Liveblogging the Apocalypse (7): Combined and/or Uneven

To begin with a point of departure, from a review by Michael Willand:

More than a blueprint for liberation, Williams’s limpid and creative dissection of these cultural artefacts is an exemplary illustration of the serious scrutiny we should apply to our imaginative lives.

And to show that it amounts to damning not so much with faint praise as with actual damning, and makes a non sequitur of the fundamental question of what it is about our ‘imaginative lives’ that deserves serious scrutiny, and for what purpose we should engage in the ‘creative dissection of cultural artefacts’. Or, to put it another way, what’s the point of film and literary theory, other than showing that you can learn to do them very well.

Evan Calder Williams has been blogging at Socialism and/or Barbarism for the best part of three years, although it would be more precise to say that he has been straining the blog form for most of this time, alternating between pieces of micro-critique, full-blown, exhilarating journal-length essays and brutally articulate invectives of such length as to spill out of the format altogether, counselling the author to split in two parts what didn’t need to be, insofar as a web page can accommodate texts of indefinite length (or, rather, depth). It would be tempting to call some of these excesses self-indulgent, were it not for the obvious fact that self-publishing is that by definition, and that furthermore conceiving of outside editorial intervention as the means of curtailing excess and ensuring that a piece of writing adheres to a more common – read: virtuous – set of expectations is far from unproblematic. That said, Evan is one of the few bloggers, or writers more generally, to whom I don’t begrudge the occasional rough draft, for it rarely fails to offer sharp poetic turns and interestingly jagged edges. And besides it can be as much in the throwaway one-liner or image association as in the controlled long-form essay that one can detect the changes of trajectory in the development of his ideas. (None of which – this must be said for it’s far from a given – have ever been regarded by their author as ‘too good for a blog’.)

All of this work has been conducted against the dual backdrops of the global financial crisis and most especially the permanent struggle against the dismantling of public higher education that has in Evan’s adoptive California one of its nerve centres, and is therefore shot through with and necessarily informed by the author’s own activism. And so the blog’s subject – which broadly speaking has been thus far the study of apocalyptic texts, with a particular emphasis on film – with its attendant reflections on the collapse of institutions and broader social structures, is moored to a context that surfaces time and again in explicit fashion amongst the posts, allowing us to provisionally establish at the very least a contiguity between the political and the aesthetic, but also giving the blog its own peculiar, angry time signature.

It should be clear by now that I am talking again of a genre-defining blog, much as Socialism and/or Barbarism is certainly not alone in what it does. It is the blog that gave us salvagepunk and one of the most acute and challenging analyses of the zombie canon, as well as the work in progress of hostile object theory – whose relevance to my own field of research I’ve had occasion to comment on – but yet existed in that uncertain zone, freely accessible yet hard to piece together, suffering as it were from the excess of vitality of the not-yet-printed word. And so when it transpired last year that Evan would publish with the British imprint Zero Books, it produced the likely expectation that he would organise this material and produce a less malleable, more discrete object to think and work with, as well as making that at times implicit dimension – of political injunction, as opposed to critical analysis – more fully explicit.

The resulting book, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse, is on a level just that. Organised as a three-part study of an eclectic selection of fantasies of the capitalist apocalypse from the late nineteen-sixties to the present day, the book acknowledges the influence of the particular instance of crisis in which it was produced, but doesn’t draw legitimacy from it. One of its central points is to underscore rather the immanent, as opposed imminent, nature of the apocalypse, its being already here except not everywhere at the same time – hence combined and uneven, a play on the Marxist theory of historical development inaugurated by Trotzky – and how the various articulations of this fantasy, with their corresponding eschatologies, are integral to capitalism as a global system. There is one passage in particular that deserves to be quoted in full:

[C]capitalist apocalypse […] does not mean just an end of capitalism or even an end that suddenly reveals things about it which we didn't know before. Rather, capitalist apocalypse is the possibility of grasping how the global economic order and its social relations depend upon the production and exploitation of the undifferentiated, of those things which cannot be included in the realm of the openly visible without rupturing the very oppositions that make the whole enterprise move forward. And by “undifferentiated things,” we mean all that we know very well yet regard as exceptional nightmares or accidents to be corrected with better, greener, more ethical management: hellish zones of the world, whole populations destroyed in famine and sickness, “humanitarian” military interventions, the basic and unincorporable fact of class antagonism, closure of access to common resources, the rendering of mass culture more and more banal, shifting climate patterns and the “natural” disasters they bring about, the abandonment of working populations and those who cannot work in favor of policies determined only to starkly widen wealth gaps. (8)

This is the apocalypse we have, an unfolding, developing story with several converging endings that demands to be approached not by fretting about what is going to happen, nor by hastening the end, but rather by making a stand ‘from the position of what has already been lost’ (203). Hence a book that is committed to rummaging through pasts according to the logic of salvage – in search of what is useful, as opposed to supposedly representative or symptomatic – and that locates its central texts in two films from the beginnings of the surveyed period: Jean Luc Godard’s Week End (1967) and Richard Lester’s The Bed Sitting Room (1969). Yet also a book that, more than is usual, was consigned to the past from the moment it came into being.

It happened at the book’s London launch, earlier this month, when Evan and China Miéville proceeded to declare salvagepunk dead and to question its political pretensions, as well as, by extension, the mechanisms of circulation and appropriation of critical terms. (Salvagepunk is dead not just because of its actual inherent conceptual limitations but because it is literally everywhere already, a victim from birth of its cool-theory sheen.) Caught between those performative moments – the slow, accretive coming together of the material on the blog on one hand, the launch on the other – the book remains trapped oddly outside of time, doubted, if not quite disavowed, by its authors (plural, for Miéville played a major role in the genesis of salvagepunk), declared outdated before the ink was even dry, thus an object that one does not quite know what to do with, which would be appropriate enough – as if too needed to be salvaged, repurposed – except for its having declared itself a work of ‘prescriptive theory’ (12), thus explicitly an object to do things with, and at this moment.

That’s where the Michael Willand quote at the top of this post comes back into play. If salvagepunk (and, by extension, the book) is not a ‘blueprint for liberation’, as is charged, then what is it that makes ‘Williams’s limpid and creative dissection of these cultural artefacts’ not just delightful and instructive but in fact useful and even necessary, something we ‘should’ engage in? In fact it is the premise of the statement that is nonsensical: the failure of the book to develop its insights based on the study of films ‘into a comprehensive plan for an alternative society’ (from the same review) is an utterly literal-minded response to the book’s exhortations to make use of the logic of salvagepunk, to retrofit the zombie genre and to occupy the zones of combined and uneven apocalypse. All of these analyses remain politically useful in a way that is analogous to Donna Haraway’s famous treatment of cyborgs – who, like the zombies of Combined and Uneven Apocalypse, also had to be rescued from under a mountain of deeply entrenched yet utterly banal critiques in order to ‘make them mean otherwise’ (146): namely, as analytical tools – or more precisely: sets of politically inflected optics designed to make visible what would otherwise be hidden – and as templates to understand social and labour relations and (re)construct antagonistic subjects.

And so too the burial of salvagepunk – its intriguing and lively fanfare of self-critique notwithstanding – was, one feels, premature, and offers one more timeline to be occupied and resisted: that of critical terms that become devalued through overuse and reduced to the level of memes before they’ve had time to even mean things. It is time already for a revival.

Evan Calder Williams. Combined and Uneven Apocalypse. Winchester and Washington: Zero Books, 2011.

Found Objects

I am very pleased that Studiolum took the time to respond to my review of Poemas del río Wang, and that he considered some of my suggestions on how to read his blog fitting to its design. Learning that one of the conscious models behind Río Wang is Alberto Savinio’s Nuova enciclopedia was a source of particular delight: there is so much that one could write about the digital form based on that stated affinity – a Master’s thesis’ worth perhaps. But in good time. So long as I have started to explore blogs as native digital forms, and speculate on which particular exemplars may be better suited to improving our media ecology, I want to turn my attention this week to a blog that is in several respects the opposite of Río Wang, at least on the surface.

From the Phase IV (1974) series, posted by Dolly Dolly at Found Objects

The idea for Found Objects came earlier this year to Mark Fisher, the author of Capitalist Realism and the blog k-punk. In both the book and the blog – the latter, just the other day – Mark makes the point that ‘screen culture is connective, not reflective’, and that one of the consequences of our wired lifestyles is a ‘twitchy, agitated interpassivity, an inability to concentrate or focus’. Sadly this is a debate that is framed more often by the likes of Nicholas Carr, author of the infamous ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’ and more recently of The Shallows, which – along with every other human in possession of a keyboard – I intend at some point to review. At any rate, without addressing either version of that viewpoint explicitly, I offered Río Wang to my readers last week as a model for a vision of cyberspace that is predicated precisely on creating the space and time for reflection, without repudiating any of the key aspects of digital textuality, but rather embracing them fully.

Río Wang stands out from the majority of blogs in a couple of respects that matter especially to what I want to discuss today: it rarely indulges in the quick, throwaway post, choosing a slow and very deliberate, considered approach, as if following a larger design (I don’t want to call it slow blogging without attempting to define what it means, which is not for today); and, in spite of its formidable armoury of images, it very rarely dumps them on the reader without exposition or analysis. You may wish to compare this with the very popular and in many respects admirable Bibliodyssey, of which I have, sadly, tired: there are only so many beautiful sets of pictures from rare and exquisitely illustrated sixteenth century tracts that I can gaze admiringly at before a jaded weariness sets in. Bibliodyssey strives generally to give basic information and context about all of these found treasures, but without an analytical and critical framework it’s just another one of those wonderful places on the Web – Strange Maps and How to Be a Retronaut seem to have become everyone’s favourites these days – that makes you go ‘Oh, cool!’ every single time. But more and more often these days I just click away. The twitch is setting in.

From The Three Ages of Briton, posted by Unmann-Wittering.

Having premised all this, you may think I would shudder at Found Objects’ tagline: 'hauntological dumping ground'. So I need to explain why it is that I don’t.

First things first: The term hauntology has its origins in Spectres of Marx, where Jacques Derrida used it to describe how Marxism survived as a ghostly, haunting presence after its death at the hand of history, but Fisher has given it a rather different remit, built over time in his writings at k-punk. Quite appropriately, you won't find a textbook definition there, but rather a series of analyses in which the fundamental traits of hauntology are gradually teased out (I'd commend to you in particular this masterful post on Kubrick's The Shining and this one on the Ghost Box label). As a result of this indeterminacy, you'll probably find that there are as many notions of hauntology as there are contributors to Found Objects (that is to say forty-five, and counting).

A fascio from the Identity Card of my great-grandmother, issued in 1938. Not posted at Found Objects.

While I realise that it is probably more literally-minded than most, my personal take on what an hauntological object is goes something like this.

There are no photographs of my maternal grandfather at a Fascist rally, nor did he preserve a copy of his Party membership card. However I know for a fact that both of them would have existed and it's quite easy to imagine what they looked like. Indeed looking at any one image of a public gathering in that area and from that period I could make a mental substitution, or even locate a stand-in that looks sufficiently like him, and put my grandfather in the scene without doing a major disservice to truth. Equally I could take his regular identity card from that era, scan somebody else’s Party card, transfer his photo from the former into the latter and create an artefact that, whilst forged, recreates a moment in the historical past whose documentary traces my family has erased. False memories of actual pasts, or real memories of pasts that failed to eventuate – like a letter that never reached its destination, or the promotional materials for a film that never got distributed – are hauntological, in that we can sense and sometimes even measure the gap between their truth and their untruth. They are not quite there, but they are not quite not-there either. Furthermore, and crucially for my understanding of all of this, the precisely shaped space left empty by my grandfather's Fascist Party membership card is also hauntological, a space defined by a concrete and meaningful absence. (To put it more simply: I know exactly where it is that we would keep it, but it’s not there, and its not being there is a presence of sorts.)

I'm sure you can see how this critical term would be essential to a proper understanding of mediated memory, and I will talk soon about the lamentable under-development of this dimension in memory studies. But hauntology does not refer simply to the past: we are also haunted by the futures that we no longer imagine. It is chiefly in this respect that Derrida's lesson in the otherwise largely dated Spectres of Marx remains most valuable, for Socialism is one such future. But so are the past futures of science fiction, of Futurism, of architecture and design, of science proper. John Ptak's brilliant blog Science Books is an acute and at times seemingly near-exhaustive catalogue of many of these branches of hauntology. At Found Objects thus far the main reservoir has been popular culture: music, film, television, comics, publishing, narrative fiction, advertising, a gallery of the self-explanatory mixed with the truly eclectic and surprising. And not all of the objects are found, either, some are original creations or remixes, such as this musical piece care of Unmann-Wittering or this short film by Dolly Dolly.

A frame from Dolly Dolly’s Ether. Reminiscent of Decasia but decidedly more haunting.

True to the dumping ground label, the posts on Found Objects to date are rarely accompanied by explanations. It is the objects, the ghosts themselves that enter into a conversation. For my only contribution thus far, for instance, I was rather uncannily led by a sign for Scarab Close to the place where I wrote last year about lost objects, and Found Magazine. All that remained to do was post (dump) the image and cover my tracks by not linking to where my scarab came from. I saw, for once, no place for reasoned argument, and besides that argument was, again, far too literally-minded to account for the spectral conversation, and too laden for the speed at which this conversation takes place.

That is something else: last Friday alone there were eighteen posts on Found Objects. There really is no time for saying ‘Oh, cool!’, or to get twitchy. It is a thing that moves, that buzzes. It reminds me a little of the road in Falling Out of Cars, except I am not sure if meaning is being lost or found. But it is the road itself, or if you prefer the track, that is becoming densely symbolic, a thing to think with: about cyberspace, about textuality and materiality, about history, culture, memory, time.

From Cop This, You Crooks!, posted by ekolad

And then there are the contributors, for whom I might just have to dust off again the idea of authoriety. Whose blog is Found Objects? Is ours a research unit of sorts, or does it aspire to be? Could the project evolve along the lines of Hacking the Academy, with a book or in performance? Does Found Objects need a hashtag, and if it found one, could it cease to be a blog and just be out there, germinating in places that we cannot foresee, speaking other languages? If in fact the project has a limitation at this moment it is what I’d otherwise think of as a virtue: its being so predominantly (although not quite exclusively) of one place – for let’s face it, you’re not always going to feel terribly haunted unless you are British. But that too could change, and quickly.

There is a sense then in which Found Objects is a spectral double to Poemas del río Wang – as fast as the other is slow, proceeding by free association instead of studious reflection, speaking in a melange of voices instead of few carefully inflected and highly distinctive ones. But they both work, and do the work of mapping for us cyberspace not as it is, but as it could be. We need to value that.

Future Alarm. Posted by Mark.

Poemas del río Wang

I’ve been meaning for a while to write a proper blog review, something that goes beyond the occasional succinct praise of or brief engagement with somebody else’s work. Those acts of course are a fundamental aspect of the activity of blogging and the life of a blog, just like the comments (or lack thereof) are always integral to a post. However the idea of treating a blog as a proper object of review has some peculiar implications.

For one thing, a reviewer is supposed to have extensive knowledge of the subject of the review. If it’s a book or series of books, you’d better have read it and if it’s a film, you’d better have seen it at least once. But how do you even read a blog? I mean all of it? You could follow the King of Hearts’ Advice to the White Rabbit and ‘begin at the beginning, go on until you reach the end, then stop,’ but that’s not how blogs are typically approached. We generally come to them in medias res, through recommendations or a Web search or a blogroll, and even if we like what we see and make a point of coming back, we rarely go back to the beginning. (Mileage may vary, but I think I'm right about this.) Besides, it’s rarely illuminating. As I have argued before, even to the extent that it resembles a book, a blog is a text that one approaches from the last page, which sits on top of the other ones; but if you suppose that each post is a page, then the image you’re looking for is not (necessarily) that of a ream sitting on a table that you can leaf through backwards or turn over and start from the beginning. Perhaps the pages are scattered throughout the room. Perhaps some of them are bound together, according to criteria that may seem arbitrary, while others have been hidden or discarded. Perhaps some of the pages aren’t even written in a language that you understand.

No, a blog is a textual labyrinth out of Borges, like in ‘A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain’, or ‘Death and the Compass’.

I know of a Greek labyrinth that is but one straight line. So many philosophers have been lost upon that line that a mere detective might be pardoned if he became lost as well. When you hunt me down in another avatar of our lives, Scharlach, I suggest that you fake (or commit) one crime at A, a second crime at B, eight kilometres from A, then a third crime at C, four kilometres from A and B and halfway between them. The wait for me at D, two kilometres from A and C, once again halfway between them. Kill me at D, as you are about to kill me at Triste-le-Roy.

Photo by Aleksandr Petrosyan from Tales of Petrograd

But old habits die hard, and so in preparing to review Poemas del río Wang I went right back to the beginning. I wanted to make sure I’d cover all my bases and not get lost in the labyrinth, I suppose. It is a testament to how good this blog is that it gives pleasure even when approached by that dull route, in the way of a school assignment. It is also remarkable that it seems to have come to life already formed, its voice already found. But I know from having visited it regularly for nearly a year now that it gives much more joy in its natural unfolding, at its natural pace, when you have the leisure to follow its internal labyrinthine convolutions and external detours into other blogs, libraries or whole song repertoires. As for that initial encounter, occasioned by an exceptional post on the possibility that the Italian partisan song Bella Ciao may have klezmer roots, I must credit Stephen Judd, who may just be the Web’s model reader, the steersman of the ‘cyber’ metaphor. And I really owe him this acknowledgment because engaging with Río Wang requires the full array of reading skills that the Web at once fosters and demands.

Where does one begin to explain Poemas del río Wang? It is based in Hungary, Mallorca and a China that is largely of the mind, with frequent forays in Turkey, Iran and especially the Soviet Union. Every post is written in at least two languages – English and Hungarian – and some are in Spanish, Catalan and Italian. Other languages, such as Russian, Persian and Chinese, are extensively discussed. These few coordinates go some way towards telling you what the blog is about: places and languages, history and culture. Interestingly, English is not the first language of any of the authors, but serves quite self-consciously as a lingua franca, the code that enables the people in the rest of the world to communicate not just or even primarily with the Anglo world, but rather with each other. Yet Río Wang also resists this move, not just by going out in at least one other language, but also by switching back to native or at any rate more fluent tongues whenever possible, and especially in the comments.

In this respect I must comment briefly on the authors’ decision to run two separate sites that mirror each other. Seeing as it is my day job, I know how much effort it takes to translate texts of that length and complexity, even if you’ve written them yourself; to say nothing of the fact that many of the posts are about the act of translation itself, in both a cultural and a linguistic sense. Consider also how the two sites presuppose and in fact constitute two likely quite separate readerships, with different communities of commenters but also different kinds of knowledge. When I write about Italy for this blog, I am conscious that I must explain it; the mode of address and the kinds of things that I say about home would be different if the same post were to go out both in English and in Italian. So it’s not just a matter of the work that the translation demands, but also the intelligent weaving of those stories so that they can be rendered as native texts in (at least) two languages.

An image gallery from Český Krumlov

What Río Wang is in no small part about, then, is the very possibility of translation, which is not a given at all latitudes, and most especially in the Anglo sphere, where theoretical misgivings often give way to a discomfiting monoculturalism. Here by the sharpest of contrasts is one of the authors, Studiolum, on Russian:

I already at the age of seven loved Russian, the strange letters, the romantic illustrations of the cheap brochures of fables sold in the Gorkiy bookshop, the world of the floppy-eared bear Misha, Cheburashka and Crocodile Gena, but most of all that curious alchemy by which I was able, by coupling foreign words and affixes, to tell the same like in Hungarian but in a different way, that ever since has fascinated me in each language again and again. But am I allowed to learn the language of the occupiers in a good faith?

I turned with my doubts to my father who told me that Russian was not only the language of the Soviet army, but that of Tolstoy and Dostoevski as well. With this approval I happily threw myself into the study of Russian. And thanks to this, I have since then discovered that Russian is not only the language of these great authors, but that of small people as well, and not only of Russians but, in an odd way, of many different people from Bulgaria to Beijing and from Poland to Iran, organized into a kind of a community by virtue of this intermediary language. And in this way it is also mine.

Photo by Ilya Varlamov from The house that did not exist

It was the very familiar that took me to Río Wang – Bella Ciao is sung nightly in this household, alarming as that may sound – but I stayed for the unfamiliar. The post that more than any other sealed my long-term loyalty was this piece on Moscow’s Muromtsev dacha, in which one can find the sense for the historical and the contemporary, the sensibility and the capacity to assemble and present the most extraordinary images that distinguish the blog. This last point cannot be over-emphasised, for Río Wang is visually sumptuous, and a true test of what can be achieved in the medium: I converted a number of friends simply by linking to this set of images from Petrograd, or this post on Tarkovsky’s Polaroids, which are spectacular, but look at how simply yet perfectly laid out this older post on Rodin’s statues in Mallorca is. And it’s all done with Blogger’s template.

I point this out also because with the release of the iPad there has been a lot of talk about portable devices as the future of current print publications, and about how finally magazines will be laid out properly, and be as nice to look at and usable digitally as they are in print. But Río Wang shows us we’re already there, and flips the question on its head: if it’s true that some established blogs, perhaps even the majority of them, could be quite easily thought of as regular columns in existing print publications, where would you fit Río Wang in the old paradigm? Would it be a glossy magazine? Perhaps. But how would you distribute it? How would it reach the territorially dispersed community that it currently serves, and in the idioms that it insists to speak? Where is not just the economic, but also the conceptual space in which such a publication could exist outside of the Web?

In seeking subjects for future blog reviews, I’ll be looking at whether and in what ways they move us towards a native digital form. Whilst paying homage to an eighth century Chinese poet, and seeking to recreate the space for concentration and reflection of a Renaissance study, Poemas del río Wang does just that.

The Borges quotation comes from p. 156 of the 1998 Penguin Classics edition, translated by Andrew Hurley. In every other edition, it's the last page of 'Death and the Compass', which was originally published in Artifices.

It was the latest entry in Agata Pyzik's blog that got me thinking about some of the issues I discussed in the post.