Cultural Hybridity: Week 2 Notes

Taylor

3 - "What distinguishes the moment of complexity is not change as such but rather the acceleration of the rate of change."
4 - development has a direction - "things tend to move from lesser to greater complexity." Challenge is to learn to live with complexity "creatively."
5 - tipping point [of complexity] where "more is different."
- network culture
6 - spiritual aspect of political and economic change and turmoil in the '60's and now
-Two truths from Hegel and Kiergaard:
- 1) "There is a religious dimension to all culture."
-2) "Second, religion is inseparable from philosophy, literature, literary criticism, art, and architecture, as well as science, technology, capitalism, and consumerism."
6-7 - Derrida as theological thinker. Connection between deconstruction and religion, between religion and post-structuralism.
7 - artists as "religious prophets" constructing 'kingdom of God' through avant-garde, utopian work
*avant-garde translates to "advanced guard" or "vanguard," meaning the frontline of an advancing military unit
8 - "Just as God dies when natural and historical processes are deemed sacred, so art effectively ends when it becomes indistinguishable from other forms of cultural production and reproduction." ???
- Warhol's art as an eschatological critique of consumerism that brings art into the streets, blurring lines between high and low culture --> 'business [as] art'
9 - In a visual culture increasingly governed by electronic media, the currency of exchange is image."
- Taylor's book: About Religion: Economies of Faith in Virtual Culture
10 - Next book: Imagologies: Media Philosophy. Attempt to integrate theory and practice through tele-seminar
13-14 - ???? complexity theory distinguished from catastrophe theory and chaos theory ????
14 - "According to complexity theorists, all significant change takes place between too much and too little order. When there is too much order, systems are frozen and cannot change, and when there is too little order, systems disintegrate and can no longer function."

Po-Mo, Post-PoMo, Complexity, Networking, Globalization


-Loss of "master narratives" of cultural and national origins that justify or give meaning to present-day identities, destinies, or inevitable or predetermined futures.
-->vis. a viz Taylor: Is Taylor trying to (re)construct a master narrative or philosophy of culture?


-How have networks of all kinds become the infrastructure of the present post-postmodern era, facilitating and accelerating hybridity?

* Digital Networks
* Media Networks
* Transportation Networks
* Financial Networks
* Market distribution networks
* Social networks

--> note shifts in music industry/entertainment industry as shifts in market distribution networks... these now combine with the other types of networks to create hybrid networks that disempower the traditional business models of the entertainment industries. ***How are these industries responding and adapting?***

Toward a Concept of Postmodernism (Ihab Hassan)
-Hassan was an electrical engineer before studying English literature
- 4) postmodernism not as discrete tradition, but a natural evolution of modernism, albeit fast-paced and facilitated through globalization and attendant technologies
- so what? outside of academics, do working people talk about postmodernism? how do they define the era in which they live? more importantly, is there any value for them/us to undertake such a venture? how can defining postmodernism lead to resolving conditions of hunger, poverty, lack of personal freedom and mobility? can postmodernism even offer us anything meaningful in terms of happiness or overcoming the basic problems inherent in the human condition? art and literary theory are nice, but at the end of the day I still live subject to the constraints of empire and have to ask the question, how am I gonna get a job??? (relates to point 9)
- 7) "fourfold vision of complementarities": continuity, discontinuity, diachrony and synchrony. Does this work with a modernism/post-modernism X humanist/technologist mind map? Are humanism and technologism worthy or necessary categories for consideration in the contemporary context? What would be more relevant categories?
- 8) change is happening all the time, but what kind of change is it? change we can believe in? progressive change? social change?
- can we see some examples of Dadaism, situationalism or other artistic movements mentioned by Hassan?
-"party for peace" and "gaming for change" as post-postmodern - paradoxical joining of the antithetical categories suggested by Hassan.
- don't get the conflation of "inderterminancy" and "immanence" as conflation of "decunstruction" and "language". Don't get it at all.

Stanford Encyclopedia

"Neither side, however, suggests that postmodernism is an attack upon modernity or a complete departure from it. Rather, its differences lie within modernity itself, and postmodernism is a continuation of modern thinking in another mode."

Precursors:

Kant - Copernican revolution

Kierkegaard and Hegel
*The worker romanticized in the modern era. --> example of hyperreal. Kierkegaard and Hegel on the modern "public" as constructed through media.

"In Marx, on the other hand, we have an analysis of the fetishism of commodities (Marx 1983, 444-461) where objects lose the solidity of their use value and become spectral figures under the aspect of exchange value. "

"...Nietzsche, who speaks of being as “the last breath of a vaporizing reality” and remarks upon the dissolution of the distinction between the “real” and the “apparent” world."

"Nietzsche believes only a return of the Dionysian art impulse can save modern society from sterility and nihilism. This interpretation presages postmodern concepts of art and representation, and also anticipates postmodernists' fascination with the prospect of a revolutionary moment auguring a new, anarchic sense of community."

"On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense" (Nietzsche 1979, 77-97) "In this text, Nietzsche puts forward the hypothesis that scientific concepts are chains of metaphors hardened into accepted truths. On this account, metaphor begins when a nerve stimulus is copied as an image, which is then imitated in sound, giving rise, when repeated, to the word, which becomes a concept when the word is used to designate multiple instances of singular events. Conceptual metaphors are thus lies because they equate unequal things, just as the chain of metaphors moves from one level to another."

*Can Neurology back Nietzsche up on this? Is this really how language works? Do sounds sometimes precede images? Can the stimulus be tactile or multimodal? ***Do all thoughts occur as response to stimulus?***

-Nietzsche on history and memory/forgetfulness.

Heidegger: “precisely nowhere does man today any longer encounter himself, i.e., his essence” (Heidegger 1993, 332). Criticism of functionalism of modern era: "The essence of technology, which he names “the enframing,” reduces the being of entities to a calculative order (Heidegger 1993, 311-341). Hence, the mountain is not a mountain but a standing supply of coal, the Rhine is not the Rhine but an engine for hydro-electric energy, and humans are not humans but reserves of manpower. The experience of the modern world, then, is the experience of being's withdrawal in face of the enframing and its sway over beings. However, humans are affected by this withdrawal in moments of anxiety or boredom, and therein lies the way to a possible return of being, which would be tantamount to a repetition of the experience of being opened up by Parmenides and Heraclitus."

-Western "Other" as "the Jew."
*What about the Orient?


2. The Postmodern Condition

Jean-François Lyotard's La Condition Postmoderne in 1979 (English: The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, 1984)
-"On Lyotard's account, the computer age has transformed knowledge into information, that is, coded messages within a system of transmission and communication."
"he insists, “there is a strict interlinkage between the kind of language called science and the kind called ethics and politics” (Lyotard 1984, 8), and this interlinkage constitutes the cultural perspective of the West. Science is therefore tightly interwoven with government and administration, especially in the information age, where enormous amounts of capital and large installations are needed for research."
-*Science as religion? Science as meta-narrative? Science as language game. Science as (unified) narrative. Lyotard is incredulous toward meta-narratives that don't interact with others (e.g. science toward philosophy, morality, etc.)
-"“I define postmodern as incredulity toward meta-narratives,” says Lyotard (Lyotard 1984, xxiv)."
-***"...the dissolution of narrative leaves the field of legitimation to a new unifying criterion: the performativity of the knowledge-producing system whose form of capital is information."
-"the paralogical inventiveness of science raises the possibility of a new sense of justice, as well as knowledge, as we move among the language games now entangling us. / Lyotard takes up the question of justice in Just Gaming (see Lyotard 1985) and The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (see Lyotard 1988), where he combines the model of language games with Kant's division of the faculties (understanding, imagination, reason) and types of judgment (theoretical, practical, aesthetic) in order to explore the problem of justice set out in The Postmodern Condition."
-"Kant's division of the faculties (understanding, imagination, reason) and types of judgment (theoretical, practical, aesthetic)" in postmodern context
-***"The postmodern, then, is a repetition of the modern as the “new,” and this means the ever-new demand for another repetition."

*Should I read Kant? Foucault?

3. Genealogy and Subjectivity

Foucault
-"In the 1971 essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Foucault spells out his adaptation of the genealogical method in his historical studies. First and foremost, he says, genealogy “opposes itself to the search for ‘origins’” (Foucault 1977, 141)."
-"modernity,” as a fiction modern discourses invent after the fact."
-Madness and Civilization (1965)
-confluence of knowledge and power
-reason vs. non-reason (madness). Reason dictates the terms of madness.
-****The Use of Pleasure (Foucault 1985), Foucault employs historical research to open possibilities for experimenting with subjectivity, by showing that subjectivation is a formative power of the self, surpassing the structures of knowledge and power from out of which it emerges. This is a power of thought, which Foucault says is the ability of human beings to problematize the conditions under which they live. For philosophy, this means “the endeavor to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known” (Foucault 1985, 9)
-Foucault as hybrid between philosophy and historical research, Lyotard as hybrid between language games of expert and philosopher. "This mixing of philosophy with concepts and methods from other disciplines is characteristic of postmodernism in its broadest sense.

4. Productive Difference

Gilles Deleuze
-"the purpose of his critique of reason “is not justification but a different way of feeling: another sensibility” (Deleuze 1983b, 94). "
-"Philosophical critique" as "thought and that which forces it into action."
-“difference is the only principle of genesis or production” (Deleuze 1983b, 157).
-"His major focus is a thoroughgoing critique of representational thinking, including identity, opposition, analogy, and resemblance (Deleuze 1994, 132)."
-Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Deleuze, 1972)
-"...the Oedipus concept in psychoanalysis, they say, institutes a theater of desire in which the psyche is embedded in a family drama closed off from the extra-familial and extra-psychic forces at work in society. They characterize these forces as “desiring machines” whose function is to connect, disconnect, and reconnect with one another without meaning or intention."
-body and "desiring machines"
-"territorializations" from primitive sacred, to divine emperor, to capitalism, i.e. monetary flow
-capitalism in the Oedipal triangle framework; linkage of desire and indebtedness
-***"a revolutionary potential in modern art and science, where, in bringing about the “new,” they circulate de-coded and de-territorialized flows within society without automatically re-coding them into money (Deleuze 1983a, 379)"

*Can networks create the contours of philosophy, a mental image that resembles an accurate representation of thought? Beyond the modern/postmodern dialectic to a global consciousness of interconnected ideas (linkage of philosophy, linguistics, literature, art, politics, economics, etc., etc.). These ideas can be linked in innumerable ways, the question is how they are linked. Why are they linked in certain ways, and not others? Links may be created by "reason" and reasonableness, or perhaps by distortions of group thought (re: Lyotard's view of media/medium, or Foucault's view of institutions that outlive their time). Why does a newscaster or a pundit link a trade deal in Colombia with America's inability to create green jobs? (hypothetical) Or why does a researcher/philosopher/academic combine disciplines in a certain way, other than as an accident of personal and professional development?

*Is media the joining of art and science? Is revolutionary potential unleashed through [social] networks the revolution imagined by Deleuze and Guattari?

5. Deconstruction
Jaques Derrida
-don't get difference and differance AT ALL
-spoken vs. written language, both are texts... ok... speaking is writing (cf. jazz - improv is composition)... ok... don't understand anything else
-"A deconstructive reading, then, does not assert or impose meaning, but marks out places where the function of the text works against its apparent meaning, or against the history of its interpretation."

*Contemplation/contemplative traditions/wisdom/mysticism as deconstruction. Non-violence as deconstruction. Institutionalization as violent construction of power and control, undermining/co-opting mystical truth.

6. Hyperreality
Jean Baudrillard
-linked to the concept of the simulacrum (likeness)
-simulations as signs without any referent
-**"In postmodernism, hyperreality is the result of the technological mediation of experience, where what passes for reality is a network of images and signs without an external referent, such that what is represented is representation itself."
-signs producing other signs, no original sources, no correlation to the referent (meaning reality?)
-"The hyperreal is a system of simulation simulating itself." (The Matrix?)
-"graffiti artists who experiment with symbolic markings and codes in order to suggest communication while blocking it, and who sign their inscriptions with pseudonyms instead of recognizable names. “They are seeking not to escape the combinatory in order to regain an identity,” says Baudrillard, “but to turn indeterminacy against the system, to turn indeterminacy into extermination” (Baudrillard 1993, 78)."

*RANT: I think all courses on post-modern thought should be taught based on The Matrix. We all saw it when we were like ten, we can relate. I'd rather study how they made the scene with bullets rippling through the air than read about what Baudrillard would say about the red pill or blue. Maybe not - i suppose my worldview presupposes me to want to be happy, beyond all else, and I am conditioned to believe that this is only possible through gainful employment (probably resulting in the practical application of technical skill). So I would like to pursue my own happiness, but I am dubious of philosophical meanderings as a means to that end.

7. Postmodern Hermeneutics
Gianni Vattimo
-"Hermeneutics, the science of textual interpretation, also plays a role in postmodern philosophy."
-"On Vattimo's account, Nietzsche and Heidegger can be brought together under the common theme of overcoming. Where Nietzsche announces the overcoming of nihilism through the active nihilism of the eternal return, Heidegger proposes to overcome metaphysics through a non-metaphysical experience of being."
-"The de-historicization of experience has been accelerated by technology, especially television, says Vattimo, so that “everything tends to flatten out at the level of contemporaneity and simultaneity” (Vattimo 1988, 10). As a result, we no longer experience a strong sense of teleology in worldly events, but, instead, we are confronted with a manifold of differences and partial teleologies that can only be judged aesthetically. The truth of postmodern experience is therefore best realized in art and rhetoric."
-being as a text?

8. Postmodern Rhetoric and Aesthetics
Mario Perniola
-"Perniola insists that postmodern philosophy must not break with the legacies of modernity in science and politics."
-Egyptianism and the "baroque effect"
-"philosophical reading and writing are not activities of an identical subject, but processes of mediation and indeterminacy between self and other, and philosophical narrative is an overcoming of their differences."
-ritual without myth

*Why didn't I embrace a Montessori view of education that is life?

9) Habermas's Critique
Jurgen Habermas (sic, no umlaut over u)
-"he claims that Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida and Foucault commit a performative contradiction in their critiques of modernism by employing concepts and methods that only modern reason can provide. He criticizes Nietzsche's Dionysianism as a compensatory gesture toward the loss of unity in Western culture that, in pre-modern times, was provided by religion."
-postmodernists base their arguments on modern assumptions/presuppositions

Jameson
14 - post-modern as against modernism
*What is the new economic order (15 - multinational capitalism? media and spectacle) in postmodernism? Answer: neocolonialism, the Green Revolution (environmental movement?) and computerization and electronic information
What about the new economic order in post-postmodernism? Do either of these pose a real threat to the old order, a true revolutionary force? Or are they simply reworkings of the current systems? Do we continue to repeat the modern (and ancient) models of imperialism with new victors and rising powers, or is there an alternative to these power structures that have seemed to evolve cyclically over history?
*Postmodernism as a cultural response to economic conditions of late capitalism. Is there anything to suggest that this response is at all adequate? How does this response have bearings on the economic systems at hand?
*tecno brega as an example of parody
16-17 - death of the subject - the idea that the discrete individual (subject) is no longer the cultural norm, or that the individual (subject) was a myth to begin with an never actually existed.
*I'm ready to embrace the idea that individualism, to the extent it has manifested itself in American, and now global, capitalism is a cultural myth, produced and reproduced by society. But I take myth in Joseph Campbell's terms: myth is a true story. A myth holds currency because some element of it is believed to be true. Perhaps now the transparency of the myth of the individual comes into question, but certainly the individual (as a category for identity construction) and individualism (as an ideology associated with free market capitalism and American notions of freedom) are alive and well, practiced and repracticed by capitalists and their progenitors. Though one might submit that the myth of the individual was purely Western construct, absent in Eastern cultures, (according to some social psychologists or cultural theorists of the modern era), I suggest that such an argument is a gross oversimplification of the Oriental "other" and individualism in some form exists across most cultures. We construct sci-fi images of the Borg or the Machines, but these "mythological" creatures are alien to us in their absolute adherence to communal philosophy. That is, they may express the defects (and virtues) of total self-obliteration in the form of mythological characters. Invididualism and communalism, though, are probably at play throughout most societies in history, and each culture negotiates a balance between the two. In modern capitalism, the tension was posed as the battle between communism and democracy (read capitalism). How, then, is the tension expressed in the postmodern and post-postmodern eras? The individual is certainly seen as a more complex unit, allowed to move freely between various subcultures and construct a hybrid/complex identity. (See Naomi Klein's No Logo on the branding of subcultures in the 1990s.) Yet I wonder whether these subcultures, transnational or transgendered identities are causing substantial changes to the lat capitalistic economic order. On the one hand, they may pose a threat; on the other, they may create the illusion of individualism that allows people to believe they are not full participants in the late capitalist system.
*Lady Gaga as a copy of Madonna, but most would agree she's worked hard to develop a unique personal/artistic style.
*Copying others is cheaper than creating from scratch. Re: Hollywood's ubiquitous remake and sequel culture (see everything is a remix). Rather than develop an original style, tropes that have already been profitable are reused (actors, storylines, camera angles, etc.).
*Why isn't anyone talking about archetypes?
18 - nostalgia film
*Genres facilitate pastiche.
19 - "...for whatever peculiar reasons, we seem condemned to seek the historical past through our own pop images and stereotypes about the past, which itself remains forever out of reach."
*Is the Bonaventure handicap accessible???
23 - elevators and escalators as signs/symbols of movement
24 - L.A. itself as referent
25 - postmodern warfare
*What are the postmodern features of the Bonaventure Hotel? Constant motion, nothing being still, people moving machine. Is this analogous to the information moving machine that is the Internet?
26 - "What is new about all this? Do we really need the concept postmodern? Answer: This break is necessary when certain features that were before subordinate become dominant, when there is a substantial shift in the traits latent in a given period. When something marginal becomes central.
***27 - "For one thing, commodity production and in particular our clothing furniture, buildings and other artifacts are now intimately tied in with styling changes which drive from artistic experimentation; our advertising, for example, is fed by postmodernism in all the arts and inconceivable without it. For another, the classics of high modernism are now part of the so-called canon and taught in schools in universities - which at once empties them of their subversive power." Subversion crippled by institutionalization --> the need for constant redefinitions, rearticulations of art and thought. Every era is always post-the-era-before-it (duh), and moves on not because the era before was fundamentally flawed, but the way it articulated the truth no longer resonates (because it is not new and fresh.)
28 - "One is tempted to say that the very function of the news media is to relegate such recent historical experiences as rapidly as possible into the pat. The informational function of the media would thus be to help us forget [and remember?], to serve as the very agents and mechanisms for our historical amnesia." Yeah, our memories aren't so good any more, but the pace of life and the kind of information that is relevant is what is really changing. We can still make memories just as well - our brains have [not yet] fundamentally changed. But we have devices that hold memories for us with increasing presence (the flash drive, the digital camera, Wikipedia). Thus, we only hang on to those memories that are truly impactful, and even these we only hold on to their feeling, rarely to their form.

Homi Bhabha

Introduction

- "What is theoretically innovative, and politically crucial, is the need to think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences. These 'in-between' spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood - singular or communal - that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself."
*Mystical nature of truth as something that lies in the gaps or interstices of difference, not effable statements or articulations.
*Musicians pay attention to the space between the notes.
-liminal space
-the unknowable, the unrepresentable
*Truth in paradox.

Commitment to Theory

-reversing of Orient and Occident as European meta-theorizing and Third-World creativity
-"Forms of popular rebellion and mobilization are often most subversive and transgressive when they are created through oppositional cultural practices."
**Furthering discourse by consuming, producing, reflecting; repeat!?
***"Is the language of theory merely another power ploy of the culturally privileged Western elite to produce a discourse of the Other that reinforces its own power-knowledge equation?"
-"the problem of finding a form of public rhetoric able to represent different and opposing political 'contents' not as a priori preconstituted principles but as a dialogical discursive exchange" (i.e. using established rhetoric to foment change; using institutions themselves in discursive debate to illuminate truth)
-Mills: "only by effectively assuming the mental position of the antagonist and working through the displacing and decentring force of that discursive difficulty that the politicized 'portion of truth' is produced."
*If Truth is something 'between the lines,' then what is the place of academic or political discourse? By engaging in dialectic discourse, how is it that a productive political or theoretical is created?
****-"The language of critique is effective not because it keeps forever separate the terms of the master and the slave, the mercantilist and the Marxist, but to the extent to which it overcomes the given grounds of opposition and opens up a space of translation: a place of hybridity, figuratively speaking, where the construction of a political object that is new, neither the one nor the other, properly alienates our political expectations, and changes, as it must, the very forms of our recognition of the moment of politics."
-"My illustration attempts to display the importance of the hybrid moment of political change. Here the transformational value of change lies in the rearticulation, or translation, of elements that are neither the One (unitary working class) nor the Other (the politics of gender) but something else besides, which contests the terms and territories of both."
*In theory, the dialectic negotiation of political or polemic (discursive/theoretical?) poles has the ability to illuminate, to created a hybrid of ideas that leads to something new. What we see, however, in the context of current social and political struggles, is the willingness of one side to engage in debate and negotiation (the left), while the other side (the right) engages only in negation. The willingness to engage in productive political conversation, or even committed theoretical critique, is thus entirely one-sided. The left becomes fractured while the right solidifies its base. Obama's presidency is a perfect example of this. After this tendency is amplified through the news media megaphone machine (also predominantly conservative), we end up with a society moved much further to the right than the majority of its citizens. So I ask again, how can theoretical critique address the concerns not only of those in the minority/on the margins, but those in the majority/center who are pulled ceaselessly toward the tyranny of power?