How networked culture differs from postmodernism

Kazys Varnelis has published a remarkable and extensive essay, The meaning of network culture, from which we have chosen substantial excerpts.

It is the first time I see such a clear analysis of how current ‘p2p’ network culture differs from the postmodernism. (Kazys says network culture differs from digital culture and postmodernism corresponds to the latter, i.e. earlier phase of computerization). Below, he first explains the new culture, then discusses how this affects our subjectivity. The original has many notes and references.

1.

“If Empire is a political theory, my goal here is to sketch out a cultural theory of this networked age. Although postmodernism anticipated many of the key innovations of network culture, our time is distinctly different. In the case of art and architecture, Jameson suggests, a widespread reaction to the elitism of the modern movement and the new closeness between capital and culture led to the rise of aesthetic populism. Network culture exacerbates this condition, replacing the populist projection of the audience’s desires onto art with the production of art by the audience and the blurring of boundaries between media and public. If appropriation was a key aspect of postmodernism, network culture almost absentmindedly uses remix as its dominant process. A generation after photographer Sherri Levine reappropriated earlier photographs by Walker Evans, dragging images from the Internet into Photoshop is an everyday occurrence, and it is hard to remember how radical Levine’s work was in its redefinition of the Enlightenment notions of the author and originality.

Art critic Nicholas Bourriaud states that this lack of regard for originality is precisely what makes art based on what he calls postproduction appropriate to network culture. Works like Levine’s still relied on notions of authorship and originality for the source of their meaning. More recently, Bourriaud explains, artists like Pierre Huyghe, Douglas Gordon, or Rirkrit Tiravanija no longer question originality but rather instinctively understand artworks as objects constituted within networks, their meaning given by their position in relation to others and their use. Bourriad observes that, like DJs or programmers, these artists “don’t really ‘create’ anymore, they reorganize”.

The elements that artists choose to remix, however, tend to be contemporary. The nostalgia culture so endemic to postmodernism has been undone and a world in the throes of modernization is long gone. Unable to periodize, network culture disregards both modern and premodern equally, as well as the interest in allegory. As T. J. Clark describes it, modernism is our antiquity, the unintelligible ruins of a vanished civilization. For Clark, like Jameson, modernism was rendered anachronistic once the process of modernization was complete.

Instead of nostalgia and allegory, network culture delivers remix, shuffling together the diverse elements of present-day culture, blithely conflating high and low – if such terms can even be drawn anymore in the long tail of networked micropublics – while poaching its as-found contents from the world. Correspondingly, reality increasingly dominates forms of cultural production: reality television shows are common, film documentaries such as Supersize Me, An Inconvenient Truth, and Fahrenheit 911 proliferate, popular sites Web such as eBaum’s World or YouTube are filled with videos that claim to be true. In The Office, the sitcom is reconfigured into a pseudo-documentary. When fiction is deployed on Internet video sites, it poses as reality for viral marketing methods (e.g. Lonelygirl15 or Little Loca). The vision William Gibson had in Pattern Recognition of an exquisite movie released cut-by-cut on the Internet is replaced by low-quality clips of snarky teenagers in front of webcams or low-quality clips of actors playing snarky teenagers in front of webcams.

Video games are the dominant form of fiction today. By 2004 they generated more revenue than Hollywood made in box-office receipts. If the novel simulated the internal voice of the subject, video games produce a new sort of fiction and affirm the networked self through a virtual reality in which the player can shape his or her own story. In MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft – which earns some $1 billion a year in subscription fees, compared that with the $600 million earned by Hollywood’s most successful product, Titanic – the ability to play with thousands of other individuals in immense landscapes thoroughly blurs the boundaries of reality and fiction and the boundaries of player and avatar.

To be clear, the tactics of remix and the rapt fascination with reality are not just found in GarageBand and YouTube, they form an emerging logic in the museum and the academy as well. Art itself, long the bastion of expression, is now dominated by straightforward photography (like Andreas Gursky), and some of the most interesting work can be found in research endeavours that could easily take place in Silicon Valley rather than in the gallery (like locative media), by (sometimes carefully faked) studies of the real (like the Museum of Jurassic Technology, the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Andrea Fraser, Christoph Büchel, etc.). Other works, such as Ólafur Elíasson’s ambient forms or Andrea Zittel’s environments, clothing, restaurants, and High Desert Test Sites, suggest another strategy of new realism in which art becomes a background to life. Similarly, architecture has abandoned utopian projections, nostalgic laments, and critical practice alike for a fascination with the world. Rem Koolhaas, arguably the world’s foremost practitioner, produces book after book, matter-of-factly announcing his fascination with shopping, the Pearl River Delta, or Lagos, Nigeria. ”

2.

What of the subject in networked culture? Under modernism, for the most part, the subject is autonomous, or at least subscribes to a fantasy of autonomy, even if experiencing pressures and deformations from the simultaneity generated by that era’s technologies of communication and by increasing encounters with the Other. In postmodernism, Jameson explains, these pressures couple with a final unmooring of the self from any ground as well as the undoing of any coherent temporal sequence, forcing the subject to schizophrenically fragment. With network culture, these shards of the subject take flight, disappearing into the network itself. Less an autonomous individual and more of a construct of the relations it has with others, the contemporary subject is constituted within the network. This is a development of the condition that Castells observes in The Rise of the Network Society, when he concludes that contemporary society is driven by a fundamental division between the self and the net. To support his argument, Castells turns to Alain Touraine: “In a post-industrial society, in which cultural services have replaced material goods at the core of its production, it is the defence of the subject, in its personality and in its culture, against the logic of apparatuses and markets, that replaces the idea of class struggle.”

But the defence of the subject has dwindled in the time since Castells and Touraine formulated their critique. Instead, it is Gilles Deleuze’s “Postscript on Societies of Control” that seems more appropriate to network culture. Here Deleuze suggests that the contemporary self is constituted not so much by any notion of identity, but rather of “dividuals”. Instead of whole individuals, we are made up of multiple micro-publics, inhabiting simultaneously overlapping telecocoons, sharing telepresence with intimates with whom we are in near-constant contact, classified into one of the sixty-four clustered demographics units described by the Claritas corporation’s PRIZM system.

In network theory, a node’s relationship to other networks is more important than its own uniqueness. Similarly, today we situate ourselves less as individuals and more as the product of multiple networks composed of both humans and things. This is easily demonstrated through some everyday examples. First, take the way the youth of today affirm their identities. Teens create pages on social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. On these pages they list their interests as a set of hyperlinked keywords directing the reader to others with similar interests. Frequently, page creators use algorithms to express (and thereby create) their identities, for example, through a Web page that, in return for responses to a set of questions, suggests what “chick flick” character the respondent is.

At the most reductive, these algorithms take the form of simple questionnaires to be filled out and posted wholesale on one’s page. Beyond making such links, posting comments about others and soliciting such comments can become an obsessive activity. Affirming one’s own identity today means affirming the identity of others in a relentless potlatch. Blogs operate similarly. If they appear to be the public expression of an individual voice, in practice many blogs consist of material poached from other blogs coupled with pointers to others in the same network – for example trackbacks (notifications that a blogger has posted comments about a blog post on another blogger’s blog) or blogrolls (the long lists of blogs that frequently border blog pages). With social bookmarking services such as del.icio.us or the social music platform last.fm, even the commentary that accompanies blog posts can disappear and the user’s public face turns into a pure collection of links. Engaging in telepresence by sending SMS messages to friends or calling family on a mobile phone has the same effect: the networked subject is constituted by networks both far and near, large and small. Like the artist, the networked self is an aggregator of information flows, a collection of links to others, a switching machine.

Along with this change in the self comes a new attitude toward privacy. Many blogs reconfigure the personal and the public, as individuals reveal details that had previously been considered private. The idea of locks on diaries today seems almost preposterous as individuals, particularly teenagers, discuss their most intimate – and illicit – details online. Meanwhile, advances in computation and networking have made it possible to store data on individuals to a greater degree than ever imaginable. As debit cards and other technologies replace cash, our actions, be they online or out on the town, leave behind a trail of information. Corporations routinely track what websites individuals visit at work. In the wake of 9/11, governments have taken to recording more and more communications traffic, even when that recording is of questionable legality. As tracking increases, advances in data mining mean that those wishing to find information can do so more easily than ever before.

But if this degree of surveillance conjures images of George Orwell’s 1984, there has been relatively little protest. That Watergate undid Nixon seems impossible in retrospect. To some degree this is the case of what security researcher Ross Anderson calls “boiling the frog” (a frog in a pot of water doesn’t notice when the temperature of the water is raised incrementally, and it boils to death).[23] Nevertheless, it also underscores the degree to which privacy is no longer important in this culture. As the subject is increasingly less sure of where the self begins and ends, the question of what should be private and what not fades.

In network culture, then, the waning of the subject that began under postmodernism grows ever greater. But whereas in postmodernism, being was left in a free-floating fabric of emotional intensities, today it is found in the net. The Cartesian “I think therefore I am” dissolves in favour of an affirmation of existence through the network itself, a phantom individuality that escapes into the network, much as meaning escapes into the Derridean network of différance, where words are defined by other words, significance endlessly deferred in a ceaseless play of language.The division between the self and the net that Castells observed a decade ago is undone.

Nor are the networks that make up the contemporary self merely networks of people. On the contrary, they are also networks between people and things. In Bruno Latour’s analysis, things are not merely objects that do our bidding but are key actors in the network. As things get smarter and smarter, they are ever more likely to make up larger parts of our “selves”. An iPod is nothing less than a portable generator of affect with which we paint our environment, creating a soundtrack to life. A Blackberry or telephone constantly receiving text messages encourages its owner to submit to a constantly distracted state, a condition much lamented by many.”

7 Comments How networked culture differs from postmodernism

  1. AvatarSepp

    “Along with this change in the self comes a new attitude toward privacy … As the subject is increasingly less sure of where the self begins and ends, the question of what should be private and what not fades.”

    I can only confirm that – having lived through a good part of the change. Privacy is not an overriding concern of the networked culture nowhere near as important as it seemed some decades back. This allows us to see “privacy protection” laws in a more distant view and to see that, contrary to what we’re made to believe, paradoxically they protect the state more than the individual.

    Openness and transparency are the new values that come with the network culture and they are increasingly embraced by individuals.

    What remains to be done is to make governments adopt those values. “State secret” is no longer tenable in a networked culture. In a truly democratic society, should not the individuals that make up the society be fully appraised of what their elected and appointed representatives are up to?

  2. AvatarBob Haugen

    “In network theory, a node’s relationship to other networks is more important than its own uniqueness. Similarly, today we situate ourselves less as individuals and more as the product of multiple networks composed of both humans and things.”

    This is somewhat the opposite of what I understand Nikos Salingaros to be saying over here:
    http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/beyond-left-and-right-peer-to-peer-themes-and-urban-priorities-for-the-self-organizing-society-by-nikos-a-salingaros/2010/04/29

    Salingaros seemed to be to be championing individualism.

    (But then both of these essays are pretty fuzzy…)

    I feel myself to be a node.

  3. AvatarMichel Bauwens

    though i call p2p a form of networked individualism, I believe it is quite different than classic individuality; because we are able to self-allocate different ‘fragments’ of our selves to different common projects and thereby construct a contributory identity.

  4. AvatarBob Haugen

    I mostly don’t believe in the common meaning of “the individual”. I think humans are social creations from birth to death. Mind develops socially, language, identity (or identities: I think you have different identities in different social contexts), ideas, skills, the whole ball of wax.

  5. AvatarMichel Bauwens

    we are social creatures; but that doesn’t mean we have no powers of self-creation in this process of individuation … George Simondon is good; though complex, on this

  6. AvatarBob Haugen

    “that doesn’t mean we have no powers of self-creation in this process of individuation”…

    I agree. But much less than the pat-yourself-on-the-back rugged-individualists think.

    As in “born on third base and thought he’d hit a home run”.

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