Yule Heibel's Post Studio © 2003-2010

Research arms of the culture industry

I googled “adorno research arm of the culture industry,” hoping to find a reference to what was the Frankfurt School’s assertion that the avant-garde in the mid-20th century acts as a kind of research arm for culture industry. It’s sort of similar to what “cool hunters” do today, snooping out underdog trends, “ethnic” values, ghetto fashions, etc., which can then be mass-produced (in non-union, cheap labour factories) and sold for inflated profits in chain stores. (I tell you, Adorno & Horkheimer had it all figured out decades ago; they were good readers of Hegel & Marx, too.) I didn’t find an exact reference, but I stopped looking when I found this terrific article, Virtual Vaginas and Pentium Penises; A Critical Study of Teledildonics and Digital S(t)imulation by Meredith Balderston and Timothy Mitchell instead. [Note: it's on a site called cavityshack.com, but I can't seem to access it, hence my link to the google search result.]

I had never heard anyone use the word teledildonics (or cyberdildonics) until just now, but then I googled it and found (silly me) that it’s …a thriving research arm for culture industry. We live in interesting times. There is a lot to learn.

Some excerpts from Virtual Vaginas and Pentium Penises; A Critical Study of Teledildonics and Digital S(t)imulation, but read the whole thing. It’s worth it:

Interestingly enough, pornography and science in the U.S. have a long-standing relationship. The porn industry is often first in adopting new technologies and occasionally is the impetus behind technological developments. This phenomenon is particularly noticeable on the Internet, where the revolutionary ease of production and distribution has led to an explosion of porn sites. As Sun Mircosystems spokeswoman Susan Struble states: “The way you know if your technology is doing good [sic! lol] is if it’s doing well in the porn world.”
Linda Williams in her book Hard Core (1989) hypothesizes that the undertaking of pornographic cinema is an ongoing attempt to uncover and display the mystery of female sexuality. Pornography is obsessed with visibility and assertion of presence, displaying and demystifying bodies, an example of what Jean-Louis Comolli calls a “frenzy of the visible” in which visibility is tied to mechanics, and progress in one leads to a dominance of the other. When a camera ‘captures’ an event, the mechanics of the activity in the event become known, able to be broken down into discrete moments each second. In porn, female pleasure and orgasm, having no reliable visible counterpart to the male “money shot,” usually remain in the realm of the repressed invisible – demonstrable only as a lack in the scopic field. In this instance, the technological apparatus that allows the recording and portability of the visual wonders of the world fails to explain the invisible. Furthermore, by visualizing the body and sexuality in film, a medium that can manipulate visual sequence and speed in ways that do not have to adhere to the real world, sex and body in this medium likewise become mechanical apparatuses and processes that can be modified through science and technology. Pornography then, can be seen as an attempt to contain and control (female) sexuality and pleasure by absorbing them into the rationalizing and systematic realms of science and technology, commodifying them and controlling the means of the commodity’s production.

I wish I had said that. I completely agree with this analysis. Point one, the invisible is not explained — or made manifest or experienced or “grokked” — by the technologically made-visible. Point two, sex and body become like mechanical apparatuses (instead of more human) precisely because they are mediated through the technology: that is, you end more alienated from the matters at hand than before. And point three, it’s a question of control, finally. I would go further and say it’s more than a question of controlling female sexuality, it’s a question of bringing all revolutionary impulses under control, regardless of whether they belong to male or female. The unbridled impulse must be made to serve the interests of commodity capitalism. Doesn’t matter a rat’s ass if it’s your unbridled impulse or mine.

Balderston & Mitchell go on to quote from N. Katherine Hayles’s critique of “posthumanism” (or “transhumanism”), How We Became Posthuman:

First, the posthuman view privileges informational pattern over material instantiation, so that embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an accident of history rather than an inevitability of life. Second, the posthuman view considers consciousness . . . as an epiphenomenon, as an evolutionary upstart trying to claim that it is the whole show when in actuality it is only a minor sideshow. Third, the posthuman view thinks of the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body with other prosthesis becomes a continuation of a process that began before we were born. Fourth, and most important . . . the posthuman view configures human being that it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines. In the posthuman, there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and human goals.

Hayles consider posthumanism a modification of liberal humanism, a logical extension, in other words, of the trajectory we’ve been on for some time now. She uses the phenomenon of anorexia as illustration: “In taking the self-possession implied by liberal humanism to the extreme, the anoretic creates a physical image that, in its skeletal emaciation, serves as a
material testimony that the locus of the liberal humanist subject lies in the mind, not the body. Although in many ways the posthuman deconstructs the liberal humanist subject, it thus shares with its predecessor an emphasis on cognition rather than embodiment.” To this observation, Balderston & Mitchell add that “Teledildonics follows posthumanist ideology in its disconnection of the mind from the body through how it provides sexual stimulation. Not only is a teledildonic experience separate from other people, but the tools it employs resemble disembodied vaginas, rectums, penises and mouths – body parts that have no unified body.” From here, the argument goes back to Adorno & Horkheimer’s critique of Englightenment ideology, and this paper notes that teledildonics “simply extends this search for hyper-rationality and perfection [expressed in the reduction of the experienced world to mathematics and data] into the irrational world of sexual desire and fulfillment through the usage of technology itself.”

The whole article is really interesting. Go read it: Virtual Vaginas and Pentium Penises; A Critical Study of Teledildonics and Digital S(t)imulation . (And let me know if there are glitches accessing it. As I said, my link points to the html version brought up through the google search string “adorno research arm of the culture industry,” not the direct link to cavityshack.com.)

I’ve used up at least two days blogging time now. So long till later.

Menschenskinder…

[edited with a PPS below...]

It’s clear that mentioning the p-word (porn, long & short form) will get you more google search hits than most any other thing. This creeps me out, especially given some of the mindboggling searchstrings that people are putting into google, which, weirdly, result in visits to my blog. How’s this, for example: the p-word, “torture” and “devices” (together), names for female genitalia, “insert,” and “exploding,” all in one string? …There are some seriously twisted puppies out there.

I also can’t believe how slow some of this variant of fandom is. On August 8th — eons ago, in other words — I wrote a brief note about an imaginary biotech invention (whose name I don’t want to mention here, as it will just generate more hits, but which incorporates the “L” word that rhymes with glove, with the lump-y description of its appearance). This “invention” (by an Emily Carr College of Art affiliate) is a send-up of high-tech / bio-tech, and apparently some of the p-surfers now noticed it. Starting about 10 days ago, my referer stats went off-balance as the L-lump meme began making the rounds on the p-oriented sites. I keep getting hits to that August 8th entry: apparently, the L-lump scared some afficionados because they thought it really existed, while it appears to have turned others on, and both camps are visiting my blog entry for information regarding its source. Au wei. Do me a favour and crawl back in your caves people. Please.

It’s bizarre to consider that so many words potentially become triggers — taboos, in effect — for contamination with matters you don’t want to be associated with. I have never used the words porn, torture device, exploding, insert, vagina in a single entry. I have undoubtedly used these words singly, but someone was looking for them in combination. Is this a harbinger of the web’s power to spread knowledge and enlightenment, or of renewed myths that spread darkness and fear? Myths of taboos and bogey-men, vs fearlessness and freedom? But why would anyone think that knives cut only one way?

Postscript: The number of hits I’m getting from one site (something with oioideej or something) is exceeding the number of hits I got the one time that Scripting News linked to my site via a picture of Shadia Drury…. Follow the money, follow the money…. Porn is $$$. That’s all. That’s everything.

PPS: On second thought, perhaps the number of hits are about even (I think I need to add them up over days, and I didn’t keep track of Scripting’s, and I haven’t kept tabs on these new ones). The p-ones are from several sources and have been showing up over the past 10 days or so. Whatever, doesn’t really matter to me as such, but what I find really odd is that the main site (oioideej) that’s driving these hits to my site is linked to by only 4 other sites, according to technorati. What does this mean in terms of the power of so-called A-listers and the power of porn-oriented sites to drive traffic? Are we missing a couple of pieces in the quest to determine “popularity,” traffic, resonance, whatever? Just asking…

Narcissus isn’t the only god in town: check the pictures

I’ve been thinking about the blog as an existential problem, and can’t quite decide if I’m just in a really bad mood, or whether there is something more important happening here. Sartre said that we have the choice to stop existing: that’s what differentiates us from things, which do not have that existential freedom. The paper I initially scribbled this on — while sitting anonymously in a cafe, exuding an air of bad mood, nursing my writer’s block and mulling over my mundane condition of feeling as though I will never ever again manage a sustained piece of work, or ever again have an income (for those of you who don’t know, I gave up a brilliant dead-end career as an underpaid adjunct to be willfully unemployed and at loose ends: I have not made any money since January 1999, and even though I would love to figure out how to have at least a semblance of a professional existence, I cannot think of a single person or organisation that would hire me for anything at all) — anyway, mulling this over, I began scribbling away on paper. So the paper has no choice in being paper, but I have a choice in being who I am, and in deciding to do this versus that. See?

And that was the context in which I was thinking of the blog as an existential problem. Is it a piece of paper, or is it a part of you? I want to quit, to end. I wonder to what extent a blog is a living piece of a person. Unlike a book, a blog is continually updated, refreshed, submitted to (…who is master, who is servant here?). My book, my contributions to the other book, my articles are pieces of paper that someone may or may not get something from, and I have no problem being detached from these things: they are not a part of me in the sense that the blog is, in the sense that the blog demands attention. Can a blog choose to stop being a blog? Is online writing artificial intelligence, or just real-life stupidity? I would probably have to have a canny knack for dissociating if I wanted to peel this thing off me, to shed it like a snake skin, …or to flay it away. In that sense, blogs seem like virtual amputated existences, prostheses of the compulsive. Do all the blogs out there add up to a body? That would be telling. However, while there are apparently quite a few assholes in this virtual body, as well as some eyes and ears, a couple of brain cells, quite a bit of skin, many many mouths, arms and legs grabbing and running, too, the whole thing still doesn’t add up to a real body.

Endymion (the chap “sleeping” so voluptuously in the picture at top left) was an object of desire. He was in fact the moon goddess Selene’s object of lust. She put him into perpetual sleep so that she could visit him whenever she wanted. Other versions of the myth say that Endymion asked to be put to eternal sleep so that he would become immortal and remain young and gorgeous forever, as well as willingly available to Selene. At any rate, he is passive (asleep), an object of the gaze (Selene’s, but of course yours, too), and — this is important — he is the object not of an active force’s desire, but of the otherwise “passive,” female, reflective moon, that cold body without heat and light of its own. [Don't you love how myths make all this misogyny explicit? Did you know, however, that in German (and probably one or two other languages associated with weird nations) the sun is female and the moon is male?]

But I digress.

I’m wondering what kind of body the blogging “conversation” makes. It’s got an awful lot of American muscle in it, but there’s so much more. Of course, lots can happen to a body. Marsyas, for example, was flayed — and who hasn’t felt that? He was flayed by Apollo — who did it with terrible calm: Apollo is all head, all light, all cerebrum; his lusts are discursive, the stuff of legends (which are told): such a contained version of torture is the rational Apollo’s domain. Remember that Apollo was Selene-Diana’s brother. Selene never flayed anyone; with any luck, she didn’t have the head for it. Just remember she and Apollo were twins, though. And click, by the way, on the Ribera illustration of The Flaying of Marsyas on the right there. It links to an exquisite poem from 1957, by Zbigniew Herbert.

We really have little idea how our bodies traverse these spaces.

This entry with apologies also to Jonathan Delacour who writes about being overloaded. Just came across that, and his bit of heart of things emboldened me to post this. Thanks also to Maria Benet of Alembic who circumscribed her state of mind as a kind of blogger’s ADD: yup, I’ve got that too, and don’t even think of trying to prescribe any meds for me!

The utopia of non-regulated seriousness

There was a Tuesday evening library visit a few weeks ago that I didn’t write about. I found a slim volume, a collection of papers delivered at the ICA in London, Ideas from France; the Legacy of French Theory, edited by Lisa Appignanesi (1985). The book has four sections: The Pleasures and Pitfalls of Theory; The Archeology of Michel Foucault; The Rise and Fall of Structural Marxism; The Uses of History. I chose to read around in section two, the one on Foucault. In “Foucault & Psychoanalysis,” pp.24-26, John Forrester wants to know what Foucault’s relation to psychoanalysis was. He notes that while La volont� de savoir purports to be an archaeology of psychoanalysis, “there was something too neat about the project: if the book were the archaeology of psychoanalysis, why was there so little textual reference, so little explicit addressing themes in psychoanalysis? To me, it seemed clear that many arguments were implicitly aimed at psychoanalysis (amongst other things). Yet sometimes the other things were so vaguely evoked, so tangential, while the unnamed object was so obviously pshychoanalytic [sic] that I felt that there was something odd, refracted and displaced about the book.” (25) Forrester eventually discusses

“an early work of Foucault’s, one that I have never seen discussed. Perhaps it is Foucault’s earliest publication: the Introduction to a French translation of Ludwig Binswanger’s Traum und Existenz. (…)
According to Foucault, the dream as analysed by Freud gains access to the meaning of the unconscious — it is a semantic analysis. But it leaves out of account the morphology of the imaginary:

There is a different morphology of imaginary space when what is at issue is free, light-filled space, or when the space at work is that of the prison of obscurity and of suffocation. The imaginary world has its own laws, its specific structures — the image is a bit more than the immediate fulfilment of meaning; it has its own density, and the laws of the world are not solely the decrees of a single will, were that one divine.

It is also clear that Foucault’s reading of Freud was already influenced by Lacan, as every recent French writer on psychoanalysis has been; but this is the Lacan of 1954, the Lacan of a metaphysics of full speech, of the necessarily deceptive functions of the imaginary. [Pay attention, next comes the bit that interested me from an art historian's p.o.v.:] Foucault resisted this metaphysics of speech. He opposed Klein and Lacan, and opposed them to each other, with the independent logic of the image, resistant to the linguistic interpretation, the speech-ocentrism, if you will allow me to say that, of psychoanalysis. Hence Foucault’s interpretation of Dora sees her cure as effective, because the dream in which she announces the termination of the treatment maps out her struggle to escape from the interpretive strategies of Freud and all the others with whom she is in everyday contact, both men and women. It announces her means of escape from the iron law of Freud’s theory of identification, in which every image of herself and of the others is just a representation, and a representation of something else. For Foucault, Dora becomes heroically, stoically cured through acknowledging her solitary destiny, by walking out on Freud. If she were to say it, she would only be subjected (in all the senses of the term) to Freud’s steamrollering interpretive strategies. Dora’s truth cannot be found along the path of psychoanalysis because the communication of psychoanalysis will leave the expressive force of the image untouched and will attempt to dispel it, since psychoanalysis is wholly committed to an analysis of representation, rather than expression. What is more, her truth will only be found by the solitary escape from the prison of representation.” [emphasis added]

Next, Peter Dews compares “Foucault and the Frankfurt School,” 26-28. By Foucault’s own admission, he could have been twenty years further along had he discovered the Frankfurt School sooner. Dews writes, “‘It is a strange case,’ he [Foucault] states, ‘of non-penetration between two very similar types of thinking which is explained, perhaps, by that very similarity.’” I love Foucault’s take here: I see him and the Frankfurt School making lesbian love. It should indeed have happened. The way I understand Adorno, the problem of violence was central to his thinking. Adorno tried to articulate a “negative” dialectic, a philosophy that wouldn’t be a philosophy, a language that would eschew the regulating force of language, its violence, and its conformity. Dews elaborates as follows:

…the work of Foucault and of the Frankfurt School is haunted by the idea of a “utopia” of nonregulated seriousness [i.e., play]. In The History of Sexuality, for example, Foucault permits himself to evoke fleetingly a “different economy of bodies and pleasures” which would no longer be subordinate to the confessional quest for identity, while in Negative Dialectics Adorno argues that “all happpiness aims at sensual fulfilment and obtains its objectivity in that fulfilment. A happiness blocked off from every such aspect is no happiness.”

Note that in History of Sexuality Foucault made the case that psychoanalysis is not a “major break in knowledge” but is instead yet another way of making sex discursive (i.e., something talked about). Foucault’s point was that “sexual liberation” — as manifested in open discussions about sex — is in reality an extension of systems of power and domination that have infiltrated our most private activities. In other words, the more you bring activities previously considered non-verbal under the control of language, the more you’re extending mechanisms of social control into those areas. (That’s why I think you have to be a nitwit to praise pornography, because even though porn is visual, it is a visual mode cliched into language patterns, it is prepackaged narrative, it is a form of spectacularism avidly trying to shed its spectacularity and slip instead into the norms of language. It is in that sense a new form of “global” control, and hardly one of “global sexualisation,” whatever that’s supposed to be.) You can talk yourself silly about sexuality; just remember that it’s not called the prison-house of language for nothing. And that’s what I was reading about a couple of Tuesdays ago.

The Freedoms of Animal Slaves

There’s an entry I’ve been meaning to write. Somehow all these other things have been getting in the way, pushing me here and there, distracting me. Little things, big things; but if I start to list them, I still won’t be writing the entry, which is supposed to be about art. About expression. About honour. About principles. About passion. About fires that burn, rains that inundate, hearts that rage, and, in this brave new millennium, about the incredible survival and transformation of a particular animal species of 80s punk.

The entry I’m supposed to write is about Elizabeth Fischer‘s vocal art. She’s the vocalist-slash-lead singer for that 80s band, The Animal Slaves, which I wrote about on November 16th and 15th. Fischer happened to read these entries and sent me an email to say thanks for liking the music, and “for understanding the text/subtext… not too many people do…” It’s a real buzz to hear from someone you’ve blogged about, particularly someone whose work you admire, if that person says, “ok.” We started emailing a bit more, and she let on that she was putting her music online. It is wonderful — check it out right now.

But now let’s talk about me again. (Haha) Have you been here before, reading my blog, I mean? Why are you here? Do you think you know what interests me, what books I like, what thinkers I gravitate towards, what I care about? Is it mildly interesting to learn more? Well, listen to Dark Blue World or Night Face then, or any of the other pieces on Fischer’s site and hear what I relate to. It’s not wall-paper, it’s not a constant sound, a white noise. It’s music.

There’s music, there’s natural noise, there’s silence. Music — classical, jazz, blues, rock, “ethnic” — has to be expressive. Much of what needs to be expressed happens to be painful, or somehow embarassing to the carefully made-up, coiffed self. Unharmonic. Riven. Dissonant. Happiness of the pedestrian variety doesn’t need much of a leg-up on the stirrups: it sits in the saddle of social control by virtue of routine: get up, groom yourself, fit in. I have nothing against happiness, and in fact I am happy a lot of the time. If I’m really pissed off, or stressed, a walk with my dog makes me happy because my dog plays, and before I know it, I’m laughing with my dog and at myself because I’m once again playing some game with him. But my dog does not sing, nor does he play an instrument. He doesn’t write or make visual art, either. Nor does my dog actually get depressed, which I think has something to do with his sense of time and mortality. He does get bored if he doesn’t get out enough, whereupon he’ll go into a funk, but this isn’t quite the same thing as a human depression; for one thing, at the sight of his leash or the car keys or the word “walkie,” he snaps out of it instantly. A lot of happy-themed (and sappy-themed) popular manufactured culture seems to have been made by cleverly trained dogs who never get depressed: everything runs in preordained ruts, there’s nothing new to sniff out, nothing that shocks the expectations. Actually, we’ve got so many clever dogs these days who know exactly how to dish up shock that it has become degraded as a vehicle of cognition. Those dogs work in advertising; they use shock to make you pay attention to their product …for 30 seconds, just long enough to get the hooks in, convince you to think about buying it.

I go back to playing with my dog. He doesn’t try to shock me — he shocks himself when he humps my leg and then doesn’t know what to do with his neutered self.

Just how exactly does an artist today grow back his pair of figurative balls? Or grow back the ovaries that have been spayed out of her?

The artist can’t compete with or within Culture Industry, where dissemination now takes place through memes, sterilised bits of sperm and ovaries cavorting digitally. No one listens to you there, in Culture Industry. If they do, they’re listening along preordained ruts — even your dissonances will be perceived as yet another marketing gimmick. The only way you’ll get your organs back — become some sort of entire individual again — is if people — one other person, two, maybe three, perhaps a small horde — will stop. And listen. And look. Take time, and let it sink in, into the flesh that we are. Silence, natural noise, music. Different kinds of music, but always real music. Play. Cognition. Agape. Love. The Animal Slaves howled at the ends of their leashes, telling us that we’re just domesticated animals ourselves. Neutered, spayed. Shocked by our own urges, unable to figure out what to do with them. Twenty years later, Fischer’s music has moved beyond some of the urgency to a deeper body, but has lost none of the scalpel-like precision. You have to hear her.

And what about you? Are you an animal slave? In 1970 Bob Dylan wrote If dogs run free:
“If dogs run free, then why not we, Across the swooping plain?”

The last verse goes like this:

If dogs run free, then what must be,
Must be, and that is all.
True love can make a blade of grass
Stand up straight and tall.
In harmony with the cosmic sea,
True love needs no company,
In can cure the soul, it can make it whole,
If dogs run free.

True love… If dogs run free…. They don’t, though. Even in the “off-leash” area of the park, their leash is made of cookies and praise. And if you’re a human, your leash is made of money.

Fischer has made the music available for free. I tried to convince her to put a PayPal button on her site, but she wouldn’t hear of it: “nope, no paypal. the idea here is to have all the downloads be absolutely free. i think it is the most radical thing to do, as an artist. to have (hopefully) good work be free. seeing as our culture is totally, commercially corrupt.” (I hope she doesn’t mind my quoting from an email…) What’s on the site is real music, and there’s not a leash in sight. Check it out, listen. Run free.

Fischer writes too. Also online, for free. Read it here and here.

Free your children

Brian’s son Tobin is having some interesting school experiences, which Brian kindly blogged about. Few things get my attention as quickly as qvetches about schools, and I left a comment. Then it occured to me that it’s probably not the case that everybody has read John Taylor Gatto — I keep forgetting this! — and that I should point to this essay, The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher, right here, on my blog. Have you read? You must. Print it out. Study it.

Considering the topic of my last blog, “play-playgrounds-laws/of/genre-expectations-discourse,” reading Gatto on how schools condition us to accept the status quo can be an eye-opener. The first lesson is “Stay in the class where you belong.” Fast-forward to adulthood: gender boundaries, anyone? Class boundaries of the “grown-up” kind? “…they envy and fear the better classes and have contempt for the dumber classes. So the class mostly keeps itself in good marching order. That’s the real lesson of any rigged competition like school. [=society] You come to know your place.” Gatto’s lessons are chilling, the blueprint for societies going wrong: “In lesson five I teach that your self-respect should depend on an observer’s measure of your worth. [...] Self-evaluation — the staple of every major philosophical system that ever appeared on the planet — is never a factor in these things. [...] People need to be told what they are worth.”

Schooling stays with us long after we’ve left school. What are you still being schooled in? Is it worth it? Is it the best way?

“School” is an essential support system for a vision of social engineering that condemns most people to be subordinate stones in a pyramid that narrows to a control point as it ascends. “School” is an artifice which makes such a pyramidal social order seem inevitable (although such a premise is a fundamental betrayal of the American Revolution). [More...]

Take a look at John Taylor Gatto‘s website for further links, including this September 2003 Harper’s Magazine article, Against School. Gatto has had a tendency lately to propound too much conspiracy theory — that, since there is a benefit to keeping a population docile, stupid, and passive, there is an agency or a cabal at work to make that happen. I can’t follow him there; I think being docile, stupid, and passive is simply easier, and most people do what they’re used to. They send their kids to school for all the wrong reasons, the first being that they themselves went to school, so they can’t imagine an alternative; and they want their children to “fit in”; and they think the kids need to go to school to learn how to get along: these are terrible reasons, but they don’t necessarily constitute a conspiracy. But despite Gatto’s increasing forays into conspiracy-land, his critique of schooling remains sound.