OK, here’s the deal. I moved last week, driving from IA to NV in 3 days, after which I had to unpack and set up my computer and everything, then there was the Father’s Day Extravaganza, and then… flu. Today is really the first day I’m able to get to my computer. I’ve got a whole slew of things rolling around in the old noggin, waiting for their chance to be spewed forth across these pages, so hopefully will begin to unload over the next couple of days. Some of the thoughts that have been clamoring for release:
- Driving cross-country: What’s that like?
- Mormons: What’s up with Mormons, anyway? (Before the Mormons out there start sending me hate mail, I should point out that, irreverent tone aside, I’ve been thinking some fairly positive things about Mormons.)
- Online society or just society online?: I’ve been thinking about the way we think of the Internet in relation to society (thoughts that have grown out of earlier posts on blogging and ethics, third places, and the Matrix).
I’ve noticed myself moving away from the, shall we say, “topically political”–that is, reactions to the particular political events of the moment–and towards more theoretical exposition here, which is, I guess, what one would expect from a nth year grad student. But it’s a little troubling to me, as part of the reason I started this site was to engage the politics of the moment. It seems like I should be thinking a lot more about the various resignations from the Bush administration (which, I should say, aren’t very stunning–Reagan had huge numbers of resignations during his presidency, with more leaving to spend time with their parole officers than to spend time with their “families”) and the Roadmap to Peace (or is it Roadmap to Pieces, these days?), but so many other people seem to do that so much better than I can (and where do they find the time?!).
In any case, I’ll be coming more fully online over the next couple days, as I get more things sorted out for myself, and as my body’s revolt eases into a more comfortably bureaucratic status quo. To those of you who have been anxiously awaiting my return, thanks, and to those of you who haven’t, go fu-, er… well, I hope you find more reasons to enjoy these offerings in the future.
With apologies to my regular visitors (both of you–hi mom!), I am going through some “life changes” at the moment and have been unable to post for the last week, having been out of town. It also looks like I’ll be unable to post anything new for at least another week.
I have a strong interest in ideas of space and place. Whether it’s the use of places as sites of memory and memorialization, the construction of spaces for expression and community, or the mapping of different sorts of activities onto the social landscape, my interest is always sparked by the ways people think of and use physical and metaphorical space.
So a couple of posts about “third places” caught my attention. The first is a definition and short historical examination of the third place in American life; the second, a contribution to the current buzz about Starbucks’ policy on photography inside their stores. In the first, we learn of the basis and post-War decline of third places, while the second describes Starbucks’ conscious effort to craft new third places appropriate to the demands of the ’90s.
So what’s a third place? The rise of industrialized labour (including the service sector) over the course of the 19th century was paralleled by a new focus on the division of space into public and private spheres. Against the pressures of the “public” world of politics and commerce, the family and home were constructed as an asylum of sorts, a place where even the lowliest working man and we are speaking here, for the most part, of men, despite the large numbers of women in the workforce) could escape the dramas of workaday life. Likewise, the home as a site of consumption was opposed to the workplace as site of production: at home, a man was free to enjoy the fruits of his labour.
This geography of social life was felt across the board, in domains as diverse as the development of modern art (e.g. the turn from massive, celebratory historical or mythological scenes to more appropriately-sized images drawn from the world familiar to an urban peit bourgeoisie), political economy (a common critique of Marx’s work is that his view of economics ends at the threshold of the home, and so ignores the contribution that women’s free domestic labour contributed to lowering the costs of the reproduction of labour), the characterization of women as consumers and men as producers (even as women and children toiled away in the mills of the North East, the sweatshops of the urban centers, and the farms of the rural hinterlands), and so on. It is not too much of stretch to say that the multiply inflected opposition between public and private lies at the core of the modern Western worldview–consider our efforts to legitimize what goes on between consenting adults “behind closed doors”.
Third places were spaces in which the conceptually separate worlds of public and private were mediated. For instance, while complaining about unfair labour practices at work could get one fired, and complaining at home might get you sympathy but rarely any satisfactory understanding, the local pub offered a place for workers to share their complaints without fear of management repercussions. Pubs, cafes, restaurants, social clubs, parks, shopping centers (such as the famous Parisian Arcades), museums, even department stores became consciously seen as spaces for sociability, more inclusive than the confines of the home but free of the pressures of the workplace. Partaking of equal parts commerce (networking, deal-making, job-tip-seeking, and other economic activities thrive in third places), politics (Marx’ International met in a pub just south of the British Museum; Hitler’s putsch was launched from a Munich Biergarten, Jewish immigrant socialism thrived in the cafes of the Lower East Side), and a highly constructed privacy (maintained as often through attitude and discretion as through physical barriers). third places provided an outlet ofr expression that neither the workplace or the home could produce.
It is no overstatement to say that the third place has virtually disappeared from American life in the wake of WWII. The rise of suburbs and the interstate beltways ahve moved our homes ever-further from our workplaces and scattered our coworkers–the people that we are most likely to know well–across wide swaths of suburban geography. Americans are often surprised when visiting Europe at the great deal of activity in pubs, cafes, and other public spaces–the piazzas of Italy, the Biergartens of Germany, the British locals. Seeing a family, complete with toddlers, socializing in a smoky pub in Aberystwyth was one of my more surreal moments abroad, running deeply counter to my conceptions of public space. Europeans, on the other hand, often find American bar culture to be highly suprficial, over-eroticized, and asocial.
Over the last decade, however, Americans have seen the rise of new kinds of third places. The Internet has probably been the most significant force in the creation of new spaces for expression and sociability, despite the questions of identity and security that have accompanied its penetration into American consciousness. But the Internet cannot completely fill this apparent need for social interaction. One important factor of third places is their local-ness, their ability to focus on local concerns and identities, and the Internet has, so far, been very lacking in addressing local concerns.
The late ’80s began to see an upsurge in coffee houses, wine bars, brew pubs, and other post-Yuppie third places. At the same time, marketeers began more consciously exploiting the sociality of such places as part of corporate branding efforts. Among the most successful of these establishments was Starbucks, at the same time fueling and exploiting a newly-developed taste for gourmet specialty coffees. ALthough a number of factors played into Starbucks’ success–most notably the disaggregation of the American mass market into an ever-multiplying array of micro-niche markets), among them is their self-conscious efforts at creating third places where coffee-drinking would provide the focus for social existence.
Of course, its a different social existence than that of the local pub in Wales. Starbucks is, first and foremost, a professional’s third place. By virtue of price, design, and location, Starbucks makes it’s audience clear. What’s more, Starbucks is a space for small groups of such people, or solitary people. I once had a housemate who would go to Starbucks to write poetry, apparently drawn by its literary atmosphere. It is unlikely that the next revolution will start in a Starbucks.
But the attempt to capture “third place-ness” as part of a corporate brand is a risky one, and as Brian of Op/Edit (home to the second post mentioned above) points out, the demands of corporate existence are often at odds with the social needs of a third place. A long-time Starbucks employee, Brian describes the origins of managers’ restrictions on in-store photography as a means to combat corporate espionage at a time when the third-placiization of Starbucks was a relatively new and shaky premise. Starbucks has been highly successful in this effort, however, and now managers’ attacks on photographers mainly hamper the fairly widespread social behaviour of taking snapshots of your friends. Corporate concerns demand that Starbucks control the use of its branded space, a demand that is ultimately opposed to the needs of a third place.
I am not about to predict the imminent demise of Starbucks–Americans have shown time and again their willingness to adapt to the social controls of corporatized space, and I doubt that, some miscreants aside, much will come of efforts to subvert Starbucks’ control.
I have a strong interest in ideas of space and place. Whether it’s the use of places as sites of memory and memorialization, the construction of spaces for expression and community, or the mapping of different sorts of activities onto the social landscape, my interest is always sparked by the ways people think of and use physical and metaphorical space.
So a couple of posts about “third places” caught my attention. The first is a definition and short historical examination of the third place in American life; the second, a contribution to the current buzz about Starbucks’ policy on photography inside their stores. In the first, we learn of the basis and post-War decline of third places, while the second describes Starbucks’ conscious effort to craft new third places appropriate to the demands of the ’90s.
So what’s a third place? The rise of industrialized labour (including the service sector) over the course of the 19th century was paralleled by a new focus on the division of space into public and private spheres. Against the pressures of the “public” world of politics and commerce, the family and home were constructed as an asylum of sorts, a place where even the lowliest working man and we are speaking here, for the most part, of men, despite the large numbers of women in the workforce) could escape the dramas of workaday life. Likewise, the home as a site of consumption was opposed to the workplace as site of production: at home, a man was free to enjoy the fruits of his labour.
This geography of social life was felt across the board, in domains as diverse as the development of modern art (e.g. the turn from massive, celebratory historical or mythological scenes to more appropriately-sized images drawn from the world familiar to an urban peit bourgeoisie), political economy (a common critique of Marx’s work is that his view of economics ends at the threshold of the home, and so ignores the contribution that women’s free domestic labour contributed to lowering the costs of the reproduction of labour), the characterization of women as consumers and men as producers (even as women and children toiled away in the mills of the North East, the sweatshops of the urban centers, and the farms of the rural hinterlands), and so on. It is not too much of stretch to say that the multiply inflected opposition between public and private lies at the core of the modern Western worldview–consider our efforts to legitimize what goes on between consenting adults “behind closed doors”.
Third places were spaces in which the conceptually separate worlds of public and private were mediated. For instance, while complaining about unfair labour practices at work could get one fired, and complaining at home might get you sympathy but rarely any satisfactory understanding, the local pub offered a place for workers to share their complaints without fear of management repercussions. Pubs, cafes, restaurants, social clubs, parks, shopping centers (such as the famous Parisian Arcades), museums, even department stores became consciously seen as spaces for sociability, more inclusive than the confines of the home but free of the pressures of the workplace. Partaking of equal parts commerce (networking, deal-making, job-tip-seeking, and other economic activities thrive in third places), politics (Marx’ International met in a pub just south of the British Museum; Hitler’s putsch was launched from a Munich Biergarten, Jewish immigrant socialism thrived in the cafes of the Lower East Side), and a highly constructed privacy (maintained as often through attitude and discretion as through physical barriers). third places provided an outlet ofr expression that neither the workplace or the home could produce.
It is no overstatement to say that the third place has virtually disappeared from American life in the wake of WWII. The rise of suburbs and the interstate beltways ahve moved our homes ever-further from our workplaces and scattered our coworkers–the people that we are most likely to know well–across wide swaths of suburban geography. Americans are often surprised when visiting Europe at the great deal of activity in pubs, cafes, and other public spaces–the piazzas of Italy, the Biergartens of Germany, the British locals. Seeing a family, complete with toddlers, socializing in a smoky pub in Aberystwyth was one of my more surreal moments abroad, running deeply counter to my conceptions of public space. Europeans, on the other hand, often find American bar culture to be highly suprficial, over-eroticized, and asocial.
Over the last decade, however, Americans have seen the rise of new kinds of third places. The Internet has probably been the most significant force in the creation of new spaces for expression and sociability, despite the questions of identity and security that have accompanied its penetration into American consciousness. But the Internet cannot completely fill this apparent need for social interaction. One important factor of third places is their local-ness, their ability to focus on local concerns and identities, and the Internet has, so far, been very lacking in addressing local concerns.
The late ’80s began to see an upsurge in coffee houses, wine bars, brew pubs, and other post-Yuppie third places. At the same time, marketeers began more consciously exploiting the sociality of such places as part of corporate branding efforts. Among the most successful of these establishments was Starbucks, at the same time fueling and exploiting a newly-developed taste for gourmet specialty coffees. ALthough a number of factors played into Starbucks’ success–most notably the disaggregation of the American mass market into an ever-multiplying array of micro-niche markets), among them is their self-conscious efforts at creating third places where coffee-drinking would provide the focus for social existence.
Of course, its a different social existence than that of the local pub in Wales. Starbucks is, first and foremost, a professional’s third place. By virtue of price, design, and location, Starbucks makes it’s audience clear. What’s more, Starbucks is a space for small groups of such people, or solitary people. I once had a housemate who would go to Starbucks to write poetry, apparently drawn by its literary atmosphere. It is unlikely that the next revolution will start in a Starbucks.
But the attempt to capture “third place-ness” as part of a corporate brand is a risky one, and as Brian of Op/Edit (home to the second post mentioned above) points out, the demands of corporate existence are often at odds with the social needs of a third place. A long-time Starbucks employee, Brian describes the origins of managers’ restrictions on in-store photography as a means to combat corporate espionage at a time when the third-placiization of Starbucks was a relatively new and shaky premise. Starbucks has been highly successful in this effort, however, and now managers’ attacks on photographers mainly hamper the fairly widespread social behaviour of taking snapshots of your friends. Corporate concerns demand that Starbucks control the use of its branded space, a demand that is ultimately opposed to the needs of a third place.
I am not about to predict the imminent demise of Starbucks–Americans have shown time and again their willingness to adapt to the social controls of corporatized space, and I doubt that, some miscreants aside, much will come of efforts to subvert Starbucks’ control.
Emma Goldman (no, the other Emma Goldman, silly) of Notes on the Atrocities is putting aside the politics of the moment, for the moment, and running a “Literary Week”. And, so far, it looks pretty good (and I’m not just saying that becuase she had the good foresight to quote me as an example).
Yesterday’s post introduced a short, short story, a metafiction entitled “Democracy, by Martha Shulman” (Links apparently bloggered; go to her home page and read all the entries for the week of May 26), about a frustrated interview with the author of a book on Democracy. Or, rather, three books–or, even better still, three versions of the same book, each radically conflicting in its analysis of the promise and practice of democracy, each ideally adapted to its American, European, and South Asian audience, respectively. Encountering the chain-smoking author in a diner in Sheboygan, our narrator tries to get the “real” story behind “Democracy”. Instead, she receives a fifteen minute discourse on the author’s son’s golf habit.
I don’t pretend to know what it’s all about–is the author hinting that our focus on meaningless trivialities obscures our relationship with democracy, as she herself is obscured in her haze of cigarette smoke? Or that democracy, a malleable and subjective force in life, is somehow like the strange proclivity some have for their particular pasttimes? Or is the son’s futile attempt to play golf in the Wisconsin winter–using red golf balls in the hopes that he will find them in the snow–a mirror of the futility of declaring democracy to be one thing and one thing only? Like most good literature and popular culture, the story evokes more than declares, leaving us rather more wondering than enlightened. Or maybe I’m just missing it completely. In any case, what it reminds me of, obscurely, is an essay by feminist anthropologist Kamala Visweswaran, describing her attempt to interview a woman who played an important role in the Indian revolutionary movement. Visiting the woman, now an important local power and a figure of strength and perseverence, in her office, Visweswaran’s attempts to draw out a narrative of this woman’s involvement in the movement towards India’s independence is repeatedly diverted into a recounting of her late husband’s actions. After finally giving up, Visweswaran is ready to chalk the interview up as a failure, but when she stops to think about it, she realizes that, in denying the anthropologist her story, the woman has denied Visweswaran the power to remake her life. Gayatri Spivak has asked “Can the Subaltern Speak?”; Visweswaran discovered that while she may not be able to speak, she can certainly refuse to speak, and thus refuse to be the subaltern for anthropological consumption.
Moving on to Tuesday, Emma explores the different motivations behind bloggers’ activities, and the way their (our) use of language reflects those motivations. In doing so, she explores the emergent nature of blogging itself, the definition of an activity through its practice.
Blogs are neither pure diary nor journalism–they occupy a space in between. Like diaries, they’re informal, personal, and conversational. But because information is now so immediate and accessible, blogs are more immediate and less reflective than diaries. And they form a public forum of opinion about events as they unfold, placing them in context (personal, ideological) that news avoids.
As to defining “good” and “bad” blogs–this is a more interesting question. So much of the information we receive has the appearance of neutrality (“objectivity” being an artifact of modernism) , but exists for the purpose of selling. Whether it’s direct commercial speech, or speech presented as the hook to sell ad space or commercials, the consumer is always aware of the actual motivation behind the words.
Goldman posits blogging as an attempt to reclaim language from the marketeers and propagandists, to construct a space ofr “authentic” expression–sometimes raw, sometimes polished, sometimes intensely intimate, and sometimes highly abstract, but always somehow personal, an alternative to the journalistic faux-neutrality that hides its objectives behind the mask of rhetoric, and to the affected speech of corporate spokespersons and politicos, speech that refuses to take responsibilty for its implications, speech constructed around the potential of its own denial.
Because my own words are included in her survey of blogging style, I will refrain from discussing that section, except to goggle in wonder at being included in the same thought bubble as Jeanne d’Arc of Body and Soul, who I think is a far more consistent and compelling writer than I am. I will, however, note a semi-criticism, hopefully in good faith. Goldman focuses highly on a fairly particular sort of blog, the lefty political blog. While she does a fine job of teasing out similarities and differences in both style and intent in that sphere, I wonder how her catagories hold up against the freeper crowd, the daily journalist, the friendship blog, and so on. While I think the generalities would hold up pretty well, I think she would find differences between these different spheres of activity at least as great as the difference between Atrios’ succinct thought-poems and my own wordy, rambling posts.
That aside, Emma does us all a service in her analyses, especially in focusing on lesser-known writers alongside “big dogs” in the park. I am looking forward to the rest of the week: Wednesday’s topic, “Prose poetry. Does it always suck?” sounds particularly juicy, followed by Thursday’s focus on the Internet and storytelling. Friday is the old standby, TBA, from whom we’ve all taken at least one or two courses.
Update:I just noticed a small error–when listing other kinds of blogging, I mention “the daily journalist”. Since I’ve made a point of asserting that blogging is not journalism, I hope it’s obvious that I misspoke, there. I mean “daily journalist” in the sense of “keeper of a daily journal”.
You may notice a few changes around here. Over the last several weeks, I’ve grown more and more dissatisfied with Blogger (free service). It started with some ghost entries that it wouldn’t let me delete from the archives–I had to hard-code pages to fill the spaces Blogger insitsted on linking to but wouldn’t generate pages for itself. Then there’s the ongoing archives problem, where only part of your archives get published to the “archives” menu, and the consistent bloggering of permanent links, and so on. I’ve been half-heartedly looking for a replacement, but yesterday I hit a wall. For some reason, after my last post was published (mercifully), my template reverted to one I had designed three years ago when I first signed up with Blogger (although it was never used). And Blogger won’t let me change my template, yesterday or today, which means, no posting, until BLogger gets around to fixing it. Of course, they have to guess that I have a problem, becuase I can’t access their tech support contact page.
So I made the plunge. My choices were limited by the wonky performance of Perl on my host’s servers. PHP doesn’t give me the same problems (although it’s locked in “Safe Mode”, which makes permissions a bit of a challenge). Which is ok–I like PHP. I also wanted something that was Free Software, GPL’ed if possible. Not because I plan to modify my code (I’m not much of a programmer) but because I support the principle of Free Software, and although my hardware pretty much demands I use Windows (and my budget pretty much demandes I keep my current hardware), I am trying to move to Free Software solutions whereever I can. (One of these days I plan to write a post on why I think Free Software is a Good Thing.) Everyone raves about Movable Type, and I might have struggled with my host’s wierd Perl, but MT is not Free Software, and I don’t like that my ability to use it is based solely on the whim of the producer, however good the software might be. I’ve had more than enough cases where free software (free as in beer) “evolved” into shareware or commercial software, and I simply cannot afford that risk with MT.
So, I’ve settled on Pivot, which is a nice software package, a little difficult to set up (especially in Safe Mode) but highly configurable. Technically, it’s an Alpha release, which means I shouldn’t be trusting my incredibly important thoughts to its potentially buggy workings, but what the heck, right? Gotta live a little. Things might be a little messy around here as I get settled in. The problem with Blogger’s template updating meant I had to format my Blogger entries for import by hand, and I already notice a few places where I stripped out a necessary P tag or two (thus removing my style definitions from that text)–I’ll try to clean everything up as time permits. I’ve also included links to the old comments in all the imported entries, so nothing’s lost, though it looks a little funny (with two “comments” links for all the old entries). THese things will slowly drift off the front page and everything will be wonderful once again.
If you see any strange problems, please e-mail me.
I wasn’t going to write about the new Matrix film here. I’ve been posting comments to some of the discussions of the film around the blogosphere, but didn’t feel I had enough to say to make it worth a post of my own. But it’s a funny thing–certain ideas kept reprocessing, some of my earlier sureties about the movie have come under question, and I find myself admiring the movie a lot more today than I did when I saw it 10 days ago. And then I read William Blaze’s take on the political implications of Matrix: Reloaded (via Doc Searls), and it all clicked together. So, for better or worse, here are my thoughts (or a selection of them, anyway) on the Matrix. Note: Spoilers ahead. If you plan to see the movie, don’t read the rest of this post.
Let me first say that we’re talking about a piece of popular culture here, and like any pop culture artifact, we approach it subjectively, with all the baggage of taste and experience that makes us who we are. I happened to like the new Matrix, though it’s not going to be one of my favorite movies. It was, I thought, good blockbuster material, even if you didn’t understand–or didn’t like–all the philosophical mind-gaming. But the meaning of movies, and their impact on cultural thought, has to do with more than just whether we liked a movie or not–heck, some movies can influence the way we think and feel even if we’ve never even seen them. So don’t take this as a review or my attempt to convince you to like a movie you haven’t seen or didn’t like.
The big question about the movie is the ending. After his encounter with the Architect, where he learned that there have been 5 previous iterations of the matrix and that each one gave rise to a "One" as a sort of error-recovery tactic, Neo leaves the matrix to find the Nebuchadnezzar under attack from a troop of sentinels. As the crew flees the ship on foot, the sentinels hot on the heels, Neo has a realization. Muttering, "Something’s different," he turns, holds his hands up, and *wham!* kills sentinels dead. The buzz in the blogosphere is that Neo could do this because he suddenly realized that the "real world", the world where Zion lays, is not actually outside the matrix at all, but is a simulacrum of the outside, developed ostensibly to keep the "errors"–the people who chose the red pill–from contaminating the system.
Many, many commentors found this utterly unsatisfying, a sort of "the last season of Dallas was a dream" cop-out. Despite some earlier reservations, though, I’m beginning to think that this may, in fact, be the correct interpretation. But rather than being disappointed, I find it highly intriguing.
William Blaze sees this as a commentary on the way society controls, contains, and disarms political dissent–a particularly powerful statement given the current vilification of dissent under the Bush administration particularly and contemporary American society in general.
The way the Matrix Reloaded points out the multiple layers of control built into society is perhaps the most potent of the messages it carries. Its one thing to make people aware of the first layer of control. Its far more powerful to make them aware of the way that a built in "resistance" can be used to solidify the power structure.
These are powerful seeds for any campaign to make the American public aware of the way the Bush administration is using the rhetoric and the media to sell a system of control. The left has been pushing these ideas for decades now, and the general public couldn’t give a fuck.
The most effective means of establishing and maintaining control, said Michel Foucault in The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, is through desire, or more properly the manipulation of desire. It is desire that defines markets–desire harnessed and channeled by the PR and marketing machines of corporations–and it is desire that drives the matrix (recall Cypher’s desire for the–illusory–pleasures of the matrix, discussed over a glass of wine and a steak). Because that which is desired is perceived as, well, desirable, the fulfillment of our desire is felt as a choice, and thus also the acquisition of that which fulfills it. The Architect describes the first iteration of the Matrix as "perfect", a system in which all human desires were easily met, and thus flawed; the second and later iterations all included (the illusion of) choice–looking remarkably like late 20th-early 21st century North America–and one very real choice: each denizen of the matrix chooses the matrix, in act after act of desire fulfillment.
Although their desires differ (though highly commodified, Gap-esque party style apparently remains a universal of human desire), the denizens of Zion (I hesitate to say "Zionists")are no less ruled by desire–the desire for change, for revolution (for revolutions sake, maybe?), for love, and ultimately for meaning. Which brings me to the crux of this discussion. Foucault wrote that their is no point outside society, outside the system, from which an attack on society or system could be mounted. As products of society, we are by definition of society, even as we imagine it in some other form. Neo’s sudden insight–along with the words of the Architect, and other hints throughout the movie as a whole–suggests that there is likewise no point outside the matrix from which an attack on the matrix can be mounted. In a scene with one of Zion’s councilors–the kind of scene whose "hidden meaning" is apparent through its seeming pointlessness–Neo visits the Zion machine room. All these machines, the councilor points out, grind away, day after day, to make the city of Zion habitable. Though crude in comparison to the matrix, the machines of Zion act as yet another means by which the society of (Zion’s) desire is realized.
If Zion is simply matrix writ in cruder code, then there truly is no escape from the matrix. Or at least that’s what the disappointed commentors seem most worried about. Two interlocked dicta of Foucault’s thought address the issue of resistance. The first is that power is not only destructive–the power of the sentinels, of the Agents, of society as a whole to grind down, wear out, and ultimately destroy non-compliance–but is also constructive–the power to build coalitions, to create, to imagine and to reimagine. This is the One’s power, to reach into the code of the world and to rewrite its rules. The second, trickier dictum is that even the subversive can be subverted. This is the principle of the matrix–that the subversive elements can be isolated and contained in the subverts paradise, Zion–but it is also the principle of Morpheus–to challenge, even to destroy, the nascent hierarchies of Zion if doing so can produce the conditions for real freedom. (And suddenly it dawns on me: Foucault defined "power"–mysteriously, mystically–as "polymorphous perversity"; I just defined it as poly-Morpheus subversity…)
Foucault would have loved the Matrix movies, I think. A consumer product created largely through the manipulation of signs, fueled by a marketing campaign stretching back months, even years, to build up a desire to see the films (in many cases, perhaps, building a desire too strong to be fulfilled by what was ultimately released), about a world explicitly constructed by the manipulation of of signs, in which both resistance and compliance are mediated by the matrix, the machines that humans have constructed in their desire for a desire-free world. What remains to be seen is how Neo–although I still have a long shot bet on the Kid as the "real" One (or maybe just the Tall Cool One, with a nod to Robert Plant; kidding aside, the Kid was able to free himself from the matrix without the intervention of a Morpheus or other herald, without the act of choice–red pill or blue pill–that Neo and all others before and after him had to make to break the matrix’s hold, and I think we’ll be seeing more of him)–resolves the paradox of choice and desire in the third installment. Foucault’s vision could be bleak–not willing to hand over the reins of his own desire, he threw himself into a life of ever more extreme sex acts, in the course of which he contracted the AIDS he ultimately died of–but apparently did not share his critics’ misgivings about the political implications of his work. Although his work is often seen as undermining political activism (if the subversive can be subverted, then so too can the subvertor of the subversive), Foucault himself was active on behalf of prisoners, immigrants, mental health patients, and the politically oppressed. Neo’s sex life is considerably tamer–we’ll have to wait and see if his revolution proves equally tame.
There wasn’t really anywhere to mention this in my earlier screed on the Matrix, but check out the NYTimes article on the philosophy of the Matrix movies. Or forget the article, which is only “non-specialist reporter good”, not “real insight about the movie good”, and check out the picture. Captioned “Keanu Reeves portrays Neo in a scene from ‘The Matrix Reloaded,'” the image shows not Keanu Reeves, but the computerized simulacrum of Keanu Reeves created for the entirely computer-generated “Burly Brawl”. Life imitates art, indeed.
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I wasn’t going to write about the new Matrix film here. I’ve been posting comments to some of the discussions of the film around the blogosphere, but didn’t feel I had enough to say to make it worth a post of my own. But it’s a funny thing–certain ideas kept reprocessing, some of my earlier sureties about the movie have come under question, and I find myself admiring the movie a lot more today than I did when I saw it 10 days ago. And then I read William Blaze’s take on the political implications of Matrix: Reloaded (via Doc Searls), and it all clicked together. So, for better or worse, here are my thoughts (or a selection of them, anyway) on the Matrix. Note: Spoilers ahead. If you plan to see the movie, don’t read the rest of this post.
Let me first say that we’re talking about a piece of popular culture here, and like any pop culture artifact, we approach it subjectively, with all the baggage of taste and experience that makes us who we are. I happened to like the new Matrix, though it’s not going to be one of my favorite movies. It was, I thought, good blockbuster material, even if you didn’t understand–or didn’t like–all the philosophical mind-gaming. But the meaning of movies, and their impact on cultural thought, has to do with more than just whether we liked a movie or not–heck, some movies can influence the way we think and feel even if we’ve never even seen them. So don’t take this as a review or my attempt to convince you to like a movie you haven’t seen or didn’t like.
The big question about the movie is the ending. After his encounter with the Architect, where he learned that there have been 5 previous iterations of the matrix and that each one gave rise to a "One" as a sort of error-recovery tactic, Neo leaves the matrix to find the Nebuchadnezzar under attack from a troop of sentinels. As the crew flees the ship on foot, the sentinels hot on the heels, Neo has a realization. Muttering, "Something’s different," he turns, holds his hands up, and *wham!* kills sentinels dead. The buzz in the blogosphere is that Neo could do this because he suddenly realized that the "real world", the world where Zion lays, is not actually outside the matrix at all, but is a simulacrum of the outside, developed ostensibly to keep the "errors"–the people who chose the red pill–from contaminating the system.
Many, many commentors found this utterly unsatisfying, a sort of "the last season of Dallas was a dream" cop-out. Despite some earlier reservations, though, I’m beginning to think that this may, in fact, be the correct interpretation. But rather than being disappointed, I find it highly intriguing.
William Blaze sees this as a commentary on the way society controls, contains, and disarms political dissent–a particularly powerful statement given the current vilification of dissent under the Bush administration particularly and contemporary American society in general.
The way the Matrix Reloaded points out the multiple layers of control built into society is perhaps the most potent of the messages it carries. Its one thing to make people aware of the first layer of control. Its far more powerful to make them aware of the way that a built in "resistance" can be used to solidify the power structure.
These are powerful seeds for any campaign to make the American public aware of the way the Bush administration is using the rhetoric and the media to sell a system of control. The left has been pushing these ideas for decades now, and the general public couldn’t give a fuck.
The most effective means of establishing and maintaining control, said Michel Foucault in The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, is through desire, or more properly the manipulation of desire. It is desire that defines markets–desire harnessed and channeled by the PR and marketing machines of corporations–and it is desire that drives the matrix (recall Cypher’s desire for the–illusory–pleasures of the matrix, discussed over a glass of wine and a steak). Because that which is desired is perceived as, well, desirable, the fulfillment of our desire is felt as a choice, and thus also the acquisition of that which fulfills it. The Architect describes the first iteration of the Matrix as "perfect", a system in which all human desires were easily met, and thus flawed; the second and later iterations all included (the illusion of) choice–looking remarkably like late 20th-early 21st century North America–and one very real choice: each denizen of the matrix chooses the matrix, in act after act of desire fulfillment.
Although their desires differ (though highly commodified, Gap-esque party style apparently remains a universal of human desire), the denizens of Zion (I hesitate to say "Zionists")are no less ruled by desire–the desire for change, for revolution (for revolutions sake, maybe?), for love, and ultimately for meaning. Which brings me to the crux of this discussion. Foucault wrote that their is no point outside society, outside the system, from which an attack on society or system could be mounted. As products of society, we are by definition of society, even as we imagine it in some other form. Neo’s sudden insight–along with the words of the Architect, and other hints throughout the movie as a whole–suggests that there is likewise no point outside the matrix from which an attack on the matrix can be mounted. In a scene with one of Zion’s councilors–the kind of scene whose "hidden meaning" is apparent through its seeming pointlessness–Neo visits the Zion machine room. All these machines, the councilor points out, grind away, day after day, to make the city of Zion habitable. Though crude in comparison to the matrix, the machines of Zion act as yet another means by which the society of (Zion’s) desire is realized.
If Zion is simply matrix writ in cruder code, then there truly is no escape from the matrix. Or at least that’s what the disappointed commentors seem most worried about. Two interlocked dicta of Foucault’s thought address the issue of resistance. The first is that power is not only destructive–the power of the sentinels, of the Agents, of society as a whole to grind down, wear out, and ultimately destroy non-compliance–but is also constructive–the power to build coalitions, to create, to imagine and to reimagine. This is the One’s power, to reach into the code of the world and to rewrite its rules. The second, trickier dictum is that even the subversive can be subverted. This is the principle of the matrix–that the subversive elements can be isolated and contained in the subverts paradise, Zion–but it is also the principle of Morpheus–to challenge, even to destroy, the nascent hierarchies of Zion if doing so can produce the conditions for real freedom. (And suddenly it dawns on me: Foucault defined "power"–mysteriously, mystically–as "polymorphous perversity"; I just defined it as poly-Morpheus subversity…)
Foucault would have loved the Matrix movies, I think. A consumer product created largely through the manipulation of signs, fueled by a marketing campaign stretching back months, even years, to build up a desire to see the films (in many cases, perhaps, building a desire too strong to be fulfilled by what was ultimately released), about a world explicitly constructed by the manipulation of of signs, in which both resistance and compliance are mediated by the matrix, the machines that humans have constructed in their desire for a desire-free world. What remains to be seen is how Neo–although I still have a long shot bet on the Kid as the "real" One (or maybe just the Tall Cool One, with a nod to Robert Plant; kidding aside, the Kid was able to free himself from the matrix without the intervention of a Morpheus or other herald, without the act of choice–red pill or blue pill–that Neo and all others before and after him had to make to break the matrix’s hold, and I think we’ll be seeing more of him)–resolves the paradox of choice and desire in the third installment. Foucault’s vision could be bleak–not willing to hand over the reins of his own desire, he threw himself into a life of ever more extreme sex acts, in the course of which he contracted the AIDS he ultimately died of–but apparently did not share his critics’ misgivings about the political implications of his work. Although his work is often seen as undermining political activism (if the subversive can be subverted, then so too can the subvertor of the subversive), Foucault himself was active on behalf of prisoners, immigrants, mental health patients, and the politically oppressed. Neo’s sex life is considerably tamer–we’ll have to wait and see if his revolution proves equally tame.
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In comments on my post yesterday (Art of Noise), Michael Hall of PuddingBowl takes exception with my characterization of his comments on “blog noise”. Indeed, he links to two of his posts that I hadn’t seen, one of which explains his position somewhat more thoroughly, in a way that jibes finely with what I had said:
Armed with a more informed understanding of how blogs/bloggers tick and why they produce the media they do, and how they have a healthy chunk of Google’s attention, we’ll become able to contextualize them (and Google’s usefulness) in our overall information diet. This isn’t, to my mind, about de-privileging blogs… it’s about understanding them and the effect they have on their media surroundings, then incorporating them into the much broader mission of seeking the truth, which is something grander and harder to nail down than all the words and facts to which Google can direct us.
As I explained to him privately, I did not intend for my comments to be read as a slight towards any of the people I mentioned. I have a great deal of respect for bloggers in general, as I think that, regardless of our political beliefs and our personal quirks, we are all contributing to the construction of a space for public debate, something that is becoming all too rare with the commodification of public spaces in the physical world. What I was trying to get at in my discussion of “blog noise”–ineffectively, so it seems–is that the terms in which this discussion has been couched, particularly the characterization of what we do as “noise”, subtly undermines the “emergent democracy”-type values that a lot of us profess. Obviously Searls is at the forefront when it comes to celebrating bloggers’ contributions to society–and the fact that the rest of us are blogging in the first place suggests that the rest of us are as well–but the uncritical acceptance that what we do is aptly characterized as “noise” seems to fly in the face of that celebration.
Nobody at the moment seems to be able to define just what it is bloggers do or, indeed, what characteristics mark a particular website out as a “blog”, as opposed to some other species of online communicating. And that’s, in my opinion, a good thing. Blogging is a new phenomenon, regardless of its precedents, and ambiguity of form and function is welcome in new forms of social interaction. Maybe in any form of social interaction. But ambiguity makes some (maybe most) people uncomfortable. They try to resolve it by comparing what it is they do with more “fixed” categories, in this case journalism.
Thus the ridiculous charges directed at Joi Ito, condemning him for blogging openly about his relationship with a product (in this case, the Movable Type blogging system) and its creators, and then investing in it. Or the hand-wringing over The Agonist‘s use of third-party material without proper citations. Or the Blog Herald’s criticism of Andy Baio’s fundraising drive to buy an Apple iPod for the subject of the Star Wars video that’s been circulating the ‘net, in some part due to Baio’s hosting of the file on his site–the Blog Herald takes them to task for their failure to post a statement saying “how long you would go, how you would be transparent, what steps you would take to assure full disclosure.” I agree that it would be a shame for a blogger to exploit someone to raise some cash for themselves, but the Blog Herald’s consternation seems to stem more from Baio’s failure to be professional than anything else–I mean come on, we’re all amateurs here, in every sense of the word. Should Baio, or any of us, refrain from doing nice things for each other because we lack the legal know-how to arrange a statement of disclosure? Should Baio have registered as a fundraiser to limit his and the boy’s tax liabilities, written a mission statement, organized a Board of Trustees, retained a lawyer and outside auditor, or set up an escrow fund in order to do what he felt was right? I’m glad that he is making an effort to show where the money came from and how it’s being used, but let’s face it, people didn’t give money because they admired his legal acumen, they donated because they trusted Baio, and that trust comes out of his relation with his community, not the legal edifice he failed to surround his efforts with.
(By the way, they raised over $4,000! I’ve always been somewhat uncomfortable about putting one of those “PayPal me” links on my site–despite severe “cash flow problems”–but that’s a lot of cabbage, that is! Maybe I should rethink my objections? I’m overweight and do goofy stuff–maybe I could score some bling-bling?)
Whatever these accusations may say about the trustworthiness of Ito, Sean-Paul Kelley of the Agonist, or Baio, the apparently widely-shared sentiments that their actions somehow calls into question the nature of the blogosphere itself only makes sense if we view their efforts–and those of other bloggers–as failed journalism. All are being attacked for their failures to live up to a standard of journalistic integrity that none of them professed to uphold in the first place.
It is this conception of blogging as failed journalism–a conception that infects the writing of people who would otherwise not give a moment’s credence to such a suggestion, through the uncritical use of phrases like “blog noise” and the uncritical comparison of bloggers’ comments to standards that have little to do with what bloggers do–that I was trying to expose in my earlier post. Blogging may be like journalism, in some ways, but blogging is not journalism.
In another post, Searls describes some of the positive features that set blogging apart from run-of-the-mill journalism (although in doing so he calls blogging “the most accountable form of journalism ever invented”, a characterization I disagree with for reasons that are surely obvious by now):
We not only respond personally in many (perhaps most) cases, but take correction far more willingly, and publicly, than you’ll ever see from a newspaper or a magazine. We even rewrite already published stuff.
Ever notice how pathetic most letters to editors are? I can’t think of a weaker thing to publish. Yet with newspaper and magazines, those who disagree, or need to offer corrections, have little recourse.
Ever notice useless corrected errata in print publications are? And don’t even bother with TV or radio news. There’s nothing remotely like that here.
Where it counts, blogging lives up to a standard that most journalists–and their publishers–would find all too constrictive. We rewrite, correct, retract, and rethink what we’ve written, and we do so publicly. We open ourselves and our thoughts up to comments and critique from outsiders–and we respond. And we do so not because of legal or financial obligations but because of social obligations, to ourselves, to our readers, and to our communities.
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