Copy editing for fun

It's my birthday!

As for Digimodernism the book, I've been through the process of copy editing. This was slightly odd. We're going with American spelling and usage as the book will probably sell primarily in the US, and some of the alterations the copy editor insisted on were to bring it into line with American habits, such as a distinction between "which" and "that" as relative pronouns which (?) is lost on the average Briton but crucial on the other side of the Atlantic. Fair enough. And there were other questions - where to put commas in phrases in inverted commas - which relate to publishing conventions. Couldn't argue there either.

But I couldn't understand some of the issues. For instance, I was asked to make my use of synonyms like "the United States" and "the US" consistent throughout - i.e. stick to the same one every time. Why? How many times have you thrown a book to one side in irritation crying "for pete's sake, he's said UK, but he said United Kingdom in the last chapter!". When did you last get annoyed because on one page it's World War II and on another it's the Second World War? My rule of thumb is not to repeat words or expressions more than is absolutely necessary, and this rule is, I would argue, why God invented the synonym.

Still, I have a lot of respect now for copy editors. They do a very hard and thankless job with great diligence - it's one of those roles that no one notices except when it's carried out badly. And all that worrying about detail does do your head in - it's a short step from the comma to the coma.

Comment is free (but is it healthy)

I've been spending (or wasting) time recently on the Guardian's Comment is Free site http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree It's an emblematic digimodernist forum. As message boards go it's one of the more interesting and fruitful. Articles of a Guardian nature (favouring issues related to race or gender, tending to criticism of Israel or US foreign policy or Britain and to idealization of France or Scandinavia, etc.) are uploaded on to it every half hour or so during the day, joining those also available in the printed paper. After spending a certain amount of time commenting you get the feeling that you know the regulars - Kizbot, LordSummerisle, MrPikeBishop - as though you were actually acquainted with more than their pseudonym and a selection of their opinions. It easily becomes "addictive", or it encourages repeat behaviour patterns, because once you've added your thoughts and wisdom to a thread you find you're somehow desperate to know what others make of them. So you go back and look, again and again. Losing interest in a discussion, you find there's a new article to append your reaction to, and so it goes on. Eventually you've lost several hours of your day. And what have you achieved? You've told some people whom you'll never know some things they can do nothing with as they'll never know you, and they've done the same back.

Cif is pretty good because often people respond to each other, and as a result there's usually (not always) a governing ethos which forces contributers to use logic and evidence to support their views. On many other message boards people spout and rant away in a little argumentative bubble of their own, indifferent to the rules of rational debate. On a good day Cif is like a spirited argument in the pub with some articulate, informed, interesting and committed friends. It's stimulating, challenging, fascinating. On a bad day it's like a semi-involuntary outpouring of rage and hatred by lonely people in the street with mental health issues. It seems futile and really sad. Although the Guardian is a centre-left paper many contributers are well to the right, and presumably go to Cif because they're spoiling for a political fight. There's a recurring flirtation with anti-democratic stances on many of the threads, and a sense of dissent for dissent's sake on some of them too.

David Mitchell (above) recently complained in The Observer, the Guardian's sister paper, that message boards degenerate into outlets for vile and sociopathic loathing when they are supposed to provide a forum for thought http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/15/online-feedback-public-sector?commentpage=1 He suggested circumventing this drift by posting a certain banal and vacuous response on threads; hundreds of Cif posters, "hilariously", did exactly that to his article. Are message boards a "good" or a "bad" thing? Interestingly, it's impossible finally to say. All depends on the last or the next contribution: if it's abuse, no; if it's a thought or an angle you'd never previously encountered, posted by someone with interesting things to say whom you'd never otherwise meet, then boards are wonderful. You make of them what you will; they are what we will. And I'm not telling you my pseudonym, no.

What

Gran Torino

Peter Preston has an article in today's Guardian oriented around Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino which makes this interesting point:

Half a century ago, as Eastwood played a TV cowboy in Rawhide, it became accepted wisdom that Hollywood was doomed. Who would want to pay to go to the movies when slumping at home in front of the box cost nothing? Cathode-ray tube would oust silver screen just as surely as, today, it is assumed that another kind of screen will kill words on paper. But discard such doom-fraught assumptions. Gran Torino is already $100m in the black. Clint, at 78, is as bankable as ever. Cinema admissions - in the midst of the crunch are up, not slithering down. And it is television, the new whiz-kid on the block, that is gasping for air.

We're in the middle of a huge historical shift in text, what sort we want, how we access it, and so on. How things will pan out is anyone's guess, but the tectonic textual plates are shifting. I read last week that people used to say that the computer was the biggest thing since the invention of the printing press but they were wrong; it's the biggest thing since the invention of the alphabet.

I suspect they're right. All bets are off.

Cultural desert, mirage and oasis

More confirmation of the death of rock: Oasis have won the NME's best British band award for 2009.

This is a band who were creatively bankrupt by 1997.

It's on its way...

Update on the book's production: it's gone off now for copy-editing. I don't know really what that entails (!) but I suspect that at some point I'm going to get an email asking me to check certain things in the manuscript or to agree to certain changes. I remember Henry James on accepting a magazine's editor's request to remove two words from a story he had written. He sent the proofs back with a note saying "Yours is a butcher's trade"!

And we're looking for famous people to endorse the book. If you'd like to put your name forward please leave details below! "Famous" here is a very relative word of course. I'm not expecting Brad Pitt to throw his weight behind digimodernism as our new cultural paradigm, but someone heard of by academics in, say, three countries would be fantastic. Having said that, one of Continuum's 33 1/3 books on rock albums was favourably namechecked by James Franco, the Spider-Man actor, on the red carpet before the Oscars last night. Maybe next year The Hobbit will sweep the Academy Awards and its director will approve my stance on contemporary culture having become aware of my praise for Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings...? More unlikely things have (very seldom) happened!

Altermodern or digimodern?

I've had a few days off work and during that time I went to the Altermodern exhibition at Tate Britain (not at the Tate Modern, as its name might suggest; it includes plenty of non-British art too). The Tate Triennial showcasing the latest thing(s) in art has come around again; and its curator this year Nicolas Bourriaud believes postmodernism has given way to altermodernism, a new cultural paradigm exemplified by the work of his 28 artists.

The Tate has asked me to use an article I wrote in 2006 on the death of postmodernism and the new digimodernism in a publication they're producing to tie in with their exhibition. I said yes, obviously, but wanted to see what Bourriaud thought altermodernism consisted of in practice. So what did I make of altermodernism? Well, it some places it struggles to differentiate itself from postmodernism. Like Raoul Eshelman's performativism, it seems to have been invented by a mind so immersed in postmodern and indeed poststructuralist theory that it can barely stagger out from their depths into the sun-kissed uplands of the brave new artistic world. Emphasising "trajectories" and "globalities" seems yesterday's "hybridity" and "fluidity" at the service of a new master.

Some of the work on display is very powerful (especially "The Russian Ending") but some of it is rotten. And almost all of it seems to be cursed with a need to be "interesting" which precludes beauty or profundity or scope or really interesting intelligence. There are too many smart-but-pointless video pieces as well.

I don't think of altermodernism as a rival or some kind of competitor in the -ism marketplace. I have a pragmatic view of -isms - they're created to give shape to art, to serve a purpose, and if they don't then jettison them. And digimodernism doesn't have that much to say about art, except in terms of digital art which others like Christiane Paul have written about at length elsewhere. So I went thinking that maybe Bourriaud could fill in some of the gaps in my account. I was wrong about that, but the trip wasn't a complete failure.

All in all, an interesting exhibition which I'm glad to have seen. You should see it too, if you can. Some of the artists in it deserve to go on to much greater success (while others don't, but then dramatic unevenness is the price of this kind of exhibition). But I can't believe in altermodernism and I suspect nobody else can either.

Here's his manifesto anyway:

AltermodernManifesto
POSTMODERNISM IS DEAD
A new modernity is emerging, reconfigured to an age of globalisation – understood in its economic, political and cultural aspects: an altermodern cultureIncreased communication, travel and migration are affecting the way we live Our daily lives consist of journeys in a chaotic and teeming universeMulticulturalism and identity is being overtaken by creolisation: Artists are now starting from a globalised state of cultureThis new universalism is based on translations, subtitling and generalised dubbingToday’s art explores the bonds that text and image, time and space, weave between themselvesArtists are responding to a new globalised perception. They traverse a cultural landscape saturated with signs and create new pathways between multiple formats of expression and communication.The Tate Triennial 2009 at Tate Britain presents a collective discussion around this premise that postmodernism is coming to an end, and we are experiencing the emergence of a global altermodernity.Nicolas BourriaudAltermodern – Tate Triennial 2009at Tate Britain 4 February – 26 April 2009

Winter of Discontent or Spring Clean? (Sorry!)

For Britons of a certain age events this week have a strange resonance.

(1) Snow everywhere making the roads impassible, closing the schools, sending children out to throw snowballs and toboggan into trees.

(2) Talk everywhere of economic recession, depression; companies laying off workers left, right and centre; an atmosphere of financial crisis and monetary gloom.

(3) Wildcat strikes driven by fear of unemployment and articulated through a xenophobic scapegoating of the socially other.

(4) A Labour government clearly in its dog days, fighting the fires of crisis while inescapably aware of its short life expectancy.

(5) Murmurs of a new paradigm, a new conception of economics, the sense of an ending to thirty years of political wisdom favouring the anarchy of unregulated markets and burgeoning debt-driven consumerism.

In short, it's February 1979 all over again! (And Magazine are going on tour - I'm seeing them next week as it goes.)

It's number five which interests me most, of course. Are we heading for a new way of thinking about the world? A new worldview, new values, new lifestyles? Postmodernism was not born in the wastes of 1978-79, though Thatcherism derived all of its political acceptability from the Winter of Discontent's cocktail of arctic weather, strikes, ungovernability, crisis and fear. And it can be argued - as Terry Eagleton, among others, has - that postmodernism was the intellectual response of 1980s leftists to the reactionary politics of Thatcher and Reagan.

However, there are inchoate signs that a thirty-year political cycle is over. A dominant economic paradigm is discredited and played out, at the highest levels at least. Whether postmodernism was the expression of that paradigm is moot, but there is a sense of gears changing. What does this mean culturally? Put another way: what are the politics and the society of digimodernism?