In Memoriam: The Nation-State?

Sorry for missing last week; life was crazy. New blog day will be Thursdays through early December.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the nation-state as a site of legal, economic, and diplomatic power has been (or is being) superseded by globalization/transnationalism/technological processes.

Tony Bennett (1995, p. 218) had begun to observe these processes as early as 1988; “Expo ’88” in Brisbane, Australia displayed a “tendency for the corporate pavilion, once a marginal feature of the exhibition form, to displace national pavilions as the organizing centres of expositional rhetorics of progress.”

Rather than the traditional exposition structure, then, in which the core was made up by nations showing off their innovation and modern-ness, there was a shift in the late twentieth century toward the corporation as the preeminent international entity.

This change, I’d like to argue, is not just a matter of exhibition layout, but rather is indicative of a shift in the worldwide balance of power; the de-centering of the nation, then, would seem to “pose fundamental questions to our neat categories of the liberal public sphere, where citizens interact through constitutionally guaranteed rights” (Liang, 2005, p. 16).

This is to say that the model of the citizen with legal rights—and particularly rights to private property, as has been codified by the conflation of political and economic liberalism (see Brown, 2003)—has become less compelling (and less accurate to the functioning of the world) in recent years.

Instead, as Lawrence Liang (2005, p. 16) argues, “globalization demands that we ask fundamentally different questions of the relationship between law, legality, property (tangible and intangible) and that which we call the public domain.”

On one hand, there are situations in which the power of capital is great enough to override the protections extended by the nation, such as when nations eliminate or relax or create exceptions to labor and environmental and tax regulations in order to draw business, though as Aneesh (2006, p. 22) notes this is “not an autonomous process that undermines the ability of nation-states to protect against the deregulation of their markets. In fact the nation-state—under contemporary neoliberal pressures—is the key actor in effecting deregulation.”

Through deregulation, then, nations are actively ceding their power to corporations, but there are also ways in which the nation-state is undermined through processes which, if not autonomous, are at least beyond its control. David Savran (1998, pp. 240-1) describes terrorism as “both a perversion and a parody” of “multinational capitalism”—each, he says, “threatens not just national security and national borders but the very idea of the nation as a sovereign political and economic entity.”

In the age of terrorism, one of the nation’s fundamental powers and responsibilities—to keep its citizens safe—has been to some degree stripped from it, and in this way the power of the nation has been diminished overall. Indeed, U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan can be seen as a last-ditch effort to keep that power in the hands of the nation using old-style military-power modes of maintaining safety in a world in which they no longer apply.

In these ways, then, the nation’s role is diminished from one direction through a reduction of the power of law, whether chosen or imposed.

On the other hand, though, the process works in more or less an opposite direction—the nation is obviated by means of a shift from place-based to international enforceability, or the extension of law.

This can be seen in the articulation of intellectual property piracy as requiring “universal jurisdiction” (Govil, 2004, p. 382). Typically, law operates with “national jurisdiction,” overridden only by “the moral heinousness of crimes against humanity,” and “for centuries prior to the post-World War II application of universal jurisdiction against genocide, apartheid and war crimes, maritime piracy was the only crime deemed heinous enough to warrant universal jurisdiction” (Govil, 2004, p. 382).

In this way, then, Govil demonstrates the ways in which the use of the term “piracy” for illicit copying of data is not coincidental, but instead quite explicitly bound up in moral judgement, as it frames the theft of intellectual property as on par with genocide, of such compelling interest to humanity that nations have no right to protect their citizens from prosecution.

In this way, then, though the world may seem to be becoming more lawless, it turns out that law is actually just becoming disarticulated from the nation-state, which suggests that, as an institution, it is perhaps being rendered obsolete by the tides of history.

References
Aneesh, A. (2006). Virtual Migration: The Programming of Globalization. Durham: Duke University Press.
Bennett, T. (1995). The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. London: Routledge.
Brown, W. (2003). Neo-liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy. Theory & Event, 7(1), n.p.
Govil, N. (2004). War in the Age of Pirate Reproduction. In R. Vasudevan, R. Sundaram, J. Bagchi, M. Narula, S. Sengupta, & G. Lovink (Eds.), Sarai Reader 04: Crisis/Media (pp. 378-383). Sarai/Center for the Study of Developing Societies/Society for New and Old Media.
Liang, L. (2005). Porous Legalities and Avenues of Participation. In Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts (pp. 6-17). Retrieved from http://www.sarai.net/publications/readers/05-bare-acts/02_lawrence.pdf
Savran, D. (1998). Taking It Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Fandom as Public Sex

In one of the many sidebars in his 2006 book Convergence Culture , Henry Jenkins notes that an “analogy to Tom Sawyer whitewashing the fence lies close to the surface” when discussing the efforts of game companies to encourage their fans to produce content (Jenkins, 2006, p. 165).

But earlier in the text, there’s another analogy that seems quite fruitful to pursue. In the pre-Internet days of fandom, he says:

Corporations might now, abstractly, that such transactions [trading around of unauthorized songs and stories] were occurring all around them, every day, but they didn’t know, concretely, who was doing it. And even if they did, they weren’t going to come bursting into people’s homes at night. But, as these tractions came out from behind closed doors, they represented a visible, public threat to the absolute control the culture industries asserted over their intellectual property (Jenkins, 2006, p. 137).

Maybe this is just a product of re-reading this in juxtaposition with some queer theory, but this just screams Lawrence v. Texas to me.

For those who are unfamiliar, this is the Supreme Court case that ruled that sodomy laws were unconstitutional. The case revolved around the arrest of two men who were found to be engaged in consensual homo-sex in Lawrence’s home by police who were (legally) entering for another reason. The argument that swayed 6 of the 9 justices was based, at least in part, on the right to privacy, or the idea that what happened “behind closed doors” wasn’t anyone’s business. For more information, see the Wikipedia article.

Sounding familiar yet?

It is in this context that Jenkins’s (2006, p. 142) assertion that “the Web provides an exhibition outlet moving amateur filmmaking from private into public space” becomes very interesting. This and other fan practices have now “come out,” ceased to be private, begun circulating openly.

We’re here, we’re fans, get used to it.

Yet, just as the decriminalization of particular sex acts between particular configurations of people is a limited victory, both Jenkins (2006) and Coppa (2008) point to ways in which some fan practices remain equivalent to sex in public, not covered by the new amnesty.

Thus, on one hand, fan films of the Atomfilms Star Wars contest, largely created by male “filmmakers who were making ‘calling card’ movies to try to break into the film industry” are encouraged, publicized, and rewarded (Jenkins, 2006, p. 154).

On the other hand, “female fan writers sharing their erotic fantasies” (Jenkins, 2006, p. 154), and the vids that are essentially equivalent (Coppa, 2008; Jenkins, 2006), aren’t so lucky. Indeed, these queer texts have become newly actionable, continually taken down from YouTube for copyright violation.

Jenkins (2006, pp. 157-8) has a vision that “if the corporate media couldn’t crush this vernacular culture during the age when mass media power went largely unchallenged, it is hard to believe that legal threats are going to be an adequate response to a moment when new digital tools and new networks of distribution have expanded the power of ordinary people to participate in their culture,” but to some degree he misses the point.

You can’t stop fans, but you can hope to contain them, and the validation of particular, gendered practices of fan filmmaking would seem to be exactly a move toward containment.

References
Coppa, F. (2008). Women, "Star Trek," and the Early Development of Fannish Vidding. Transformative Works and Cultures, 1, n.p.
Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.

Vast Content, Vast Enjoyment, Vast Consumption

In thinking about what Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin (2009) call “vast narratives,” it soon becomes quite clear that to have such vastness a narrative requires both user-generated content and vast consumption.

To begin with the former, Bartle (2009, p. 114) notes that, using what he calls “Alice” design—in which users can, so to speak, choose their own adventures (or quests) toward a predefined goal rather than having to take a particular, pre-designated path—producers of virtual worlds “don’t have to create anywhere near as many of these quests as they would have done without the Alice quests in support, and although making a world rich enough for a critical mass is not free, it’s a lot less expensive than one in which all the quests are lovingly crafted.”

Players of these games, then, are asked to do the work of making the game for themselves, and while this is a form of freedom, it’s simultaneously unremunerated labor. (See Old Fashioned Marxism for New Media Labor for more on this.)

Similarly, Gingold (2009, p. 132) speaks glowingly of the design of the game Spore as one in which, “by directing their creatures’ evolution, players would contribute valuable material to the Spore gene pool, creating aliens and civilizations for other players to discover. [ . . . ] Thanks to the effort of other players, an infinite number of alien civilizations would await your discovery.”

Other people make the game for you, and you make the game for other players, and it’s far richer than it could be if the designers built the whole thing, but the designers, at least, would get paid.

The other commonality when considering the “vast narrative” is the extensive efforts of media companies to make connections between properties such that consumers of A come to also consume B.

Thus, “For decades, DC and Marvel treated all of their titles as interconnected: characters move across different series, and universe-wide events periodically require readers to buy titles that they were not otherwise reading to understand their full ramifications” (Ford & Jenkins, 2009, p. 304).

This, then, is a richer experience, more stories and information to enjoy, which keeps fans from running out of something they love. However, at the same time this is manipulation of consumption practices; fans can’t get everything they want/need without spending more.

Another form this takes is “multiauthored, cross-media franchises”; as Krzywinska (2009, pp. 395-6) points out, “worlds”—however “completely furnished”—“offer up a recognizable brand that can be used to produce a whole range of different products.”

In this way, rather than sprinkling some of A onto B to make it more attractive, A is spun off into A-prime, and so on. The effect is similar, whether viewed as manipulation or as providing more of what people love.

The reason all this matters is that, as Hills (2009) and Krzywinska (2009) both point out, fans would seem to be the vanguard of changes to media consumption in general. Thus, Hills (2009, p. 338) argues, “one of the key developments of television seriality in the Internet age is that cult fans’ attention to narrative continuity will start to become a more generalized feature of audience activity.”

If this privileging of narrative continuity extends to everyone, will everyone then start following narratives across platforms, spending money as they go?

Krzywinska (2009, p. 396) makes this point more explicitly, arguing that “while shows that encouraged this type of consumption used to be considered ‘cultish’ and marginal to mainstream popular culture, they are now becoming central [ . . ]. This dovetails all too neatly with greater industrial and technological convergence, which depends increasingly on formulating devices to create long-stay audiences/consumers who will spend money to remain on contact with their preferred world” (396).

This needn’t be only a pessimistic future, but in the face of the persistently celebratory tone of much of the work on these developments drawing attention to the other side seems vital.

References
Bartle, R. A. (2009). Alice and Dorothy Play Together. In P. Harrigan & N. Wardrip-Fruin (Eds.), Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives (pp. 105-114). Cambridge: MIT Press.

Ford, S., & Jenkins, H. (2009). Managing Multiplicity in Superhero Comics: An Interview with Henry Jenkins. In P. Harrigan & N. Wardrip-Fruin (Eds.), Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives (pp. 303-312). Cambridge: MIT Press.

Gingold, C. (2009). A Brief History of Spore. In P. Harrigan & N. Wardrip-Fruin (Eds.), Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives (pp. 131-136). Cambridge: MIT Press.

Harrigan, P., & Wardrip-Fruin, N. (Eds.). (2009). Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Hills, M. (2009). Absent Epic, Implied Story Arcs, and Variation on a Narrative Theme: Doctor Who (2005-2008) as Cult/Mainstream Television. In P. Harrigan & N. Wardrip-Fruin (Eds.), Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Krzywinska, T. (2009). Arachne Challenges Minerva: The Spinning out of Long Narrative in World of Warcraft and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In P. Harrigan & N. Wardrip-Fruin (Eds.), Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives (pp. 385-398). Cambridge: MIT Press.

The Wisdom of Raymond Williams, Or Television: Technology and Cultural Form, and Oldie but a Goodie

When we hear from the big players in the telecom industry about net neutrality—the requirement that internet service providers (ISPs) treat all content on their network the same—the industry “does not call itself commercial, let alone capitalist. It uses public-relations descriptions like ‘free’ and ‘independent’, and often contrasts itself with ‘monopoly’ or ‘state control’” as it calls net neutrality a threat to freedom, peace, and puppies (Williams, 2003, p. 32).

Here’s the thing about that Raymond Williams quote, though. He wrote it in the 70s about television.

And here’s the thing about those major players and their allies: at the same time that they talk up the “free market” and “free choice” and worry about keeping the government’s hands off the internet and predict doom (Study: Net Neutrality to Cost 600,000 Jobs, Shrink GDP $80 Billion), what they aren’t saying is that they want to keep it legal to use pay-for-play in determining what content you get to see.

Without net neutrality, preferred, partner sites that show the money come to your browser window faster than Average Joe on the Web. Those are the stakes. I keep coming back to a phrase from Williams: “uncontrolled and therefore unequal competition” (2003, p. 38).

The idea that this constitutes anything resembling freedom is laughable, and Williams (2003, p. 136) called this one in the context of TV, too: “The American version of ‘public freedom’ was open broadcasting subject only to the purchase of facilities, which then settled freedom in direct relationship to existing economic inequalities.”

In the early days, the FCC “tried to keep the competitive market open, against strong tendencies to monopoly” (Williams, 2003, p. 30). This continued even into the recent past, but beginning with the Telecommunications Act of 1996 restrictions on how many different media properties one company could own were greatly reduced. And guess what? Fewer and fewer companies own greater and greater swaths of the mediascape—you can, then, blame Clinton for ClearChannel.

The fallout of this is harder to see in the Internet era even than it was in TV times--when we had FoxNews and MSNBC!!11!oneoneeleven!1!! “All earlier forms, in large-scale societies, were more limited in character and scale. The sermon, the lecture, the political address were obviously more limited in immediate points of view. Only in certain favourable situations was there regular choice and variety of viewpoints which is now common within even the limited range of current television argument” (Williams, 2003, p. 45).

These days, Google News gives us thousands of sources at our fingertips, and that is a dramatic improvement to be sure. But we can’t let that become a bait-and-switch such that “under the cover of talk about choice and competition, a few para-national corporations, with their attendant states and agencies, could reach farther into our lives, at every level from news to psycho-drama, until individual and collective response to many different kinds of experience and problem became almost limited to choice between their programmed possibilities” (Williams, 2003, p. 157).

References
Williams, R. (2003). Television: Technology and Cultural Form. London: Routledge.

“What about First Life?” and Other Pitfalls of Internet Research

Even today, with the Internet a well-established and vital part of contemporary existence, studying it is seen as less than fully respectable. As Tom Boellstorff (2008, 201) argues, this position rests on “an unfounded suspicion that cybersocialities are not legitimate or sustainable places of human culture in their own right.”

The implications of the argument that it’s illegitimate to take online cultures, such as that of Second Life, as the object of study are troubling. It is, in fact, exactly like contending that you can’t study “gay culture” (or “African-American culture” or “academic culture”) because it doesn’t exist in isolation from hegemonic culture.

Second Life, like other internet phenomena, has a distinct culture, worth studying, and this does not require believing that the subjects that interact in it aren’t produced by and with the capitalist, racist, and sexist prejudices of the actual world—no one, least of all Boellstorff, is claiming that.

This—the positioning of virtuality as always ever derivative, secondary, and incomplete—is why no one takes us seriously.

Instead, what we have to ask about not only “virtual worlds” such as Second Life but all new media developments is: to what extent is it new or different, and to what extent is it just like one’s “first” life or “old” media?

That is, to shamelessly plagiarize Eve Sedgwick (1992), we can’t know in advance how they will relate to each other—the cultural forms in SL and other new media phenomena are “shaped in unpredictable ways by actual-world sociality” (Boellstorff 2008, 25).

This is to say that, though “not everything connected to virtual worlds is novel,” neither is nothing new, such that “it is imperative that we ascertain precisely what elements are new and in what ways they are new” (Boellstorff 2008, 25).

Finally, though the technophobes and technophiles among us might want to pin everything on the technology, we also can’t know in advance how that influences the ultimate shape the culture takes

After all, technology “always comes to be through particular cultural and historical circumstances,” such that, for example, “drive-in movie theaters could not have come into existence without the automobile, but were not an inevitable consequence of the automobile’s invention” (Boellstorff 2008, 32, 58; see also Dyer 1997).

These, then, are the major difficulties one runs into when examining new media phenomena: (non)triviality, (non)novelty and (non)technology. Through careful analysis and a willingness to stick to one’s guns, however, they can be negotiated, and truly high-quality work can emerge.

Works Cited
Boellstorff, Tom. 2008. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Dyer, Richard. 1997. White. London: Routledge.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1992. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Old Fashioned Marxism for New Media Labor

Particularly in the contemporary era, when the media-producing organization “no longer even needs to directly pursue everywhere the profit interests,” but can instead achieve profit indirectly through “the manufacturing of ‘goodwill’” (Adorno, 2001, p. 100), it is vital that the common-sense linkage between “produsage” or “prosumption” and democratization be broken.

That is, though Jenkins (2006, p. 3) most likely did not mean it this way, it’s essential to pay attention to the “the work—and play—spectators perform in the new media system,” and we should pay special attention to the fact that the exploitation of users’ freely-given, playful labor for corporate profit is always a possibility (Howe, 2009; Moore & Karatzogianni, 2009).

This is particularly so when, as Van Dijck and Nieborg (2009) point out, many of the most enthusiastic expositions of the possibilities of user-generated content—for example Howe (2009) and Shirky (2008)—are business books designed to help companies build businesses around this unpaid labor.

Fuchs (2010, pp. 148-9) argues that “the produser commodity does not signify a democratization of the media towards participatory systems, but the total commodification of human creativity.” In this way, he argues, the labor done by users of Web 2.0 sites produces value for the capitalist without said capitalist having much (or even any) outlay of labor costs, resulting in more or less pure profit (Fuchs, 2010, pp. 143, 147).

Fuchs does this quite explicitly, demonstrating—in what strikes me as a particularly orthodox Marxist way, with those delightful M-C-M’ formulas—the “overexploitation” of these produsers. However, there’s also something to be said for a more theoretical articulation, which is what Adorno gives us. It’s a bit less concrete, admittedly, but it is very good to think with (things I never thought I’d say about Adorno include . . . ).

In particular, Adorno’s (2001, pp. 88, 98) vision helps us understand the sleight-of-hand involved in linking self-exploitation with democracy—just how it is that “for the citizen the free capacity to produce replaces the idea of a life free from domination” and mass culture, a “culture industry” product, is passed off as “something like a culture that arises spontaneously from the masses themselves.”

In fact, what we quite eagerly take on in the name of freedom is really quite the opposite: “the masses are [ . . . ] an object of calculation; an appendage of the machinery. The customer is not king, as the culture industry would have us believe, not its subject but its object” (Adorno, 2001, p. 99).

In this way, it is clear that “we should not think of those plain new rows of dwellings but rather of the detached family houses which fill such a large part of Old and New England: standardized mass products which even standardize the claim of each one to be irreplaceably unique” (Adorno, 2001, pp. 78-9).

That is, it’s not the little boxes made of ticky-tacky you need to keep your eye on, not what is transparently mass-produced, but rather that which appeals to the sense of smugness we get from not being “taken in” by the mass produced, and this is exactly what much of Web 2.0 is.

Works Cited

Adorno, T. W. (2001). The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge.

Fuchs, C. (2010). Class, Knowledge and New Media. Media, Culture & Society, 32(1), 141-150.

Howe, J. (2009). Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business. New York: Random House.

Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.

Moore, P., & Karatzogianni, A. (2009). Parallel Visions of Peer Production. Capital & Class, (97), 7-11.

Shirky, C. (2008). Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. New York: Penguin Press.

Van Dijck, J., & Nieborg, D. (2009). Wikinomics and its Discontents: A Critical Analysis of Web 2.0 Business Manifestos. New Media & Society, 11(5), 855-874.

The Tea Party and the Politics of White Backlash

There’s something about the Tea Party.

That something is eerily familiar as I’ve been rereading David Savran’s 1998 book Taking it Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture. And no, this won’t be something that hasn’t already been said about the Tea Party’s racially-inflected hysteria, but damned if this whole white-people-angry-at-their-imagined-victimhood thing isn’t something we’ve seen before.

And it’s entirely possible that, in Battlestar Galactica style, all this will happen again, particularly as white Americans do become numerically the minority, but I have enough faith in the inexact nature of iteration (Butler, 1999; Derrida, 1988) to think that figuring out how it works will make it go differently on down the road.

So, with that in mind, what is it that’s so familiar? During the 70s, Savran (1998, p. 207) says, “as Faludi points out, ‘the “traditional” man’s real wages shrank dramatically (a 22 percent free-fall in households where white men were the sole breadwinners.’ Yet these wages were being channeled from working-class white men not to African Americans but to the very rich (who are overwhelmingly white).”

Does this sound to anyone else like our current situation, in which there was an economic downturn due to the greed of those extremely rich, overwhelmingly white people but neither the blame nor the consequences ever seems to fall on them (unless you’re Rolling Stone exposing Goldman Sachs)?

And now there’re angry white people in the streets over anything our black-under-the-one-drop-rule president does, even things that are in their class interest like the expansion of healthcare.

People have, of course, been picking up on the racial politics of the Tea Party, but it’s not the central story the way it seems to me like it should be. After all, “only after the Oklahoma City bombing did the press even begin to consider that there might be a relationship between the mythology of the white male as victim and the growth of the paramilitary Right,” and it seems like there’s some amount of asleep-at-the-wheel happening here again (Savran, 1998, p. 206).

Even the fact that a guy flew a plane into that IRS building didn’t quite connect the dots. Apparently it has to be guns and bombs for anyone to notice.

Moreover, the dominance of white people has in no way been challenged by recent events. Unemployment, after all, has disproportionately affected people of color in this recession much as it always has.

Nevertheless, now as 40 years ago, “the remarkable level of prosperity of white men relative to women and African Americans by no means prevented them from later identifying themselves as the victims of the slender and precarious gains made by those groups” (Savran, 1998, p. 192).

The only real difference would seem to be the inclusion of white women, and that’s a kind of gender equality I, for one, could do without.

In the end, then, the Tea Party may be new in that it is a populist white backlash instead of the more top-down one the last time (though my knowledge of that history is admittedly a bit fuzzy), in many more ways it is disturbingly familiar.

Works Cited
Butler, J. (1999). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.
Derrida, J. (1988). Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Savran, D. (1998). Taking It Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press.