Networked Futures in Busan

From Wikimedia Commons, courtesy Michiel1972

In a sociological tradition stretching back to Durkheim, the city represents the apogee of alienated life, with residents adopting a variety of strategies to cope with their anonymity and to preserve their privacy amidst multitudes of other residents. Especially important are techniques for managing contact in public transportation—trains, buses and subways—where interactions are simultaneously intimate and anonymous. Those strategies include ways of looking, but also a variety of technologies that urban-dwellers adopt to avoid contact with others: newspapers, books, and, in more recent decades, a variety of technological devices, including MP3 players and smartphones.

But while analysis of these techniques and technologies has revolved around avoiding contact, it may be more useful to think of them as techniques for relating to the anonymous city—for initiating contact through differentiated interactions. All of these technologies, including subways, books, buses and smartphones, can be said to enable a certain construction of place: a networked knowledge of the city that connects to people and space in particular ways. As we become more urban, these technologies are quite likely to increase.  The future, then, may bring new excesses of anomie, but it will also result in new ways of networking to place and people.

This is certainly the case with Korea’s largest city (Seoul) and its second-largest (Busan), both with highly-developed subway systems and ubiquitous computing infrastructures that ensure that residents will never spend an instant unplugged from various social networks, even as they navigate complex, transportation networks above and below ground. Living in the city means initiating and managing relationships in time and space while in constant motion. Some analysis has suggested a “bang” (room) culture that constructs a variety of “third spaces” between home, work and school, but the ubiquity of online social networks means that these liminal spaces can also be mobile--appended to the cityscape during the course of everyday perambulation. 

 

This is particularly evident in the profusion of social networking software and social apps available for smartphones, including ones available for setting up bling dates  (소개팅)and managing appointments, locative mobile social networking (LMSN) utilizing GPS in order to pinpoint friends and potential contacts amidst an urban scape, as well as locational games that overlay the Korean city with digital game networks. These can mean novel ways of associating, and even new forms of politics. For example, the candlelight vigils following the liberalization of beef imports in 2008 have been seen as a watershed in Korean politics because they involved a preponderance of school-aged girls, and because they were organized through online social networking.

Ultimately, this may say something about the development of urban living as not only a contemporary phenomenon, but as a bellwether for urban futures around the world. However, the profusion of applications and the near-universality of the hand-set in Korean life don’t necessarily signal a “break” with the past and the emergence of a new way of urban living. Rather, the focus on the network discloses the networked character of the city, as shifting assemblages of connected urban systems rather than as a static tableau of spaces. Life networked to the city through the smartphone doesn’t so much initiate new forms of living as re-invent the urban as the elaboration of networked technologies—as the creation of new lines of flight focused on transportation and communication technologies. 

 

This has important consequences for the study of the future. First, the profusion of smartphone applications and social networking suggests an immanent social critique—the projection of a utopian ideal over the grit of the real city. That is, the popularity of these forms of networked socialites suggests the production of multiple “invisible cities” over the existing one, the analysis of which may suggest the direction of urban futures. Second, although the Korean city construed as an assemblage of transportation and communication suggests ways of living and interacting that may be particularly Korean, it also signals urban futures for other parts of the world where these systems are not yet as developed, including urban spaces in the United States where IT infrastructures have not yet reached the level of integration of Korean cities.

Baltimore Syndrome

wikimedia commons: Iracaz (talk). Original uploader was Iracaz at en.wikipedia

In the March 2012 Wired, an article on the Jerusalem syndrome, the religion-related psychosis associated with visits to Jerusalem ("The God Complex").  The article doesn't really develop any new angles on this culture-bound syndrome, but its appearance in Wired is important.  My thought: while we may never travel to Jerusalem, our future will be the Jerusalem Syndrome.  Now that we have crossed the tipping point of urbanization (over 50% of the world's population as of 2007), all of us have an opportunity to be overwhelmed and enraptured by our urban lives: the Baltimore syndrome.

Generally speaking, discussions of the Jerusalem syndrome devolve into a discussion of religion, psychology and (more recently) neuroscience.  That's certainly the case with the Wired essay (it's the limbic system!), but there are several interesting asides here, especially those moments that move beyond psychologism to the power of the city:

The Old City is a mosaic of sacred spaces, from the al-Aqsa Mosque to the Western Wall of the Temple Mount to the well-trodden stones on which Jesus supposedly walked.  Like every city, it's the combination of architecture and storytelling that makes Jerusalem more than just a crossroads.  Great cities, the places that feel significant and important when you walk their streets, always rely on stagecraft--a deftly curving road, finally wrought facades, or a high concentration of light-up signage can all impart a sense of place, of significance.  (Nashawaty 2012: 117)

That is, psychology aside, there's a lot coming together in a city like Jerusalem: discourse, place, architecture, history.  Something, in other words, more akin to genius loci, the spirit of place, then to the overactivity of the limbic system.

But does this "complex" only exist in Jerusalem? Many point to the "Paris syndrome,"  where it's the art and architecture of the city that overwhelms.  And, indeed, the psychological anthropologist Yoram Bilu seems to locate the power of the city in the depths of its history: "The city is seductive, and people who are highly susceptible can succumb to this seduction.  I'm always envious of people who live in San Diego, where history barely exists" (117).  But this seems unfair.  People in San Diego (or Baltimore, or Busan) live suffocated under the overdetermined weight of the city--its spaces, its discourses, its histories.  Of course, if this triggers some "syndrome," then it is a syndrome of humanity, with a majority of us living in urban areas.

What this "Baltimore syndrome" needs is not a neuroscience of religious psychosis, but something more along the lines of Benjamin's ruins, a way of apprehending the city that bring together the assemblage of discourse, time, self and space--a cultural analysis of the spirit of place.  We will all be "overwhelmed" by the spirit of place; that is, the city will continue to bring us up against assemblages that overwhelm the self.  We will variously sink under the waters of the city's deep significations. Of course, very few of us will exhibit symptoms deviant enough to warrant professional help, bit all of us will need to understand the genius loci around us.

References

Nashawaty, Chris (2012).  "The God Complex."  Wired (March):112-117.

Future Day and Songdo (송도국제업무단지 )

Songdo Under Construction, Courtesy Wikipedia Commons.

March 1 is the inaugural celebration of Future Day, and it's got me thinking about urban futures again.  On my futurist bookshself at the moment: Aerotropolis, by John Kasarda and Greg Lindsay.  It's a business book, really: breathless descriptions of fabulous capitalists and the globetrotting edge cities they build.  I'm reading it because South Korea's Songdo is a poster child for this vision of the future.  At 7 miles from Incheon International Airport, this massive development on land reclaimed from tidal flats is supposed to represent the city of the future--a networked hub with near-immediate access to most of Asia, hard-wired for ubiquitous computing, and constructed for minimal levels of car pollution (although building a new city from scratch surely caused some pollution!).  Songdo will join other poster-cities for globalization, including Dubai and Shanghai.

As Kasarda and Lindsay point out, Songdo, and the many aerotropolis-like encampments in China and Southeast Asia, takes globalization as a mode of production as its organizing principle--both in its design and in its function.  It's all about circulating capital; and it's built to circulate capital and the humans that serve it in the most efficient way possible, from high-rise apartment to subway to airport and back.  They wonder "whether we will consciously choose to live in cities built in globalization's image--machines for living linked in great chains and tasked with specific functions: factories, farms, headquarters, hospitals, and hubs" (p. 13).  Living in Songdo means defining oneself according to flows of capital--living at the the vertiginous heights of advanced capitalism.  

Is this "the future"?  It's certainly one version of urban futures.  But I wonder if Songdo and Dubai are the only places "built in globalization's image".  An alternative possibility on the other end of the globalization scale: temporary housing fashioned from discarded cargo pallets.  The idea here is to utilize pallets discarded from

Pallet House, OpenArchitectureNetwork.org

cargo shipments (including international aid shipments) in order to build temporary (yet sturdy) housing for the enormous mass of refugees and urban poor.  This is another future certainly, but not one reflected in Songdo's design.

Similar to the "appropriate technology" debate in anthropology and development in the 1960's and 1970's, we see here a division: graceful, gated, LEED certified aerotropolises rising out of ground in Asia, squatter- and refugee settlements for the poor in the Global South.  Similar to solar ovens and composting toilets--clever technological hacks, but hacks for those on the other end of capital flows.

As David Harvey, Mike Davis and many others have predicted, the tendency for globalization is to develop according to a power-law distribution of wealth.  Both rich and poor are embedded in global movements of capital, but at opposite ends.  But living in Songdo means that this "other" globalization (what Gordon Mathews suggestively terms "low-end" globalization) is never visible, even though the "high end" spires and parks of Songdo very much depends on the contributions of the "low-end". Songdo--as a city of the future--suggests another future for the city: the ideological division of the world by social class, the networked hubs for the wealthy developing apart from globalized spaces for the poor.  If this seems like the inevitable future, then it is only because we have already (although perhaps tacitly) accepted the logic of these spaces of exception. 

But if we're choosing to live in globalization's image (or, indeed, if we have no choice in the matter), then we might choose a built environment that embraces (at least symbolically) more of the global supply chain.  Devoting a city of flows of financiers and computer programmers represents one end of that, but what about the massive cement industry that supports the spires of Songdo (Korea is the world's fifth largest producer of cement)?  And what about the host of other goods and services that move through, borne not on airplanes, but on trains and cargo ships? 

Globalization layers on inequalities after inequalities.  In terms of urban life, one of the most glaring: enormous amalgams of surplus capital to those states that can afford it (or, in South Korea's case, merely underwrite it), and make-shift re-use and re-purposing for an enormous cross-section of global poor.

Contrast this to Keetwonen, a massive student dormitory complex in Amsterdam fashioned entirely out of re-purposed shipping containers.  While denizens of Amsterdam's Keetwonen are hardly helping the world's poor, they are--at least in a symbolic way--engaging both ends of the supply chain.

If we're to build in globalization's image, then I am advocating a Jane Jacobs approach.  A future city that consciously connects with global flows at multiple ends--that includes multiple reminders of globalization's inequalities and builds accordingly. 

Keetwonen: the largest container city in the world

Apocalypse Now

 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

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

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

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?

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?

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

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

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.