trail of Emergence

2008-11-06T03:37:00.000-08:00

As the Python sketch said long, long ago: "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!" By definition, future forms and practices will be unexpected, i.e., inexplicable from our perspective now. One reason--technologies, behaviors, ideas, social relationships will combine in unforeseen ways and result in some novel assemblage. This semester, we're on the trails of these sites of emergence in my "information age cultures" class as we plumb the depths of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in East Asia. By looking at the flow of new technologies and concomitant social practices in Korea, Japan and China, we can, perhaps, tease out (yet not predict) the emergence of new forms in the U.S. It's not that U.S. practice will ineluctably follow on the tails of East Asia (although this has often been the case), it's that those different social and cultural perspectives suggest the possibility of future differences here . . .

Anyway: check out our messy, messy ning site, "Information assemblages."

The End of the Free Market, and the Future of Culture

2008-10-25T03:08:00.000-07:00

In the New York Times on Friday (10/24), a really astounding admonition by Alan Greenspan, looking a bit like a drunk on the morning after: "Greenspan admitted that he had put too much faith in the self-correcting power of free markets" (A1). Although we're supposed to take this as his belated indictment of mortgage-backed securities, I see it as a much more sweeping confession: that, far from describing some objective, underlying reality to which the rest of us non-economists should concede, the "free market" is not some fact of nature circumscribed by Netwonian law, but an amalgam of greedy institutions acting in concert with government to expropriate wealth from the rest of us. Greenspan's contrition should lead us to a cascade of revelations--perhaps austerity measures and free market propaganda foisted onto developing nations weren't such great ideas? Perhaps the derivatives-led interpenetration of global finance isn't the inevitable fate of an evolving 'global economy' after all?

Most of all, Greenspan's belated apology gestures to the need for alternatives, and underlines the paucity of social theorizing over the past 30 years. As Fredric Jameson points out, a whole generation of critics systematically legitimated free market ideologies, if only by omission. Where is the cultural other to the "culture of capitalism"? How much of our anthropological work has been framed by assumptions about the inevitability of globalization? About vectors of development? Even critical work presupposes the (dismal) course of a free market development. What have we ignored in the meantime? And is it too late for anthropology to awaken from its theoretical sleep? When we look around at other anthropological responses(e.g., savage minds), we can see this struggle--not just to critique, but to move in some alternative direction.

Future Baltimore!

2008-08-21T08:30:00.000-07:00

It's pretty hard to imagine a more Gothic city than Baltimore (in the literary sense). You've got the Faulkner-esque kind of gothic with over-grown gardens, crumbling shacks, shambling, sclerotic citizens. And also the northern gothic--shuttered factories, menacing turrets on decrepit mansions, etc. It is no particular wonder why Baltimore is often the preferred mise-en-scene for mystery novels.

But it's harder to envision a futuristic Baltimore. The usual urban boosters (e.g., Live Baltimore, The Urbanite) do their best, but I don't know of any sf novel set in the city--even cyberpunk dystopias of the near future seem to have passed us by. Still, I would like to try to evoke stochastic, interesting futures for my city.

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, Margaret Mead often theorized about the ingredients of the creative city—the institutions that she thought might stimulate what she called “emergent clusters”. But the point to her analysis—and to what I think today—is that neither what elements might be important nor the resulting “clusters” can be known in advance. What we can do is to multiply opportunities for creative crossings of all kinds—not just forms that we’ve determined in advance (festivals, galleries, literary salons)—but the ones that will emerge just beyond the borders of our predictions. The point is to open connections between peoples and parts of life in our city that have been historically separated—by race, religion, language, location, orthodoxy and heterodoxy. In Baltimore, this would first involve identifying the configurations with the most potent potentialities for emergence, and then assist in the creation of the space for those connections to grow, a catalog of potentials, rather like Doni’s 15th century catalog of books that had not yet been written. When we imagine the best that Baltimore can be, aren’t we excluding what we can’t yet imagine? This is the difference, I think, between urban areas that emerge as poster children for the creative class and ones that continuously run to catch up.

robots and agents

2008-07-29T06:31:00.000-07:00

The robot-gone-awry has been a theme in literature and popular culture from at least Goethe. The 20th century variant generally revolves around advances in robotic technologies that lead to robots displacing humans altogether--basically the Braverman thesis (after Harry Braverman) followed to its natural asymptote. But can the same thing be said of other kinds of non-human agents? I mean--not the anthropomorphic robots produced by various research groups to simulate human feelings, speech, perceptions or cognition, but those agents that swarm in and out of our lives as vaguely intelligent, vaguely autonomous search engines, routers, global positionings, spyware, etc. What about these? The difference between these and more anthropomorphic agents is in a way similar to what Andy Clark (in Natural Born Cyborgs) terms "transparent" versus "opaque" technologies:

A transparent technology is a technology that is so well fitted to, and integrated with, our own lives, biological capacities, and projects as to become (as Mark Weiser and Donald Norman have both stressed) almost invisible in use. An opaque technology, by contrast, is one that keeps tripping the user up, requires skills and capacities that do not come naturally to the biological organisim, and thus remains the focus of attenion even during routine problem-solving activity. (37)

I think I would re-work Clark to include in the list of "opaque" technology agents that emulate human behavior, and thus make human-like demands upon our attenion and concentration, a politics of recognition for robots, as it were, that doesn't exist with more transparent technologies that simply reflect back upon the self to the ultimate amplification of ego.

M. John Harrison

2008-07-09T11:44:00.000-07:00

I just finished M. John Harrison's Light (2002)--that novel, as well as those of Gaiman, Egan, and other contemporary, SF authors, seems to revolve around the question of postmodernity in the quantum universe. That is to say, it combines contemporary cosmology with the vertiginous technologies that are ultimately construed as transformative of the human. And yet, like so much in sf, this isn't so much of a prediction as an ironic gloss on information technologies that, far from emancipating us from both corporeality and parochial indentity, seem to immobilize us both physically (with whole generations of Americans captive to the television) as well as mentally (the strong resurgence of knee-jerk ethnocentrism and know-nothing jingoism). If only our products could allow us to escape from our Newtonian world into a quantum universe! But--shopping's not going to lead us to the revolution, right?

Manufacturing the Alien

2008-06-23T08:04:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking on and off about aliens these days. One of the reasons must be because I'm on the CONTACT! listserve, which is fairly choc-a-block with speculations on Earth-like planets in other solar systems. The other has to with my research on other "aliens," those non-human agents that are more and more part of our everyday life.

Of course, it's odd to think about these "agents" (software or hardware) as "aliens" at all, but this is exactly what Morton Klass did in a 1983 essay of his I just re-read, "The Artificial Agent: Transformations of the Robot in Science Fiction" (Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 470 (171-179)). Klass spent much of his career as Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College (Columbia University). But his early career was one saturated in science fiction. As the brother of William Tenn (aka Phillip Klass), Morton Klass contributed several sf stories in the 1950s and early 1960s--several which subsequently were re-printed in anthropological science fiction collections like Leon Stover's Apeman, Spaceman.

In this essay, he tries to conjoin those two, otherwise distinct careers in a bit of speculative , cultural analysis on why we feel more comfortable with the alien we've manufactured (the alien we know?) than with the one we don't:

The robot in science fiction was portrayed at first as an alien and as a threat, but the danger was perceived as primarily an economic one--apart, that is, from the theological danger. The robot may drive us from our jobs and otherwise destroy our economic well being, it was felt; it may even threaten to destroy the world as we know it; it may endanger our collective soul. But we have never believed it would dishonour or corrupt us, something we have always assumed that our aliens wanted most of all to do. Perhaps not surprisingly then we seem to be able to live with whatever threat, economic or theological, the robots represent; we do not exhibit horror or revulsion, or even very much trepidation.

What strikes me about this passage is the fate of the robot today. Is it considered alien at all? Perhaps this is one of the reasons I found the movie version of I, Robot so unsatisfying: the robot today is hardly a figure of fear (at least to those people not being bombed by drones). I would even go further and say that the robot isn't really figured as a robot at all, if by that we mean some anthropomorphic, Capek-inspired robot. Instead, we have a wide variety of hardware and software agents that have seamlessly(?) extended our cognition, perception and sociality without actually demanding that we consciously recognize their alien autonomy from us. Of course, robotics labs manufacture extremely life-like robots, but these are not the ones that we encounter in our everyday practice. Our robots have faded into the (human) woodwork--as tools we use. Or, perhaps it's the case that we have become more alien, multiply supplemented by the artificial and hence no longer distinct from some intelligent 'Other".

"Circle" and the Spirit of Capitalism

2008-05-08T12:18:00.000-07:00

There's a really interesting (or at least suggestive) story in May's issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction: "Circle," by George Tucker. Oh, it's got plenty of standard SF devices: Billy Black is a Seminole shaman who never seems to get hurt at the cursed construction site he's working on in Miami (a la the "Miami circle"). Eventually, he's hired on to "exorcise" the spirits from the site and, after a couple of complications, everyone profits: the condo complex goes up, complete with the cultural "value-added" of a seminole shaman and Billy can finally buy the plot to his grandfather's grave in order to stop developers from dis-interring his body . . .Kind of a Heinlein-esque-free-market-conquers-all story.

But, there's other things afoot here as well . . .The resolution of the story rests on Billy's realization that the "spirit of place" must be given recognition in order to be palliated. But what kind of recognition? Commodified recognition, occupying advertising and gallery space in the commodified topologiies of the new condo complex. This is certainly a prominent theme in contemporary anthropology: tracing the encroachment of commodities into ritual spaces, such as Laurel Kendall's 2008 article in american ethnologist examining the influx of global commodities in a Korean shaman's "kut".

But the question I had reading the story was: which spirit is being mollified? The spirit of space (genius loci) or the spirit of capitalism? In other words, the spirits that demand recognition are ultimately subsumed within another spirit: the spirit of perpetual, autochthonous growth, the ability of monster-developers like George Perez to develop Miami into a perpetual growth machine. Not the spirit of place, but the spirit of money.

But this is not just a case of commodification, wherein all forms of pre-capitalist culture become commodities to be bought and sold. Instead, the story gestures to more ghostly dialectics . . .one spirit in concert with another spirit. In the process, Tucker alludes to the what we can construe (not ironically) as the mystical trappings of the real estate boom, the sense that these commodities, animated by the spirits of capitalism, can generate endless, logarithmic growth. In another words, Tucker takes us to into the animism of the West.

CONTACT lives!

2008-05-02T11:52:00.000-07:00

The word last year was that this wonderful, annual convocation of anthropologists, astronomers, artists, science fiction writers, visionaries and the occasionally wacky was on indefinite hiatus. But--they've met again at NASA-Ames, and the world is, I think, much better for it.

http://www.contact-conference.com/

Savage science fiction

2008-04-24T05:59:00.000-07:00

It doesn't bear trying the number of science fiction stories juxtaposing hyper-trophied, Gernsback-ian technologies with highly stereotypical visions of gathering-hunting or pastoralist societies. And there's little evidence that this is a new trend--Wells's Time Machine, after all, devolved around the two, favorite Western tropes of the "primitive": the noble savage, basking about in a Dionysian prodigality (Eloi) and the rude savage (Morlocks), where, in the words of Hobbes, life is "nasty, brutish and short." One could say (and several have) that the "future" is only imaginable through this juxtaposition with the imagined savage. This, indeed, is what Christopher Bracken (in Magical Criticism) has suggested recently of Western discourse in general. And in a world where Western hegemony is tottering, there's been a renewed surfeit of these science fiction stories--shoring up the cracked foundations of modernity, as it were, with tales of genetically modified interplantary pastoralists quoting the Qur'an. But there are some bright spots as well.

For example, I very much liked (or, perhaps, liked to think about?) David Moles' short story, "Planet of the Amazon Women," starts off typically enough, with lots of allusion to Suzy Charnas (and to feminist utopia in general), with women on horseback, spontaneous conception, etc. Years after a temporally-induced "disease" has killed off all males on the planet Hippolyta, a male, scientist-mathematician makes his way to the planet and to the center of the temporal distortion that, we learn, didn't so much spawn a disease as replace one evolutionary timeline (sexual dimorphism) with another where it never developed. Our hero's goal: "to establish a metastable equilibrium that allows convex regions with real and virtual; histories to co-exist in four-dimensional space-time"--in other words, to "stabilize" these what-if kinds of gedanken into real-time possibility.

Of course, he succumbs to the disease in the end as well, but this ends up being the best thing about the story. As Moles' narrator concludes:

I was wrong to define my own history as real, Hippolyta's as unreal--to define mind as Self and Hippolyta's as Other. That is what the inference engines were trying to tell me.
There is no past that is not in some sense a lie. We see the past through the distortion of memory and imagination. We collaborate in its conscious distortion through history and propaganda. We see the laws of cause and effect violated not only each time a starship bends space-time but also each time we view the incomplete records of the past with our teleological modern eyes, imbuing them with presentiments of the future that is our own present. [ . . .]
The women of Hippolyta have a story they tell about themselves, and it does not include men.

There's a lesson here for both science fiction and representations of the West's many Others in general. When we tender these kinds of "savage" portraits of others, we introduce temporal distortions in the West . . .a kind of fragmentation of chronotypes as a by-product of attempting to (temporally) conquer the cultural Other.

2008-04-18T08:45:00.000-07:00

All Tomorrow's Cultures: Anthropological Engagements with the Future by Samuel Gerald Collins
List Price:
$29.95
Product DescriptionHow will we live in the future? Are we moving towards global homogeneity? Will the world succumb to the global spread of fast food and Hollywood movies? Or are there other possibilities? In this book, Samuel Collins argues not only for the importance of the future of culture, but also stresses its centrality in anthropological thought over the last century. Beginning with the often times racist assumptions of 19th-century anthropology and continuing today in the work of anthropologies of emergent science, anthropologists have not only used their knowledge of present cultural configurations to speculate on future culture but have also used their assumptions about the future of culture to understand the present. About the AuthorSamuel Collins is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of Cultural Studies at Towson University. He researches globalization and information society in the United States and South Korea and has recently begun ethnographic research on multiagent systems composed of humans and robots.

Product Details
Hardcover: 144 pages
Publisher: Berghahn Books (February 1, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1845454081
ISBN-13: 978-1845454081
Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.6 inches