Some
Reference Points for Discussion
|
Preliminary Class Business
|
  |
|
Synopsis of the Argument Thus Far
- The initial unit of the course is an investigation into
the role, position, or stance of art vis-à-vis information
culture
- We can get a good first approximation of the issues by
contrasting two poems of memory:
- Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" from the era of
the first Industrial Revolution and the early modernization
of information media (e.g., newspapers, magazines, postal
service)
- Gibson's "Agrippa" from the era of the Information
Revolution or so-called "postindustrialism"
- For Wordsworth, memory is an act of consciousness that
fuses disjunctive moments in time together and fuses the interior
self with external nature. Memory is what makes a self whole,
"organic."
(The relation of the poem to its media reinforces this argument:
writing is embedded within orality).
This is thus Wordsworth's idea of "information": (ll.
119-42)
an "in-forming" of the self as an organic whole within
an organic "One Life" of nature and community.
- For Gibson, memory is not the consciousness of "in-formed"
wholeness in Wordsworth's sense. It is consciousness of something
external and technological—"the mechanism"—that
does the opposite of fusing time and space into an organic whole.
The "mechanism" disjoins (like the shutter
of a camera). Life is a collage of disjunct moments and places
like snapshots in a photo album crammed full of clippings from
newspapers and images from media
(The relation of the poem to its media reinforces this argument:
the physical
form of Agrippa).
This is thus Gibson's idea of life in the information age: "memory"
like RAM (random-access memory), like browsing, like records
in a database.
Cf., E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Cultural Literacy: What Every American
Needs to Know: "To be culturally literate is to possess
the basic information needed to thrive in the modern world"
(p. 1); the "list" of cultural literacy (his appendix)
|
| |
|
Zooming Out to See the Larger Context: "Postmodernism"
Art that engages or experiments with contemporary information,
media, and technological culture is part of a larger movement
in art since the 1960s that has been called "postmodernism."
- Jameson's paradigmatic works on postmodernism (the 1983
essay on "Postmodernism and Consumer Society,"
the 1991 book on Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic
of Late Capitalism)
- Moreover, art that engages with information media and techology
is increasingly important in this context because postmodernity
as a whole is increasingly defined by information culture.
- Jameson's increasing awareness of the role played by "informationalism"
- First note in Postmodernism: "This is the
place to regret the absence from this book of a chapter
on cyberpunk, henceforth, for many of us, the supreme
literary expression if not of postmodernism, then
of late capitalism itself."
- Postmodernism, p. 44:
"So I come finally to my principal point here, that
this latest mutation in space—postmodern hyperspace—has
finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the
individual human body to locate itself, to organize its
immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to
map its position in a mappable external world. It may
now be suggested that this alarming disjunction point
between the body and its built environment—which
is to the initial bewilderment of the older modernism
as the velocities of spacecraft to those of the automobile—can
itself stand as the symbol and analogon of that even sharper
dilemma which is the incapacity of our minds, at least
at present, to map the great global multinational and
decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves
caught as individual subjects.
|
| |
|
Postmodern Art
-
Some of Jameson's paradigms of postmodernism:
-
Renée (pseud.), Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl,
with analytic interpretation by Marguerite Séchehaye;
translated by Grace Rubin-Rabson (New York: New American Library,
1970, c1951) — as quoted in Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism
and Consumer Society," p. 120:
| I remember very well the day it happened. We were staying
in the country and I had gone for a walk alone as I did
now and then. Suddenly, as I was passing the school,
I heard a German song; the children were having a singing
lesson. I stopped to listen, and at that instant
a strange feeling came over me, a feeling hard
to analyze but akin to something I was to know too well
later—a disturbing sense of unreality. It seemed
to me that I no longer recognized the school, it had become
as large as a barracks; the singing children were prisoners,
compelled to sing. It was as though the school and
the children's song were apart from the rest of the world.
At the same time my eye encountered a field of wheat whose
limits I could not see. The yellow vastness, dazzling
in the sun, bound up with the song of the children imprisoned
in the smooth stone school-barracks, filled me with such
anxiety that I broke into sobs. I ran home to our garden
and began to play "to make things seem as they usually
were," that is, to return to reality. It was the first
appearance of those elements which were always present
in later sensations of unreality: illimitable vastness,
brilliant light, and the gloss and smoothness of material
things. |
- Unjustified, unexplained irruption of a "strange
feeling" (compare Wordsworth's "blessed
mood"). Life shrinks/expands to this one instant
that has nothing at all to do with the rest of her life.
- The intensity of her isolation in the moment is imaged
in the imprisonment of the children within the vast landscape
of wheat: "It was as though the school and the children's
song were apart from the rest of the world"
- She can only return to a seamless reality by "playing"
at it or simulating it
- Bob Perelman's "China" (quoted in Jameson's
"Postmodernism and Consumer Society" essay, pp. 121-22)
- Conspiracy films & nostalgia films
- Westin Bonaventure Hotel, Los Angeles: [image
site 1] [image
site 2] [image
site 3] [image
site 4]
- Frank Gehry House, Santa Monica — Images: A
B
C D
E
- Compare, once more, the
physical form of Agrippa
The principles of "schizophrenia," "pastiche,"
loss of "cognitive-mapping": Random-access space and
time |
| |
| |
|
Whither Art in the Information Age? Preliminary
Thoughts
- Collage
and cut-ups in Modernist art:
Paul D. Miller (aka "DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid"),
"Kut Kulture: Teleplex: Telecommunication versus Transportation"
Artbyte (May-June 2000), pp. 26-27:
". . . the 'cut': words, images, sounds flowing out
that would deliver, like James Joyce used to say, "sounds
like a river." Flow, rupture, and fragmentation–all
seamlessly bound to the viewer's perspectival architecture. . . ."
"D.W. Griffith, Dziga Vertov, Oscar Michaux, and Sergei
Eisenstein (especially with his theory of "dialectical
montage" or "montage of attractions" that created
a kind of subjective intercutting of multiple layers of stories
within stories) were forging stories for a world just coming
out of World War I. A world which, like ours, was increasingly
inter-connected, and filled with stories of distant lands,
times, and places–where cross-cutting allowed the presentation
not only of parallel actions occurring simultaneously in separate
spatial dimensions, but also parallel actions occurring on
separate temporal planes–and helped convey the sense
of density that the world was confronting."
-
Contemporary arts of collage, assemblage, appropriation, and
random access:
Steven Shaviro, "Fringe Research: Napster and its
Discontents"
Artbyte (May-June 2000), pp. 18:
Today creativity is about sampling and appropriation. The
result is a double bind. The more creators are guaranteed
payment for their work, the less access they have to the materials
they need in order to create.
 Examples:
- What is the purpose of such art?
- Mimesis?
- Pleasure?
- Critique?
-
What will be the ideology of art in the information age?
- Modernism's "make it new"
- Information age's mantra of "creative destruction"
(with the emphasis on "creation," "innovation,"
"new")
- Critical Art Ensemble and other artists credo of art as
critique by destruction (which has Modernist, avant-garde
precedents)
- What is the difference between such art and "terrorism"?
- A different paradigm: an art of "cool"?
|
| |
|
References
- E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Cultural Literacy: What Every
American Needs to Know (New York: Random House, 1987)
- Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema
and Space in the World System (Bloomington: Indiana Univ.
Press; London: British Film Institute, 1992)
- Alan Liu,course
on postmodernism
- Paul D. Miller (aka "DJ Spooky that Subliminal
Kid"), "Kut Kulture: Teleplex: Telecommunication versus
Transportation"
Artbyte (May-June 2000)
- Steven Shaviro, "Fringe Research: Napster and
its Discontents"
Artbyte (May-June 2000)
Supplementary
links for this class on Study Materials page
|
| |
|
