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[Part 2 of a 5 part paper, corrections or comments are very welcome] 2 On the Political Interpretation of New Media Objects Henning Ziegler Form and content in discourse are one; once we understand that verbal discourse is a social phenomenon. 柚. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination In their essay 典he California Ideology,? European cultural critics Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron have argued that 殿 loose alliance of writers, hackers, capitalists, and artists from the West Coast of the USA have succeeded in defining a heterogeneous orthodoxy for the coming information age.?(2) This 蘇eterogeneous orthodoxy? is what the writers call the California Ideology: The idea that new media will make everybody 澱oth hip and rich,? being able to 兎xpress themselves freely within cyberspace.? Barbrook and Cameron hold that this utopia is grounded on a Californian 努illful blindness towards (...) racism, poverty, and environmental degradation,? so they see a need for Europeans to step into the picture 鍍o develop a more coherent analysis of the impact of hypermedia than can be found within the ambiguities of the Californian Ideology.? Although I find this argument somewhat overstated (and I知 not sure if I would call the resulting 僧ore coherent analysis? a 途ebirth of the modern?), this paper could be seen as a part of the theoretical project to ground new media theory in the social and political sphere instead of a lofty West Coast utopia. Several key concepts from Fredric Jameson痴 seminal book The Political Unconscious might prove useful in this regard. Basically, remembering that 杜en represent their real conditions of existence to themselves in an imaginary form? (Althusser 1971: 163), it is not hard to see why the political should somewhat enter the analysis of new media objects or 奏exts? at all. What痴 harder to see is the primacy of a political reading over other readings from theoretical schools such as psychoanalysis, feminism, or deconstructionism, this primacy, however, is precisely the notion that I need to establish in order to justify a reading of new media objects in purely political terms. In The Political Unconscious, Jameson asserts that he is not calling for just another 僧ethod? of political criticism耀ince the social and the political form the backdrop of cultural production, he rather holds that 溺arxism subsumes other interpretative modes or systems; or, (...) the limits of the latter can always be overcome, and their more positive findings retained, by a radical historicizing of their mental operations, such that not only the content of the analysis, but the very method itself, along with the analyst, then comes to be reckoned into the 奏ext? or phenomenon to be explained? (Jameson 1981: 47). In his view, then, text, method, and analyst all become part of a larger political configuration that can only be uncovered by a 喪adical historicizing? of the methods? mental structuring of material陽ooming into the 奏ext only version? is just too quick a move for a comprehensive understanding of the structural limitations that have been at work in the society the cultural object originated from. But how does Jameson arrive at this conclusion? On level of the philosophy of history, he does away with the fashionable notion that 粗verything is a text? (in a similar way, R馮is Debray does away with the 壮ign? in favor of the structure in media studies(3)). Without receeding to an essentialist notion of history, Jameson holds that 鍍hat history is not a text, not a narrative, master or otherwise, but that, as an absent cause, it is inaccessible to us except in textual form, and that our approach to it (...) necessarily passes through its prior textualization, its narrativization in the political unconscious? (Jameson 1981: 35). When uncovering this narrativization in the process of textual interpretation, however, history never reveals its 奏rue? meaning to the critic; the 喪eal? history remains the 疎bsent cause? for the 奏ext? as a cultural production. The structure of any text or new media object becomes an expression of a specific historical configuration whose 疎uthenticity? can never be finally established; it remains a cultural object that is indexical to a non-existent cause葉he political unconscious. Significantly, Jameson also points to the necessity of reading history through cultural objects: We are left with them as 奏races? of the political unconscious, or of our ideas of historical power configurations. In my mind, Jameson痴 move of deconstructing essentialist notions of 蘇istory? by calling history an 疎bsent cause? while also establishing a kind of 素ormalist essentialism? with which stuggles over the interpretation of history can be discovered in the structure of cultural objects convincingly establishes the primacy of a political reading of old and new media objects. On the formal level, then, a political criticism of any cultural object will attempt to extract structural antagonisms that are indexical of a historical dialectic as 疎bsent cause.? This reading strategy is, of course, to some extent based on Engels view that 殿ll history (...) was the history of class struggles? (Tucker, MER 699): Form and content of a cultural object are not two opposite aspects to be discussed; rather, dialectic historical struggles are manifest in the form itself. Furthermore, when one understands form as 都edimented content? (Jameson), 鍍he individual narrative, or the individual formal structure, is to be grasped as the imaginary resolution of a real contradiction? (Jameson 1981: 77). The cultural or new media object is a strategy for unification of differences which retains certain traces of those difference in its formal limitations. It is important to note, however, that the object is not different 素rom itself? (in the sense of Derrida痴 diff駻ance), since the differences do refer to historical struggle, if only as an 疎bsent cause.? Interestingly, Jameson mentions two aspects of new media objects in his argument which will prove useful in my later analysis: The pluralism of (class) struggle and the relationality of all antagonism: 擢or Marxism (...) the very content of a class ideology is relational, in the sense that its 宋alues? are always actively in situation with respect to the opposing class? (Jameson 1981: 84). If the cultural interface as a new media object is a site of differences, those differences take on the form of multiple, opposing views that 双verdetermine? (Ernesto Laclau) the interface and that, furthermore, only work as active oppositions: I am not what I致e set a hyperlink to. The method of European criticism against the 舛alifornia Ideology? then becomes something like 鍍he rewriting of the (...) text in such a way that the latter may itself be seen as the rewriting or restructuration of a prior historical or ideological subtext? (Jameson 1981: 81). In a way, the California Ideology incorporated into its world view the idea that politics has come to an end and that restistance is merely a matter of 祖ulture jamming.? This cultural turn, which, as Barbrook and Cameron have pointed out, ironically comes from the very people that participated in the 祖ountercultural? movements of the 60s, overlooks the ways in which political antagonisms are still structurally inscribed into new media objects. Or, as Jameson says, 鍍he convenient working distinction between cultural texts that are social and political and those that are not becomes something worse than an error: namely, a symptom and a reinforcement of the reification and privatization of contemporary life? (Jameson 1981: 20). Importantly, however, the kind of political criticism that I have advocated here does not lead to the 爽nmasking? of new media objects as mere feedback loops into the system which they were originally in opposition to. The benefit of a formal, political analysis is that it doesn稚 automatically lead from the view that 粗verything is culture? to the cultural studies dead-end of seeing opposition as only preparing another 爽nderground trend? for the multinationals to take up. As Jameson relativizes, 鍍he lesson of the 宋ision? of a total system is for the short run one of the structural limits imposed on praxis rather than the latter痴 impossibility? (Jameson 1981: 91). (2) Barbrook, Richard and Andy Cameron, 典he California Ideology,? http://www.wmin.ac.uk/media/HRC/ci/calif.html. (3) See R馮is Debray, Media Manifestos (London, New York: Verso, 1996) 133-170. [End of part 2] Henning Ziegler, Berlin http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~hziegler # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net