Origin stories

I am wondering these days if our desire to always bring things back to the originary creator (i.e. humanity) is a fundamental part of our psyche and our need to feel we control our world(s)?

What I find fun and interesting about studying non-human agency is the fact that the question is moot really about who created the being/entity/thing being examined. The question of non-human agency centres around capacity and capability to act, not on the omnipotent human actor that birthed the non-human actor. I find it particularly fun when you consider that I, too, at my fundamental basic level of academic identification, consider myself a sociologist. But in my sociology, I study interactions between humans and their environment, which can and does include non-humans, particularly in the digital context. But I don't feel that I have to place humans at the centre of my examinations.

Perhaps this comes too from my desire to be a philosopher of sorts, without having to go back to reading Plato and Aristotle.

Certainly this whole question of origin stories is one I'm really getting into these days. What is the power of these origin stories in our world today? Why is it so necessary for us to continously remind ourselves that we created the Internet? That we can fix the earth's environmental problems? That we are full of power? What purpose and function does this serve? Why is it so important to us?

Thinking of this a lot these days as I read scads of Foucault and as I contemplate the multivariate nature of power as a pure force.

[Above musing inspired by a great juicy thoughtful post
over on the Digital Conversations blog]

Responsibility of power

Reading more in this Digital Delirium book.... Found an excellent essay by science fiction writer, Bruce Sterling, in which he explores the possibilities, limitations, myths and powers of cyberspace and cyberculture. And being a writer, he can come up with some very biting, pithy and humourous observations.

Examples:

The liberating powers of the Internet:

"We might learn a lot of truth about a lot of things off the Internet, or at least access a lot of data about a lot of weird junk, but does that mean that evil vanishes? Is our technology really a panacea for our bad politics? I don't see how. We can't wave a floppy disk like a bag of garlic and expect every vampire in history to vanish." [p.36]

Its apparently transformative powers:

"Cyberspace isn't a world all its own like Jupiter or Pluto, it's a funhouse mirror of the society that breeds it. Like most mirrors it shows whatever it's given: on any day, that's mostly human banality. Cyberspace is not a fairy realm of magical transformations. It's a realm of transformations all right, but since human beings aren't magical fairies, you can pretty well scratch the magic and the fairy parts."[p.36]

What is power?

"A power that was only the power to do good would not be power at all. Real power is a genuine trial. Real power is a grave responsibility and a grave temptation which often causes people to go mad. Technical power is power. When you deal with power you have to fear the consequences of a bad decision before you can find any satisfaction in a good one. Real power means real decisions, real action with real consequences."[pp.36-37]

What are humans' metaphysical responsibilities? Sterling states that they shouldn't be centred around some magical notion of perfection or infinity, he says because "infinity and eternity are not our problem" [p.37]. Instead, they should be about judging and knowing, acting and living.

Sounds good to me!

Fragmentary Baudrillard

In honour of Baudrillard, who died earlier this month, and his series of books called Cool Memories and also his Fragments book, I'm going to start periodically posting small quote snippets from him.

"Our society was once solidified by a utopia of progress. It now exists because of a catastrophic imaginary".
[Baudrillard, J. 1997, Global Debt & Parallel Universe. In A & M Kroker (eds.), Digital Delirium, (pp. 38-40). New York: St. Martin's Press.]

Justifying consumption

One of the things I really had to struggle with when I stopped my fancy yuppie career to go back to school was the fact that I would no longer be able to consume things as I once had. Shopping, one of my then-favourite pastimes, was going to have to be throttled back severely if I was going to make it on a student's stipend. No longer could I continuously search for the new, for something to spend my money on.

That was two years ago. Fast forward to today and I find myself quite different than I was. I haven't set foot in a Winners or Homesense in over two months. The jeans and hoody and kickaround skirt I bought a week ago are the first new clothes I've purchased in quite a while, and I only go to the grocery store a few times a month, rather than twice a week. The new mantra for me isn't the pursuit of the new, but rather "making do"....getting into my consciousness the notion that I already have everything I actually need.

It would seem, then, that I'm running contra to the current craze and buzz over one of the latest Oprah book club selections, The Secret. The book promotes the power of positive thinking to bring about success, but success isn't measured in terms of inner happiness and right living. Instead, success is put in material terms. Thinking positively and envisioning personal success will lead to fancy cars, expensive homes and designer clothing. Alternet has an excellent if scathing overview of the book and the hype around it.

This has all given me an idea for a new paper about how the new is the handmaiden of postmodern consumption practices.

Crisis of intellectualism

It is nearing the end of March and the runup to the end of the second semester of my MA is upon me. If you'd asked me last year at this time where I'd be right now intellectually, I'd have told you blithely that I'd be pumped up about my thesis, finishing up my coursework and happily enjoying the community of a bunch of like-minded students around me.

Is this my reality? Not really. Ok, no it isn't. Instead, I find myself trudging along in coursework that bears little resemblance to what I'm interested in. The digital theory and studies component of my classes is all tacked on at the end and is the first thing to be truncated in the interests of time. Rather than dealing with digital culture, every single class has at least one week, if not two or three, on psychoanalytic theory and visual culture (ick ick ick!). My fellow students are all into anthropological or visual culture/arts media topics. And an excellent paper by a PhD student in my program about the need to look at the technocultural layers of the web has shaken my faith in my thesis topic -- she's said it all, what more is there to say?

I guess I'm lucky that my RAships are with excellent and distinguished academics who are both working on digital topics, but they are topics of interest to me in the slightest. This makes it hard to drum up the enthusiasm to do the work.

The only bright spot in this semester is my Foucault reading class.

I'm sorely tempted to take the summer off and see if I can rekindle myself and my intellectualism over the warmer months. Or at least just do a single reading course, perhaps in the influence of science fiction on digital culture, particularly in the way space cowboys and soldiers have influenced video games. Perhaps if I do that I can find a niche area for myself in comparative literature, a field I'm getting more and more interested in.

RIP Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard died yesterday in Paris at the age of 77. The best obituary for him is in French, naturally, in Le Monde, but the New York Times, London Times and the Guardian Unlimited are all good too, as is this editorial commentary on his life and work.

It makes today's reading of The System of Objects surreal, sad and significant.

Preserving the vibrancy of culture

I've spoken with a lot of pedantic and pompous people lately. You know the ones...who go on and on about some topic, thinking they know all the answers, when you realize not far into the conversation that they've not read anything new about that topic in a decade and don't realize or care that the discourse has moved on and left them behind.

I was thinking about such people when reading Raymond Williams' account of the need for culture to remain adaptable, flexible and vibrant. He believes that academics and intellectuals hold a particular place within culture, acting as the defenders for culture, but for the culture of the everyday and ordinary.

Williams says that culture is ordinary. It isn't something deliberately crafted and created by artistes and academics, but is instead the accumulated effect of numerous small everyday decisions and actions made by everyday, normal and ordinary people. He scorns the intellectual who patronizingly pontificates on the everyday culture of people, while still arguing for the need to preserve high end culture and educate and restrain the masses.

It matters also whether, in the inevitable tensions of new kinds of arguments and new kinds of claims, the defenders of reason and education become open to new and unfamiliar relationships, or instead relapse to their existing habits and privileges.

And he notes that intellectuals, academics and society leaders who do so would stifle culture because:

The culture that is then being defended is not excellence but familiarity, not the knowable but only the known values [p.8].

The open-mindedness and willingness to change that he exhorts all leaders and thinkers to embrace needs to stay front of mind for me as I prepare to enter into the thesis research part of my MA program.