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.