We’re back again after a little bit of a break — my fault: I had a minor mental breakdown but I’m fine now!
This week we read the first chapter of Jodi Dean’s 2010 book Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive, which was so good, and which threaded together so much of what we’ve talked about so far in this series of talks, that we’re going to continue reading it over the coming weeks.
I didn’t write anything like an intro this week, but I did pull out a lot of quotes I found resonant with previous discussions. First, links to articles, games, and videos referenced through the discussion, then a few Dean aphorisms after that.
Thanks to Wassim, as ever, for this week’s pun title.
- Michael Steinberger, “Does Palantir See Too Much?”, The New York Times Magazine
- Moira Weigel, “Palantir Goes to the Frankfurt School”, boundary 2
- “Theory in Crisis Seminar – Benjamin Noys, The Crisis of the Future”, YouTube talk
- Yuji Agematsu, “Four Seasons”
Agematsu has an exhibition on at the moment that Robin Mackay has written an essay for:
Four Seasons is a unique artist book presenting Yuji Agematsu’s renowned zips, miniature sculptures comprised of reanimated urban detritus collected by Agematsu on daily walks in New York City and encased within the cellophane wrappers of cigarette packs. The book features images of a selected month from each of the four seasons.
[…]
The essay written by philosopher and Urbanomic publisher Robin Mackay incisively captures and theorizes the spirit of the artist’s daily assemblages, likening them to video game creator Keita Takahashi’s “clump spirit [katamari damashii, ??]—a cosmic disposition which places great hope in the obsessional collecting of heterogeneous stuff.” Gathering inspiration from a wide swath of sources including Plato, Philip K. Dick, Zoolander and Dante’s Paradiso, Mackay pays homage to Agematsu’s work.
I’ve spoken to Robin before about katamari damashii, which he sees as the best analogy for Deleuzian assemblages.
- Katamari Damashii (PS2 Gameplay)
- Katamari Damashii REROLL (Nintendo Switch launch trailer)
- Oneohtrix Point Never, “Lost But Never Alone” (Music video)
- Nic Carter, “Why NFTs are hard to explain”
Matt’s Notes
A few things I wrote down whilst reading the chapter. No extensive intro — little need to summarise what Dean has said with far more clarity. But maybe the notes below are useful jumping off points when read in context of the discussion. Numbers in brackets are page numbers from Dean’s book.
- Accelerationist theory
- Brassier’s critique that the internet is a orgy of stupidity
- “The temporal take-over of theory displaces sustained critical thought, replacing it with the sense that there isn’t time for thinking, that there are only emergencies to which one must react, that one can’t keep up and might as not try.”
- “communcative capitalism fragments thought into ever smaller bits, bits that can be distributed and sampled, even ingested and enjoyed, but that in the glut of multiple, circulating contributions tend to resist recombination into longer, more demanding theories.”
- Blogs bad: “Drowing in plurality, we lose the capacity to grasp anything like a system.”
- Blogs good: “Rather than restricted to positivist methods of description and measurement or linear, developmentalist, histories of technical change, this emerging critical media theory anchors its analyses of technologies, users, and practices in an avowedly political assessment of the present.”
- Zizek on reflexivity in The Ticklish Subject
- How does Dean’s / Zizek’s theory of reflexivity lead to our own reflexive impotence; see also Noys essay — S low-down is a tactic in worker struggles but coming to a standstill and affirming stillness is the bourgeois viewpoint, is it not? There’s no way we can alleviate our contradictions. “Human inquiry into the world affects the world.”
- Dean on capitalism, economy and the affirmation of contradiction and volatility, pg 12 — “reflexivity leads to uncertainty and indeterminacy”. But the reflexive subject does not function quite like the reflexive market — “the endless loop of reflexivity becomes the very form of capture and absorption. A completely reflexive self is as incompatible with democracy as reflexive self-goverance is with fully reflexive subjects.” (13)
- Without active and engaged resistance, things get worse for us. Why? Because we provide the negative feedback that keeps things in check, and which can further influence later outcomes. Yes, this means intervening in capitalism on its terms, but to withdraw from this process, in its current global state, would mean being trodden over roughshod by the sheer informational excess it produces.
- Fred Turner comparing impotent hippies to the New Left, pg 19 — also relevant to libertarian frontierism in cyberspace — “In taking over systems theory and the collaborative practices of military research, then, the New Communalists assumed as their own the basic practices and suppositions of their opponent.”
- It is true that capitalism can seize upon the tactics and strategies of counterculture, but it is also true that many counterculture have adopted the tactics and strategies of capitalism as their own. The New Communalists, for instance, didn’t realise that “the military, state, corporation, and university were already functioning in distributed, decentralised networks… they failed to acknowledge how their ostensibly countercultural practices themselves served as the conduits for spreading the communication and control mechanisms of the technocratic research world not just throughout US society but, via the Internet, throughout the whole world.” (22-22).
- “displaced mediator” — what happens when a blogger becomes an academic? “… obliterating the prior open and antagonistic position.” (27)
- “What proffered itself as a vehicle for bringing in something new, something better, becomes the mechanism for further embedding and extending the old, now strengthened by the rhetoric of its own over-coming.” (27)
- “Media appear as displaced from the perspective of a backward look. Their displacement is retroactively determined in the context of an attempt to pull an explanation out of the multiplicity and contingency of technological change. Thus, a benefit of ‘displaced media’ is that it yields ‘newness’ in advance. Rather than linking critical media theory to its currency — has it kept up and incorporated the latest techno-trends? — the idea of displaced media embeds the instability and volatility of media practices into the analysis.”
- Lacan on will to create from zero, will to begin again — ethics of psychoanalysis
- “Accelerations and repetitions throughout their circuits gain in momentum and intensity — feeding frenzies, vicious circles, bubbles — until their result in extreme or catastrophic ruptures, zero points from which something new begins.” (30) — Should we keep an eye on those aspects of the blogosphere that return, generation after generations? (How long is a blog “generation”? 3 years these days?) Or should we affirm those moments when we grow out of things? Break with them and rupture? (Punk to post-punk.)
- “what idealists from the Enlightenment, through critical and Democratic theory, to contemporary techno-utopians theorise as the very form of freedom is actually a mechanism for the generation of extreme inequality and capture.” (30)
- “The contemporary challenge, then, is producing the conditions of possibility for breaking out of or redirecting the loop of drive.” (31)