Sunday, November 29, 2009

Carry On Wayward Son

Muscle memory is a bitch.

In general, the second I hear classic rock on the radio, my fingers change the station. It's not that I don't like classic rock, but that my only exposure to it happened for those four terrible, wonderful, terrifyingly full years of high school. So, yes, I get a little nostalgic when I hear "Back in Black" or "Cat Scratch Fever" or "We're An American Band." But nothing, and I mean Nothing makes me react the way I do to "America" from West Side Story or that little ditty by Kansas (see title).

Luckily, the local station doesn't have much use for old show tunes. But for the last three weeks, I've heard the damn song every Thursday morning as I drive to school.

It wouldn't be that bad, if Supernatural didn't also use it as a theme song. Or if the roommate didn't take a certain glee to my wide eyes and panicked breathing. But lately, it's like everywhere I turn, there's those strong downbeats, and my wrists flex without my permission on the steering wheel.

Hence, muscle memory's bitchiness.

This one time, at band camp


It's in the blood. It's the source of shivers (of slivers).
Pulse turned to pulp by the blender beat of drums.
This three minute death and rebirth burns at the crescendos.
Canvass burns at first, but for this we pray:
Love, split lips and numb fingers,
Clear, crisp skies and a hidden flask,
The seamless motion of the stars as our own.
It is born in full from the first,
No rising to life, but complete it bursts
Whole and unwrapped
For bloody mouths and splintered palms to embrace.

Chapter 2, or, Amy Re-re-revisits Burke

Chapter 2 of the dissertation is currently titled "Burke's Dystopian Imagination." Last summer, I presented a paper at the Triennial KB conference on a panel with His Most Awesomest Jack Selzer, who, along with Ann George, wrote the Totally Rad Kenneth Burke in the 1930s. After Kate's Really Cool Burke video project presentation, Dr Selzer gave me a few notes on my presentation, the key one being that if I was going to do it right, I'd need a whole book--i.e. 10 pages of conference presentation didn't do justice to the thing (his word) I was noticing about Burke.


When I was "given the opportunity" (their words) to rethink my dissertation, I immediately thought of Selzer's advice. At this point, however, moving to a historical, archival dissertation (NOT MY STRENGTH) would have meant another 18 months at Purdue, without funding, so I changed it up and went with the plan I'm now following. Still, I was left with an entire chapter--upwards of 50 pages--to do something like what I imagined before: a review of Burke's general social philosophy throughout his corpus, hopefully linking the subtle changes, as George and Selzer do, to his changing localities, his "circles" of influence.


The result? I'm stuck on page seven, nowhere near even beginning to quote Counter-Statement. I'm stuck where I was when I wrote the Burke presentation the first time: outlining my assumptions about what counts as dystopian literature, what makes something a dystopian argument. Because I can't show how KB is dystopian until I do that, but I also can't explain what I mean by "dystopian" until I can use Burke's terms.


Ouroboros. The snake eating its own tail. Consummation has never looked so complex.

Friday, November 13, 2009

Random Writings

exstasis

What air fills these lungs,
they that will sing and sing
and deny
the beauty of spaces and faces
in favor of seeking lightening-wrought hearts
steeled by flame to hope!
The upbeat of the canvass cuts through the veil
and enflames the waiting spirit within--what blue skies
and cobbled streets humming in harmony
drain us of, of trying to be!

Once our skin was breaking from containing the desire
but now we stretch our wings to hold room in unbidden embrace.


December 23

Some commands cannot be followed: Remember!
Scuffed terra cotta ground with sand, aside;
Cheeks flushed against the sun, aside;
aside from the sound of hushed steps
and the prick of hollow watching eyes,
these things band too loosely and are denied.

Even though breaths can be counted and heart beats tamed,
even though absolute stillness of the body attained,
and blood slows to stagnant deep in veins
and pain disperses in heat across white skin
Even though the door is opened, nothing comes in
Remember: some commands cannot be followed.

September
From the first of September, the center starts to break
and once the nucleus has shattered, the cell walls bow out
from the first cold crackle, the ceiling sags down
under the weight of salt water, the dirt path is unmade


inGrained

Patent faith soaked to the feet
the fear of god, of water
of drowning in the stares,
falling on the stairs of the baptistry,
where we as children played,
dry and content to be unwashed.

But when guilt pours down and paints our skin--
the faults of a thousand aching sins--
then must we speak,
into the mic, into the air,
over the sobbing piano chords
that accompany such confessionals.

Friday, August 07, 2009

The Arc of Truth

Watching Stargate with the commentary tracks on has led me to consider the nature of plotting narrative over a long serial text. The idea of an "arc" is of particular interest--why such mathematical a term? Should stories really be "plottable"? What would a graph of a series actually look like? What about the financial, production-controlled aspects of a serial narrative?
Given the right information, could a television writer use the desires and narrative conventions of fandom to better control an audience? Do we really want fans writing our canon stories (yes, I'm still angry at Russell T Davies. But Martin Gero, this is for you, too).

Pendulum

This isn't the story he wants to tell
he makes her fall, cloying sweetness gone,
he makes her fly, volition lost in plumbing depths
that plumb three years later, carrying her closer to Xeno's mark

He shapes the world with steep arcs
smooth sines dipping below to break the zero line
he threw her down to this cupped pit to ride the curve
to cushion the rough universe plotted hastily against blue grid squares.

Tuesday, August 04, 2009

Drabble

Or, Amy Tries to Cope with Torchwood: Children of Earth



He doesn’t try to fix it, for once. He stands there and lets time wash over him and space move around him. And still he is not still, but hurtling around the sun as the rest of us flip our daily coins: to be or not to be? And the odds are always the same, anyway, half and half, maybe a little less, if you’ve got a nickel with the thick raised head of what’s-his-name. He lets the coins drop without tossing his own or tripping over all the spare change rolling around. All the day you’ll have good luck.

RUSSELL!

Friday, June 26, 2009

Rewiring

brain chemistry reboot

Are you there, passion?
Are you yet asleep?
Has hope awoken you on cue
at the end of the end,
where you can sip the most fuel
thrust forward at the tip of the fuse?
Or have you slipped beyond us now
infusing the realm of dreams
where you are more easily grasped
where you are not denied a chance
to light the plot, burn it forward?

We've waited, passion
Waited on you and upon you
waited for your arrival at the darkest night
triumphant in trumpet blares at blastissimo.
But you snuck in quiet to the back room
and tied us up with black and yellow and green,
a mighty pen against a mightier sword
till we are furiously still at the keyboard
passionately aware, the standard of awareness raised.

Are you still here, passion,
Now that the worst has floated downriver?
It seems we can't remember
how this is supposed to end--
is it a tragedy or comedy?
A romantic gesture?
A single rose on the fifteenth of February?

Friday, May 15, 2009

Precision Surgery Required

My blog is so not boring, Lou.

Precision Surgery Required

It was supposed to be over bandaid quick
This was the simple plan without illusions
But minds left alone can change
Minds left to cracked alley wanderings
Might make another turn,
Delay the path to home just to see
Where the faded beat down grass leads

And hope left alone can wait for the appointed day
Burning low on the back burner, ready to ignite
Alcohol flames that flash ere one can say it lightens
The story said we’d burn together
Cautionary tales will convict us
before allegations are named

Left hope festered down to a gram
Always waiting in the darkness
For the dawn of sun to rise
To play a role in careless dreams
To turn bleak reminders of all those turns,
Of what you said while palming embers
What is it that hope hopes for?

Now all the things you said would never die
Had already withered by your last breath
How can we go home to this,
Tree lined streets blown to splinters
In the middle of a drunken night?
What can there be to praise in such dust?

What have we done, but torn and shredded
Forgotten and breezed away,
Only flitting in and out in dreams?
Rip the plaster away quick like a bee sting
And run; this was the plan
But I lingered and wandered too close to home
One void summer, the blank before the period.

Wednesday, April 01, 2009

The Rhetoric of Fan Studies: PCA/ACA 2009, Draft 1

The Popular and the Permanent: The Rhetoric of Fan studies (v2.2) Comments welcome!

Popular and Permanent: The Rhetoric of Fan Studies
Presented at PCA/ACA National Conference 2009
April 9, 2009
New Orleans, LA


I hid in the closet of fandom for years. My Master's degree was survived mainly by secretive late night forays into fic and vid and art and dubs--consuming fanworks to relax after Derrida. But why did I have to be so secretive? Fandom has always had some social stigma, perhaps best exemplified by the Simpson's character Comic Book Guy: a fat slob living at home, sad and lonely, too immersed in his fantasy worlds to attempt the performance of Normal that the rest of us partake in. Today I want to talk about that stigma, how it appears in academic conversations, and ways that we might legitimate the study of fandom(s) without resorting to "the popular" as our justification. Specifically, I want to suggest there are significant tensions in the language of fan studies: First, there is an unacknowledged dissonance in our language about fandom that stems from the difference between popularity and fanaticism. Second, there is a tension created by the language of popularity that categorizes fandom as somehow both “mass” and “unique,” both mainstream and eccentric. What results from these tensions is first a sense that a fandom is a legitimate object of study only for what it can show us about mass media, consumption, identity formation and the like. But in this assumption, the fans themselves and the products of fandom are still somewhat trivial (if not downright silly) and will disappear once the object of that fanaticism is no longer in the public eye.

Fandom is nothing new--and I'm even talking pre-Trek here, long before a person like Comic Book Guy could even exist and subsist within a society. Fiction in confluence with a middle class and industrial-print culture seems to create fandom as it grows, with the Pamela fandom of the 1740s as our earliest archived example. I’ll talk about the importance of archiving as legitimation later, but for now let us just say that fan studies might be said to be as old as the first critics of The Novel in general, those who spoke of silly little girls too busy reading to do their proper (house)work. In her book Consuming Pleasures Jennifer Pool Hayward examines fandom through the lens of serial production--and we might say that fandom is necessarily drawn to serial texts, if we were to make such broad generalizations. In tracing Dickens fandom, Hayward examines the pleasures of consuming a serial text, giving value to such a study by invoking a Marxist critique: Fandom in the past is important because it can show us cultural modes of production, movements of ideologies, and creation and maintenance of hegemony, particularly of the gendered sort.

My concern today is not with the studies of fans in the past, for many of these give value to the fandom by pointing to, not surprisingly, the permanence, artistry, and worthiness of the original text. Popularity and “mass“ audiences often characterize these fan works, which are not noted for their own intrinsic value as fan texts, but for what they can show us about the spirit of the age in which they were created. Aside, perhaps, from Joseph Andrews and his parody Shamela, no one I've met or read in "early" fan studies refers to a fan-writer by name or an exemplary fan-work by its title. By merging “popular” with “fanaticism,” we can study fandom as an interesting, but temporary phenomenon that emerges from the texts they reference. I wish to suggest that, at least in the digital era, fandom is not as dependent on the text it adores, but has created itself to be a nearly independent system of knowledge creating and knowledge sharing that can sustain itself across multiple, transient media events.

I am limiting my discussion to the fandom of the late 1990s through today because, true to our assumptions about the fickle nature of popularity, earlier fan works have been lost to us. The transience of fan works and fandom in general is part of what makes it a difficult object to study. The lack of an archive or a canon that can serve as what Latour and Woolgar call “immutable mobiles,“ those documents that serve as a foundation of knowledge for a community and serve as constitutional documents that create the community from nothingness gives us no common base from which to speak, doubtlessly causes some of the disjuncture we feel in fan studies. Further, when popular culture became an object of study, it became so within a Marxist-Foucauldian framework of ideological control. In this case, what is popular is what is hegemonic, and what is hegemonic tends to be without value in academia, unless it is to analyze the ways in which a text is hegemonic (and therefore uncritical, manipulative, and bad). Horkheimer and Adorno (as well as countless pop psychologists and after school specials) tell us that popular media are dumbing us down, working to institutionalize us by entertainment, and, in general, is for uneducated fools whose attention flits to whatever shiny object the producers flash at us. While we here at the PCA attempt to argue against that, some of that language and its values tend to seep into our language anyway, and we begin to assume that fandom is synonymous with consumption and all that is new.

This language appears, however rationalized, in many fandom studies. Cornel Sandvoss provides the most complete critique of such language in his introduction to Fans: The Mirror of Consumption: “The Balance between structure and agency is…crucial to the academic analysis of fandom….In [many] approaches fandom is interpreted as a consequence of mass culture needing to compensate for a lack of intimacy, community and identity” (2). Further, Sandvoss questions the definition of fandom as identity formation, and instead provides his own, which I borrow, for the most part, here: “I define fandom as the regular, emotionally involved consumption of a given popular narrative or text” (8). As his examples, Sandvoss points to Joli Jenson for her examination of the language used in common parlance and in some academic writings. In “Fandom as Pathology: The Consequences of Characterization” Jenson reminds us of the psychological and medical explanations of fan-ish behavior--a pathology, an unfulfilled relationship, a Freudian error in the fan‘s upbringing (9). The scholarly accounts, however were few and far between when Jenson wrote in 1992, and the criticisms tend not to be from media scholars. Still, the language of pathology or deviance that Jenson cleverly pulls from multiple sources has remained in our language, even as fans came to describe themselves in the summer of 2007 as pirates (see post 4/15/08: The Symbolic and the Virtual Event, to be presented at NCA 2009).

Of course, Henry Jenkins remains our key scholar in fandom. In Textual Poachers and later in Convergence Culture, Jenkins emphasizes the unique aspect of certain fandoms, what Sandvoss calls an “assumed uniqueness” that characterizes most fan studies. Jenkins might be the first to treat online fan works as legitimate objects of study; he cites the URLs of specific works and larger communities with the same academic rigor that the rest of us give to Dickens and Shakespeare. Like many fan scholars, Jenkins emphasizes the subversivness of fandom without acknowledging the tension between fanaticism and subversion, between “mass” media and counter-culture.
Several volumes of fan studies have emerged in recent years, and like Jenkins, they remain enthusiastic about the potential scholarly work available to fandom scholars, but continue to use language that celebrates the ex-centricity of fandom, emphasizes the subversiveness of fan works, and mark fandom as Other. The introduction to Rhiannon Bury’s Cyberspaces of Their Own notes the connection of fandom to oral culture and domestic storytelling that skews fandom demographics toward the female gender. The book surveys and analyzes certain communities that the author notes are dominated by women and tries to explain the need for and the pleasure in such activities. In Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, the editors (including Sandvoss), dedicate the introductory chapter to “Why Study Fans?“ The editors try to summarize “three generations of fan scholarship over the past two decades” to come up with their answers, which include the subversive nature of fandom, the economic power of fandom that has television producers salivating for our attention, fandom as a mirror for what Bourdieu calls “habitus,“ and, more currently, fandom as “a cultural practice tied to specific forms of social and economic organization” (8-9). Neither Bury nor the authors of Fandom are too concerned with the connection of fandom to “popularity;” instead, these studies mark fans as an object (and as such, necessarily Others the fans) to be studied for what we can learn about larger cultural movements or human nature in general.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with Othering fans this way; fans themselves embrace this designation in their t-shirts, in their icons, in their posts that include some kind of self-disclosure. Whether we Other fans as subversive agents against mass culture or dismiss them as blind, adoring audiences, fans and fandom will and have survived in one form or another. In fact, “survival” of fandom may be one way we can begin to think of fan works as more than temporary manifestations of a fad. The connection of fandom to “popular” culture hinders us here--how can something be both popular and permanent?

The unstated criticism is that fan works, as non-legitimated narratives, exist only within a localized community and then only briefly. In the days of zines and snail mail fic and vid exchanges, few copies were made, and even fewer were available to outside readers. Without the backing of a publisher or producer, fan works tend to first shine brightly then fade from our consciousness. Without an (published) anthology to catalogue them, fanworks do not have a canon for academic study. Imagine trying to teach a class on fandom that focuses on the fan-produced texts themselves--what to include? The "textbook" as Bernadette Longo reminds us in Spurious Coin, is a legitimating tool in academia--a guide for what to teach, why to teach it, and what is teachable. Likewise, anthologies symbolically inscribe a field and guide scholars towards what is acceptable, even good, text. Despite the growing number of fan-scholars, scholar-fans, and scholars of fandom, we have no central, legitimated field. So where might we look, if we were to teach such a class or (God forbid?) create such a field?
First, we would probably find key authors in fandom--most likely those that write across many fandoms or those who are the most read. Perhaps the most celebrated fic (and some would argue, fic writer) in slash fandom comes from Speranza. “Written by the Victors” is, as one fan put it “what fanfic should be.” The 330K file is a long fic, coming in at several thousand words. More importantly, Speranza gives us a new genre that represents the core desires of fandom: to make the fandom world more present, more real, more encompassing, and to change that world as we see fit. “Victors” or the “VictorsVerse” tells a fairly standard Stargate: Atlantis story, an imagined universe where the crew on Atlantis officially split from Earth and form their own culture--a culture that allows for explorations into otherwise improbable romantic plots that facilitate slash relationships. In Victors, however, Speranza does not provide the standard narrative, but tells the story through quotes from books on the history of the Atlantis expedition. Of course, these books are not any more real than Atlantis itself, but Speranza’s authoritative academic voice makes these excerpts believable. An incident that would have perhaps been a chapter of a long fanfic is thus described through a quote from “Tina Eber,” author of the book The Atlantis Chronicles, Volume 2, page 37:

While we will never know for sure what happened on the evening of 17 January 5 A.T, we can make several educated guesses. It is probable, despite William Summerville's analysis in "The SGC's Real Target?" (Journal Of Political Diplomacy, OUP: 2010), that John Sheppard was the object of the attack. It is likely that Armitage planned to ambush or otherwise surprise Sheppard; Armitage's military record, as well as her preference for knives, shows a distinct predilection for stealth. It is also likely that McKay stumbled upon or otherwise interrupted her approach; it is unlikely that he would have sustained the degree of injury Royce witnessed if Sheppard had been in the fight. Royce's description accords with McKay having made a brave, if clumsy, grab for the knife while Sheppard's back was literally or metaphorically turned; it is not unreasonable to speculate that his injuries were sustained almost immediately as Armitage tried to ward him off. (“Victors” Book 3).


“Victors” has spawned a “VictorsVerse” that features both standard fan works and styles similar to what Speranza has done. What is important about this particular fic is the response it has elicited from the community: it has been bookmarked on Delicious by a thousand people, recommended in multiple fandoms, and, in general, recognized as one of the best scifi fics ever.
The fact that so many fans recognize Speranza (by her several online nicknames) as a key writer for the community is another way, I think, fandom can be seen as more permanent than other aspects of popular culture. Victors has captured the attention of the fan community as a whole--not just SGA fans. And any fan entering the SGA fandom will be recommended (recc’d) this story. "Victors," and other similar iconic fics, show the start of a canon for Stargate fandom and fandom as a whole.

Of course, the problem with fandom, even one as wide as the Stargate fandoms, is that it is tied to an original text, and once that original text disappears from the public eye, we would expect--assuming a close tie between the popular and the fanatic--the fandom to die as well. And in some ways this is true; enthusiasm for a given text dials down as new texts enter the media stream and our consumer consciousnesses.

Sandvoss’s definition of “sustained interaction” with a text only applies while the fandom is in vogue. In his definition both in the introduction and later in his book, fandom is still highly transient; it is the fan that remains the same. When interest dies, the fandom dies. But in many cases, most notably, the Buffyverse, Due South, and Star Trek, the original text is several years (if not decades) dead, while the fandom surges on. The ease of file bootlegging and DVD boxed sets allows for new fans to join, and many fans follow each other from one fandom to the next, creating relationships that extend beyond a single fandom. And jumping into an older fandom is easy, as I found out last summer when I consumed the whole of Due South in about a week. For example, using recommendation lists, newcomers can easily locate the most proliferous members and the most celebrated fan texts of that fandom. Major authors begin to emerge after a few minutes of research: Cassandra Clare, SuEric, Speranza, and Aristide, top may lists if quality writers

And most of their works in fact can be found with relative ease, thanks to an almost fevered effort to catalogue, categorize, and archive the fics of a fandom. Websites like the LiveJournal-hosted “dsficfinders” allows users to request help finding such works--all an inquiring fan has to do is describe what they remember about a favorite fic, and the community responds with suggestions within 24 hours--usually within an hour or two. Fans can even describe elements they want to read in a story, and the community will recommend the best version they know.

In Harry Potter fandom, Fictionalley features an overwhelming archive of fan works. Larger, multiple fandom sites such as fan fiction.net and mediaminer.org host thousands upon thousands of fic and art and poetry and snippets of conversation that would have, in the days of mimeographs and mailing lists, long been rotting in a landfill.
When LiveJournal purged several dozen communities in the summer of 2007, fans were outraged for the loss of years of conversations, “inscribed” proof of their lives and communities. The fics could be replaced (and they were, since many fans stored their favorites on separate thumb drives or email accounts), but the textual evidence, the immutable mobiles that made the fandom more than just a momentary enthusiasm, was gone. Using archives (and now, carefully backed-up archives) allows a fandom to subsist long after the object of its attention has faded from the public eye.

The inscription of fandom into texts and archives suggests that associating fan studies with popular culture may be, for now, a mistake. As “pop culture studies” grows, it will, probably, throw off some of the assumptions of transience and frivolity, and maybe even “mass.” Fandom is not, and cannot be both a part of mass media--that is, a part of the “mainstream” and part of the ex-centric, and it is time we stop looking at fandom as such. I’ve only begun to list here some of the processes that are now helping fandom become more permanent, more legitimate, and hopefully others can add those I am not aware of. Comments, like in fandom, are always welcome.

____________________________

Bury, Rhiannon. Cyberspaces of Their Own. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2005.
Hayward, Jennifer Poole. Consuming Pleasures. Lexington, Ky: University Press of Kentucky, 1997.
“Introduction: Why Study Fans?” in Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World. Eds Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington. New York: New York University Press, 2007.
Joli, Jensen. “Fandom as Pathology: The Consequences of Characterization.” In The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media. London: Routledge, 1992.
Latour, Bruno. “Drawing Things Together.” Representation in Scientific Practice. Eds Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. 19-68. Reprinted at www.bruno-latour.fr. 9 April 2009. 4 April 2009.
Sandvoss, Cornel. Fans: The Mirror of Consumption. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005.
Speranza. “Written By The Victors.” 2007. Accessed 9 April 2009. See also “VictorsVerse Art and Artifacts.” Accessed 9 April 2009.

Monday, March 02, 2009

Settling Accounts

On accounting

I've been a member of the internet-addicted community for some years now; it was March of 1996 that I got my first modem-enabled computer dialing up to speeds of 14.4K (!). I was hooked. It was like a drug; the coding, the chatrooms, the web searches that required a gentle hand and a clever mind. But online communities, the heart of the internet's popularity explosion, around since the WELL's inception (and conception) in 1984, were not really a part of my world; most were hosted by Prodigy and AOL and required fees to join. A few interfaces such as IRC created "channels" or chatrooms in which individuals could converge and ramble on about their lives, but IRC, unlike today's communities, was more fluid: users had multiple "nicks" and could change nicks at will, and you were never really sure about who you were talking to--I mean, sure, you could find out their IP address, the name of the server hosting the channel, their ping time, etc, but as for the person behind the nick, well, you could be anyone, including creepy voyeurs and pedophiles.

I don't remember my first "account" creation that gave me a stable internet presence. It might have been my hotmail, but definitely by the time I got my Yahoo! email, I had registered on several sites--a lot of them for casual games, a few on early blog-like sites. Today I have so many accounts, I can't account for them all. There's my credit card company account, my Papa Johns account, my Amazon.com account, Shockwave, various fan sites, facebook, delicious, my blog, my various emails and IM accounts, WebCT, job search engines, my MLA and PCA memberships, some more casual games sites, Bluffton Alumni...etc etc etc. There are accounts for sites that don't really account anything (such as Icanhascheezburger.com), and accounts that are attached to my bank accounts security sensitive accounts (like mypurdue).

Derrida says that postmodernism is marked by an "archive fever," a need to constantly count and account for (accompter) people, places, and things by rendering them into text--that permanent, substitution-vehicle that stands in for us long after we're gone. What does it meant to have an "account," then, but to re-iterate and re-cite one's own self-hood, to nominate yourself as part of a count, to ask to belong to a certain set? To call oneself into being through text, through the legitimating power of an email address--after all, most accounts require you to prove your identity or confirm your account by responding to an email sent by the automated program. Yes, I am real. Yes, I exist.

These "accounts" name us, they classify us as members, and they give us a place within a larger schema. They, not surprisingly, mirror many of the usually hidden aspects of language and governance, making them transparent. Who are you? When were you born (i.e. are you a legal adult)? What do you look like (in the case of avatars)? How can others identify you? Substitution upon substitution that makes us "present" online, that presents us online, that re-presents us to the world. The text and image stand in for us, they reserve our place among the counted.

Presence and presentation are, of course different. One can still create multiple accounts with the same site. One could change one's avatar to be older, younger, a different gender, blonde, fat, thin, elfin, wizard, troll, or sheep. Clever people have created MySpace pages for everyone from Hitler to Heidegger, Aristotle to Zola, and yes isn’t it cool how digital “presence” shows us that all identity is a performance. But for those less overtly ironic identities, those accounts we take seriously, the ones that are supposed to equate presence and presentation for operations in the “real” world--what does it say of us, this endless profiling, selecting, electing and editing of our selves into text, into image? Into something that will remain long after ourselves (thanks to the Internet archive project)? Does blogger.com really need to know my gender? My state of residence? My likes, dislikes, favorite quotes and movies?

Part of me gets frustrated with the multiple username/passwords I have to remember every day. Part of me wants to create a universal ID that allows me to log-in efficiently to every site or community I am a member of. Then the dystopian imagination kicks in, and I think of the Mark of the Beast, of Big Brother tracking my purchases, my involvement, my movements across cyberspace. Paranoia is another condition of postmodernity, and it is also a condition of a dystopian imagination.

For now, I suppose I’ll do like everyone else, and use the same two or three web identities for everything, the same password with variations, for everything. So if you see an unwiredmascot or a pandoratrue somewhere, it’s most likely me. It’s just easier to keep account of accounts this way.

Saturday, February 07, 2009

Prospectus, version 1.0

Well, here it is. Attempt #1. This is the introductory statement/rationale, which will eventually become part of the introduction to the dissertation. The rest of the plan can be found on this blog back in October 2008, but I'll be revising that in coming days and weeks.
Suggestions welcome.

The title of the final book of the Christian Bible, John of Patmos' [GREEK FORM GOES HERE] has been translated as "Revelation", but the Greek "Apocalypse" has passed into our vernacular as a synonym for catastrophic endings and destruction. Apocalyptic literature is far older than even the New Testament's Book of Revelation; the apocalyptic books of Enoch, Daniel, Isaiah ......[Baruch?] reveal to their ancient Hebrew listeners the truth of their current situation, a transcendent truth beyond simple predictions of the fall of a civilization, the truth of the nature of history itself.
The lofty goal of apocalyptic literature, the goal of enlightening and revealing, has been subsumed in recent decades by a more (perhaps profitable) concrete purpose of positing possible, albeit dark, futures. The apocalyptic genre has moved from sacred literature to popular fiction, and not without accompanying aesthetic and rhetorical shifts. Whereas once the genre "QUOTE FROM COLLINS," the utopian and dystopian literature produced since the Enlightenment (itself a revelatory moment) lacks a godhead to direct history; instead, human agency and the science of causality together determine whether human civilization continues or falls. Since Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto, a teleological sense of history has ruled the fictions--we know we are going somewhere, progressing to some fulfillment of human potential, either ultimately good or horrifically bad. The speculative fiction of the mid-twentieth century was decidedly leaning toward the latter.
These dystopian--or anti-utopian, as some say--fictions, while still firmly within the apocalyptic tradition, Something about fear/pity and tragedy as well. Like the great Greek tragedies, these narratives seem to hold a permanent place in our collective consciousnesses that we wouldn't expect from pulp "science fiction." Brave New World, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and Lord of the Flies are listed on most junior high and high school curricula and feature heavily in Advanced Placement English classes [CITE], and dystopian narratives comprise much of science fiction television and film today. A "dystopian impulse" QUOTE BOOKER. This impulse to explore the end, and, in exploring, reveal and predict it, Quote RABKIN. Human seem to have a need to foresee the end; perhaps as a survival instinct, perhaps as morbid curiosity.
Understandably, most studies of dystopian fiction focus on explicating the particular philosophies and social systems each text proposes; comparisons to Marx's vision, examination of power a la Foucault, reworking of "the human" from Heidegger to Haraway. Frederick Jameson's recent work Archeologies of the Future, much anticipated among utopian studies scholars, offers a predictably Marxist analysis of utopianism, often blurring real utopian projects, formal texts proposing utopian communities, and utopian fictions such as Francis Bacon's The New Atlantis into one, uniform idea. M. Keith Booker's two studies on dystopian fiction provide a good introduction the the genre, but also focuses mainly on the social systems proposed within the texts. Seeing dystopian fiction as literature seems to be a problem among most critics; Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction begins with a disclaimer--he will not be including "didactic fiction" such as Orwell's 1984 in his study because it is too obvious in structure.
Dystopian fiction has often been included in other genre studies, as part of science fiction, fantasy, or both.--something about todorov's genre study and rabkin's--why they don't give us enough, but their overall understand of genre is good. To study the genre of dystopian fiction as literature, we would want to understand how it works, its purpose, its structures, and its rhetorical impacts. Early dystopian fiction such as 1984 and Brave New World have clear directives and proposals for their audiences, but how those arguments are made palatable to a reading audience has not been examined in depth. What, we might ask, is the pleasure of a text mired in death, fear, and loss?
Return to ancient western rhet. Deliberative genre. Kenneth Burke is good for this because his scholarship focuses on social change through text, literature as "equipment for living" and the ameliorative qualities of symbolic action. Burke gives us a language for literature as rhetoric, for aesthetics as persuasion, for heroes as avenues for identification.

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Two months? Really?

According to Blogger, the last time I published a post was November 7th, 2008. Two months is a long time between posts, but I did accomplish some stuff in December. Like passing the prelim.

I was playing on Icanhascheezburger.com last week, and ran across their sister site, Once Upon A Win, which features all the cool stuff from when we (whoever "we" is; there seem to be some assumptions about audience being made) were kids. Now, I never really liked VH1's I love the 80s (or 90s, or whatever), but this site makes me actually remember stuff, which is interesting in and of itself. It also reminds me that I am getting old.

Aside from fears that I may cease to be, the site provides links to some of that cool stuff. One such link sent me to a few MadLibs-esque sites that allow you to play that wonderful word game all day, no pens required. While some of it turned out quite silly, my reproduction of Hamlet's soliloquy had some good moments, which I have edited together here.

Oh, and a note about engrishfunny.com: Some of those "errors" are really quite lovely, such as "from time to time, the usual moment seems terribly beautiful."

Soliloquy
When we have washed off this mortal thief,
when we have found that dread of something after restlessness,
then we will know those ills we have
and prattle on to others that we know not of.

Thus conscience does make writers of us all
And thus the flattened hue of resolution
Is plated over with the passive wrench of thought.
And we are ordered, missives all:
To carry out the first stage of
(a lawsuit, for example): filed charges against your lover.
To march or quilt in a line.
To put items in a crate.
To make application; to elate.
To open one's name to a sterling contest
of will, of hope, of daily rendered love.