Matilda Anderson: Theory and criticism

"It is my conjecture, however, that neither the modernist nor post modernist approach is fitting for artwork created within the past five years. "

Matilda Anderson: Theory and criticism

Of sex and blogs

Two interesting articles in last week's Technology Guardian leapt out at me.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2009/jun/24/sex-in-games

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/jun/24/charles-arthur-blogging-twitter

Aleks Krotoski noted that sex is absolutely excluded from videogames in any form other than visual titillation. Yes there are heroines with bulging tight tops to gawp at. But actual sex as a practice is rigorously excluded. You can adopt a self that blows someone's head off, fine. But you can't adopt a game self that has intercourse. Why? This is a very interesting question. Every other textual form - the novel, theatre, film, TV etc etc - has found a place for sexual activity and tended to sell better when that place was a prominent one. Why not videogames?

I suspect the answer is, in short, that videogames are a different (digimodernist) species of textuality. The inherited rules of games don't apply to them; they're not commensurable with what's gone before them; their exceptionalism takes us into uncharted reaches.

Charles Arthur, on the other hand, argued that the long tail of blogging is over. Yes, people still blog and read blogs, but he quoted research saying that 95% of existing blogs on the Web are in effect abandoned. Where have all the bloggers gone? To Facebook and Twitter, he thinks.

The digimodernist text is clearly subject to its own evanescence, but also, it would seem, on the level of the platform. There is a powerful wave of fascination for computerized text around now and it tends to surge towards the newest thing, leaving behind older models.

Another successor to postmodernism?

Philip Galantar has suggested a successor to postmodernism called "complexism". Again, I haven't fully digested this yet, but it does seem stimulating. Here's a chapter on the subject he wrote:



http://www.philipgalanter.com/downloads/complexism_chapter.pdf

Quote:
"As a central part of the art manifesto aspect of this chapter I’m asserting that it is time to go beyond postmodernism. Like all waves of philosophical skepticism, postmodernism taken to its ultimate conclusion leads to an intellectual and existential dead-end. And, indeed, even in the arts and humanities there is a vague sense that postmodernism has been “played out.”

Allan Cameron's modular narratives

After James Harkin, Allan Cameron has written about the rise of "modular narrative" in contemporary cinema, and changes in narrative structure in films such as 21 Grams, Time Code, Run Lola Run, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Memento. Very interesting, though he's more reticent (it seems) on the links between new digital technologies, the Internet and such movies. I need to study this more carefully, but here's the introduction to his book (published 2008).

http://www.palgrave.com/PDFs/0230210414.Pdf

How postmodernism lost its cool

This is interesting (and amusing)

How postmodernism lost its cool

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Symbols clash

It's been announced that "Web 2.0" is the millionth word in the English language:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/article6475123.ece

A shame, perhaps, that it wasn't digimodernism (!), but otherwise it's entirely fitting that a concept so close to the heart of our new cultural and textual dominant should be given such a symbolic status. There's a whole chapter about some of the modes of Web 2.0 in the book.

Except, of course, "Web 2.0" is not a word... Never mind. When the symbol and the facts diverge, print the symbol!

Lost and gained

I've been watching the first episodes of Lost, first screened in 2004.

Many people pointed out a while ago that Lost resembles the 1960s TV drama The Prisoner, and I think a comparison of the two is interesting. Both concern the sudden and violent arrival, against their will, of English-speaking individuals in a beautiful and sinister, exotic-looking location. One is kidnapped, the others fall from the sky in a plane crash. Where they are, they don't really know - it's a major enigma and plot driver - but it seems to combine the idyllic, the touristically delightful, and the dangerous, the menacing. Stranded and striving to survive, these people have secrets which they may or may not want to reveal; they are opaque to each other and to the viewer. The attraction of both series is the unresolved nature of their premises - who these people really are, where they are, and why, are all nebulous, such that viewers become simultaneously hooked and frustrated, eager for explanations and ready to advance their own. And so a "cult" series is created, in the sense that its fans become ravenously keen to know more about it.

And yet there are differences between the shows which suggest to me the passage of cultural time. One key variation reflects the shift from "popular culture" to a dominant "children's entertainment" paradigm which is consonant both with the fulfilment of postmodernism and its superannuation. The Prisoner was a mature man, a worker, sober, serious and inscrutable; most of the Lost cast are very young, single, non-employed, and childless adults who dress and act for the most part in order that young teenagers can identify with them. I've never been on a flight with fewer couples, kids, or over-thirties on board! They all look 23 going on 18. Moreover, they're "young" in a teenage way - as cool dudes and slackers, geeks and rebellious babes. They wear scratches from the crash like make up, like members of some hip subculture. They're lightly unattached, sexually attractive, and given to fashionably unexamined attitudes about gender and race.

Much has been lost by Lost. The geopolitical, ideological, technological and indeed political aspects of The Prisoner have been evacuated by this dash for a young teenage audience. No knowledge of or interest in the actual existing world is assumed by Lost's makers. Equally missing is any philosophical enquiry, however allusive and finally unsatisfying was the one sprinked through The Prisoner. Consequently the stories oscillate between the soapily quotidian (the backstories, the character interplay) and the mystically sinister, between the natural and the ineffable, squeezing out the middle ground, the social, on the way. It's a Prisoner for a consumerist, a post-political age, and just as it's not really "popular" (it has no desire to please the older half of the population), it's not really "cultural" either - not really significant or resonant beyond itself.

Narratologically, too, the episodes are rather shapeless compared to those of The Prisoner. The show seems predicated on its own apparent endlessness: just piling enigmas and mysteries and riddles on to each other, just ceaselessly adding puzzles and their solutions, the show is set up to go on, in principle, forever. It moves forward episode by episode, but in no very palpable direction. Most interesting new TV dramas made over the last decade grow from episode to episode and contain no internal mechanism by which they could end themselves, so that they continue until halted by a TV executive (rather than until they conclude their own business). Lost is an obvious example of this. Personally, I find it rather ridiculous, though enjoyable: it seems so nakedly arranged to be "intriguing" and "addictive", to draw its viewers along a wild goose chase-cum-treasure hunt, rather like Life on Mars and The Da Vinci Code, with no intention of ever repaying the fascination they elicit. Such stories, with their evocation of a problematic and opaque reality system, owe much to the strand of postmodernist fiction that destabilized their characters' sense of the real, from The Crying of Lot 49 to The Matrix and from Money to The Man in the High Castle. But Lost isn't interested in ideas related to the "fabrication of the real". It's like an afterecho of such fictions, rendered shallow and subjugated entirely to its prevailing endless narrative structure.

Interview I gave

Here's the link to an interview I gave about digimodernism:

http://www.newsmk-harikumar.blogspot.com/