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- Author: Caroline Bassett x
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This book is a defence of narrative in an age of information. Stressing interpretation and experience alongside affect and sensation, it argues that narrative is key to contemporary forms of cultural production and to the practice of contemporary life. Re-appraising the prospects for narrative in the digital age, the book insists on the centrality of narrative to informational culture and provokes a critical re-appraisal of how innovations in information technology as a material cultural form can be understood and assessed. It offers a careful exploration of narrative theory, a critique of techno-cultural writing, and a series of tightly focused case studies. All of which point the way to a restoration of a critical — rather than celebratory — approach to new media.
Anti-computing explores forgotten histories and contemporary forms of dissent – moments when the imposition of computational technologies, logics, techniques, imaginaries, utopias have been questioned, disputed, or refused. It also asks why these moments tend to be forgotten. What is it about computational capitalism that means we live so much in the present? What has this to do with computational logics and practices themselves?
This book addresses these issues through a critical engagement with media archaeology and medium theory and by way of a series of original studies; exploring Hannah Arendt and early automation anxiety, witnessing and the database, Two Cultures from the inside out, bot fear, singularity and/as science fiction. Finally, it returns to remap long-standing concerns against new forms of dissent, hostility, and automation anxiety, producing a distant reading of contemporary hostility.
At once an acute response to urgent concerns around toxic digital cultures, an accounting with media archaeology as a mode of medium theory, and a series of original and methodologically fluid case studies, this book crosses an interdisciplinary research field including cultural studies, media studies, medium studies, critical theory, literary and science fiction studies, media archaeology, medium theory, cultural history, technology history.
This introductory chapter sets out the purpose of the book, which is to come to the defence of narrative, arguing that it is a vital element of contemporary culture, lying at the heart of the processes through which humans make sense of their experiences in everyday lives that are, by virtue of their mediation through and across information, increasingly multi-layered and complex both temporally and spatially. It argues that narrative is an intrinsic part of a new informational economy which becomes its material and which it holds and articulates. Narrative lives because it is contingent and mutable, because it is changing and transforming rather than fading in response to alterations in the material conditions under which we live, which are themselves articulations of a social totality. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.
This chapter explores narrative as a formation emerging out of the contemporary interchange between information technology, culture, and society. If narrative is socially symbolic then the materials of which it is made, the conditions within which it is read, as well as the forms in which it is written or practised, and the tales that it gathers up within itself, matter. They are a part of what gets symbolized, and how. To explore changing narrative formations developing in relation to new media might thus offer insights into the cultural significance of contemporary processes of automation transforming the temporal and spatial dimensions of everyday life.
This chapter explores how the connections between technology and culture have been drawn — and may be drawn — in relation to new media technologies. One key issue here is how and why newly introduced information technologies are so often perceived to be powerful or transformative, able to create new cultural forms and practices, remediate others, and render others still entirely irrelevant — and why they so often disappoint. The first sections of the chapter consider this issue, exploring the interplay between innovation and determination, and showing how the circuit as a whole has a certain ideological force. It concludes by suggesting that these circuits of reception and acculturation temper the critical and popular reception new media technologies receive. The middle sections of the chapter go on to suggest that this dynamic also conditions ways in which developments in the history of information technology are understood within cultural theory. The final sections of the chapter bring the arguments about the relationship between technology and culture up to the present. It explores the contemporary techno-cultural climate, considering various ways in which information technology is understood within the contemporary constellation.
This chapter considers the role digital technologies might play in the constitution of contemporary identity, when this is understood in narrative terms as a life story and its narration. The life stories at the centre of this inquiry are those of a group of inmates of Ashworth Hospital, a secure institution for the criminally insane. This group participated in the making of Rehearsal of Memory, a piece of speculative software produced in collaboration with the artist Harwood with input from the art collective Mongrel, and others. Rehearsal takes the form of a navigable composite body made up of skin scans taken from the inmates, from Harwood, and from Ashworth staff. This body holds fragments of memory, experiences of life at Ashworth and other places, held as images, texts, and audio spots. Users of the artwork are invited to explore the body and its associated objects, but are only able to do so in ways allowed by the project architecture. This functions to organize the interactions between the body and its users in ways that tend to undermine the conventional relationships operating between the inmates of such institutions and the general public.
The chapter explores a virtual community as a history of a particular kind of space, one that is made of words and to a far lesser extent images, but that is more fundamentally to be understood as carved out of code. The opening section draws on Lefebvre to explore virtual space as a social production. It then turns to the Internet itself, reading its history, and within that the history of virtual community, as the history of space. It is argued that virtual community is synecdochal for the early Internet and its values, and that these values continue to attach to virtual communities even while discrete productions of community increasingly fail to instantiate them. The third section focuses on the spatial production of GeoCities, which is also understood in narrative terms. It draws out what the sense of virtual community operational in GeoCities takes from earlier models and how the phrase itself might operate as an ideologeme. This may demonstrate the degree to which processes of contradictory integration mean that ‘virtual community’ has been at once valorized and remade. If the new commercial model of GeoCities is operationalized partly through its appeal to ‘virtual community’, read as a guarantor of the persistence of human communion within an increasingly automated world, this also tends to mask the underlying logic of the Cities, which concerns the production of narrative space as a commodity.
This chapter turns to Elephant, Gus Van Sant's film about the Columbine killings, which may be regarded as interactive and which provokes consideration of non-linearity as a new form of composition, rather than as a form of decomposition or simple disruption. This opens the way to a broader consideration of the cultural forms and practices of everyday life within informational culture. The logic of narrative as an ongoing response to information may be generalized: there is an elephant called narrative in the room.
In this chapter anti-computing is introduced, being explored from two connected directions.
First it is defined as a series of dissenting responses to computerization, and its social or cultural impacts which have arisen since the 1950s are identified. What these share is that that they refuse the powerful and teleologically inspired myth that computational progress automatically constitutes progress in general, or in common. Dissent takes heterogeneous forms, operates in different registers, and rarely fully succeeds, since digitalization continues to expand its reach globally and at expanding scales – but it persists and rearises, older arguments finding new salience in relation to developing events.
Responding to this anti-computing is elaborated as a critical theoretical approach drawing on media archaeology, media theory, and media history, constituting a means through which computational dissent, found ‘on the ground’ or ‘in theory’ can be explored. In the final third of the chapter this approach begins to be operationalized; a series of provisional taxonomies of anti-computing being generated and briefly explored.
This chapter considers the temporal dynamics of anti-computing, focusing on the tendency of tropes of dissent and anxiety around the computational to rise and fall but also to return and trouble the present. The goal of the chapter is to produce a form of thinking the technological that is apt for the consideration of anti-computing formations – taking cognisance both of their material underpinnings and the ideological heft of computational capitalism and its claim to be compulsory. The route taken goes first by way of a critical but appreciative engagement with media archaeology, approached by way of Foucault’s discussion of the sleep of history. Media archaeological approaches, drawing on this, but exchanging the document for the technical material, and focusing on disjuncture and on non-linear accounts are then explored, and deployed to develop a sense of anti-computing as non-continuous but recurrent.
The focus then shifts to consider systemic factors that media archaeology largely sets aside in its concentration on the material effects of technical media; this demands a consideration of anti-computing as a formation produced by and within computational capitalism – and produces the conundrum of resistance within what has become compulsory. Finding a way through these conflicts it is argued that anti-computing itself can present a challenge to strongly new materialist forms of media archaeology whilst also making evident the need for forms of cultural materialism that continue to reach beyond representation and that find new ways to grapple with the specificity of digital media.