Erik Johnson’s Medi(a)tations

Erik Johnson’s storage unit for quotes related to his research and teaching. Usually stuff on communication and media in contemporary Africa, performance in postcolonial public spheres, and popular cultures of the global south. Play along at home (RSS) or grab one at random.

[erkjhnsn]

"But what if there is no [oppositional] power? In societies where there is no effective moral alternative and where potential oppositional powers are to a large extent entangled in the apparatuses of power, there is no longer anybody in a position to become outraged about the cynicisms of hegemonic power. The more a modern society appears to be without alternatives, the more it will allow itself to be cynical. In the end, it is ironical about its own legitimation. 'Basic values' and excuses merge imperceptibly. The bearers of hegemonic power in the political and economic scene become hallow, schizoid, unconvincing. We live under the management of respectable players."

— Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason (1983), trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 112–13.

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"kynicism has made speaking the truth dependent on the factors of courage, cheekiness, and risk, and the process of truth gets caught in a previously unknown moral tension; I call it the dialectic of disinhibition. Those who take the liberty of confronting prevailing lies provoke a climate of satirical loosening up in which the powerful, together with their ideologies of domination, let go affectively—precisely under the onslaught of the critical affront by kynics. But while the kynics support their 'cheekiness' with a life of ascetic integrity, they are answered, from the side of the attacked, by an idealism with a disinhibition that is disguised as outrage and that, in the most extreme case, can go as far as extermination. An essential aspect of power is that it only likes to laugh at its own jokes."

— Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason (1983), trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 103.

[erkjhnsn]

I define as a free or natural poetics any collective yearning for expression that is not opposed to itself either at the level of what it wishes to express or at the level of the language that it puts into practice.      (I call self-expression a shared attitude, in a given community, of confidence or mistrust in the language or languages it uses.)      I define forced or constrained poetics as any collective desire for expression that, when it manifests itself, is negated at the same time because of the deficiency that stifles it, not at the level of desire, which never ceases, but at the level of expression, which is never realized.      Natural poetics: Even if the destiny of a community should be a miserable one, or its existence threatened, these poetics are the direct result of activity within the social body. The most daring or the most artificial experiences, the most radical questioning of self-expression, extend, reform, clash with a given poetics. This is because there is no incompatibility here between desire and expression. The most violent challenge to an established order can emerge from a natural poetics, when there is a continuity between the challenged order and the disorder that negates it.      Forced poetics: The issue is not one of attempts at articulation (composite and "voluntary"), through which we test our capacity for self-expression. Forced poetics exist where a need for expression confronts an inability to achieve expression. It can happen that this confrontation is fixed in an opposition between the content to be expressed and the language suggested or imposed.      This is the case in the French Lesser Antilles where the mother tongue, Creole, and the official language, French, produce in the Caribbean mind an unsuspected source of anguish.      A French Caribbean individual who does not experience some inhibition in handling French, since our consciousness is haunted by the deep feeling of being different, would be like someone who swims motionless in the air without suspecting that he could with the same motion move in the water and perhaps discover the unknown. He must cut across one language in order to attain a form of expression that is perhaps not part of the internal logic of this language. A forced poetics is created from the awareness of the opposition between a language that one uses and a form of expression that one needs.      [. . .]      Forced poetics or counterpoetics is instituted by a community whose self-expression does not emerge spontaneously, or result from the autonomous activity of the social body. Self-expression, a casualty of this lack of autonomy, is itself marked by a kind of impotence, a sense of futility. This phenomenon is exacerbated because the communities to which I refer are always primarily oral. The transition from oral to written, until now considered in the context of Western civilization as an inevitable evolution, is still cause for concern. Creole, a not-yet-standardized language, reveals this problem in and through its traditional creativity.

Édouard Glissant, "Poetics," in Caribbean Disourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), 120–21.

[erkjhnsn]

Édouard Glissant's "The Situation of the Spoken" (selections) 1. The written requires nonmovement: the body does not move with the flow of what is said. The body must remain still; therefore the hand wielding the pen (or using the typewriter) does not reflect the movement of the body, but is linked to (an appendage of) the page.      The oral, on the other hand, is inseparable from the movement of the body. There the spoken is inscribed not only in the posture of the body that makes it possible (squatting for a palaver for instance, or the rhythmic tapping of feet in a circle when we keep time to music), but also in the almost semaphoric signals through which the body implies or emphasizes what is said. Utterance depends on posture, and perhaps is limited by it.      That which is expressed as a general hypothesis can now perhaps be reinforced by specific illustration. For instance, the alienated body of the slave, in the time of slavery, is in fact deprived, in an attempt at complete dispossession, of speech. Self-expression is not only forbidden, but impossible to envisage. Even in his reproductive function, the slave is not in control of himself. He reproduces, but it is for the master. All pleasure is silent: that is, thwarted, deformed, denied. In such a situation, expression is cautious, reticent, whispered, spun thread by thread in the dark.      When the body is freed (when day comes) it follows the explosive scream. Caribbean speech is always excited, it ignores silence, softness, sentiment. The body follows suit. It does not know pause, rest, smooth continuity. It is jerked along.      To move from the oral to the written is to immobilize the body, to take control (to possess it). The creature deprived of his body cannot attain the immobility where writing takes shape. He keeps moving; it can only scream. In this silent world, voice and body pursue desperately an impossible fulfillment.      Perhaps we will soon enter the world of the nonwritten, where the transition from oral to written, if it takes place, will no longer be seen as promotion or transcendence. For now, speech and body are shaped by their orality, by the same obsession with past privation. The word in the Caribbean will only survive as such, in a written form, if this earlier loss finds expression. 2. From the outset (that is, from the moment Creole is forged as a medium of communication between slave and master), the spoken imposes on the slave its particular syntax. For Caribbean man, the word is first and foremost sound. Noise is essential to speech. Din is discourse. This must be understood.      It seems that meaning and pitch went together for the uprooted individual, in the unrelenting silence of the world of slavery. It was the intensity of the sound that dictated meaning: the pitch of the sound conferred significance. Ideas were bracketed. One person could make himself understood through the subtle associations of sound, in which the master, so capable of managing "basic Creole" in other situations, got hopelessly lost. Creole spoke by the békés was never shouted out loud. Since speech was forbidden, slaves camouflaged the word under the provocative intensity of the scream. No one could translate the meaning of what seemed to be nothing but a shout. It was taken to be nothing but the call of a wild animal. This is how the dispossessed man organized his speech by weaving it into the apparently meaningless texture of extreme noise.      There developed from that point a specialized system of significant insignificance. Creole organizes speech as a blast of sound.      [. . .] [This phenomenon] is a constant feature of the popular use of Martinican Creole. Not only in the delivery of folktales and songs, but even and often in daily speech. A requirement is thus introduced into spoken Creole: speed. Not so much speed as a jumbled rush. Perhaps the continuous stream of language that makes speech into one impenetrable block of sound. If it is pitch that confers meaning on a word, rushed and fused sounds shape the meaning of speech. [. . .]      In the pace of Creole speech, one can locate the embryonic rhythm of the drum. It is not the semantic structure of the sentence that helps to punctuate it but the breathing of the speaker that dictates the rhythm: a perfect poetic concept and practice.      So the meaning of a sentence is sometimes hidden in the accelerated nonsense created by scrambled sounds. But this nonsense does convey real meanings to which the master's ear cannot have access. Creole is originally a kind of conspiracy that concealed itself by its public and open expression. For example, even if Creole is whispered (for whispering is the shout modified to suit the dark), it is rarely murmured. The whisper is determined by external circumstances; the murmur is a decision by the speaker. The murmur allows access to a confidential meaning, not to this form of nonsense that could conceal and reveal at the same time a hidden meaning.      But if Creole has at its origin this kind of conspiracy to conceal meaning, it should be realized that this initiative purpose would progressively disappear. Besides, it has to disappear so that the expression of this conspiracy should emerge as an openly accessible language. A language does not require imitation but apprenticeship; it must be accessible to all.[. . .]      The dilemma of Martinican Creole is that the stage of secret code has been passed, but language (as a new opening) has not been attained. The secretiveness of the community is no longer functional, the stage of an open community has not been reached. 3. As in any popular oral literature, the traditional Creole text, folktale or song, is striking in the graphic nature of its images. This is what learned people refer to when they speak of concrete languages subordinate to conceptual languages. By that they mean that there should be a radical transition to the conceptual level, which should be attained once having left (gone beyond) the inherent sensuality of the image.      [. . .]      But the Creole language, in addition, is marked by French—that is, the obsession with the written—as an internal transcendence. In the historical circumstances that gave rise to Creole, we can locate a forced poetics that is both an awareness of the restrictive presence of French as a linguistic background and the deliberate attempt to reject French, that is, a conceptual system from which expression can be derived. Thus, imagery, that is, the "concrete" and all its metaphorical associations, is not, in the Creole language, an ordinary feature. It is a deliberate ploy. It is not an implicit slyness but a deliberate craftiness. There is something pathetic in the imaginative ploys of popular Creole maxims. Like a hallmark that imposes limitation.      One could imagine—this is, moreover, a movement that is emerging almost everywhere—a kind of revenge by oral languages over written ones, in the context of a global civilization of the nonwritten. Writing seems linked to the transcendental notion of the individual, which today is threatened by and giving way to a cross-cultural process. In such a context will perhaps appear global systems using imaginative strategies, not conceptual structures, languages that dazzle or shimmer instead of simply "reflecting." Whatever we think of such an eventuality, we must examine from this point on what conditions Creole must satisfy in order to have a place in this new order. 4. Creole was in the islands the language of the plantation system, which was responsible for the cultivation of sugar cane. The system has disappeared, but in Martinique it has not been replaced by another system of production; it degenerated into a circuit of exchange. Martinique is a land in which products manufactured elsewhere are consumed. It is therefore destined to become increasingly a land you pass through. In such a land, [. . .] the structure of the mother tongue, deprived of a dynamic hinterland, cannot be reinforced. Creole cannot become the language of shopping malls, nor of luxury hotels. Cane, bananas, pineapples are the last vestiges of the Creole world. With them this language will disappear, if it does not become functional in some other way.      [. . .]      The role of Creole in the world of the plantations was that of defiance. One could, based on this, define its new mode of structured evolution as "negative" or "reactive," different from the "natural" structural evolution of traditional languages. In this, the Creole language appears to be organically linked to the cross-cultural phenomenon worldwide. It is literally the result of contact between different cultures and did not preexist this contact. It is not a language of a single origin, it is a cross-cultural language.      [. . .]      The Creole folktale is the symbolic strategy through which, in the world of the plantation, the mass of Martinicans developed a forced poetics (which we will also call a counter-poetics) in which were manifested both an inability to liberate oneself totally and an insistence on attempting to do so.      [. . .]Verbal delirium as the outer edge of speech is one of the most frequent products of the counterpoetics practiced by Creole. Improvisations, drumbeats, acceleration, dense repetitions, slurred syllables, meaning the opposite of what is said, allegory and hidden meanings—there are in the forms of this customary verbal delirium an intense concentration of all the phases of the history of this dramatic language. We can also state, based on our observation of the destructively non-functional situation of Creole, that this language, in its day-to-day application, becomes increasingly a language of neurosis. Screamed speech becomes knotted into contorted speech, into the language of frustration. We can also ask ourselves whether the strategy of delirium has not contributed to maintaining Creole, in spite of the conditions that do not favor its continued existence. We know that delirious speech can be a survival technique.      But it is in the folktale itself, that echo of the plantation, that we can sense the pathetic lucidity of the Creole speaker. An analysis of the folktale reveals the extent to which the inadequacies with which the community is afflicted (absence of a hinterland, loss of technical responsibility, isolation from the Caribbean region, etc.) are fixed in terms of popular imagery. What is remarkable is that this process is always elliptical, quick, camouflaged by derision. That is what we shall see in the folktale. The latter really emanates from a forced poetics: it is a tense discourse that, woven around the inadequacies that afflict it, is committed in order to deny more defiantly the criteria for transcendence into writing, to constantly refusing to perfect its expression. The Creole folktale includes the ritual of participation but carefully excludes the potential for consecration. It fixes expression in the realm of the derisively aggressive.

Édouard Glissant, "Poetics," in Caribbean Disourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), 122–125, 126–129. This is a text that I introduce early in my African Rhetorical Traditions class, well before students settle on their research project for the semester. I've found that Glissant is a writer who students love digging into, but you have to give him the space he demands. On a day we're going to discuss Glissant, I get everything else off our plate, and we spread out and work through it line-by-line. This one is four points that Glissant makes across eight pages. His comment that Creole conceals itself by it's openess and publicity, in particular, gives me the feeling of the exploding-head emoji (and I'm still recovering from that point when he follows up with "whispering is the shout modified to suit the dark"). Once we've spent 30–45 minutes with the essay in front of us, we let ourselves off the hook, take a break, and maybe spend the rest of class workshopping ideas for an uncoming assignment or just doing something that gets us moving around the classroom. Highlighted portions in this post are offered to help re-focus students if they're returning to the text later in the semester. (Importantly: I don't circulate my highlighted version to students when we're first processing the reading.) Glissant also works well paired with Palcy's La Rue Cases-Nègres, but I'm sure that's a pretty standard lesson plan. Has anyone else used Glissant successfully in a class? If so, please reach out; I'd love to trade ideas (especially for undergraduate classes and liberal arts colleges).           — Erik

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There exists a scholastic and academic historico-political outlook which sees as real and worthwhile only such movements of revolt as are one hundred per cent conscious, i.e. movements that are governed by plans worked out in advance to the last detail or in line with abstract theory (which comes to the same thing). But reality produces a wealth of the most bizarre combinations. It is up to the theoretician to unravel these in order to discover fresh proof of his theory, to ‘translate’ into theoretical language the elements of historical life. It is not reality which should be expected to conform to the abstract schema.

Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 200. [N.B.: One small but interesting difference in the translation of this passage that appeared in the complete English translation of the Prison Notebooks (published as three volumes by Columbia University Press in the ‘90s) is that, in the new translation, reality doesn’t “[produce] a wealth of the most bizarre combinations” … instead, “reality is teeming with the most bizarre coincidences.” — Erik]

[thecommunicationstation-blog]

In Northern Nigeria, the instability of everyday life has been sublimated into the quite different melodramatic arena of romantic love. Love is a profoundly individual emotion but unsettling, potentially excessive, overwhelming people’s judgement and sometimes involving them in actions against their will. It is the sight of key tensions between individual desire and respect for a social order in which marriages are expected to be arranged, and where individual desire runs up against the ideal of obedience to parents and to the social order (195). […] But in the case of love, at least in contemporary Northern Nigeria, these imaginative investments produce shifts in gender relations and practices of courtship and marriage. At their heart is real social change, manifest most starkly in the movement away from arranged marriages in urban areas and toward a far greater choice for youths in marriage partners, and a greater reluctance of parents to force their choices onto unwilling partners (208).

Larkin, Brian. Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria. Durham: Duke UP, 2008. Print. (via thecommunicationstation)

[erkjhnsn]

Something like a transnational public sphere has certainly rendered any strictly bounded sense of community or locality obsolete. At the same time, it has enabled the creation of forms of solidarity and identity that do not rest on an appropriation of space where contiguity and face-to-face contact are paramount. In the pulverized space of postmodernity, space has not become irrelevant: it has been reterritorialized in a way that does not conform to the experience of space that characterized the era of high modernity. It is this that forces us to reconceptualize fundamentally the politics of community, solidarity, identity, and cultural difference. Imagined Communities, Imagined Places    People have undoubtedly always been more mobile and and identities less fixed than the static and typologizing approaches of classical anthropology would suggest. But today, the rapidly expanding and quickening mobility of people combines with the refusal of cultural products and practices to 'stay put' to give a profound sense of a loss of territorial roots, of an erosion of the cultural distinctiveness of places, and of ferment in anthropological theory.[. . .]     [. . .] In this culture-play of diaspora, familiar lines between 'here' and 'there,' center and periphery, colony and metropole become blurred.     [. . .] It is here that it becomes most visible how imagined communities (Anderson 1983) come to be attached to imagined places, as displaced peoples cluster around remembered or imagined homelands, places, or communities in a world that seems increasingly to deny such firm territorialized anchors in their actuality.

Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, "Beyond 'Culture': Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference," Cultural Anthropology 7, no. 1 (1992): 9, 10, 10–11. [NB: The section break in Gupta and Ferguson's essay that I've included in this quote functions as the fulcrum between the taken for granted understandings of culture that emerged around the nation-state, high modernity, and classic anthropology on one hand and, on the other, the new models that we are forced to be sensitive to within transnational, postmodern, and postcolonial inquiry. In doing so, Gupta and Ferguson invite a series of pivots for analysis, including those from native to mobile communities, from isomorphic to hybrid identities, from boundaries to the borderlands, and from a sense of space as something that is placed to something that is imagined. — Erik]

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It has been argued that long playing records surpassed sea-going vessels as the most important conduits of Pan-African communication in the twentieth century. This adage is an apt description of the mechanisms whereby a poly-lateral dialogue between African Americans and Black South Africans has been able to sustain itself over a century. Since 1890 music has been one of the primary mechanisms through which Black South Africans have accessed African-American culture and used it as a vehicle for formulating and articulating critiques of and responses to the social forces that structure their lives. [. . .]      Rap music is a preeminent example of an art form that exhibits dual tendencies with respect to Western modernity. On the one hand, rap music celebrates individualism, racial chauvinism, consumerism, capitalism, and sexual dominance—core values that have shaped the trajectory of modernity and its bitter fruits, particularly for people of color. [. . .]      On the other hand, rap music has also provided a powerful critique of Western modernity.      As a result, when [rap music] is 'indigenized' both elements become available for interpretation and incorporation.

Zine Magubane, "Globalization and Gangsta Rap: Hip Hop in the Post-Apartheid City," in The Vinyl Ain't Final: Hip Hop and the Globalization of Black Popular Culture, ed. Dipannita Basu and Sidney J. Lemelle (London: Pluto Press, 2006), 208, 210.

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[T]he practices of contemporary media constitute a lens through which we can view the history of remediation. What we wish to highlight from the past is what resonates with the twin preoccupations of contemporary media: the transparent presentation of the real and the enjoyment of the opacity of media themselves. [. . .]      [. . .]      [W]e call the representation of one medium in another remediation, and we will argue that remediation is a defining characteristic of the new digital media. What might seem at first to be an esoteric practice is so widespread that we can identify a spectrum of different ways in which digital media remediate their predecessors, a spectrum depending on the degree of perceived competition or rivalry between the new media and the old.      At one extreme, an older medium is highlighted and represented in digital form without apparent irony or critique. [. . .] In these cases, the electronic medium is not set in opposition to painting, photography, or printing; instead, the computer is offered as a new means of gaining access to these older materials, as if the content of the older media could simply be poured into the new one. Since the electronic version justifies itself by granting access to the older media, it wants to be transparent. The digital medium wants to erase itself, so that the viewer stands in the same relationship to the content as she would if she were confronting the original medium. [. . .] Transparency, however, remains the goal.      Creators of other electronic remediations seem to want to emphasize the difference rather than erase it. In these cases, the electronic version is offered as an improvement, although the new is still justified in terms of the old and seeks to remain faithful to the older medium's character. [. . .] [T]he new medium does not want to efface itself entirely. [. . .] The borrowing might be said to be translucent rather than transparent.      The digital medium can be more aggressive in its remediation. It can try to refashion the older medium or media entirely, while still marking the presence of the older media and therefore maintaining a sense of multiplicity and hypermediacy. [. . .] This form of aggressive remediation throws into relief both the source and the target media. [. . .] This tearing out of context makes us aware of the artificiality of both the digital version and the original[.] The work becomes a mosaic in which we are simultaneously aware of the individual pieces and their new, inappropriate setting. In this kind of remediation, the old media are presented in a space whose discontinuities, like those of collage and photomontage, are clearly visible. [. . .]      Finally, the new medium can remediate by trying to absorb the older media entirely, so that the discontinuities between the two are minimized. The very act of remediation, however, ensures that the older medium cannot be entirely effaced; the new medium remains dependent on the older one in acknowledged or unacknowledged ways. [. . .]      [. . .] And in most cases, the goal is to make these electronic interventions transparent. [. . .] And here too the goal is to make the computer disappear[.] [. . .] This attempt shows that remediation operates in both directions: users of old media such as film and television can seek to appropriate and refashion digital graphics, just as digital graphics artists can refashion film and television.      Unlike our other examples of hypermediacy, this form of aggressive remediation does not create an apparently seamless space. It conceals its relationship to early media in the name of transparency; it promises the user an unmediated experience, whose paradigm again is virtual reality. [. . .] On the other hand, [. . .] immersive virtual reality also remediates both television and film: it depends on the conventions and associations of the first-person point of view or subjective camera. [. . .] This strategy does not mean that virtual reality can obliterate the earlier visual point-of-view technologies; rather, it ensures that these technologies remain at least as reference points by which the immediacy of virtual reality is measured. Paradoxically, then, remediation is as important for the logic of transparency as it is for hypermediacy.      [. . .] [D]igital media [. . .] function in a constant dialectic with earlier media, precisely as each earlier medium functioned when it was introduced. Once again, what is new about digital media lies in their particular strategies for remediating television, film, photography, and painting. Repurposing as remediation is both what is 'unique to digital worlds' and what denies the possibility of that uniqueness.

Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 21, 45, 46, 47, 48, 50. [NB: Such is the spectrum of remediation that Bolter and Grusin lay out in the opening chapter of their book: from transparent to translucent forms of remediation to aggressive forms of hypermediacy that refashion and, alternatively, absorb. (For the purposes of this post I've bracketed out a fifth kind of remediation, "refashioning within a single medium" (49). … And, for the record, Wikipedia's survey of this chapter seems to get the taxonomy wrong—yet another reason that any students out there might want to avoid that shortcut!) . . . Bolter and Grusin actually provide a number of examples of each form of remediation that they cover, but I've mostly dodged my way around those examples with ellipses. However, there is one example of remediation mentioned in the chapter that I can't help but post here: "Electronic Behavior Control System" from art-school performance artists, the Emergency Broadcast Network. Enjoy it in all of it's early-/mid-90s glory:

— Erik]

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[O]ur culture's contradictory imperatives for immediacy and hypermediacy [demonstrate] what we call a double logic of remediation. Our culture wants both to multiply its media and to erase all traces of mediation: ideally, it wants to erase its media in the very act of multiplying them.      [. . .]      Virtual reality is immersive, which means that it is a medium whose purpose is to disappear. This disappearing act, however, is made difficult by the apparatus that virtual reality requires. [. . .]      [. . .] Virtual reality, three-dimensional graphics, and graphical interface design are all seeking to make digital technology 'transparent.' In this sense, a transparent interface would be one that erases itself, so that the user is no longer aware of confronting a medium, but instead stands in an immediate relationship to the contents of that medium.      The transparent interface is one [. . .] manifestation of the need to deny the mediated character of digital technology altogether. To believe that with digital technology we have passed beyond mediation is also to assert the uniqueness of our present digital moment. [. . .] However, the desire for immediacy itself has a history that is not easily overcome. At least since the Renaissance, it has been a defining feature of Western visual (and for that matter verbal) representation. [. . .] These earlier media sought immediacy through the interplay of the aesthetic value of transparency with techniques of linear perspective, erasure, and automaticity, all of which are strategies also at work in digital technology.      [. . .]      [. . .] Immediacy is our name for a family of beliefs and practices that express themselves differently at various times among various groups, and [. . .] [t]he common feature of all these forms is the belief in some necessary contact point between the medium and what it represents.      [. . .]Where immediacy suggests a unified visual space, contemporary hypermediacy offers a heterogeneous space, in which representation is conceived not as a window on the world, but rather as 'windowed' itself—with windows that open on to other representations or other media. The logic of hypermediacy multiplies the signs of mediation and in this way tries to reproduce the rich sensorium of human experience. [. . .] In every manifestation, hypermediacy makes us aware of the medium or media and (in sometimes subtle and sometimes obvious ways) reminds us of our desire for immediacy.      [. . .] The logic of immediacy has perhaps been dominant in Western representation, at least from the Renaissance until the comping of modernism, while hypermediacy has often had to content itself with a secondary, if nonetheless important, status. Sometimes hypermediacy has adopted a playful or subversive attitude, both acknowledging and undercutting the desire of immediacy. At other times, the two logics have coexisted[.] At the end of the twentieth century, we are in a position to understand hypermediacy as immediacy's opposite number, an alter ego that has never been supressed fully or for long periods of time.      In all its varied forms, the logic of hypermediacy expresses the tension between regarding a visual space as mediated and as a 'real' space that lies beyond mediation. [Richard] Lanham (1993) calls this the tension between looking at and looking through, and he sees it as a feature of twentieth-century art in general and now digital representation in particular (3—28, 31—52).

Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 5, 21–22, 23–24, 30, 34, 41.

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The working hypothesis will be this: power relations (with the struggles that traverse them or the institutions that maintain them) do not only play with respect to knowledge a facilitating or obstructive role; they are not content merely to encourage or to stimulate it, to distort or to limit it; power and knowledge are not linked together solely by the play of interests or ideologies; the problem is not therefore that of determining how power subjugates knowledge and makes it serve its ends, or how it imprints it mark on knowledge, imposes on it ideological contents and limits. No body of knowledge can be formed without a system of communications, records, accumulation and displacement which is in itself a form of power and which is linked, in its existence and functioning, to the other forms of power. Conversely, no power can be exercised without the extraction, appropriation, distribution or retention of knowledge. On this level, there is not knowledge on the one side and society on the other, science and the state, but only the fundamental forms of knowledge/power

Michel Foucault, "Penal Theories and Institutions" (1971–72), quoted in Alan Sheridan, Michel Foucault: The Will to Truth (London: Tavistock, 1980), 131. [NB: This quote comes from Foucault's 1971–72 lectures at the Collège de France on Penal Theories and Institutions (Théories et Institutions Pénales). Although Palgrave has been steadily issuing the English translations of these lectures for a few years now, the 1971–72 lectures are one of the few not yet out in English. For those of you who parle Français, you can always seek out les originaux over at Amazon.fr — Erik]

[haidangphan-deactivated20150207]

Lou’s Views, forever! 

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"Reed's largely improvised monologue in Blue In The Face, where he plugs his invention for flip-lens reading glasses, brings to light his rarely seen good-humoured side. It seems that Reed has neatly folded away the ubiquitous shades, let his hair grow, come out of a depressive state of bereavement that snowballed into his last two albums, Songs for Drella and Magic And Loss to rediscover his quick-witted, charmingly effusive other self. [. . .] Shot in only three days, Blue In The Face is set in the same cigar shop as Smoke. It's a high-spirited celebration of everyday Brooklyn life. The largely improvised performances, based on [Paul] Auster's notes, also feature an array of New York personalities and actors as diverse as Madonna, Roseanne, Jim Jarmusch, Michael J.Fox, Mira Sorvino, Jared Harris and Lily Tomlin. It's a funny, intriguing, spontaneous and quite mad hour and a half."      — from "Lou Reed and Paul Auster" by Jefferson Hack.

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A powerful sign of impending changes in the significance of culture was Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835, 1840). He wrote of encountering in the United States a vibrant, changing society where popular sovereignty was a fact rather than a fiction, where common people were uncommonly literate, and where culture was overwhelmingly popular yet conservative in character. The contents of democratic culture, as described by Tocqueville, was qualitatively different from the unreflective prejudices favored by [Edmund] Burke. Democracy was developing its own versions of literature, philosophy, and even science, thus challenging the divide between ‘high’ and 'low’ culture. The phenomenon of a democratic culture was encouraged by the outpouring of newspapers, pamphlets, and books—testimony to the democratizing role of technology in the production and dissemination of culture.

Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, exp. ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 455. [NB: Those interested in Tocqueville should also seek out Wolin’s Tocqueville: Between Two Worlds (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). — Erik]

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When men are no longer united in any firm or lasting way, it is impossible to persuade any great number of them to act in cooperation unless you convince each of those whose help is vital that his private interests are served by voluntarily joining his efforts to those of all the others.      This cannot be achieved usually or conveniently except with the help of a newspaper, which is the only way of being able to place the same thought at the same moment into a thousand minds.      A newspaper is an adviser one need not seek out because it appears voluntarily every day to comment briefly upon community business without deflecting your attention from your own.      So, as men become more equal and individualism more of a menace, newspapers are more necessary. The belief that they just guarantee freedom would diminish their importance; they sustain civilization.      [. . .]      The principal citizens in an aristocracy see each other from a distance and, if they wish to join forces, they walk around toward each other, drawing a crowd of men behind them.      On the other hand, it often happens that, in democratic countries, a large number of men who want or need to form an association cannot do so because they fail to see or find each other because they are all very puny and lost in the crowd. Then a newspaper appears to publish the opinion or idea which had occurred simultaneously but separately to each of them. Immediately, everyone turns towards this light and those wandering spirits, having sought each other for a long time in the darkness, at last meet and unite.      [. . .]      There is, therefore, a vital connection between associations and newspapers; the latter create associations which, in their turn, create newspapers. If it is a truism that associations must multiply as social conditions become more equal, it is no less certain that the number of newspapers increases as associations proliferate.      [. . .] A newspaper survives only if it echoes a doctrine or opinion common to a large number of men. Thus a newspaper always represents an association of which its regular readers make up the membership.      [. . .]      The more social conditions become equal and less power individuals possess, the more easily men drift with the crowd and find it difficult to stand alone in an opinion abandoned by the rest.      The newspaper represents the associations and one may say that it speaks to each of its readers in the name of all the others, sweeping them along all the more readily as they are individually powerless.      The power of newspapers must therefore increase as men become equal.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America and Two Essays on America (1835, 1840), trans. Gerald E. Bevan (London: Penguin, 2003), 600–01, 601, 602, 603, 603–04.

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Individualism is a recently coined expression prompted by a new idea, for our forefathers knew only of egoism.      [. . .]      Individualism is democratic in origin and threatens to grow as conditions become equal.      Among aristocratic nations, families remain in the same situation for centuries and often in the same location. This turns all the generations into contemporaries, as it were. [. . .]      In addition, aristocratic institutions achieve the effect of binding each man closely to several of his fellow citizens.      Since the class structure is distinct and static in an aristocratic nation, each class becomes a kind of homeland for the participant because it is more obvious and more cherished than the country at large.      All the citizens of aristocratic societies have fixed positions one above another; consequently each man perceives above him someone whose protection is necessary to him and below him someone else whose cooperation he may claim.      Men living in aristocratic times are, therefore, almost always closely bound to an external object and they are often inclined to forget about themselves. [. . .]      In democratic times, on the other hand, when the obligations of every person toward the race are much clearer, devotion to one man in particular becomes much rarer. The bond of human affection is wide and relaxed.      Among democratic nations, new families constantly emerge from oblivion, while others fade away; all remaining families shift with time. The thread of time is ever ruptured and the track of generations is blotted out. Those who have gone before are easily forgotten and those who follow are still completely unknown. Only those nearest to us are of any concern to us.      As each class closes up to the others and merges with them, its members become indifferent to each other and treat each other as strangers. Aristocracy had created a long chain of citizens from the peasant to the king; democracy breaks down this chain and separates all the links.      As social equality spreads, a great number of individuals are no longer rich or powerful enough to exercise great influence upon the fate of their fellows, but have acquired or have preserved sufficient understanding and wealth to be able to satisfy their own needs. Such people owe nothing to anyone and, as it were, expect nothing from anyone. They are used to considering themselves in isolation and quite willingly imagine their destiny as entirely in their own hands.      Thus, not only does democracy make men forget their ancestors but also hides their descendants and keeps them apart from their fellows. It constantly brings them back to themselves and threatens in the end to imprison them in the isolation of their own hearts.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America and Two Essays on America (1835, 1840), trans. Gerald E. Bevan (London: Penguin, 2003), 587, 588, 589.

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But I am not a stranger in America and the same syllable riding on the American air expresses the war my presence has occasioned in the American soul.      [. . .] [The American Negro slave] is unique among the black men of the world in that his past was taken from him, almost literally, at one blow. [. . .] It was his necessity, in the words of E. Franklin Frazier, to find a 'motive for living under American culture or die.' The identity of the American Negro comes out of this extreme situation, and the evolution of this identity was a source of the most intolerable anxiety in the minds and the lives of his masters.      For the history of the American Negro is unique also in this: that the question of his humanity, and of his rights therefore as a human being, became a burning one for several generations of Americans, so burning a question that it ultimately became one of those used to divide the nation. [. . .] [I]n effect, the black man, as a man, did not exist in Europe. But in America, even as a slave, he was an inescapable part of the general social fabric and no American could escape having an attitude toward him. American attempt until today to make an abstraction of the Negro, but the very nature of these abstractions reveals the tremendous effects the presence of the Negro has had on the American character.      [. . .]      At the root of the American Negro problem is the necessity of the American white man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself. And the history of this problem can be reduced to the means used by Americans—lynch law and law, segregation and legal acceptance, terrorization and concession—either to come to terms with this necessity, or to find a way around it or (usually) to find a way of doing both these things at once. The resulting spectacle, at once foolish and dreadful, led someone to make the quite accurate observation that 'the Negro-in-America is a form of insanity which overtakes white men.'      [. . .]      The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man, too. No road whatever will lead Americans back to the simplicity of this European village where white men still have the luxury of looking on me as a stranger. I am not, really, a stranger any longer for any American alive. One of the things that distinguishes Americans from other people is that no other people has ever been so deeply involved in the lives of black men, and vice versa. [. . .] It is precisely this black-white experience which may prove of indispensable value to us in the world we face today. This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.

James Baldwin, "Stranger in the Village" (1954), in James Baldwin: Collected Essays (New York: Library of America, 1998), 124, 125, 127, 129.

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From all available evidence no black man had ever set foot in this tiny Swiss village before I came. I was told before arriving that I would probably be a 'sight' for the village; I took this to mean that people of my complexion were rarely seen in Switzerland, and also that city people are always something of a 'sight' outside of the city. It did not occur to me—possibly because I am an American—that there could be people anywhere who had never seen a negro.      [. . .]But there is a great difference between being the first white man to be seen by Africans and being the first black man to be seen by whites. The white man takes the astonishment as tribute, for he arrives to conquer and convert the natives, whose inferiority in relation to to himself is not even to be questioned; whereas I, without a thought of conquest, find myself among a people whose culture controls me, has even, in a sense, created me, people who have cost me more in anguish and rage than they will ever know, who yet do not even know of my existence. The astonishment with which I might have greeted them, should they have stumbled into my African village a few hundred years ago, might have rejoiced their hearts. But the astonishment with which they greet me today could only poison mine.      [. . .]And this is so despite everything I may do to feel differently, despite my friendly conversations with the bistro owner's wife, despite their three-year-old son who has at last become my friend, despite the saluts and bonsoirs which I exchange with people as I walk, despite the fact that I know no individual can be taken to task for what history is doing, or has done. I say that the culture of these people controls me—but they can scarcely be held responsible for European culture. [. . .] Yet they move with an authority which I shall never have; and they regard me, quite rightly, not only as a stranger in their village but as a suspect latecomer, bearing no credentials, to everything they have—however unconsciously—inherited.      For this village, even were it incomparably more remote and incredibly more primitive, is the West, the West onto which I have been so strangely grafted. These people cannot be, from the point of view of power, strangers anywhere in the world; they have made the modern world, in effect, even if they do not know it.

James Baldwin, "Stranger in the Village" (1953), in James Baldwin: Collected Essays (New York: Library of America, 1998), 117, 121–22, 122.