Avengers in Seoul

Children's day (어린이날) is upon us, so the family was off to the neighborhood CGV at 군자역 to see "Avengers: The Age of Ultron."  I'm not a fan, but I consoled myself with the thought that the movie would somehow work into my research on Seoul and science fiction.  And, indeed, it's certainly gratifying to see Avengers battling it out in front of "Kimbap Heaven."  However: without the still, I would have missed it.  For all of the money spent (and for all of the incentives the city of Seoul dished out), there's barely five minutes of Seoul in this film, and that--beside a couple of signs in Korean and an 옥상 텃밭--is of a generic "any city," bits and pieces of Seoul strung together into a non-place.

And I was not the only one disappointed.  As Gang Yu-jeong argued in 경향신문:

A masterpiece of atmospheric kitsch, the back alleys where the action takes place in the Avengers don't really look that different from the back alleys of Hong Kong or Beijing.  When the Avengers talk to Su-hyun (who plays Helen Cho in the film) about the situation, it's not different.  Nothing really sticks out.
The way Avengers 2 portrays Seoul isn't that far off from the way we see it.  Like when you run into your family on the street, the Avengers makes a familiar Korea seem strange.  [ . . .] But this is not the Seoul that we had hoped to see.  The Seoul represented in the film is not a place where I'd want to go.  In Avengers, that hoped-for place is nowhere to be found.   (강유정의 영화로 세상읽기]2015년 어벤져스 서울, translation mine)

Well, given the shallow treatment Seoul gets in the film, one would have to expect disappointment.  On the other hand, the Avengers (in its comic form), is not exactly a superhero version of Baudelaire's flaneur.  Sure--there's lots of urban background, but that's all it is: background.

That is to say, it's just a scene to stage the action.  On another level, if we look at the film as the expression of a conquering and colonizing film apparatus, then Seoul can be incorporated into the action as well as any other place.  Here's where the film even engages in some self-referential dialogue with parallels to both U.S. foreign policy and U.S.-supported "free trade" policies.  As Tony Stark intones, "In a world this vulnerable, we need something more powerful than any of us."  There's equal measures of arrogance and lack of imagination in this line of thinking, and we don't need to move too far afield to see the corporation itself as this unifying power.  And what is cultural difference to a global corporation?  Ultimately, the cities of the world are only a proscenium to stage corporate power, and for that, Seoul will do just fine.  

Attack of the Social Media Zombies

My colleague, Matthew Durington, and I have just finished our final iteration of a 4-year collaborative project, Anthropology By the Wire.   From the outset, we sought to produce

YouTube Video from this year’s Anthropology By the Wire, “Clean and Green Superheroes”. Photo courtesy Samuel Collins

counter-narratives to David Simon’s “The Wire,” alternative representations that contest urban imaginaries of Baltimore premised on crime and drugs.  Through collaborative productions shared through social media, we have tried to challenge the directionality of these representational regimes by making local media disseminated on YouTube, Tumblr and Flickr.

But what we have realized is that the urban imaginary (as LiPuma and Koelbedescribe it), is constituted not only by representations of urban circulation, but the imagination of the circulation of those representations of circulation (and it may be circulations all the way down).  In other words, it is not only the representations of the city that allow people to understand themselves and others, but the way people imagine that those representations circulate.

As mass media, “The Wire” (and other television and film evocations of the city) is imagined to circulate through an audience: a mass that desires and consumes media, that can be characterized by demographic analyses, and that, finally, can be packaged and sold to advertisers.  It’s the imagined gaze of that homogeneous “mass” that has been so devastatingly effective in slotting Baltimore as “Other”: as a racial and class alterity that becomes the subject for critique and intervention.

Stereotypical Spectacles of Baltimore: Abandoned Industry. Photo courtesy Kamau Collins via Flickr

In many ways, this idea of mass audience has been profoundly challenged by the widespread adoption of social media; to some media scholars, we are all “prosumers” now.  But the social media platforms that communicate our work draw upon other circulation imaginaries.

The Spectacle City

The first is an extension of the flanerie that marked the city as a site of male privilege a la Charles Baudelaire.  In the postmodern logic of late capitalism, this means the city as an extension of individual identity.  In his prescient Soft City (1974), the writer Jonathan Raban put it best: “Decide who you are, and the city will again assume a fixed form around you.”  In other words, the city exists as a foil for the elaboration and construction of one’s identity.  Raban’s Soft City is echoed in countless films (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) and endless postmodern spectacle, where the city becomes a site for personal consumption and successive elaborations of commodified identity.

Social media has been erected on this capitalist scaffolding.  First, social media is ultimately personal social media—the city as an object for individual consumption on instagram and pinterest.  With social media, life may be constituted as “an immense accumulation of spectacles” (a la Guy Debord), but those representations are inward-focused, with the spectacle of the city laid out as a buffet of representations to take and share with a circle of intimates: pictures of lunch and dinner, of urban desolation, street festivals, alternative fashion.  Superficially ethnographic, each of these images and videos are mobilized as a projection of self to a cluster of acquaintances.

The Contagious City

Crab Cakes. Photo courtesy jpellgen via Flickr

Alongside the privileged flanerie of the 19th century city came panics over pollution and contagion, with the 1864 Contagious Disease Act targeting the poor and dissolute as sources of “pollution” to the flanerie of upper-class men.  Today, theories of “contagion” are deployed epidemiologically, but they are also utilized to represent the spread of information in networks, the spread of crime in cities (the “broken window” theory) and in the virality of social media.

In each case, the question of contagion becomes a network problem.  In any cascade of information, disease, new technologies, new ideas, what percent of a given social network configuration needs to be “infected” before it can spread to the remainder?  When media go viral, they have passed this cascading “tipping point,” and a number of network scholars are currently examining the morphology of networks for clues to the virality of content.

Zombies during the Baltimore Marathon. Photo courtesy Nick Hall via Flickr

Although contagion seems like the opposite of the individuated consumption of the city, it is really its logical counterpart, with each individual first atomized into her own media telecocoon before influencing her neighbors.  It’s not by mistake that zombies have become such a ubiquitous figure in social apps and movies about the city.  If I imagine myself as active in my individualized consumption of the spectacle of the city, than everyone else can only be a zombie, a node through which my influence propagates.  In other words, as a form of circulation, we imagine social media to be composed of individuals and zombies: people who tweet, and people who propagate that tweet.

For our social media circulation of Baltimore, we therefore imagine not only media producers (those who represent Baltimore and share their representations on social media), “consumers” (those who watch the media we’ve produced), but also this interstitial category of social media zombies that pass along the links to our YouTube media and blog posts—who do the work of network propagation.  In this respect, much of our social media tagging can be considered varied forms of zombie food: keywords that encourage re-posting and that stimulate networked cascades.  Tagging your photo “urban ghetto” precipitates one form of contagion, while tagging the same shot “gentrification and abandonment” generates quite another.  Yet these lines of contagion are only possible in the imagined circulation of individual consumption and, in the end, we need to be mindful of our zombies lest they overtake us altogether.

The Ends of the Urban Imaginary

The last scene of Akira shows Tetsuo exploding out of his body with tendrils of flesh and machine.  Often interpreted as an apocalyptic, nuclear vision of Tokyo, it is simultaneously one where the differences between people and between places are eviscerated: Tetsuo’s monstrous appendages engulf his friends and enemies, traduce geographies, brachiate uncontrollably through Tokyo.

For me, Akira is a metaphor for the limits of our imaginaries of circulation.  It’s the ends of these two imaginaries—the individual spectacle and the contagious zombie—pushed to their limits until social media itself has become something monstrous where the city, the individual and the community disappear into circulatory flows.  In these scenarios, new configurations of the circulatory imaginary implode into non-representation.  Do we have an alternative?  Ultimately, our efforts to replace one circulatory imaginary with another—as Bruno Latour and Marilyn Strathern have shown—will ultimately produce more monstrous imaginaries.  Who will save us from our zombies then?

(Second photograph courtesy Kamau Collins; Third photo courtesy jpellgen; Fourth photo courtesy Nick Hall)

[Originally Published in Anthropology News]

Friending the Man of the Crowd

Illustration for Edgar Allan Poe's story "The Man of the Crowd" by Harry Clarke (1889-1931), first printed in 1923 (from Wikimedia Commons)

Edgar Allan Poe’s story fragment, “The Man of the Crowd” (published in 1840 when Poe was living between Baltimore, Richmond and Philadelphia), begins with the narrator peering out onto a London street from a café, making observations about passersby: typologies of urban dwellers (“the tribe of clerks,” the “race of swell pick-pockets”), divisions of the population into age, gender, race and ethnicity.  Finally, though, his gaze alights on an enigmatic character that eludes easy classification: “decrepit” and “feeble,” yet “he rushed with an activity I could not have dreamed of seeing in one so aged”; “without apparent aim,” yet characterized by “blood thirstiness” and armed with a “dagger”.  Seduced by these paradoxical attributes, Poe’s narrator follows the man until sunrise, without, though, gaining any insight into the man’s history, nor of his ultimate aims. 

            Within this brief fragment, we can see multiple approaches to the urban collide: the first, the assignation of types.  The second, an ethnographic approach premised on direct observation of a single individual walking the streets.  One attempts to make sense of the whole—to say something, in this case, about London’s (or Baltimore’s or Philadelphia’s) urban population and the growth of a heterosocial, public space in the mid-19^th century (Walkowitz 1992).  The second, the specificity of the individual in a particular place: what one could call the “daily round” of the individual.  But both approaches prove inadequate to understanding the enigmatic man of the crowd. 

            But what if Poe’s narrator had tried a network approach?  What if one could show that the man of the crowd’s apparently aimless wanderings were, instead, the outlines of a networked city connecting multitudes of nodes consisting of places and people?  What if one could analyze those connections?  As many have shown, the city is, literally, the sum of its networks, assemblages of place and connection that are simultaneously larger and smaller than the geo-political boundaries of the urban (Pflieger and Rozenblat 2010).  Within this concatenation, people and place can be connected in myriad ways: the “strong” and “weak” ties that form the basis of much of social network analysis, but also in the form of a variety of “latencies” that, as Haythornthwaite (2002: 389) suggests, multiply in the age information and communication technologies and add new potentials to the elaboration of the urban networks around us.  In a networked world, Poe’s narrator might be able to exploit these connections in order to connect to his man in the crowd and make sense of his world. 

            And, indeed, this is what happens all of the time in urban life.  Armed with various ICT’s (information and communication technologies), people trace complicated networks that include physical structures, transportation, socialites, technologies, economies and symbolic communications.  But by tweeting (or using me2day or yozm), posting to blogs, utilizing geolocational apps and uploading photos and videos, people multiply possibilities for place- and sense-making, mobilizing virtual connections that might open up new possibilities for physical or spatial connections, that might make the strange into the famiilar.   

           This is an important difference from Poe's time.  Poe's "man of the crowd" and Baudelaire's "flaneur" depend upon a uniquely urban condition: spending one's life surrounded by complete strangers.  On the other hand, in our ICT-inflected lives, nobody can be a "complete" stranger.  Rather, in the fuzzy logic of social media, people on the street present different quanta of latency--different potentialities of connection that we may or may not be able to exploit.  When we attend a rally and marvel at the disparate groups that (momentarily) cohere in a place, we're witnessing the activation of some of those latent ties, and, most probably, their rapid dissolution.