Time for a Manifesto?

I've noticed of late a little spike in things - books, ideas - being described as manifestos. This observation is entirely non-scientific, and I don't have any figures to back it up, but it seems as if the manifesto is having something of a mini-renaissance.

Firstly, there's David Shield's Reality Hunger, which seems to be causing quite the controversy a manifesto is supposed to, although it does appear to be a rather subdued controversy, mainly concerning the viewpoint that it's not-really-very-radical and thus not-really-a-manifesto. I am yet to read it, though rather itching to, as it will no doubt form quite a large part of my future studies, and more pressingly I gather there's a mention of cellphone novels in there somewhere that I have to dig out.

Secondly, there's this - You are Not a Gadget (: A Manifesto) in which the inventor of Virtual Reality Jaron Lanier decides the internet's rubbish now. I think Michael Agger may have it right in his review: "The Web hasn't lost flavor; you've lost flavor."

Thirdly - and this is what made me think there was something worth noting here - is Tony Judt's piece in the Guardian on Saturday, which in the paper version was called A Manifesto for a Brighter Future but on the net is called A Manifesto for a New Politics, which is strange, given that it's a manifesto for a traditional social democracy that realises that "radicalism has always been about conserving valuable pasts". Which may or may not be true - the piece is generally good, I think, even if it places a little too much faith in the idea of social democracy - but what is interesting is how it's called a "manifesto". Why? It isn't really, or if it is then a whole host of opinion pieces in newspapers around the world can be called manifestos. And the two books above seem to have added their colonic subtitles for reasons of provocation rather than a genuinely held belief that they are putting across something new. David Shields, perhaps, thinks he's doing that, but if some reviews are to go by, his something new is to say that non-fiction or the tinkering between it and fiction is the way forward, which isn't particularly new. And Lanier's book appears to be a collection of column articles. Which isn't new or even a coherent single piece!

And of course there's the altermodern, which had a manifesto, even if it did seem to be going through the motions somewhat.

So why manifestos? Times are rough/tough/uncertain etc, and in these sorts of times people are supposedly open to big ideas (although none so big as to actually make a difference: hence the use of the word "recovery" so often in relation to the economy), and big ideas need big statements to get them across and that means a manifesto. But it's a particularly postmodern idea of a manifesto that seems to be doing the rounds - call it a manifesto but actually aim to change very little.

Having said that, it would be exciting if we had a new age of manifestos by radical artists being published on the front page of the Daily Telegraph.

Possible Precariousnesses

In a recent review, Stephanie Merritt picks out a line from Javier Marias's Poison, Shadow and Farewell, the third part of his Your Face Tomorrow series. Bertram Tupra, a member of MI6, explains to a recent recruit, Spanish academic Jacques Deza, his view of death: ""We've become very soft, very thin-skinned, we think we should last for ever," he tells Deza. "We ought to be accustomed to the temporary nature of things, but we're not. We insist on not being temporary, which is why it's so easy to frighten us, as you've seen, all one has to do is unsheathe a sword.""

Now, my eyes and ears opened and pricked up at this, because that sounds a lot like precariousness. What's more, it is a particularly contemporary view that is both being attacked and being put forward. The idea being attacked is the contemporary desire to extend life, to make it more solid, to protect ourselves against threats. You may wonder exactly how contemporary that is - surely it's human nature? - but I think what Marias is getting at is the particular fetishisation of permanence that an increasingly decadent capitalism creates. The equally contemporary idea being put forward by Tupra - who has just attacked a young diplomat with the aforementioned sword - is a reaction to these capitalist certainties, an embrace of the precarious which is in Tupra's case both a reactionary turning back of the clock to an age both more primitive and in touch with death as well as a more positive embrace of life in that seemingly solid capitalism which works on a valorisation of solidity whilst simultaneously destablising everyone and everything.

Another recent potential precariousness is Padgett Powell's The Interrogative Mood: A Novel?, a book composed entirely of questions - how much more precarious can you get? The question itself, as a concept, is precarious - it pitches something out into the ether, the dark, the unknown, without any guarantee of it coming back in the form of an answer. It is a leap of faith, it is uncertain and unstable. Here is a quick snippet of Powell reading from it. It sounds really funny if nothing else!:

Keitai shosetsu

I'm currently preparing my PhD proposal on precariousness and contemporary fiction. To give a gloss on it, it will question contemporary literature's ability to adequately represent a world grown out of postmodernism and postmodernity in the last ten years, a world which I think is primarily characterised by precariousness, from the quotidian (lifestyle trends and job security or lack of) to the extraordinary - those attempts by Western governments to indefinitely detain suspected terrorists or the banking crisis/credit crunch/recession/depression.

I'm going to look at some novels by writers who tackle this world one way or another, with some doing better than others, and end up saying that they're all pretty much failing. In the same way that the early twentieth century needed modernism's upheaval, I think this period needs its own shake-up. No author, at least no author of mass readership, has, for instance, gotten to grips with the internet in any significant way, either as subject matter or - and this is what I'm most interested in - form. You can tell how insufficient literature is when Joseph O'Neill's beautifully written but formally conservative Netherland is praised as "new territory, or at least new subject matter, claimed for fiction" for talking about Google Earth.

Today I've been reading parts of Randall Stevenson's 12th volume of the Oxford English Literary History covering 1960-2000 The Last of England? and discovering how David Lodge wondered at this division of subject matter and form in an essay from 1971 called "The Novelist at the Crossroads". There is most likely a long line of essays of this nature. I suppose it's a fairly fundamental question. I'm about to read Jonathan Franzen's infamous "Harper's essay", now collected in the book How To Be Alone, about the evils of the experimental novel. That Franzen is such a big seller may well not be unconnected to the lack of the sort of experimentation seen at modernism's height.

So I'm searching high and low for glimpses of new forms. I have a suspicion that the internet may have something up its sleeve, though I'm not sure what it will be like and when it will appear. Today, though, I discovered keitai shosetsu, the Japanese phenomenon of the cellphone novel. Dana Goodyear is widely commended for writing the best English-language article on the literary form of teenagers and 20-somethings, but I discovered it through this article by Barry Yourgrau on Salon.com. The cellphone novel, is, written by "Japan's vast demographic of girls and 20-something young women, who thumb out ultra-lurid, mawkish teen romances on their cellphone keypads in scraps of manga-like dialogue, skimpy action, texting slang and emoji (emoticons). They post these skeletal pseudo-confessions in installments, under cute pseudonyms, on dedicated Web sites like Magic i-land and Wild Strawberry where they can be read for a low fee."

They are extremely popular: "In 2007 -- keitai shosetsu's annus mirabilis --half the top 10 fiction bestsellers in the shrinking Japanese book market originated on cellphones. Overall list-topper "Love Sky," by the self-styled "Mika," has sold 2. 9 million copies." Even "Jakucho Setouchi, the Marguerite Duras of Japan, revealed herself as "Purple," author of a keitai shosetsu, "Tomorrow's Rainbow," about a teen's search for love after her parents' traumatizing divorce. Delightfully, Setouchi is also a celebrated 86-year-old Buddhist nun who wrote a contemporary update of "The Tales of Genji," Japan's racy ur-novel classic."

The precariousness that I'm interested in appears here, in connection with a new form of literature. Yourgrau explains how his attempts were hindered by writing them longhand first, then typing up the finished pieces. Not so the more "genuine" ones: "Keitai shosetsu, however, exist in vast online pools, where writers and readers can dynamically engage with each other. And that's key. Yoshi shaped "Deep Sky" based on ongoing hits and e-mails." It is in these Mills and Boon-style stories that perhaps what I'm looking for reveals itself most clearly. These are novels that not just through subject matter but crucially through form engage with contemporary lived experience. They do not look down on this experience from a rarefied distance, but speak directly out of it. They have precariousness built into their very distribution - text messages are easily lost, deleted or ignored, and their authors canvas opinions on storylines through the same medium that those storylines are distributed. Whether these cellphone novels come to be seen as a sort of twenty-first century imagism is of course unlikely (although thinking about it, there is a certain similarity in the vividness of the imagery, the short bursts of text etc), and apparently the American equivalent, Twitter fiction, hasn't taken off to nearly the extent that keitai shosetsu has, but I'm sure its the first of many new forms. To me at least, they claim far more "new territory" for fiction than Joseph O'Neill does.

Oorutaichi

Catching up with Click Opera I came across this guy:



I think he's great, and pretty much agree with everything Momus says about him in this earlier post on him. I love how he creates complex web-like music, where he takes sounds and styles from all over the place and instead of just putting them all together and offering that to the listener, he twists each one and then twists the one-to-one relation each bit has with another and then twists the entire thing. It's a succession of subversions that makes the whole thing really exciting. (Here's the video that Momus links to, it's my fave one I think).



I'm currently flying free with regards to the Masters, insofar as I have no fixed deadline. I am reading various books that will be useful and keeping my eyes and ears open as usual. This guy's music caught my attention for the way it both is and represents a navigation through a world of signs that Bourriaud's altermodern theories talk about. Oorutaichi is obviously a man of his time, not fighting against this plethora of signs but using them all in the service of great music. It occured to me whilst watching the videos that blogging is an exemplary activity in this world, being a personal meandering through a forest of signs, everything connected one way or another to everything else.

Moving Forward, Sideways, and Backwards

I presented a paper at Moving Forward, the 6th Annual College of Arts and Social Sciences Postgraduate Conference at Aberdeen University last week. But that's not what I'm writing about here.

The theme of the conference was "interdisciplinarity", a word that's very hard to say but which is becoming something of a buzzword in academic circles. Or so I'm told. In addition to the 130-odd postgraduate delegates presenting papers ranging from "literary reflections" to "resistance and artistic output" to "military security" to "European community law" were four plenary speakers, talking about various subjects they felt fitted into the theme of interdisciplinarity.

I only went to two of them, but they were the right two insofar as they acknowledged each other and in many ways trod similar ground, albeit in different shoes.

Tim Ingold is Professor of Social Anthropology and has just taken on the post of Head of the School of Social Sciences at Aberdeen university. He got the conference off to an "interesting" start by suggesting that it wasn't actually interdisciplinarity that should be the aim of scholars and academics, but more a determination to let the path of scholarship follow itself, wherever that may be. To be interdisciplinary, he said, was actually not to "move forward" like the conference's title suggests, but to move sideways. It was to be self-consciously interdisciplinary by "setting targets" for knowledge before the scholar knew what knowledge they would find. Academics shouldn't set out to be interdisciplinary at the start, he said, because that's just as prohibitive as strict disciplinary work. More it should be an accidental act; scholars should improvise pathways, resist closure.

And anyway, disciplines aren't really as bounded and strict as everyone thinks they are. Scholarly work is a "tangled field", and what we call interdisciplinarity has always existed in those moments where unexpected joinings occur.

It is management structures that impose disciplines, he said. They set targets for "knowledge production". We should be aiming for a more holistic mode of thought, where the whole matters more than the parts, where one creates an "architectonic museum of knowledge". I'm not entirely sure what that means.

That's all very well, but those management structures that impose disciplines also run universities and govern how courses are set up and ran. And so his ideas of resistance come face to face with the cold face of reality telling anthropologists to be anthropologists and mathematicians to be mathematicians and literature scholars to be literature scholars. He didn't really seem to accept this.

This may well be because he is -- to be disciplinary -- a social scientist, and therefore does not suffer from quite the same management strictures as Chris Fynsk, the next day's plenary speaker does as a humanitarian.

Four years ago, Fynsk set up the Centre for Modern Thought. Besides boasting a lovely font, the centre exists "in order to foster dynamic and theoretically informed cross-disciplinary research. It was established as a forum for rethinking the key intellectual movements of modernity in the context of the most urgent questions of our time."

To quote further:
"In its activities, it traverses the fields of literature, philosophy, theory of art, political and legal thought, and science studies. With a strong emphasis on intellectual history and philosophical foundations, we seek to give a new impetus to contemporary theoretical research. We also want to explore what is possible in the academy and to create a new interface between it and other sectors of cultural and political activity."

Fynsk's plenary address was to give an overview of the centre's work and its raison d'etre. He sees interdisciplinary work as revealing both the lines of convergence and those of divergence between disciplines. The centre's work is to ask what philosophy's role is in the modern university, and where the humanities fit into the academy as a whole. The word "humanities" is not an empty one, he said, it "answers to something". It means something. And it is under threat, a threat the social sciences may not feel quite so keenly.

The centre has a "strong respect for difference", he said, noting that the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities are different, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing. In fact it's a good thing, because it can bring together different viewpoints on key issues. Climate change, for example. Such a vast problem cannot be "solved" by one discipline alone. Just as it needs the natural sciences to work out alternative fuels, it needs the social sciences to suggest ways of using those fuels and the humanities to examine the effects of using those fuels. Each discipline can only "grab a certain type of truth". It "goes as far as it can" but it has to recognise its limits. It is akin to a relay, where each discipline hands on to the next, giving the problem a different voice that compliments the others whilst retaining its difference.

It is wrong, he said, to ignore the ways disciplines have been traditionally set up, and how they continue to be informed by those parameters. It is simply unrealistic. These institutional frameworks have in the past and continue to create limits for knowledge in certain disciplines. What Tim Ingold talked about in relation to setting paths and tracing routes can be looked at as creating lines. Lines show a path but they are also a function of tension, difference and resistance. That is why interdisciplinary work is needed.

Fynsk paraphrased Georges Bataille, who remarked of the boredom a person must feel to want to be a lawyer, a doctor, or a professor. His point was that we should want to be all of them!

To champion interdisciplinary work is not to denigrate specialised knowledge. From a purely practical point of view, universities employ people because they have specialised knowledge. No-one would get anywhere without it. And in fact, interdisciplinary work would not be able to exist were it not for specialised knowledge: it is precisely the coming together of specialists! What interdisciplinary work aims for, said Fynsk, and I was inclined to agree, is to resist the traditional frameworks of knowledge in order to take practical and real steps forward in answering the key questions of our era.

Rhizome 2010 Commissions

My Bloglines tells me that Rhizome's commissions for 2010 have just been announced. Pricking up as they do now at anything remotely altermodern, my ears and eyes settled on two in particular.

Heba Amin's work, Fragmented City, will "research and locate abandoned buildings in Cairo and then populate Google Earth with sketch-up models of these structures to “counteract the skewed understanding of the city’s experience online where only models of historic monuments exist.”" This will be followed by setting up a "tourism bureau in Cairo in order to give tours of these forgotten areas to provide a new view of the city." You can read her essay on Fragmented City on her website.

This layering of city landscapes is familiar through psychogeography. Personally, this sort of project is always likely to excite my interest, proposing as it does a subversion of the experience of a city. Michel de Certeau talks about these sorts of battles between a dominant city mapped out by planners, architects and institutions and inhabitants; he calls them strategies and tactics. The Wikipedia entry on de Certeau has this definition: "Certeau links "strategies" with institutions and structures of power, while "tactics" are utilized by individuals to create space for themselves in environments defined by strategies."

Amin's work is interesting from an altermodern point of view because it drags the past, the present and the future into contact with one another, creating sparks like those of conflicting ideas in a debate. Google Earth skews the viewer's understanding of Cairo by presenting only certain monuments. Will Amin's work result in a welcome evening out of this authoritarian impulse, or will be another instance of it? There are many criterias for choosing the buildings - how, where, why - are how these are regulated will be interesting to see. What access does she have? What knowledge?

The second work that caught my eye was Red76's YouTube School For Social Politics. As Rhizome write: "scattered throughout YouTube lie countless points of view, scattered moments of histories, both personal and collective. By arranging these video segments - documentaries, personal missives and old family films, newsreels, music videos - new light can be shed on the sociopolitical landscape of history past, and history present. The YouTube School for Social Politics (YTSSP) invites guest historians, artists, and theorists to construct passages of historical inquiry through the assemblage of clips found on YouTube."

The Wikipedia page on Red76 is small but gives a starting point: "Red76 is a multi-artist collective started in Portland, Oregon ... Red 76's work centers around the practice of grassroots publishing (both zines, small newspapers and online), conversation, and alternative economies which center around a larger theme of the American Revolution and a general revolutionary spirit.

Projects like Ghosttown and Taking Place sought to charge space and create an atmosphere wherein the public may become highly aware of their immediate surroundings, and their day to day activities, is an often recurring element within many of the groups activities."

Red76, then, are also interested in space, with a communal twist. This Youtube project appears primarily to be concerned with the space of public record, public memory. In shedding "new light [...] on the sociopolitical landscape of history past, and history present" Red76 are performing an altermodern process, spreading their practice into all aspects of history (past and present, and, missed by Rhizome's description but surely implicit - future) and collating it in the present. As Bourriaud described back in his exhibition catalogue, they are "tracing lines in all directions of time and space".

David Mitchell Attains Japanese Thought. Or Does He?

The paper I'm giving at the University of Aberdeen in July focusses on the contemporary British writer David Mitchell and whether or not he can be considered an altermodern writer. I call him a British writer a little provocatively, because the altermodern, and definitely Mitchell's novels, question the traditional sense of nationality.

In The Radicant, Nicolas Bourriaud discusses Victor Segalen, his book Essay on Exoticism and his ideas of diversity-as-energy and positive experiences of difference. Recounting how Segalen travelled to and through China and came to write a collection of prose poems Steles, Bourriaud defines Segalen's importance to the altermodern as this: "if the book [Essay on Exoticism] encourages us to seek to understand foreign cultures, it is so as to better appreciate what establishes our own difference. One cannot become Chinese, but one can attain the ability to articulate Chinese thought; one cannot claim as empathy what is merely a tourist's clear conscience, but one can translate".

My thought, which came to me whilst doing the washing up earlier, was that Mitchell attains a similar ability vis-a-vis Japan. Having re-read Cloud Atlas, I have just finished number9dream and am now moving on to Ghostwritten. It is number9dream that interests me here.

What struck me initially was how similar to some of Haruki Murakami's narrator-heroes Mitchell's narrator Eiji Miyake is. His thoughtfulness, stubborness and naivete are all found in Kafka on the Shore's narrator, as well as that of Sputnik Sweetheart and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Now, there are quite a few assumptions being made here - which naturally were I to follow this line of thought I would chase up - concerning how typical of "Japanese thought" Murakami's characters are. And there is certainly room for debate, given the obvious debt of influence he and his characters owe to Western culture - Beatles songs, jazz, pasta. But assuming that Murakami is able to articulate a recognisably Japanese mindset, then the similarities to Mitchell would suggest that the non-Japanese writer gets pretty close too.

My gut instinct says that number9dream doesn't seem mannered. Eiji doesn't come across as the character stuck between a British background and a Japanese present that you might expect. He doesn't seem caricatured or two-dimensional. And in those moments where characters use familiarly "British" words like "bloody", the effect is to make them more vivid and memorable. One might even be able to argue that Mitchell's background actually helps him see Japan more clearly: his experience of difference is translated into country-boy Eiji's impressions of megalopolis Tokyo.

These are very much early thoughts, but suggest that there is some mileage in the David Mitchell-Altermodern idea.

World Literature and the Altermodern

A thesis is emerging. Or an area of study at least.

In 1827 Goethe coined the phrase "world literature" to describe the increased availability of writing from other countries and in other languages. Marx and Engels picked it up and used it in describing characteristics of the bourgeois economy. Recently, David Damrosch has asked What Is World Literature? According to Wikipedia, Damrosch "define[s] world literature as a category of literary production, publication and circulation, rather than using the term evaluatively".

I'm wondering whether these ideas can be pulled into an essay about the relevance or usefulness of Bourriaud's altermodern theories (and other, non-literary theories of contemporary twenty-first globalization) to literature.

If I ask myself the question - are there any altermodern books? the first name that pops into my head is David Mitchell. Especially Cloud Atlas.

I await a reply from Bourriaud to the four questions I emailed him last week. Let's hope he illuminates this question for me a bit.

Benjamin H Brattan @ Postopolis

Dan Hill has posted the whole of Benjamin H Brattan's talk at the end of Postopolis on City of Sound.

It's a fascinating collection of musings on the economic crisis, the internet, design, space, politics; essentially a collation of thoughts on 'the now' from an avowed "out of the closet theorist".

Reading it, I found myself linking it to the things I've been reading recently about the altermodern, and low and behold!, Brattan mentions Bourriaud about half-way through the talk. Lucky then, as I was busy connecting thoughts and intuitions between them and creating new thesis ideas along the way.

There appears to be a considerable dialogue emerging - probably accelerated by the "credit crunch" - looking at the ways we live in the twenty-first century, about the possibilities and opportunities for change but also worries about not taking those opportunities. Do we have the right people in charge to take those opportunities? Does the concept of people in charge inherently damage a possibility for change?

All are in agreement about the growing out-dated-ness of postmodernism. It has reached saturation point, a moment in which postmodernism is becoming passé, washed up; irrelevant! Of course that doesn't mean we are in a post-postmodernism. It just means we are in a gap between post- and pre-. That is what Brattan's talk focussed on.

The main idea I've taken away from it, from a literature/art point of view, is an idea of the "afterimage". The designation "post" is used, Brattan notes, "to name a particular state of things that is somehow eclipsed but not entirely done with." We are in that moment now, a society creating afterimages. Afterimages of what, though? After postmodernism, after politics, after economics? No-one knows. Because we haven't entered a stage that can easily be called "an ism", we are left flailing in a limbo, using up yesterday's leftovers but not cooking a new dinner. Unsettling as this all may be, these sorts of conditions tend to be fertile ground for exciting art and ideas. This is emerging as the topic of my dissertation...