Old Posts from Nonhuman Site

Last year, I participated in a course on New Materialism and OOO. I realized that all of these are on a protected site that no one can see. I don't want to lose these posts, so I am reposting. Some of them, at least at the moment, might be outdated. They may express opinions about the philosophies  that I have since (and probably should revise at some point) made more nuanced. Forgive these slips.

Adventures at Guitar Center's Grand Opening

Imagine with me, if you will, that you walk up to a store to get that sweet deal on 12 packs of strings for 30 bucks and there's a line outside (ok, not too unexpected for a GO). While you wait in line, you are addressed by a man with flyers for lessons. You say politely but firmly, "no thanks, I'm not interested in lessons" because you don't want to carry around pamphlets all night. He says, "Oh, well, I bet you know some people who want lessons." And I thought more a minute--do I? "No sir, not really." I stand in line for a few minutes and the same dude comes up to me trying to hand me a flyer "no thank you," says I, thinking "this dude can't possibly have forgotten my firm but polite reply from 3 minutues ago. . ." But alas, this man would try and give me one of those damn flyers at least three more times while you are inside.

Did I mention that at the same time a rock band is playing in a tent in the parking lot. They are pretty solid sounding, but you can't help but laugh at a name like The Heroin. (not Heroin. Not Heroine. The Heroin.) Still, you probably would have been better off watching their set while everyone else scrambled to 'sample' a guitar or bass.

They really do like they are having fun like this child. 

When you finally enter the main room, it is full of electric guitar players, all plugged in. They all are either shredding or playing the best riff they learned from the internet over and over again, trying to impress their girlfriends, boyfriends, or friends they brought along for the ride, knowing they aren't going to buy a guitar. But that's not the first thing you hear. No. The first you hear is a poorly sung rendition of a song you can't quite pin down. You think: Where is that coming from? It can't be a recording because its out of tune. You swivel your head around searching for the source and low and behold there is a fucking elvis impersonator singing in front of the electronics/mic/recording section. You double take. Nope. Still there. He's real. You think again: ok, let's get these strings and get the hell out of here. You find the string shelf, you see the Martin SPs, mediums, that are supposed to be 12 for 30. But there are only 10 packs. What the hell? There must be a mistake. Oh god, do you I really have to find someone to go check the stock? Damnit, I knew I should have stayed home. But just then, you see them. You see that there are prepackaged packs of 12. You grab them and rejoice for your journey is almost over. You see a pack of 12 tortex picks and decide--what's another 6 bucks?

You go to one of the multiple lines that don't seem to have any particular ending, find one, wait, and check out.

But then you get curious: You wonder if they are selling F-Style mandolins (they aren't). You wonder if they have any good bass amplifiers I could try out? (Ampeg, Acoustic). You wonder what kind of Martins and Taylors they have in stock (plenty). You squeeze your way into the acoustic room where you find several people playing the acoustic guitars to a MUCH less annoying effect since most of them are playing quietly and honestly look like they may be trying out acoustic guitars for actual music making rather than girl-impressing or that guy-who-plays-the-guitar-in-every-music-shop-to-show-how-good-he-is.

Just then, you hear the announcement that there will be a raffle, which you did fill out a ticket for cuz-- you know -- why not? Maybe you'll win a guitar. But most likely, you will stand in the heat and watch others win and politely clap, knowing that if something were to happen that it would be a bonus. Hell, you didn't even know the raffle was taking place -- the strings were enough to drag your ass to the store. But of course, as with all raffle drawings, there are the two guys who are tryign to get the audience riled up asking stupid questions like "who wants a 300 dollar gift card" and then pretending to care that people aren't as enthused as these guys (who do openings for a living) would like. The raffles comes and goes. You sense the people around you are actually quite disappointed that they didn't win anything. You can almost hear their thoughts : "Why did he win. What is that little shitstain kid gonna do with an Epiphone Les Paul? Oh god, that's a horrible thought. But still -- I can already shred the shit out of that guitar and he has to still learn."  Or another guy to your right who is clearly thinking: "I bet that old fart is gonna sell that guitar on ebay. He's not gonna love it like I would love it. Damn old people." Maybe you are making all this up, but it entertains you while you stand there knowing that you are probably just gonna go home with your new sets of strings which will save you (hopefully) a lot of stress of coming up stringless when you inevitably break a string while drunkenly bashing out the chords to a Lucero song on your balcony--or another such situation.

The raffle ends. You think: I should probably just go home. Do I really need to see if I can play some of the nice basses. I could do this anytime -- ANY other day. But, well, there probably won't be that many people who go back in.

You are wrong. Again.

But you head back in anyway. As you cross the threshold, this lady ever so politely asks you if you have your receipt (she is your favorite part of the night: just seems like a decent, calm human being amidst the chaos).

 "yes, yes I do, ma'am."

"Ok well, I need to hold your bag while you go back inside -- but keep the receipt and I'll give it back to you when you come back out."

(Huh? you wonder)

"Oh, you know I could just put it back into my car and come back if that would be easier. . .or wait. . .no I gues--"

"Oh no, just let me hold it -- you're already here. It will be easier."

"Ok."

So you entere the guitar room again -- a barrage of dissonance and riffs peaking out here or there that are technically correct and sometimes sophisticated but, for the most part, without any kind of goal (like a song) or soul (like when you play a song). But in the far corner, someone is slapping the bass like a motherfucker through that Ampeg amp you desire. It's impressive. You are grateful for the relief of the low end from the chugging and screeching guitars surrounding him.

You wander again, thinking you may have missed the mandolins. You encounter your good friend Pamphlet/Flyer guy who once again tries to hand you something -- at this point you just ignore him.

It's clearly time to go. It's not like you'll be able to hear yourself if you even got to play an instrument that night. You've accomplished your goal. Now its time to go home and eat.

As you drive home, you think: Man, that place is gonna be great to go to for strings and other minor accessories. But that's it. You'll probably never buy a guitar, mandolin, bass or bass amp there (unless there's a good used instrument for a good deal). For some musicians, that's analogous to buying a dog or a cat from PetCo when there are tons of pets looking for good homes at the shelter and who will not only give them shots and spay/neuter them for you, but if you buy an older cat for instance -- just straight up give it to you.

But who knows.. .maybe a fender jazz is in my distant future.

 Guitar Center Gainesville lives. And despite its corporate image, I like it better than the local store in town already. It's better than Best Buy used to be too

Why'd I write this? Because I can. And initially it was going to be a long facebook post. I figured--why not just use the blog. Apologies to any academics who may actually follow my academic posting and apologies to those who actually produce nonfiction stories worth reading. But I said it. I tried to entertain you and myself. Maybe I succeeded, maybe I didn't.

"The Human Element" --On Dave Grohl's Sound City and Capturing Music

I often tell myself that one of the reasons I am glad I have a band and play music is that its something that is, in some ways, "outside" the university. It is my one activity that has little to do with my academic mind. When I play music by myself or with others, I'm not thinking about ontology or the construction of facts -- I'm 'thinking' in a completely different way. Recently, my friend Blake told me that by playing music early in my life, parts of my brain are actually designated for playing music. This may be why I can get hammered and still manage to play pretty well (unless you ask me to solo). I begin with this point because I have been afraid to incorporate 'music' (except for a paper on noise that needs a lot of development)  into my academic world-- that is, on this blog. Sure, I've posted music videos and other things on the blog to break up the monotony of print, but I think the thing I fear is that my academic work is so entrenched in the "nonhuman turn" toward critical animal studies, posthumanism, speculative realism, technology, etc. that I fear deconstructing and dissecting the life out of that remainder that's always there in playing music. In his new documentary Sound City, Grohl calls this "the human element."

But is it really the human element?

Sound City, Grohl says, started out as trying to tell a story about a sound board: the Neve console. This sound board was located in Sound City, a shitty looking studio in CA where a lot of great records were made (Neil Young, Nirvana, Fleetwood Mac, etc.). Despite this reference to "the human element," we see that it is actually the nonhuman elements that are the condition for the possibility of catching this "human element." The board, combined with the room (which "no one designed") happened to produce an amazing drum sound. For anyone who has never recorded music, drum sound is probably one of the hardest things to capture on an album (live, mic-ed drums that is). In fact, I find that when I listen to a local band's record compared to, say, Tool's Lateralus, one of the main ways you can tell that the band is semi-professional or at the very least producing the album themselves is the drum sound. Drums on an album need to sound full, round, and, on a rock album, BIG. However, it is the technology -- the room and the board -- that is posited in the film as the reason for the good drum sound. The 'human element" is continuously linked to the capturing capacities of the technology.

Grohl and co. are careful, however, to point out that the technology is not to be relied on-- one still needs good songs and good musicians who practice. Indeed, this point emerges through the latter half of the film which discusses the debate between analog tape and digital tools. The way musicians talk about analog is that it is "no frills" directly onto tape. You "had" to practice and to do multiple takes -- you couldn't simply "fix" something. One of the musicians remarks that he heard a younger musician once say "you don't really even have to practice anymore--you can just put it into the machine and cut it up."

It's not that you cannot cut tape. You actually have to cut tape in order to bond different takes and such. However, the musicians make a good point for lifetime musicians like me: you really can't just rely on the technology whether it's a guitar, pro tools, weird effects. A good song, a good cut, a good album is not just the technology, but the way in which the technology interacts with 'the human'. In some ways, digital tools can be used to master the music (pun intended) rather than to capture the music happening in the room. There is an element of chance, an 'event' feel that happens when you record live -- on tape or digital.

Big Shoals' debut album has been recorded entirely "digitally," but we played the underlying tracks "live" in the studio. Lance had previously tried to record without a full band, and it didn't sound "right." It was good, but there was something missing. On this album, we've "captured" rather than mastered the music. It's a true collaboration between us, our instruments, Ryan our sound engineer, pro-tools, and the rooms in which we are recording. I'm not going to lie -- we've had to "punch in" a few notes when we missed it, but the overall feel of live playing still lingers in the mix because we were playing the damn thing live. We also did multiple "takes" of certain solos and parts. Lance would play several takes of a lick and there would be something in the take that set it apart from every other take -- an event captured.

Much of the music demonstrated and played in the documentary Sound City was recorded "live" in the studio. Rage Against the Machine tells how their debut album was recorded "like a concert" where they invited friends in to watch them play. They said they got over half the album done in one night. And if you've listened to this album -- there's something there, something captured. 

As more and more artists -- particularly pop artists -- rely on technology in order to master their already-written and composed songs, we lose what Roland Barthes once called "the grain of the voice" (although it's not just the voice, but any note on any instrument -- perhaps its timbre). We also lose the "event" character of music. It's not that everything in an album has to be done all at once, but the collaboration is distributed across not only people, time, and space, but I imagine certain musicians divvying out their music like an assembly line. We call this music "mass produced" because it all "sounds the same." Obviously, in the western scale, there are only 12 'notes' so I am not saying that musicians are playing the same chord progressions. I mean that there is no sense of a "capturing." The voice captured is probably weak, uninspired, and a little out of tune that needs doctoring until we can no longer hear the vocal chords. Instead of working to get that note 'right', to capture a moment on tape or in bits and bytes, the note is played and then after the fact reintegrated into the song.

Am I merely being nostalgic? No. I do not long for the days of analog tape as if somehow that was always better. However, I am suggesting that there is a difference between the capturing of an event (even just one note) and being a "master and possessor" of notes and timbres. I'm suggesting that if we lose that element of chance produced through the collaboration of the human and nonhuman, then I believe we begin to colonize music -- to make it more human in the most Humanist of ways. To be a posthumanist musician actually means letting the nonhuman become actors (or actants) themselves rather than wielding them as 'tools'. This is why even though people like Brian Eno use primarily digital tools to make music, one could see him as a "posthumanist musician" because he introduces chance into his compositions -- a combination of skill and chance makes a music event.

"Pro-tools." It's in the name. It's a professional tool -- we wield it like a weapon or a diamond cutter -- carving out the excess in the name of perfection.

In Sound City, the exception to the rule of analog vs. digital is NIN -- Trent Reznor. Reznor, according to Grohl, "uses technology as an instrument, not as a crutch. He doesn't need it." Technology as an instrument rather than a tool. "Instrument" not in the sense of "instrumental" but instrument in the sense of a musical instrument. A musical instrument is not a tool that a musician uses. A musical instrument is a collaboration between the human and nonhuman. Things happen when you play a musical instrument that you might not have expected. I'm not simply talking about "jamming" here, but I mean the way we play an instrument. In the moment of putting your fingers to strings or keys, even if it's a song you've played a million times before, maybe you hit a chord harder than usual or do a little run that comes out of nowhere. It's not "magic" but its a collaboration between the environment, the instrument, and you. It's a subtle difference but its the difference that makes a difference between a musician and someone playing music. "Musicians" know that each performance is a unique event in which they become musicians by participating in every performance as one actant among many.

I'm far from the first academic to think theoretically about musical environments. Thomas Rickert's book Ambient Rhetoric shows how Brian Eno is a potent illustration of what he means by 'ambient rhetoric'. Rickert writes,

"In this process, not only do the boundaries between music and environment blur and blend, but the locus of creation is dispersed ti include the environment, which thus grants an active role to the technological apparatus as an element within the whole material surroundings" (Rickert 110).

This is definitely in part what I am trying to get with my reflections on Sound City. However, in Sound City, as opposed to the example of Eno,  the other really determinate actants are not only nonhuman instruments, technologies, and spaces, but other musicians. When you play (and record) with other musicians, songs emerge in their performance/recording.

In another article by Thomas Rickert and Michael Salvo, "The distrubted Gesampkunsterwerk: Sound, worlding, and new media culture," the authors discuss "Garageband" --the mac's pre-installed music software. I have used garageband myself when I owned a mac and I do find it to be a powerful tool for making one's own music. Rickert and Salvo argue that Garageband helps enable what they call "worlding."

"Worlding, then, carries this double sense: It is the aesthetic realm that a visual musical work invites us to both enter and immerse ourselves, and it is the constellation of production pathways and inputs--people, communities, technologies, and networks--that are simultaneously evoked with each aesthetic world." (Rickert and Salvo 313).

The authors point out that in addition to recording traditional instruments, the program comes with preloaded beats and sounds etc. for people to (re)mix. Thus, Garageband makes everyone a (potential) composer. Garageband itself, much like the "digital tools" that Grohl refers to when speaking of Reznor, becomes an instrument: "software is no longer limited to combining or transforming pre-existing content; rather, it produces content itself no differently than a musical instrument" (Rickert and Salvo 315).

In the future, Rickert and Salvo speculate that the interface of these digital tools will become more affectively pleasing like a musical instrument. They argue that this will mean that "sound" will become more important in composing. "Sound" is different than 'music' in some ways, but inseparable from music as well. We just spent quite a lot of time talking about "drum sound" and how important it is to capture that feel.

One question is whether or not these digital tools allow one to make new sounds, or simply remix premade, poorly composed 'stock' sounds. We already hear a kind of levelling of sound happening in the production of recent pop music. Perhaps Rickert and Salvo are right that it is through these DIY tools that new sounds will be produced -- new soundworlds for songs to exist within.

But also, we do need to ask whether or not the sound, the song, the soundworld, the environment is poorly or well composed. Rickert and Salvo, although they use the example of some of the greatest musicians of the second half of the 20th century (Hendrix, Yes, The Flaming Lips), are more interested in the potential for garageband and other tools to allow nonmusicians to make music--or at least to make sound. These sounds and songs will also enter into the digital network where musicians can receive feedback (such as reverbnation or bandcamp -- Byron Hawk has spoken of music networks in his article "Curating Ecologies, Circulating Musics: From the Public Sphere to Sphere Politics in Dobrin's edited collection Ecology, Writing Theory, and New Media.).

These points are apart from a concern that underlies this entire post and myself as a musician: good music. Now, everyone says that music taste is "subjective," but I think that even within the recent theoretical millieu of academia, we have abandoned such separations of 'subject/object'. Of course I want people to make their own music (after all, it's what i'm doing) but I just hope that democratization and public "prosumerism" does not mean levelling.

And again, I don't think it does. While there's going to be a lot of shit produced, a lot more great music can now be accessed easily through Spotify, Pandora, Bandcamp, ReverbNation, etc.

The trick now is to figure out how to get people to realize they have access to great music. It's usually even free! Yet when I ask my students, for example, what they listen to, the majority of it is not local or semi-local or stuff they found via Pandora but anything that happens to play on the radio or at the club.

I'm starting to sound cranky -- and I am.

Maybe this whole post is simply an elaborate academic ruse to privilege a certain type of music making over others. Maybe this entire time my real target is all the heartless (*sigh* such a cliche, outdated metaphor) pop music and corporate rock that leaves nothing to chance and simply leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Maybe all that shit about Miley Cyrus's 'twerking' scandal with no one saying anything about the fact that she didn't sing well (and Thicke was even worse) just got to me--particularly after watching such a labor of love as Grohl's documentary, Sound City. Maybe I'm tired of people taking shitty songs and turning them into hits through spending an enormous amount of time on their production. I'm not trying to be a pretentious dick. I'm far from advocating that an older technology is far superior and more true to authentic music making. Nor am I trying to say that all popular music is bad. Shit, who knows, maybe I am saying that despite myself. Regardless, there's some DIY music that's bad too.

See. This is what I'm talking about. I can't extricate my involvement in music from any academic reflection. This is not what I'd call a 'sober' analysis of the issue. But hey, it's just my blog.

I'll end with this:

"The human element" turns out to be the element of surprise at one's own collaboration and participation in a musical event composed of other musicians, technology, instruments, and dingy rooms that just happen to make drums sound fucking badass.

Why "Eco" now?

In the following post I hope to examine whether or not media ecology and "ecomedia" (which we seemed to understand last class as media about ecology) belong  together theoretically. As Aaron pointed out to me the other day, media about ecology (and the 'environment') is not the same as media ecology. He argued that just because both terms contain "eco" in them does not mean that the course (or maybe even media ecology as a discipline) should necessarily concern itself with nonhuman animals or "environmental" concerns. His main point is not that we should abandon this work, but that to analyze media about ecology differs from the analysis of "media ecology." Thus, my analysis of the 'mediated' nature of environmental shows such as Whale Wars on South Park was a relatively standard move that many scholars have made using different texts, rather than using the methodology we might call "media ecology." (Is it a methodology? This will be discussed later).  BlackFish, Sea World, and other media that deal with 'ecological' issues can be thought through the methodology of media ecology, but media ecology is not restricted to issues of the nonhuman animal or ecological politics.

Caroline Stone's work on e-waste, for example, is a media-ecological study because, although she discusses the film Wall-E as a representation of e-waste, the interest is not on the film per se, but the problem of e-waste and the ways in which it is circulated and eventually gathers.

But is it a coincidence that the metaphor of 'ecology' for objects of inquiry such as media or writing has become so dominant? Does it provide an original methodology for studying the ecology of writing or media that focuses on the medium regardless of its content (and indeed, would this not be to agree with Mcluhan: the medium is the message) or is it because the problem of the nonhuman animal, nonhuman AI/bots/search optimization, matter/materiality presses upon us as we confront global issues such as climate change, overpopulation, globalization, food production,  that deal with the very real fact that the earth is a finite resource? And that these problems has allowed such a methodology to emerge?

Ecocomposition and Ecomedia

In his book Postcomposition, Sid Dobrin recognizes the 'failures' of what he calls "Ecomposition."  I recognize that Dobrin's book is situated in a particular disciplinary conversation in composition studies. I further recognize that Dobrin is not saying that ecompositional work that engages with political and ecological issues should not be done. He does write, however, that at least within composition, ecocomposition has functioned as "a misnamed approach for giving students something to write about, a political content addressed as the thing that fills writing with meaning" (124). Dobrin identifies four ways in which Ecocomposition has already failed:

1.) Falls prey to the 'pedagogical imperative' of composition studies.

2.) Ecological composition has failed because of its embrace of "floating signifiers like 'nature' and 'environment'  as its primary objects of study rather than writing"

3.) Ecocomposition has always been anthropocentric, "focusing on the human agent's relationship with the environment"

4.) Ecocomposition as an idea hasn't spread and influenced further scholarly work.

(125-26)

Dobrin explicitly reminds us that questions about the construction of nature or the nonhuman animal should not be abandoned: they are important.  Yet, this is something he explores elsewhere.

Why do I bring this up when we aren't talking about "the phenomena of writing" or even the field of composition? Because writing  seems to occupy the place of the word we have chosen for this course: media. That is, Dobrin's  description of the phenomenon of writing-as-system as isolated from other political and theoretical issues in ecology mirrors a possible position that "media ecology" does not have a necessary relationship to larger ecological concerns. In contrast, "ecomedia" does. "Ecomedia" to implies that we think about ecology as the content of media. Another way to put it -- Media ecology designates a methodology (in the same way that one might categorize 'deconstruction' or 'actor-network-theory') and 'ecomedia' designates something media ecology might choose to study, but does not have any privileged relationship to Media ecology's methodology.

But in the academic scene, media ecology as a methodology has also emerged from the recognition of global ecological problems. Is media ecology simply a new name for an old methodology or does it offer a different different mode of inquiry? Or am I simply wrong that media ecology is a "methodology" and that we should position media ecology as a 'field' of inquiry? (And what are the differences?)

I prefer the idea that media ecology is a methodology, but a methodology that is not an empty formal method, but one which is not only influenced by the concerns of those theorists that have helped media ecology emerge, but were the conditions for the possibility of its emergence. These concerns are not the same as "content," but it does seem that media ecology contains methodological assumptions that in some ways connect it to the larger scholarly endeavor of the "nonhuman turn." I turn now to those theories.

The Nonhuman Turn of Theoretical Inquiry

In the previous post, I mentioned the Wikipedia entry on "Media Ecology." The main distinction the author(s) of the entry make between the North American Media ecology and the European is that, citing Matthew Fuller,

"The European version of media ecology rejects the North American notion that ecology means environment. Ecology in this context is used 'because it is one of the most expressive language currently has to indicate the massive and dynamic interrelation of processes and objects, beings and things, patterns and matter' (Fuller 2005:2).

Despite this claim, it seems that the more recent media ecology, especially Parrika (although he calls his method 'media archaeology'), look to the nonhuman animal, plant, and mineral world for models and metaphors for media, distinguishing them from the Mcluhanesque definitions offered by the Media Ecology Association (Parrika's book is called Insect Media for a reason, right?).  Indeed, as I pointed out in my last post, the MEA's definitions all seem to use environment to describe human made media and its impact on humans. The metaphors are of "information" "code" "system"  or all at once "complex communication systems as environments" (Nystrom). 

The title of Parrika's book would have one believe that instead of using the metaphor of "environment" to describe communication systems among humans, we appropriate elements from what we might call the 'environment' or nonhuman animals systems as metaphors or models for these communication systems. That is, 'media' is not restricted to its impact on humans, but rather becomes a problem/issue/interest between humans and nonhumans as well as among nonhumans themselves. Nonhumans do not only mean here the digital world, containing many algorithms that make decisions without direct human intervention, but also nonhuman animals and their environment. If we think "ecology" simply means the digital circulation of texts, images, videos on networks, we may be bracketing an entire realm which does not appear to concern the human (but really does). 

In other words, we get the sense that the North American Media Ecology Association is primarily interested in human endeavors and the complexity of our digital and textual lives rather than "ecology" as a biological discipline that has to bear on ecological crises.  

In contrast, many theorists have tried to theorize about what Quentin Meillasoux calls "the great outdoors," those parts of the world that are not directly correlated to our perceptions. An influx of nonhuman, nonanthropocentric philosophy has arrived in the forms of Speculative Realism, New Materialism and critical animal studies. The former is a general term for philosophers that attempt to revive the tradition of realism in the face of what Quentin Meillasoux calls "correlationism." 'Correlationism' is any philosophy that makes the real conform to what is given to the human being. In After Finitude, Meillasoux writes, 

"By correlationism, we mean the idea according  to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other." (AF 5). 

The main culprit briefly discussed in M.'s book is Heidegger. I'll leave the details to the reader's leisure, as it does not directly bear on the question at hand.

The critique of correlationism has been taken up by Object Oriented Philosophy (Graham Harman) and Onticology (Levi Bryant. These philosophers also reject 'correlationism' and propose a realist theory of objects (although Levi Bryant seems to have toned his OOO influence down a bit lately). As I mentioned in class, this philosophy has had a huge web presence and one could even argue that the entire intellectual movement would have been impossible or at the very least had much less of an impact on theoretical discourse today had their not been blogs (Bryant's blog, for instance). Bryant in particular, especially in the earlier days of the blog where he was developing what would become The Democracy of Objects worked tirelessly to respond to questions and criticisms, shoring up evidence and speculations for his argument that would result in a book and continued engagement with his own work. 

Object oriented ontology argues for a "flat ontology" in which even the human subject is considered 'an object' among other objects. One of the tenets of OOO is that, because of the influence of correlationism, we have mistaken ontological questions for epistemological questions. That is, instead of asking what something "is," we turn that question into "what can we know about it?"  OOO tries to construct a different ontology in which we understand objects as "withdrawn substances" (Harman). OOO, at least ontologically, does seem to make much of a distinction between nonhuman animals and plants and other material objects like tables and hammers. Both Harman and Bryant have their own specific way of getting at their ontologies, with Harman relying on Heidegger and a weird philosophy of 'substance' and Bryant on his reading of Deleuze, Lacan, and Niklas Luhmann (among others). Both, however, are trying to construct a nonanthropecentric philosophy. 

In contrast to OOO, Cary Wolfe has recently used complex systems theory of Niklas Luhmann in conjunction with Derrida's philosophy, particularly those texts explicitly thematizing the nonhuman animal (Animal that Therefore I am (following)), to show how we are dependent on nonhumans for our current ways of life under global capitalism. Unlike OOO, Wolfe is very interested in the distinction between nonhuman animals (and other things we might characterize as 'living') and other objects. For Wolfe, there is a biopolitical imperative to interrogate the difference between the who and the what -- even if the 'what' is always the condition for the possibility of the who. Wolfe is not so much in "ecology" as a metaphor because of his adherence to Luhmann's systems theory. We will return to this point when we discuss Wolfe's critique of Latour. 

'New materialism' is, in some ways, a theoretical position that mirrors OOO except that new materialist do not think that we have to build first an ontology that can only then can lead to discussions of ethics and politics. Rather, new materialism is already intimately concerned with politic.  Rather than reviving old school philosophical terms like "substance" as Harman does, Bennett and other new materialists focus on materiality and matter (Karen Barad can also be considered a new materialist). New materialism is interested in exploring the agency and the capacity/potential/energy/affect of nonhuman beings within networks. Bennet's book title? Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. 

Bennett draws on an array of sources including Deleuze, Whitehead, Bergson, and especially: Bruno Latour. 
While I hesitate to put Latour in a completely separate category than these other recent theorists, I feel I must. Latour springboarded "science studies." Furthermore, Latour is an anthropologist/sociologist. He is interested in a new methodology that could allow for a "symmetrical anthropology," an ongoing project that was outlined in We have Never Been Modern ( Latour believes that we must shift from the verb "to modernize" to "ecologize." But why ecology?

First, we should understand that none of these thinkers that I mentioned has much interest in the well worn opposition of Nature/Culture. Indeed, the 'realist' philosophical project is also deeply invested in getting rid of the distinction because 'culture' leads to the postmodern impasse of cultural relativism.  Indeed, "ecology" for some of these thinkers seems to be the only way out of this dichotomy. Because of this caveat, we cannot understand "ecology" as a synonym for a vulgar environmental politics in the name of the Natural World or the Environment (as if it was separate from human intervention). 

However, doesn't  'ecology' must have something to do with what we used to call nature?

Latour defines 'ecology' as such: "Ecology is not taken in this inquiry as a focus on Nature but  as the end of the notion of nature which is presumed to be a common world of all collectives. If nature is no longer the arbiter of judgments, we now have to compose rather than modernize" (Latour, Inquiry, online text)

Ecology, then, is meant to signify not only the movement and circulation of media, but rather the imperative for a common world. A 'common world' in some sense that can be opposed to simply accepting the values of globalized capitalism.

In other words, ecology resonates with the imperative to allow 'things' and 'animals' to have a 'say' in our common future as collective beings in the world. We already know that nonhumans act upon human beings, sometimes as essential components to human ways of life.  I believe that for Latour and many other thinkers the larger context that we must take into account is the fate of our common collective under the threat of what used to be taken as 'environmental' concerns: climate change, sustainability, overpopulation. 

These are our current problems that must be addressed not only by actions but the creation of new concepts. I am referring here to Deleuze and Guattari's claim in What is Philosophy that "all concepts are connected to problems without which they would have no meaning and which can themselves only be isolated or understood as their solution emerges [. . .] concepts are only created as a function of problems which are thought to be badly understood or badly posed" (16). 

The question we should ask, then, is whether what I've called the methodology of media ecology is necessarily connected to the concept of ecology that has emerged because of the ecological problems we face today. 

Media Ecology/Ecomedia -- What is it? And South Park. . .again.

http://talisa3091.wordpress.com/2011/03/06/mediaecologies/

Hello again, world. It's been awhile since I've used this blog. I want to mainly just outline quickly some things I've been finding out about our two key terms for the semester.

1.) 'Ecomedia' -- In class, we seemed to focus our discussion on ecomedia around the types of texts, images, and films that participate in 'environmental' and 'ecological' discourses. We pointed out that many of the arguments made by television shows on animal planet and even some professional documentaries such as The Cove and maybe Blackfish may be critically examined not only in terms of the work's argumentative content or its politics, but also the formal techniques used to gather, present, and re-present the information.

(Side note: Using TinEye , I tried to trace the above image back to its "original" site. Many of the links were  broken links,  particularly some of the very early sites that used this image. Eventually I just gave up trying to get the "oldest" site. I was hoping to find out who generated/made the image, but my admittedly hasty attempts bore no fruit) 

South Park. . .again

 I personally have never seen many of these shows or documentaries, but I kept thinking about an episode of South Park (a constant reference for me): Whale Whores (a parody of Whale Wars). The episode suggests that the people on those on the show who present themselves as "badasses" who are combatting the perpetrators by 'any means necessary', actually are motivated partially by self-promotion (Look at me being an 'activist' on tv). South Park has poked fun at activism before (for instance, PETA), but not always to discredit activist values. Rather, they are more interested in how their values are transformed into practical action. 

The activists on the South Park version of Whale Wars throw rancid butter at ships, but Stan decides that such action is bullshit. He starts to really blow up the ships. This is just one example of South Park indictment of mild activists presenting themselves as, for instance, 'pirates'  (and the commercialization/televisualization/visual rhetoric of these so-called 'activists'). 

I recommend watching the full episode of "Whale Whores" (for free) on southparkstudios.com. At the end of the episode, we find out that the "real" reason the japanese hunt and kill dolphins and whales is because the united states gave them a doctored picture of the WWII bombings where Dolphin and Whale were in the cockpit -- not for food, not for sport, not because of cultural tradition. 

Instead of telling them the truth, they decide to make up another lie. It wasn't dolphin and whale, but Chicken and Cow (another doctored photograph is presented). 

We then see the Japanese raiding farms and killing all the cows and chickens. To which Randy says deadly serious as he watches the massacre: 

"Great Job, son. Now the Japanese are normal. Like us."

Thus, the viewer is left to ponder the contradiction in our society: Luke warm activism to save creatures because they are either endangered or aesthetically pleasing to human beings -- to the point of critiquing the country and culture that do not 'protect' these creatures -- but at the same time in our society condoning the "making killable" (Haraway) of millions of cows and chicken for mass food consumption. 

Furthermore, by giving the Japanese a picture of Whale and Dolphin at the cockpit (admittedly an absurdity that only South Park could pull off), the episode shows how indifferent we once were to their killing -- as long as it wasn't us! But then, we noticed that we could make a cool tv show and pretend to care -- so we just shift the sacrifice (but they aren't sacrifices -- just killable -- c.f. Haraway, Derrida, Wolfe) to "normal" things to kill. 

Why am I talking about South Park? Because I think that it usefully interrogates society's contradictions, usually ones that regard the division between theory and practice.

Though if I remember correctly, in the animal studies edition of JAC, one contributor discusses the "real" guy that stars in Whale Wars. I might want to reconsider that piece to show how South Park, as all satire does, simplifies the perception of this man as well. It's true: they are guilty of many an ad hominem attack. . .

But the more I watch this episode, the more I realize it needs a blogpost of its own for a full analysis of the show in terms of media, satire, critical animal studies, and environmental activism. 

Ok, just one more point. On "Whale Whores," we also see South Park calling attention to the formal techniques and rhetorical strategies shows like "Whale Wars" deploy in order to present a particular narrative. When Cartman realizes that the show is now successful, he pretends to care about the cause and becomes part of the crew. 

The first thing sign of this shift of concern is when narrator of the show begins to talk not about the conflict between the Japanese, the whales, and the activists, but rather narrates a battle between a show about Crab Fishing (Deadliest Catch or another similar show). (They shout back and forth: "Your show is fucking gay" "YOUR show is fucking gay" etc.).  Before this, the 'crew' is on Larry King Live (which actually happened and can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kimcoJc7wcw) and South Park Larry is only interested in how they created a "hit TV show." They even bring on an expert who also their creation of a hit tv show rather than their political practice.. Thus, the show becomes centered around not only what they are purportedly doing to save the whales, but its construction as a tv show!

One particularly poignant moment is when Cartman has his first one-on-one camera interview. 

As emotional music plays in the background, Cartman, identified as "deckhand since 3 hours ago" says, "It's really hard you know, really tough. It's like we dedicated all this time and all our lives to saving these majestic creatures. [Kenny mumbles and cries, Cartman comforts him] Shhhh, Kenny. Old ken's taking it especially hard. He's always loved dolphins so much that he. . . .Yeah, yeah, but keep it in a two shot though, keep in a, yeah, there you go"

Here Cartman calls attention to how he's being cut out of the shot. This is the kind of "behind the scenes" inserted into the scenes. Again and again throughout the episode it calls attention to its means of construction. 

Ok, I'm done with South Park now. 

---

"Ecomedia" as a term

So I googled Ecomedia and what did I find? That the term has been co-opted by an advertising agency. It's mission statement states: 

At CBS EcoMedia Inc., we have a vision: To harness the power of advertising and channel it into tangible social change.

And boasts that "an award winning company, founded by a team of environmentalists and social entrepreneurs" 

Now, on the one hand, we were talking a lot about marketing in class. However, it seems like this is not exactly the idea we have of ecomedia. But, given that we were supposed to poke around at how the term is being used, it seems useful to notice the way the term has been appropriated. Furthermore, the rather excessive amount of links google brings up to that company before getting to a more 'academic' encounter with Ecomedia. Cubitt's book by the same name doesn't show up till page 2 of the google search. 

Ecomedia also does not have a presence on Wikipedia. Media Ecology, however, does. 

Media Ecology as a Term

Partially due to the Media Ecology Association, the term media ecology seems to circulate more within an academic conversation. The Media Ecology Association offers definitions from Mcluhan, Strate and Postman, but really doesn't venture further than these canonical figures. 

The Wikipedia page for Media Ecology was a bit more elaborate. It recognizes the contributions of those mentioned on the Media Ecology Association website, but attempts to incorporate some of the more recent work, some of which we will be exploring in the course. 

However, there are some strange distinctions that, while grounded in truth, seem suspect. The wikipedia article makes a distinction between the "North American" media ecology and "European Media ecology" 

The European version of media ecology rejects the North American notion that ecology means environment. Ecology in this context is used 'because it is one of the most expressive language currently has to indicate the massive and dynamic interrelation of processes and objects, beings and things, patterns and matter' (Fuller 2005:2). Following theorists such as Felix Guattari, Gregory Bateson, and Manuel DeLanda the European version of media ecology as practiced by authors such as Matthew Fuller and Jussi Parikka presents a post-structuralist political perspective on media as complex dynamical systems. (Wikipedia) 

The writer(s) of this post seem to assume there are two totally different traditions opposed to one another -- which in some ways, goes against a kind of "media-ecological" explanation of the emergence of the very term 'media ecology', right? This reader at least is left wondering what the writer means by a "post-structuralist political perspective on media as complex dynamical systems." 

Granted, this is Wikipedia, but I'm casting my net wide here. I want to see what kind of stuff pops up when I google things. Furthermore, I'm not sure that The European version of media ecology "rejects the North American notion that ecology means environment" 

Particularly in Parrika's case, whose book is called Insect Media, it seems that Parrika is very interested in thinking ecology in terms of environment, but not just the human environment, however. Rather, "environment" in the sense of systems theory or within the paradigm of Jacob von Uexkull's biosemiotic environmental theory. The three definitions offered by the Media Ecology Association all imply that media ecology concerns media's impact on humans. 

But "media," as Robert Mitchell reminds us in his book Bioart and the Vitality of Media, also means "nutrient media." A "media" that is the kind of source of food and catalyst for growth of biological entities.So maybe its not just "systems" and "networks" and "communication technologies" but "media" can also be thought of in the way that Sid Dobrin characterizes writing as saturation. However, whereas Dobrin characterizes saturation as a kind of active and potentially violent act, the other side of saturation is a soaking in. In some ways, perhaps this concept of media (drawing on the biological terminology) is closer to Thomas Rickert's idea of "Ambient rhetoric" or "ambient environments." But Dobrin's emphasis on fluidity, especially considering the biological connotation, I think remains important. Whereas we might find it odd to think of "writing" in terms of fluids (in various viscous states) "media" (and for Dobrin I suspect these terms are all but equivalent) is easier for us to imagine. We already use fluid metaphors to talk about the "overflow" of information. It's a veritable ocean that we must navigate while being engulfed in it ourselves. 

In my next blog post, I hope to go into a summary, extension, and potentially critique of Mitchell's book on Bioart. This initial exploration will also help me to re-frame and re-compose pieces of my thesis for my upcoming presentation at Rice University's English symposium. 

Mad Men "The Crash": Of Doctors, Mothers, and Lovers

In the episode before "The Crash," Don treats Dr. Rosen's wife, Sylvie, as an object, dictating his desires to her as if she were a common whore. Although Don tends to treat women with less than full respect, this time it seems as though he's gone much further. Sylvie seems to trigger something in him when she says on the phone "I need you and nothing else will do." An innocent enough phrase, but this drives Don crazy, as he tells Sylvie to wait for him, takes her book away, buys her a dress and tells her "you are mine." His possessiveness is very disconcerting and came off as strange to me in the episode.

However, "The Crash" moves toward explaining Don's behavior.

I want to suggest that in this episode we get a glimpse into Don's Freudian 'primal scene', in which Don's virginity is taken away by a whore and then he is subsequently punished for it. The episode does not revolve around a linear plot, but rather an endless interpenetrating series of doctors, mothers, and lovers. Don has difficulty telling them apart.

The series of figures begins with Don being called out of a meeting room to take a call presumably from Dr. Rosen, Sylvie's husband (doctor #1), but we find that the call actually is from Sylvie (lover and, as we shall see, mother). Doctor becomes lover, but Sylvie is calling to chastise Don for smoking cigarettes outside her door at night. She tells Don that she wanted to make him know what it feels like to be on the brink of her husband finding out. Although Sylvie at first finds Don's demands arousing, she breaks it off at the end of the last episode and confirms her decision on the phone with Don.

But Don's secretary saying that Doctor's on the phone, sets off another chain of events. Jim Cutler (or Cutter, I can't remember) says "That's a great idea, Don! I'll call my Doctor (doctor #2) and we'll get everyone fixed up." The viewer is at first confused -- is Cutler sick? No, the doctor, it turns out, Dr. Hecht, gives Don and the other creatives a shot of vitamins and some sort of amphetamine. It remains unclear what exactly the drug is -- and this only contributes to the freedom that the director and writer take with the effects of the drug. Drugs have become increasingly more prevalent in Mad Men as we move from the 50s and early 60s to the late 60s, mirroring the development of the drug culture. Roger, for instance, ends his marriage after a particularly powerful LSD trip administered by none other than Tim Leary. However, this episode pushes the trippiness further than the LSD episode, as it seems to operate in an associational way that was not shown in the LSD episode (limited to an outside perspective of Roger and Jane, the occasional blurring of the camera, and Roger's report that he is at a baseball game when he's really in the bathtub). This makes "The Crash" even more disorienting for the viewer.

The drug is supposed to allow everyone to be more creative for a long period of time so they can work on Chevy. While the other creatives (and the sober Peggy) are rehearsing lines from Alice in Wonderland and coming up with ideas, Don has his own experience. After Sylvie hangs up on him, he coughs and this throws him back to a moment in his childhood when he was told to go sleep in the cellar by the woman (not his mother) who gave him a place to stay. This place, however, is a whorehouse (we found this out in an earlier episode).

Then he goes to take Dr. Hecht's drug -- witnessing the other creatives running around like Mad Men (haha). As Don descends the stairs, he coughs again, and flashes back to a moment when a particular whore decides that he should stay inside rather than the cellar, in her room. He sees a picture of a baby on the mirror and asks "Is that you?" and she says "No," changing the subject, and says "It's a chest cold." I suspect that this may have been a daughter of the whore, whose name is Aimee (mother/doctor, lover, as we shall soon see). As he comes back to the present, he looks at a secretary and asks if they knew each other -- the vision not quite fading. As the camera pulls back, we begin to hear loud typing and noises -- including phones ringing -- then a sudden silence. The pharmakon begins to take effect.

The camera cuts to the creatives where one of them says "The strategy is about some sort of love transaction between a parent and a child involving the greatest gift of all, a Chevy." It seems as though they are thinking about fathers and sons, but we shall soon find out that the episode revolves around another love transaction between mother and son. The creatives rattle off ideas and Peggy hits upon "The child is the father of the man" -- a cliche, but one that also works well with the idea of Freudian primal scenes.

After Peggy's statement, we cut to Don running into Ken Cosgrove. Don says that he has to speak to the Chevy people in the flesh. As Don says this, Ken begins to tap dance. Don asks who taught him that and Ken says "My mother. No, my first girlfriend." -- This statement turns out to be more foreshadowing as Don's 'first girlfriend' can be figured as Aimee, who is also in the position of the mother.

Don then arrives at the creative office asking how's it going (they are repeating lines from Alice in Wonderland). He gives a cryptic and vague speech,

"I know your all feeling the darkness here today. But there's no reason to give in. No matter what you've heard this process will not take years. In my heart, I know we cannot be defeated because there is an answer that will open the door. There is a way around this system. This is a test of our patience and commitment. One great idea can win someone over."

We suspect that there is more going on here than a Chevy advertisement. Even at this point, we might suspect that Don is indirectly speaking of Sylvie (a test of his patience and commitment and the idea that he might be able to use to win her over -- how can he seduce her again). Flashing back, Aimee feeds young Don soup and Don has an epiphany that there was a "soup account" that is the answer to his question (not the question of how to sell Chevy): "I've got it." He goes back to the creatives where Wendy (who? We find that it is a Frank Gleeson -- a man who just died from cancer-- daughter) is doing the I Ching. Don asks Peggy to find the soup account, but someone else had already looked.  Don says to Peggy, again, cryptically, "You'll know when you see it and its gonna crack this thing wide open."

When Don returns to his office (presumably he already returned, but the drug's effect is taking its toll on cinematic time as there is no transition from Friday to Saturday), Wendy is there. She is wearing a stethoscope (doctor #3). When Don asks where she got it, she said it was in one of the offices upstairs (potentially Dr. Rosen's office). She tells him she's there to make him "feel better" and asks if he wants to "get it on." He ignores the question and Wendy listens to his heart, which is silent: "I think its broken." Who broke is heart? Sylvie? Megan? Betty? All the other women? The very first woman? (Aimee?).

At the same time as Don's drama, the creatives are throwing pens at Stan and one gets stuck in his arm. The camera cuts to Don listening to a song through Sylvie's (?) door ("Going out of my head over you/out of my head over you/out of my head . . ."I must think of a  way into your heart"). The song sets Don's project and gives further significance to some of Don's more cryptic speeches earlier in the work: he must find a way to 'get his foot in the door' as Ginzberg will say (more on this later), find an idea that will convince Sylvie to listen to him.

But then it cuts back to Stan and Peggy, who has become doctor #4 ("You have a great bedside manner"). Peggy moves from doctor to lover (Stan kisses her), to mother, as Peggy recalls the pain of her abortion ("I've had loss in my life") to comfort Stan, whose 20 year old cousin has died in Vietnam. Peggy says that you can't dull the pain with drugs and sex.


A musical interlude is called for at this juncture.

--------------------

While all this is going on at the office, Sally has been put in charge for caring for her little brothers in the place of Megan, who is going to audition. She thus plays a kind of "motherly" role (that she is not ready for). Earlier in the episode, we also find hints of Sally's burgeoning sexuality through Betty's comment on Sally's short skirt. We may also remember the episode where Sally has her first period. Sally's transition into a young woman is further suggested by the book she is reading: Rosemary's Baby. The satantic undertones of this book is reinforced by a seemingly meaningless comment by Stan in the creative room earlier who says "I did it! I've got 666 ideas!" The book sets the tone for the sinister scheme about to unfold.

Sally hears a noise outside her bedroom and investigates. A large black woman is rummaging around the house. She says she's her grandmother visiting, claiming that she raised Don (mother (?)). The ensuing scene is awkward, as the viewer is suspicious (like Sally), but also find it plausible that we may learn of yet another twist in Don's past. Alternately, the woman says "Your dad is Donald Draper?" We might think that this woman raised the real Don Draper, whose identity was stolen by Dick Whitman.

But this mother is not a mother (or at least not Don's mother). She robs the house although, fortunately, does not hurt the children.

Meanwhile, Don is searching for the soup advertisement. The advertisement turns out to be an oatmeal advertisement with the words "Because you know what he needs." A mother holds the shoulders of a young boy about to bite into oatmeal. The image of the mother, however, has a beauty mark or a mole on her cheek and this causes Don to flashback once again.

Aimee is doing her makeup, but with a pencil, marks her cheek, in the exact same spot as the woman on the advertisement. She says "do you like this?" Don says, "I do." Aimee begins to seduce Don "You like my bosom." This is clearly Don's first sexual experience.

This dot, this mark, even though it is not 'natural' is the mark that links Aimee to Sylvie, who also has a dot on her cheek. If Don doesn't realize this, the viewer does. We can now begin to guess at why Don treated Sylvie like a whore: she reminds him of his mother/lover ("My mother. No, my first girlfriend" says Ken) Aimee.

After a cut to Grandma Ida, Sally, and Bobby, which increases her and the viewer's suspicion of her motives (Sally calls the police), we cut to Don in his office to perhaps the most significant scene in the entire episode:

Don (reading to himself): "This may be hard to believe, but the history can't be ignored. The history should not be ignored. Look, I don't want to waste your time, but. . ."  (calls for Peggy, resumes reading) "I don't want you to shut this door. Just let me say a few things. You and I both know. . ."

He tells them that he's "got it," showing them the oatmeal advertisement, saying that "it says it all." 

Don: Ok. I've got this great message and it has to do with what holds people together. What is that thing that draws them? It's a history. And it may not even be with that person, but it's. . it's like a. . .well, it's bigger than that.

Peggy: And that makes them buy a car?

Don: If this strategy is successful it's way bigger than a car. It's everything.I keep thinking about the basic principle of advertising. There's entertainment and then you stick the ad in the middle of the entertainment like a little respite. It's a bargain. They're getting the entertainment for free all they have to do is listen to the message. But what if they don't take the bargain at all? What if they're suddenly bored of the entertainment? What if they don't-- what if they turn of the tv? 

Ginzberg: You gotta get your foot in the door. 

Don: Exactly! So, how do I do that? Let's say I get her face to face. How do I capture her imagination? I have a sentence, maybe too. 

Peggy: Who's her? 

Ginzberg: Promise them everything. You know, you're gonna change their life. Your gonna take away their pain. [. . .] Then you hit 'em with the one two punch. What's the answer to all of life's problems? A Chevy. 

Don: No, it's not. 

First, note the slippage between the abstract notion of advertising and shared history (even if its not with that person) and the pronoun "her," which is clearly Sylvie. Is Don planning on telling her this history? Her strange and almost arbitrary connection to his first fuck? We are not sure.

So how do you do it? You become a doctor -- I'm gonna take away all your pain. Don goes home, rehearing what he's going to say to Sylvie: "Don't close the door on me. When in the course of human events. No. . .You haven't heard everything I have to say. Don't shut the door on me."

. . .But these plans are spoiled as he realizes he's been robbed (and that he left the backdoor open). Betty is there and call the city "disgusting." Don  faints. We flashback.

Aimee is charged with robbing/withholding money from selling herself on the street and is kicked out of the whorehouse. Just before she leaves, she tells him "Considering I took that boy's cherry for 5 dollars we'll call it even." Don is then beaten by the woman of the house -- called "filth" "disgusting" "shameful" "You're trash."

Don wakes up in the middle of the night. Briefly talks to Megan, who says "Sally seems so grown up, but she's really still a kid."

Cut to the morning.

Sylvie and Don ride the elevator in almost total silence ("How are you?" says Sylvie, "Busy"). Why, we should ask, has Don changed his mind about Sylvie (has he? Or is he just keeping up appearances?). What is it about the robbery and the flashback that make him realize that they should not be together? Does he realize that he was treating her like a whore? Or is he afraid of getting caught? Perhaps further episodes will shed light. Was it the drugs that cured him of his desire?

But for now, its important to see where this particular episode ends.

He calls Sally, telling her that he left the door open and that she did everything right: "Sally, I left the door open. It was my fault."

What seems to be a relatively straightforward remark becomes incredibly significant when we attach it to the many references to doors in the episode. Ginzberg: "Gotta get your foot in the door" and Don's repeating to Sylvie: "Don't shut the door on me." Its as if his obsession with Sylvie and his obsession with keeping the door open (keeping his options open?) led to the robbery.

Don goes to see Ted to tell him that he can only serve as creative editor rather than come up with advertisements for Chevy. We find that Wendy is Gleason's daughter (and know that Stan fucked her after a failed attempt with Peggy) and Ted chastises Don for the gibberish produced over the weekend: "Chevy is spelled wrong."

The last line of the episode: "I'm sorry Ted, but every time we get a car, this place turns into a whorehouse."

A brilliant clincher to the episode.

But where will they go from here? Has Don's creativity dried up? Or is he directing his creativity toward winning Sylvie back? But if that were the case, why wouldn't he have tried to talk to Sylvie in the elevator? Is that over? Where is Don, and Mad Men, going from here? I will patiently await next week's episode.

On "Writing Studies" and recent projects

"Writing studies," is a somewhat hypothetical discipline (insofar as we still don't see research positions in "writing studies," but rather "new media," "communications," "composition,"  "rhetoric") mentioned in Sid Dobrin's book Postcomposition, as a way to mark a form of disciplinary research apart from "composition," traditionally associated with First Year Writing and 'research' on pedagogical methods. In Dobrin's own words,

Thus, the primary agenda of Postcomposition is to argue for a move
beyond the academic work of composition studies in favor of the revolu-
tionary potential of the intellectual work of writing studies, specifically the
work of writing theory, an endeavor likely best removed from the academic
work of pedagogy and administration." (Postcomposition 24). 

Too often in composition, 'writing' is tied to a subject, usually a student subject. Writing as an expression of that subjectivity or writing as constituting that subjectivity. For Dobrin, 'writing' should be the focus of a 'writing studies' such that the subject cannot be torn from the inscriptional practices themselves. I like to think of this as thinking each inscriptional practice as a performance of a subjectivity, one that can only be described through that particular assemblage of inscriptional practices. That is, "subject," is no longer an expression of a human being or a consciousness, but the particular moment of inscription. The human and nonhuman actants work together to inscribe a 'subject' (if we still even want to preserve that term, so as to preserve a sense of agency). Byron Hawk gets at this through Deleuze and Guattari's ideas of the 'molecular' and the 'molar' in A Counter History of Composition:

"Meaning, purpose, and intention all are molar and separate subject and object, but the desire and the force behind them are molecular and collapse subject and object [. . .] The subject is a molar residual, off to the side, a side effect of desiring-machines, not a single center from which desire is born" (165).

 Raul Sanchez argues in his 2012 article, "Outside the Text: Retheorizing Empiricism and Identity," that the subject is neither an 'effect' nor an origin or something that precedes a moment of inscription:

"Identity names this singularity, which is neither a precursor to the act of writing nor merely its effect. If we no longer say that identity is expressed through writing, but rather that identity names the moment of inscription-the intrusion or emergence into Judith Butler's "grammatical time of the subject" (117)-yet is only available in and after writing as writing's condition of possibility, then we can also say that identity manifests, at once metaphorically and materially, in both the figure and the body of the writing-subject. These claims make it possible to recognize that there is neither an origin story for the "moment" of inscription nor an aporetic limit at which one must hover perpetually. They make it possible to name the act of writing, the moment of inscription, as that which marks a convergence of time, space, and linguistic code at the production of a text. More important, they make it possible-necessary, actually-to use this very convergence to embody, figuratively and empirically, the convergence itself. They make possible the writing-subject as both thing and word, object and concept."

The writing-subject in this sense is an event -- an event that draws together all of the actants, human and nonhuman. As Latour puts it in We have Never Been Modern, "History does something. Each entity is an event" (81). 

Ok, so the writing subject is linked to an act of inscription. Is writing simply any act of inscription? In broad terms, yes, it is. Every event leaves traces -- I would be tempted to say irreversible 'traces'. "Writing" ever since writing scholars' took notice of Jacques Derrida, has been refigured as 'the trace' in general. "Writing" is not necessarily about conscious invention and arrangement of an essay, but writing could be as simple as a mark on a wall or an animal's tracks. 

If this is truly the case, then scholars of "writing studies" are able to study practically anything as writing, as acts of inscription, of traces. My question, however, is what do we get by understanding in terms of 'writing' rather than 'rhetoric'? Are there not rhetorical limitations to the word 'writing'? Although his tone bothers me, I can't shake Ian Bogost's point in Alien Phenomenology that, "writing is only one form of being" (90). Of course, the problem with his statement is how he slips from 'writing' to "language" and then proceeds to deny the medium of writing and even language of a certain materiality, so brilliantly traced by Derrida. Bogost writes that in contrast to philosophical works (with the exceptions of Derrida, Nietzsche, or Wittgenstein) "philosophical works generally do not perpetrate their philosophical positions through their form as books. The carpenter, by contrast, must contend with the material resistance of his or her chosen form, making the object itself become the philosophy" (93). Here Bogost makes two mistakes: 1) seeing Derrida's form as a "book," when Derrida explicitly attempted to subvert that very medium, and 2) denying the inseparable bond between medium/form and content. 

In other words, Bogost makes no meaningful distinction between writing/carpentry outside of the fact that carpentry seems to lead us to 'doing philosophy' with objects other than the pen and paper. But if we understand writing as any trace, then these 'carpentry' projects of philosophy are just as much 'writing' as they are carpentry. Furthermore, the 'designation' writing, given its rigorous deconstruction by Derrida, avoids some of the baggage that 'carpentry' contains -- an emphasis on the 'hand made', for instance. 

Thus, carpentry just becomes a better metaphor for describing the practice of 'philosophy'. But what exactly is 'philosophical' about Bogost's projects? Of course this depends on our definition of philosophy, but if philosophy is the "invention of concepts" as Deleuze and Guattari contend, then Bogost's projects are not philosophy, even if they contain an 'affect' or a 'percept', which is the domain, according to D&G of ART. 

Within Derrida's understanding of writing, however, such art works would be considered "writing." But what do we get from describing artworks within a general system of writing? Does it erase the specificity of it being art or does it put into question the boundaries of what constitutes the art "work" (does it include all of the 'writing' and 'responses' that take place because of it? . . .and any possible future response?). 

Currently, I'm trying to adapt a significant piece of my writing on BioArt to a writing posthumanism. In my original piece, I framed the project in terms that would preserve these works as art, even if, at the same time, the artwork is always within a complex system of writing events, which will affect the function and efficacy of the artwork (critics reviews, theoretical statements from the artists, etc.). 

The question I have for myself is: what is it about BIOART that makes visible art as entwined within a writing system of human and nonhuman actants? My hunch is that by using 'life' materials as their medium, there is an increased probability of the artwork to not simply be the subject of writing surrounding it, but 'writes us' in some unique way. There is an unpredictableness, a propensity for failure that can be made visible through Bioart that reveals the general conditions of artworks: the possibility of their 'failure'. However, it is precisely the failure of BioArt that gives it's significance for biotechnological practices because the force of this failure is to recognize our inability to simply program and control life through genetic coding or otherwise. We can substitute "writing" for genetic coding, since there is no real way to control, in this age, the effects of our writing practices. What is the fate of this blogpost? What videos go viral? BioArt also is potent example of how our best laid plans can be foiled by nonhuman agency. 

But then, does BioArt simply become a stand in for any "writing?" Indeed, could not the same point be made with other artworks or even other inscriptions? Is there something that BioArt adds to our understanding of 'general writing' (that is, 'writing studies') or is the point of writing studies to show the very specificity of this writing practice? But then would we not succumb to the temptation of 'rhetorical analysis'? What words, what concepts does BioArt suggest that would be an essential supplement to our understanding of writing-as-system? 

These are the issues I am struggling with as I attempt to integrate some very specific research on an important group of artists and artworks in the biotechnological age.