On Reading: Form, Fictionality, Friendship - my book chapter is in this!

A collaboration with a dear old friend of mine. Read my chapter “On Printed Matter: Towards a Zineic History of Reading” in this book.

On critical steam, zines and folk

Some thoughts on critical steam…

Yesterday Lawrence Grossberg dropped into WSA to ask what is given the task of “holding chaos at bay” today? If I understand him correctly, Grossberg was flagging up a crisis of critique, particularly cultural studies critique, in that these days it is no longer radical or i.e. critique no longer offers true alternatives to established knowledge nor offers any different means to social organization or new abilities to articulate knowledge. The accusation is that critique nowadays has a divisive effect and therefore impotent. When intellectual critique is simply critique for its own sake, what tools can we use to collectively challenge the ideological hegemony of capitalism?

This rather bleak assessment comes from Bruno Latour’s article “Why has critique ran out of steam?” For Latour, the post-structuralist fashions of critique led by the likes of Baudrillard has now lost its radical punch and gone into what seems to me, some kind of self-referential K-hole: Logos is fascist, nothing is real and therefore everything can be (un)real, and we live in an unending market of symbolic exchange. Problem is, if all structure is bad, then how can we organize ourselves for making political radical impact? You know, change the world and make it a better place or at least to believe that we can change the world for the better. Instead what we have today, at least in academic circles, Latour laments, “a certain form of critical spirit has sent us down the wrong path, encouraging us to fight the wrong enemies and, worst of all, to be considered as friends by the wrong sort of allies…the question was never to get away from facts but closer to them, not fighting empiricism but, on the contrary, renewing empiricism” (p231).

My impression is that this must be quite a serious problem, especially when I remember that Latour, whose work such as Pasteurization was an central part of my set readings in my PG research methodology classes. I remember my tutor using Latour as meta-method critique, to plant the seeds of empirical doubt as a way of ensuring we seriously reflect on our methodological critique and design. Skepticism, I was told, should be the basis of my intellectual endeavours. Years of beaten-in Singaporean obedience meant that I promptly did as I was told; the irony, as Grossberg puts, “you cannot tell someone to be autonomous” was clearly lost on me. So I did my own fair bit of chasing those that Latour calls, “French field commanders” - Baudrillard, Barthes, Derrida and all their troops on either side of the Atlantic.

I have to stress that I agree with Latour and also think Grossberg’s questions are important precisely because of the poststructural theory I have read. I don’t find Baudrillard or Derrida’s work depressing at all. If anything, I think their work chimes really well with the worries outlined in Grossberg’s seminar. Unless I have read the texts totally wrong, from the get-go, such as in Of Grammatology, Derrida quite explicitly explains that deconstruction isn’t necessarily the enemy of positivist science; quite the reverse, the project of deconstruction is motivated by the belief that empiricism is no longer truly empirical [hence the preformative “post” in post-structuralist/modernist]. Derrida makes a very clear distinction between empirical consciousness and empiricism, the former breeds the kind of toxic cynicism practiced by Republican Luntz, while the latter does not. The very heart of Derrida’s radicalism aims to be, I dare say, truly empirical. I think this is why his work allows someone like Gayatri Spivak to call for “strategic determinism” - which I see as a possible response to Grossberg’s observation that “we [left cultural studies critique] hate genetic determinism unless it proves that homosexuality is genetically determined - the Right are not stupid”

One can interpret Baudrillard along similar lines. I think it is worth mentioning that his 1994 essay, “Radical Thought” does actually clarify that the Baudrillardian move is an optimistic denial of the Real; it is hopeful rather than nihilistic or repetitive ‘instant revisionism’. Maybe Latour is referring to those who deploy Baudrillardian critique without following up with substantial alternatives and in this he is annoyed and justifiably so. But I do think a text like Radical Thought shows an acute awareness of the accusations leveled against simulacra; the text says:

But the good apostles come back and ask: how can you take away the real from those who already find it hard to live and who, just like you and me, have a right to claim the real and the rational? The same insidious objection is proclaimed in the name of the Third World: How can you take away abundance when some people are starving to death? Or perhaps: How can you take away the class struggle from all the peoples that never got to enjoy their Bourgeois revolution? Or again: How can you take away the feminist and egalitarian aspirations from all the women that have never heard of women’s rights? If you don’t like reality, please do not make everybody else disgusted with it!

Baudrillard is not to blame for his book being a bestseller because I like to think his readers are not all so cynical and angry about the way the world is going. The declaration that war is a simulacrum is not the same as saying there is no point in making a stand about it. “The radical prediction is always that of a non-reality of the facts, of an illusion of the factual. It merely starts with the foreboding of this illusion, but never fuses with the objective state of things. Any fusion of this type would be similar to mistaking a messenger for his message” (Baudrillard, 1994). Indeed I think Latour does precisely this in his comment about Baudrillard’s position about the Twin Towers event - he fuses the thought with the thing. Latour suggests that simulcra-tic critical move is a partial polemic and in fact, a cheap critical gesture: the event is a fetish-sized fact with no causal weight whatsoever. You are a duped believer of a positivist projection of an event and you realize the emptiness of the event and are left to deal with the fact that you have little control over your destiny. Hence the feeling of helplessness, loss of steam after critique.

Ok - if you rely solely on such gestures, then Latour is probably right, we will all end up in a horrible binary trap, doomed to live out the legacy of European modern thought without ever putting it into any real crisis. Latour calls for a third position, a “fair position” (p243) - belief and skepticism to be held together in a mix that acknowledges that events cannot be objectively known nor are they totally “empty projections on a screen” (p242). Or in Grossberg’s words, the world is too complicated to be only explained by positions within a critical binary. On this point, I actually think Grossberg, Baudrillard and Latour are in agreement because Radical Thought says: [Here I must thank my friend Jeremy Fernando for pointing out the following quote]

The absolute rule, that of symbolic exchange, is to return what you received. Never less, but always more. The absolute rule of thought is to return the world as we received it: unintelligible. And if it is possible, to return it a little bit more unintelligible. A little bit more enigmatic.

Returning the event more unintelligible, more enigmatic - is that not a nice opening for Latour’s third position?

Later thinking about zines and folk…

Apart from trying to reconcile JB and BL [I am sure I was missing the irony in Latour’s article - as I always tell my British friends, there is no Chinese translation for irony. The concept is, unfortunately, inarticula-ble in one half of my brain], I have also been thinking about what Grossberg said about music in the 60s/70s and affect. His tentative answer to the crisis of critique is to call a search for something to hold all these divided critical positions together - a multiplicity - so as to create or offer a potent alternative social and political organization. In his interpretation of Latour’s third position, Grossberg cites the Occupy protests as a fairly successful example of a mix of positions - not necessarily agreeing with each other but at least in agreement that something is wrong with capitalist hegemony. A coming-together of different positions without making a collective demand. Another example he offers is the music from the 60s - a pre-visual and pre-digital age when music meant a matter of life-and-death to people. Music used to bring different tribes together through a critical affect - counter culture - that gave its participants an arena to gather rather than divide. Music in the 60s allowed for a counter cultural force that gave:

1. the sense of multiplicity
2. the ability to give some unity and organization that is not hierarchical or demanding homogeneity - a “movement of movements” - “where did the sense of stickiness?” not necessarily in agreement but the relationally exists, belonging together in a counter culture.

These two things, Grossberg points out, is no longer the case for our natively digital generation of Facebookers and Twitterers. Such affective power seems to be missing in today’s pop culture. Music, they can give up, iPads and computers, they cannot live without. How is this technology “keeping chaos at bay”? Where is its ‘affect’? Where are the songs?

Maybe it is indeed true for America but Grossberg’s claims made me feel a bit uncomfortable because I can think of a few examples where this critical, counter-cultural affect was holding disparate forces together. The first one: zines. I am going to try to take a ‘third’ position about zines. I have pointed out elsewhere that zines have the soul of the Internet and the body of print. Adding to this, I think this might give a clue that zines do perform the function of ‘songs’ the people who make read and collect zines. Even if you discount the earlier punk zines from the same era that Grossberg was romanticizing [and dismissing as identity politics rather than a collective counter critical culture], I do think today’s amphibious zines demonstrate collective affect.

To be sure, many zine historians or writers, (Teal Triggs, Stephen Duncombe, Amy Spencer, etc) note the power of community or collective spirit of zinesters and the zine scene. I only partially agree with them because in every single zine fair I have been to or any zine I have reviewed, I find that the zine is a product of something far more modest, quotidian and individual than say, to produce a collective communal force. Zinesters do zines for themselves and no one else. Some people make zines - online and offline - to show off their design work to peers, some people make zines because they like to draw, some make them to air personal thoughts on cupcakes, dinosaurs, football, fashion, music or architecture. Anything.The zine is a completely self-centered and somewhat irrational endeavour and represent highly individual instances, or moments - reflecting, I think, the soul of the Internet. And this is what makes zine culture and zines so interesting and to borrow from Latour again, a non-exhaustive “state of affairs”. Being evangelical about zines’ community-creating effect risks reducing their ‘thingness’, or forgetting that they are a ‘sticky’ gathering rather than a cohesive demand for alternative organization. Sure, sometimes they coincide with identity politics, feminist messages and charitable causes, and the DIY nature can be argued as a statement against mainstream commercial publishing forces but by and large, zines are made for rather more ordinary reasons. Internationale’s comment in the seminar also gave me the idea that the object and material quality of a printed zine and of the meeting to ‘swap’ might be the source of the ‘stickiness’ of an otherwise vastly dispersed online self-publishing phenomenon. Zines are for many zinesters, I am sure, their “desert island discs”.

The other example that springs to mind comes from a book I read recently, by Alex Niven, called “Folk Opposition” - kindly offered to me by whisperingdave. It’s a wonderful exploration of the notion of “folk” a sense of communality and common sentiment, providing a British response to Grossberg’s story of songs, music and American counter culture. Folk opposition, Niven argues, is much needed in the era of ConDemnation. Beginning with an incisive inspection of the Raoul Moat affair, Niven argues (much more eloquently than me) that the weird public sympathy for a police killer is symptomatic of a wider counter-spirit unaware or unable to articulate their shared disenchantment with the Tory government. The book goes on to take up a variety of other pop cultures [such as also folk music ] and I see a connection between Niven’s folk and Grossberg’s idea of affective stickiness. Really worth a read. 

my lecture on mass production and consumption  →

One of the sessions I delivered for a module called Contemporary Issues - a course designed to feed visual theory and design history to studio practice students at Winchester Sch of Art. This link points to a blog post in response to my lecture. Food for thought.

Are the birds calling out my name?  →

Archizines LIVE - A Review

I dropped in at the AA for Archi-zines Live, an exhibition curated by Elias Redstone of fanzines about architecture. The exhibition was, in true AA style, really well put together and the zines on display featured from around the world, NYC, Chile, Japan, China, Canada, France, Netherlands and including familiar UK ones such as lovely newspapers from Preston is My Paris and P.E.A.R., some traditional A5 zines from Mat.zine (‘Material Zine’), a really interesting set featuring research ideas from Dundee Sch of Architecture and my personal favorite from Touching Architecture Series #1 that has some lovely drawings from Hackney to Herne Hill, London. There were, however, some publications there that I felt really stretched the definition of ‘fanzine’ to its breaking point:  really well-finished, big-budget, glossy mini-magazines such as Log, Mark Magazine and Criticat. Urm, I’m not so sure these are fanzines.

Also watched a thought-provoking roundtable chat with zine-makers of America Deserta Revisited, Beyond, P.E.A.R. and Face B, chaired by Mimi Zeiger, maker of Maximum Maxim MMX zine about the role of printed matter in the digital age. For them, their fanzines play the role of “artifacts” or ‘things on paper”. They all talked about a “nostalgia for printed matter”, the obsession, as Tom Keely said, “with something you can hold..that is personal, lo-fi and scruffy”. Pedro Gadanho talked about a “slowness” of printed narratives in Beyond, that tries to “compete with the speed at which people read images these days”. These comments confirmed some of the already-existing defenses of print circulating in the design community or, I thought, a kind of anxiety about the overwhelming amount of ‘stuff’ on the Internet.

I’m not sure that digital can be so easily opposed to print in terms of immaterial and material, intangible and tangible or that such nostalgia for print is necessarily, as Matthew Butcher (of P.E.A.R.) says, ‘polemical’. Is the thirst for ‘slowness’ polemical? After all, the material aspect of the Internet can make reading a laboriously slow process - ever experienced a bad broadband connection? It also seemed ironic that the roundtable was talking about a nostalgia for printed matter whilst sitting underneath two massive digital TV screens projecting their fanzines. Elias himself acknowledged the perversity of having a “project that fetishises printed matter [Archizines] to begin life online”. The roundtable also acknowledged although their zines aspire to share ideas with a wide general audience, the distribution and production of these zines often means that they remain within specialists circles; these zines risk, as Tom warns,”preaching to the converted”.

Nevertheless, the roundtable brought up some intriguing ideas and I wished Mimi opened questions to the floor. I really wanted to ask the roundtable what decisions did they take about the material aspects of their zines: i.e. how did they decide on the paper, design, layout, pagination, colors, treatment for their various architectural subject-matter? For me, that would have been more helpful for showing why printed matter, well, matters.

The exhibition will continue to run til 14 December, before the entire collection will be transferred to the National Art Library at the V&A to become a public resource. Well worth a visit!

#productdesignFAIL: Bought some cardamon pods from Sainsburys the other day and the bottle came with a perforated lid whose perforations were much smaller than the cardamon pods…..?!

Don Norman on design research, research-practice gulf, and living with complexity.

What a marvelous man he is!

C-3PO: Sir, the possibility of successfully navigating an asteroid field is approximately 3,720 to 1.

Han Solo: Never tell me the odds.

— Inspirational Quote of the Day

J’s in China carving wood for woodblock printing, looks A-MAZING.

sooo jealous!

Ouverture Facile

I used to play this flash game a couple of years ago with my ex boyfriend and we only got up to levels 14 or 15, I can’t remember. Now they have updated it with user-generated riddles. Pretty excited to try them out.

Warning: not for the impatient game players!