McKenzie Wark on Wed, 6 Feb 2002 17:51:01 +0100 (CET) |
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[Nettime-bold] Vector, Site, Event |
Vector, Site and Event: An Intellectual Autobiography McKenzie Wark <mw35@nyu.edu> Applying for jobs concentrates the mind. Here, in a few thousand words, I've tried to sum up the past 15 years of my research, which produced the concepts of vector, site and event as a way of thinking in, and acting in, the emerging space I call virtual geography. There are two kinds of people: those who divide people into two kinds and those who don't. The dividers believe in categories, and are followers of Parmenides and Plato. The other kind are interested in dynamics, and are followers of Heraclitus and Thucydides. I belong to this second camp -- although as we shall see, I'm not convinced there really are two camps. There are two ways of understanding the media. One way is to search for constants, for regularities, in what happens. The other way is quite different. It is the study of what doesn't happen twice, the study of singular events. Media understood via categories is the mainstay of media studies as a social science. Media as the study of events, is perhaps more commonly the domain of the historian and of the humanities more generally. Studying media events is also a way of producing knowledge that connects quite directly to our everyday experience. We don't experience media, in the first instance, in terms of categories. We experience it as an immersion in a series of events, both trivial and significant. People remember where they were on the day JFK was assassinated, or the space shuttle exploded, or on September 11th. Media as memorable event might also describes what is exciting about being a journalist. What journalist doesn't want to be witness to some spectacular event -- and get a scoop on it? The memorable media event is what the artistry of making imaginative media is all about. Not many people aspire to make films or write books that are merely part of a statistical average. A memorable event like the Exxon Valdez oil spill is one on which the media specialists of both the environmental movement and the oil company work overtime. In short, the experience of media in everyday and professional life has an element of coping with the eventful, the singular, the unexpected. The singular event is something for which one cannot be prepared by an education solely in the constants of the media. And, I would argue, a comprehensive knowledge of the media also requires attention to its capacity to introduce surprises into life. Media may be nothing more than a magnifier of the potential for surprise. While we may indeed become weary of the media's noisy insistence on the spectacularly different, the media keeps coming up with new kinds of surprise, not merely surprises of the same kind. As Heraclitus said: you never step into the same river twice. The river, thesedays, is media. This is what it means to say that the media are 'virtual'. They are multipliers of possibility. For some 12 years now, most of my research has studied this capacity of the media to produce the unexpected. I want to share with you some of this research. Given that I want to cover some 12 years in the next ten minutes, I'm going to have to speak awfully fast. The stock market crash of 1987 was the first event that drew my attention to the nature of the media event. We have a wonderful guide, in Thucydides, into thinking about eventful time. But when the Athenians fought the Spartans, information moved at the same speed as people or things. It was a long, hot run from Marathon. What I witnessed in the stock market crash of 1987 was the instant, global marathon, in which information could circle the planet, taking stock markets down with it. It was not just the event itself that interested me, but the space in which it was possible. Stock markets have crashed before, and the impact of this has very often been international. But here there were new elements in the event that illuminated the shape of the space in which it occurred. The way computerised program trading fed into market fluctuations was also a new element. It introduced new levels of automated intelligence -- and stupidity -- into the virtual space of the mediated market. In my first book, Virtual Geography, I looked at the Black Monday stock market crash, the democracy movement in Tiananmen square, the fall of the Berlin wall and the Gulf war. To me these all contained instances of what I called 'weird global media events'. They were events in having something singular and unprecedented about them. They were media events in that the space of the media, its virtual geography, shaped the outcome of the event. They were global in that they threaded national media spaces together in unexpected ways. And they were weird in that something about them eluded explanation in terms of what we take to be the normal functioning of the media. For instance, I looked at the way reporting by western media of the democracy movement in Tiananmen square created a feedback loop. Particularly after the imposition of martial law, the demonstrators made frequent recourse to foreign news about their own movement, and this impacted upon the decisions that they made. In general terms, what emerged from this work was a picture of an emerging space of communication that traversed national borders and allowed events to emerge of a spectacular and unprecedented kind. In the 7 years since the publication of that work, events have confirmed its general thrust. The new role for satellite television that I discovered in the Tiananmen square events was an uncanny forerunner of the role of Al Jezira's broadcasts after September 11th. My remarks on the rise of NASDAQ in relation to the 1987 stock market crash foreshadowed its remarkable rise and fall in the late 90s. Something happened to me in the course of this research. It was my practice to lecture on events as they happened. So I was usually pretty well informed about, say, the release from prison of Nelson Mandela, or the attempted coup against Boris Yeltsin. I was trying to take my students with me into the unknown dimensions of media as lived experience. But I wanted to take a closer look at the way media gatekeepers themselves reacted to media events. I started writing columns about these events for The Australian, a national broadsheet newspaper. For instance, I wrote about the death of North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung. This was a news editor's worst nightmare. Kim died in the middle of serious tensions over North Korea's nuclear and missile programs. What did his death mean? A lot of people all over the world wanted to know. Only there was no reliable information available what so ever. This is a feature one can often observe in weird global media events. The desire to know is inversely proportional to the reliability of the information. What happens is that news media plot stories based on past expectations, hoping that the facts, when available will bear them out. To go back to the Tiananmen square example, it is sobering now to review the predictions of civil war with which many news organisations filled the fact vacuum created by the martial law media blackout. As you might guess by now, I did find some constants in this world of weird global media events. Those of us in the Heraclitus camp can also produce a knowledge of regularities, but without bracketing off the eventful character of media experience. In particular, I developed a theory of the role of the vector in the construction of a space within which media events may occur. In geometry, a vector is a line of fixed length but no fixed position. This seems to me a good term for describing media in general. Any media, telephone, telegraph, television, has certain fixed technical properties. These enable a media to move information in certain definable ways. For instance, twisted pair copper wire telephony is a pretty good vector for moving audible signals from one place to another. And as it turned out, it was a good vector for moving any kind of data from point to point, provided it could be sufficiently compressed. Nothing in the technical attributes of a given technology determine where or how it will be used, or what kinds of events may happen in the space so created. The inventors of the fax machine did not expect it to be used to send news reports from Beijing to Washington and Sydney and right back again. Every vector comes with its specific potential, as Harold Innis was trying to tell us. My interest is in vectors with the property of telesthesia, perception at a distance: telegraph, telephone, television, radio, cellular telephony and the internet. These I believe increasingly come together to form spaces in which events occur with a determining effect on everyday life lived in physical space. This new space, this virtual geography, increasingly passes beyond national borders, on the one hand, and the boundaries of the family and self, on the other. When Saddam Hussein touched the head of a young English boy, Stuart Lockwood, on Iraqi television, he surely did not know how powerful an image this would be in mobilising popular support for a war against him. Here was an event that happened in this virtual geography, starting in a television studio in Baghdad, but resonating around the world. When the routines of communication break down, how is one to act? I decided to find out first hand by experimenting, by making stories and images within the horizon of media events myself, and to share the results of these experiments with my students. Of course, I'm not Kofi Anan, so I could hardly work in the space of weird global media events. But I did have some standing as a public intellectual, from writing all those columns in the national newspaper. So I decided to follow weird national media events, particularly those to do with Australian cultural and literary life, topics on which I could get airtime. I'll never forget my first experience of current affairs television via satellite. I was to look at four talking heads on four separate monitors, one of them, disconcertingly, my own head. The sound technician popped a little case of flesh coloured ear pieces, chose one for the shape of my ear, and wiped it off before inserting it. My second book, The Virtual Republic, arose partly out of these experiments. It was an excellent lesson in news value. Take the Helen Demidenko case, for instance. Young Ukranian writes a book about the Holocaust from a Ukrainian perspective. It wins three major literary awards. Scandal number one is that only after it won three awards did anybody publicly noticed its anti-Semitism. Scandal number two is that its author turns out not to be the Ukrainian Helen Demidenko, who is writing some kind of oral history, but Helen Darville, an Anglo who made up an author to go with a made up story. The book was defended as being of literary value but not really anti-Semitic. It was attacked as being anti-Semitic and of no literary value. So I argued that it was indeed, a work of literary value, but which was clearly intended to be anti- Semitic and which I condemned as such. This was a minor scandal in itself, for I had broken the unspoken assumption that what is aesthetically good literature must also be morally redeeming. But by invoking a position contrary to the prevailing norm, I created position from which to speak in this literary-media event. My position in that conversation addressed its causes, and the causes of conversation in general - - the incompatibility of the constructs from within which the antagonists articulate their world. It was a moment in which consensus had broken down, when editors and producers were struggling to make a story out of unexpected facts. It revealed to me that what is at stake in many such public events are things that are not commensurable. There is no common measure for weighing up aesthetic and ethical values. How is conversation to proceed in the absence of common ground? It was a practical demonstration of much that is under discussion in theories of the public sphere, and my students and I were able to experience it 'live'. The circumstances were different, but we touched here on the kind of difficulties in public conversation that derailed the negotiations between the Chinese government and the democracy movement. Even when power is less overtly at work, it is a difficult thing to create a conversation across differences. But conversations across differences are exactly what the emerging virtual geography of the media thrust upon us. Virtual Geography has both a technical and a rhetorical dimension. We need new rhetorics for new situations. New ways of speaking outside familiar media routines and spaces. What I developed with my readership in the paper, and my students in the class, was a line of inquiry into the ethics of communication. The ethics of how one speaks -- and listens -- in the middle of a weird media event, when everyone has lost their bearings, and sometimes their heads. The thing about events is that we always find ourselves in the middle of them. One learns the hard way how to gather facts, how to exploit the dynamics of conflict in media stories, what constitutes timely and useful research. What relations hold or do not hold between the rhetorical and the reasoned. What I would still say is distinctive about The Virtual Republic is that while it deals with a common topic, the 'public sphere' and the role of the 'public intellectual', it is a rare work in making time a factor. Hannah Arendt points out, that the Greek concept of applying reason to the republic is not an abstract ideal, designed for the open ended time of philosophical dispute, but an ethics of applying reason to action in time. The Spartans are coming! Discussion at some point has to yield to action. This is the situation in which people who must communicate find themselves, again and again. Time is pressing, and yet there is no clear precedent to guide one's action. It may yet seem rather quaint to be talking about reason and the public sphere in the age of electronic media. Yet I think there is a mode of reasoning appropriate to an age of the image. It may indeed be closer to Athens than we think, given that the agora was a verbal and visual world more than it was a space of writing. This question of a 'postmodern' public sphere was my next major research agenda, one that connects the age of the sophists to the age of the cellphone. The particular problem that was of interest to me was this: how does a mainstream political party make use of popular media to form a majority? I was a member of the Australian Labor Party, and I knew some of our parliamentarians, and they sometimes asked questions along these lines. Labor held office from 1983 to 1991. It modernised the economy, opened it to international trade, but at the same time extended the social safety net to help those least able to make an unavoidable adjustment. Labor also promoted a multicultural policy. It lost power in 1991 to the mainstream conservative parties, who exploited a rising tide of xenophobia and 'white rage' that had appeared on the rightward fringes of Australian life. As a teacher, I'm a pluralist and try to get students to identify their own interests and identities and express them. As an intellectual, I have my commitments. It is the idea of engagement that I want to teach, not any particular allegiance. This ethical dimension to knowledge is a hard one to teach, but the other aspect of this research project, popular media and culture, had an inbuilt in appeal to students. So I embarked on what would eventually become my third book, Celebrities, Culture and Cyberspace. The Labor party was much criticised, in office and out, for its modernising policies. The critics usually argued that the party had abandoned its principles and traditions. But political leaders have to answer to the demands of the present. I developed a reading of Labor's record based on an understanding of politics as a matter of responding to events -- in this case some quite serious economic crises. I put politics back into the context of the media, for it is through the media that politicians and the public alike experience events. The former treasurer once described to me in gripping detail the decision to cut budget outlays, a decision he made while watching the dollar plummet on a portable Reuters screen in the cabinet room. In short, I put media back into politics; but I also wanted to put politics back into media. So my students and I sat down to watch all of the major Australian TV shows and movies of the 80s and 90s together. Here I started to think about the media event a bit differently. Up til now, the event has been obvious -- the Gulf war seems to be a self evident event. But maybe there are undetected events that happen in virtual geography. One thing that occurred to me, looking at Australian entertainment media of two decades, was that it was a slow, unfolding event in itself. At a time when the Australian economy was being significantly globalised, film and television created an envelope of images and stories that talked about this opening up of the economy -- in terms of its impact on the culture. What I found was that across a good many screen texts, the same spatial construct was being discussed -- the space of 'suburbia'. The Australian Labor party convinced the electorate that people could keep their suburban way of life, safe behind its suburban picket fences, if they acquiesced to the opening up of the economy. But what people discovered was that the economic opening was also a cultural and demographic opening, an opening not just to flows of trade and investment but also to flows of information and immigration. The spatial principle of suburbia is the fence. Differences are tolerated but kept separate. The spatial principle of an open economy and society is the crossroads, where differences are in direct contact. What I found, again and again, in film and television, was the expression of an anxiety about suburban space, its viability in an emerging world of commerce and communication. Out of this developed a more explicit rhetoric of rural and suburban populist reaction to "urban elites" and their values. Unlike in the United States, suburbia is a construct that is positively valued by intellectuals as well as by ordinary folks in Australia. So a critique of suburbia was, once again, going to be a 'controversial' position I could take into the public debate. What I called for was a cultural modernisation to complement the economic one. Underlying the rhetoric of suburban identity was a politics of the vector. It is along media vectors that identities form and dissolve. The tensions over identity in Australian politics were an expression of something else -- anxiety about the vector. A certain clinging to the myth of white suburbia was the cultural event that the conservative forces were able to orchestrate. In place of a moderate opening up of the economy and the culture, what Australia ended up with was a forced march toward economic globalisation, counterbalanced by a 'fortress Australia' approach to migration, education and culture. While I am proud of the work I did on Australian media and culture, as research, pedagogy and public service, I decided to move on. The 80s and 90s were a time when the globalisation of media vectors was actually undermining the national media envelope in which I was working. So I want to move on from looking at the national media space as defined by broadcasting and look at an emerging postbroadcast world. The book I co-edited called Readme! is a first expression of this new research focus. It is a collection of papers from the Nettime internet mailing list, which brings together theorists, activists, programmers and artists from around the world. I am currently using it as an undergraduate textbook. An event that illustrates what can happen in this new space, which was documented on Nettime, was the campaign to keep Belgrade radio station B92 on the air. This alternative media source was shut down by the Milosevic government. Dutch media activists put it on the internet, as streaming media. The BBC and other shortwave broadcasters took the signal off the web and broadcast it into Serbia, where some of the regional stations controlled by the opposition made use of it. So my interest now is in the intersection between media vectors that work outside of national borders, such as the internet, and the problem of human rights, which is a political and ethical movement that also works outside the national border. For any particular communicative goal there is both a technical and rhetorical solution. My interest is in working out what technical and rhetorical solutions work best for human rights agendas. We no longer have roots, we have aerials. We no longer have origins, we have terminals. As we move further into what I would call the postbroadcast world, the vectoral approach to media studies will I think prove more and more useful. It draws attention to the relational and temporal aspect of media, and it does not reduce media to an epiphenomenon of another process. Not everything about the media is explained by its political economy or its social construction. The vectoral approach is not a technological determinist one, but it does see the technical form of the vector as opening up a space of possibility. The dimensions of that space are more clearly revealed by exceptional events and crises than by the normal functioning of the media. I came to media studies via the Birmingham school of cultural studies, and the other bodies of mostly British, Australian and Canadian thought with which it was in dialogue. This was a field divided between those who studied media as a social relation, and those who studied media as text. The qualitative study of audiences and a focus on the institutions of discourse influenced by Michel Foucault later emerged as alternative positions. To my mind, all of these positions bracketed off media form, and were slow to react to the new period of instability in media technology that I think we are now in. What I have offered in my work is a way of thinking about what lies in between the audience, the text and the institution. I have no quarrel with these other branches of the critical media and cultural studies field to which I broadly belong. I take a pluralist view of media scholarship in general. I am ethically committed to pluralism in any and every communicative sphere. But my experience, as both a researcher and teacher of critical media and cultural studies, is that the field doesn't deal effectively with the way technologies create new possibilities for media spaces, and hence for events that may happen within those spaces. Attention to the media events that befall us, and the technologies that create these accidents of the virtual, seems to me to be an aspect of the study of media that has a particular usefulness. It can form an intertext between the experience of students coming into media studies, of media professionals in the outside world, and more specialised bodies of knowledge within media studies and indeed other branches of the university. ___________________________________________________ http://www.feelergauge.net/projects/hackermanifesto/version_2.0/ ... we no longer have roots, we have aerials ... ___________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________ Join the world’s largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail. http://www.hotmail.com _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://amsterdam.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold