Parasitic Twittering at the Anthropology Conference

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

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 . .

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

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

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

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

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.