This is the third in a series of imaginary classes that I can imagine proposing for a university English or media studies department (here are the first and second). It’s my hope that these will be useful resources for other scholars and teachers. They are inspired by the syllabi collected at the Atlantic Tech blog, especially C.W Anderson’s Print Culture 101, and Kio Stark’s Stranger Studies 101. Feel free to get in touch with suggestions.
Database/Archive
One way of defining social media (there are many) is as an effect of the compulsion to record the details of our daily lives and put them on display. Are Facebook photo galleries remediations of museum window displays, where we ourselves are both curators and curated? Total capture bookmarking, Facebook’s timeline, and Youtube as a time machine exemplify how electronic databases have moved in on the role once played by traditional archives. Now, we turn increasingly to digital archives not only machines for ordering the detritus of our lives but also as for making meaning and pleasure.
The goal of this course is not simply to provide a primer in digital archiving, but also to understand the longing for the archive that underlies these new technological practices. Where did the culture of the archive come from, and how did archival media come to form the bedrock of our lives in social media?
The idea of this class is that database studies and archive studies are necessary for each other, that we can build better digital collections, and tools for using them, when we understand the function of the archive in cultural history, and the database as a remediation of that function.
The archive as we understand it today emerged in the 19th century as a tool for understanding history; a place in the archive meant a guarantee of the status of a document or artifact as a witness to historical truth. In the first part of the class, we will study not only the emergence of the archive as an institution but also its effect on a range of other institutions, practices and technologies: the museum, art and the avant-gardes, film and photography, among others.
The second half of the course is a about the database: how has the database changed the function of the archive in contemporary culture? What are the new practices and tools (e.g., TEI) for rendering objects and artifacts within an electronic database, and what are the implications of these practices for how we experience personal and public memory?
Finally, we are interested in: what is the relevance of Youtube and other social media for film archivists? How do we preserve the cultural history of Twitter and Facebook?
The class attempts, finally, to encourage us not only to create digital archives but to think about the cultural and personal roles archives play, and to acknowledge the possibility of becoming archivists of our own lives.
Unit 1: History
from Michael Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge
from Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe
from Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History
Unit 2: Museum
Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever
from Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum
Andreas Huyssen, “Escape from Amnesia: The Museum as Mass Medium”
Unit 3: Art
from Sven Spieker, The Big Archive
Hal Foster, “The Archive without Museums”
from Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time
Unit 4: Database
Geert Lovink, “The Art of Watching Databases”
Lev Manovich, “Database as a Genre of New Media”
from Mark Poster, The Mode of Information
from PMLA special issue on the database
Unit 5: Forensics
Matt Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination
Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps and Trees
Julia Flanders, “Detailism, Digital Texts, and the Problem of Pedantry”
Since the summer, I’ve been collecting examples of Beckett adaptations on Youtube at my Beckett on Youtube tumblog. My idea was that they should not be film versions of Beckett that are hosted on Youtube, or video recordings of stage productions, but adaptations that are made with Youtube in mind.
Beckett’s late plays are really ideal for Youtube with minimalistic stagings and short running times. But I was also interested in Beckett remixes that were not just straight up adaptations. Of these, among the most brilliant is this re-cut of Atom Egoyan‘s version of Krapp’s Last Tape starring John Hurt as Krapp:
Krapp is now reimagined as an old man in the future who listens to Coldplay’s “X&Y” every year on his birthday.
In Beckett’s play, Krapp has given up what he perceives as his chance for happiness in life in order to pursue a literary career, a decision he relives every year on his birthday by listening to a tape recording of himself as a younger man recounting his choices. The tape recording for Beckett is like a character in itself, torturing Krapp with a memory he cannot escape and whose promise he can not fulfill.
But through remix, the tape recorder has a different function. Private memory is replaced by public mediation– Krapp filters his desires through the archive of popular culture, and popular culture replaces private recollection. But what we witness now is still a very private moment, and the significance of that moment depends on how we read it in context of Beckett’s play. For Krapp may still be a sad figure who has been hollowed out and reduced to the mechanical repetition of one mass produced song. Or, he may be someone defined no longer by failed literary pretensions but instead by the fast pleasures of popular culture.
Chris Martin [lead singer of Coldplay] fixes Krapp, I love it.
Coldplay’s “X&Y” is filled with this language of “fixing”: “When something is broken and you try to fix it / Trying to repair it any way you can.” Popular culture offers itself as the cure to Krapp’s broken life. Krapp himself seems broken, like a machine, and in this version it becomes unclear if the tape recording, another machine, is the cure or another aspect of the problem.
Of all the Beckett videos I added to my tumblog, this one got the most reblogs. I’ll write more of my discoveries from Beckett on Youtube in a future post.
This is the second in a series of imaginary classes that I can imagine proposing for a university English or media studies department (here is the first). It’s my hope that these will be useful resources for other scholars and teachers. They are inspired by the syllabi collected at the Atlantic Tech blog, especially C.W Anderson’s Print Culture 101, and Kio Stark’s Stranger Studies 101. Feel free to get in touch with suggestions.
How do we account for this feeling that the future has already arrived—where does it come from and what does it mean? This class proceeds from the assumption that the experience of the future is historically specific and variable. The way in which individuals plan for, speculate about, and grow anxious over the future is a product of what is often called “modernity,” the modern world and its affordances. As the pace of modern life has tended to accelerate, the way we as individuals experience the future has changed. The future is something we stress over, ignore, or learn to discard as junk– living as we do in a culture of planned obsolescence.
Nostalgia for futures past and the desire for techniques to visualize the future seem to be increasing in urgency all around us. This class is not only about understanding the history of the future (utopias, Futurism in art and literature, science fiction, speculative architecture, futuristic advertising and fashion), but analyzing its material basis and cultural context. Here, we learn both that the future has a history as well as how that history has been produced by the experience of time itself and its mediation by new technologies.
We will survey the futures of dynamism, rupture, and flow that characterize radical reconceptions of temporality in art, culture and politics. We consider science fiction and utopias alongside theories of aesthetic education that see the purpose of art, design and the built environment as producing new types of individuals for the future. Finally, we look at the future through the lens of risk, obsolescence and credit, to understand the modern condition of futurity as both a state of debt that can never be repaid and a state of hope that can never be fulfilled.
Through these investigations, we understand both our own longing for futures past and our desire for a future that is genuinely new.
Unit 1: Modernity
David Harvey, from The Condition of Postmodernity
Rita Felsky, from The Gender of Modernity
Paul Virilio, from The Original Accident
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”
Unit 2: Science Fiction
J.G. Ballard, “Myths of the Near Future”
Pat Cadigan, “Rock On”
Wililam Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Bruce Sterling, from Shaping Things
Unit 3: Aesthetics
Friedrich Schiller, On The Aesthetic Education of Man
Jacques Rancière, from Politics of Aesthetics
Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”
William Morris, News From Nowhere
John Ruskin, “The Lamp of Memory”
Unit 4: Gender
Henri Bergson, from Time and Free Will
Teresa Brennan, from Exhausting Modernity
Elizabeth Grosz, from The Nick of Time
Rebecca West, “The New Woman’s Guide to Riotous Living”
Unit 5: Futurism
Mina Loy, “Aphorisms on Futurism”
F.T. Marinetti, “The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism”
I just came back from an amazing trip to Seoul, South Korea where I presented at Korea National University of Art’s symposium on What is the Social? in the context of media studies. My presentation on Social Media Aesthetics was well recieved, and I benefited from the amazing feedback and generosity of the students and faculty who challenged me and enriched my thinking of a number of key concepts central to my work, including the public, the audience, community and so forth.
I created a tumblog of examples for the lecture here.
Through the talk, I referred to creative projects on Youtube that offered ways of thinking about Youtube as an archive. Just as I was preparing the final draft of the talk, I stumbled on this new video by Kutiman, “My Favorite Color”:
Here’s what I had to say about it in the talk:
Rather than viewing the total archive of amateur produced content on Youtube as inaccessible, in this video that archive is united according to a principle, which is to say the rules of musical composition. This is an aesthetic practice of the archive; it produces a musical composition that is itself an archive, which reveals that all music is an archive, one of notes, instruments, themes, melodies, harmonies, and so forth. And it functions because of an already existing practice of Youtube performance, that of amateur artists recording themselves playing music. The archive in this sense is the record of a practice and a way of understanding its logic and aesthetics.
This post will be the first in a series of imaginary classes that I have proposed, or would like to propose, for a university English or media studies department. It is my hope that these will be useful resources for other scholars and teachers. They are inspired by the syllabi collected at the Atlantic Tech blog, especially C.W Anderson’s Print Culture 101, and Kio Stark’s Stranger Studies 101. Feel free to get in touch if you have suggestions on any of my imaginary classes.
Public Emotions
The choreography of public emotions frequently underlies global media spectacles, whether the dramatic rescue of Chilean miners, or the sex-scandals of world leaders from the royal family to Berlusconi. These media spectacles put on display a number of affective responses to daily life under globalization: from shock and disgust to pity and relief. Ever since modern individuals learned to adopt a “blase attitude” to block out the shock-effects of urban existence, the sane management of emotion seemed to be a core bedrock of the public sphere. But the rational public life imagined by modernity was never able to expel feelings of shame, anxiety, resentment and attachment as communal tensions, war, “obscene” sexualities and political agitation continued to disrupt the projected surface of liberal consensus.
This class will address a series of affects that contribute to what cultural theorist Sianne Ngai has identified as the “ugly feelings” that underlie psychic life at the moment of neoliberal globalization. We will take as our source texts global/postcolonial novels by authors ranging from Marguerite Duras to J.M. Coetzee that raise the question of the role of affect in public life, especially as saturated with media images providing common points of identification for private fantasies and resentments. These texts interrogate conditions ranging from atrocity, violence, service, shame, anger, and beauty in order to map out the uneven circuits of global exchange underlying daily life in the metropolitan centers of globalization.
New York, London or Tokyo, as portrayed in these texts, are underwritten by past histories of atrocity and exploitation that linger in states of melancholic agitation. So too, the depictions of everyday violence such as the car crash raise the question of the constitution of contemporary subjectivity at the limits of forgiveness: how are modern individuals to act given the knowledge of the suffering and inequality on which their lifestyles are based? Finally, theories of the multitude and affective labor allow us to understand the central role of the production of affect in postindustrial capitalism. In an information society, the production of affective states becomes more and more the primary goal of all labor, whether through creative endeavors or the work of a domestic servant.
Through these texts, we will trace the intersection of the affective lives of contemporary knowledge workers in their cubicles with the production of affects through global media spectacles of war and politics.
Texts:
Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima Mon Amour
J. G. Ballard, Crash
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day
Salman Rushdie, Fury
J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace
Zadie Smith, On Beauty
Unit 1: Love and Atrocity
The course will begin with Marguerite Duras’s classic screenplay (and the film directed by Alain Resnais) Hiroshima Mon Amour in order to probe the limits of love, intimacy and sexuality against the backdrop of atrocity and global crisis. We will read Duras’s work along with selections from Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas in order to think about how the discourse of love and intimacy grounds our understanding of war and atrocity. This unit will introduce students to affect theory with selections from Rei Terada and Kathleen Stewart’s Ordinary Affects.
Unit 2: The Waning of Affect
J.G. Ballard’s Crash provides an ideal text to test Fredric Jameson’s thesis regarding the “waning of affect” in contemporary culture. Are the characters in Ballard’s novels affectless automatons, or has emotional life simply been reimagined as intensity and speed through global media and consumer culture? The unit will push the limits of affect theory through thinking about the limits of the body, capitalism and sexuality with selections from Teresa Brennan’s Exhausting Modernity, Nigel Thrift’s Non-Representational Theory, and Deleuze’s Francis Bacon.
Unit 3: Affect and Labor
Here, we will use Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day to theorize affective labor– the intersection of service work (the labor traditionally done by servants and other caretakers) and knowledge work (including aesthetic labor). We will read theories of affective labor such as in Hardt and Negri’s Multitude, as well as Teresa Brennan’s work in affect studies, The Transmission of Affect.
Unit 4: Community
Salman Rushdie’s Fury, set at the moment of New York just before 9/11, depicts the affect of fury provoked by metropolitan life under neoliberal globalization. In order to understand this condition, we will read recent theorists who address the transformation of the public sphere in an era of privatization and the effects of media saturation on private life in this context: selections from Paul Virilio’s The Original Accident, Zygmunt Bauman’s Community, and Brian Massumi’s “The Bleed: Where Body Meets Image” from Parables for the Virtual.
Unit 5: Violence and Forgiveness
In this unit, we continue to use affect theory to think about community and the politics of violence after globalization through a South African text, J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. This novel probes a range of difficult to acknowledge emotions while testing the limits of forgiveness in the new South Africa. We will read selections from Agamben’s Coming Community along with work on the political dimensions of affect, from Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings and Sara Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion.
Unit 6: Aesthetics and Sympathy
We will conclude the course with Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, a text that returns, through the influence of E.M. Forster, to the context of Bloomsbury, where we began thinking about Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas. We will complement our reading with the recent turn to neuroscience in Catherine Malabou’s What Should We Do with Our Brain?
Database/Archive
