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imomusA week or so ago, heading for the Thai supermarket on Alexanderplatz where we buy tea, coriander and shrimps, I took a detour with Hisae into the new Alexa shopping centre just over the road. A massive curving red corridor that follows the S-bahn tracks towards Jannowitzbrucke, Alexa did that very Berlin thing of seeming to spring up overnight on a vast yet central plot of empty ground, giving some vacant space a definition. In the case of Alexa, that definition is a rather ugly pomo take on art deco, with a bit of Hollywood Babylon going on.
I won't say I didn't like my visit to Alexa; rather that I didn't like how I liked it. The vast Media Markt contains an Apple Store where I got very absorbed in testing Leopard (wow, flipping through my files with CoverFlow! I didn't need this, but I like it!). Down in the mall, a living statue handed me a real orchid which contained gift vouchers inside its petals. We sniffed at the food in the Food Court and rode the escalators to the top floor to look at the Model Railway World and the Children's Playzone. Then we rode back down on 1920s-styled elevators.
I felt a familiar strangeness in Alexa. It was the same feeling I get in Disneyland. It's a feeling of being drugged, becoming stupid. There was something in the air -- I felt like I was breathing differently in there, the air wasn't clear and fresh but warm and drowsy, and a lack of oxygen was closing down parts of myself. To resist this retail befuddlement, to retaliate, I began criticizing the place to Hisae. We enacted, in the course of our conversation, the same conflict which made headlines when Alexa first opened, and bargain-hunters smashed glass to get into Media Markt while protestors catcalled them and waved anti-capitalist placards. Hisae and I had the same conflict going on in ourselves. For me it was all the stranger because, exactly 20 years ago, I made my first visit to Alexanderplatz, then the centre of a communist country. Some of the buildings are the same, but it might as well be a different planet. I remember going into a shoe shop (they asked me to take a basket at the door), then, later, being impressed to see people queuing outside a bookshop in the rain, waiting to get the newly-published books.
What I felt in Alexa was that the mall was producing me quite successfully, but in a way I didn't want to be produced; as someone stupid, someone easy to understand. I thought again of the way places can produce the people in them when I read a striking phrase of Etienne Balibar's in an essay by Zizek last week: "Man is made by citizenship and not citizenship by man".
The idea, at its most basic, is one that displaces Romantic and Humanist notions of human agency. We are produced by our context, not by our individual will. The play makes the audience, the book creates the reader, the pet produces its owner's behaviour patterns, the baby produces the mother, the shopping centre creates the shopper. That's really the impression I got at Alexa. Here we are in this city where nobody has any money, everyone is unemployed. And yet you make a new shopping centre -- despite that! -- and it's full of people, as if you'd just plonked one down in Sim City and little schlepping shopbots had populated it. As if the shopping centre itself had created them. Created us.
Let's call this process -- for want of a better term -- Production Theory. Production Theory doesn't just reverse Romantic notions of individual will. It also stands as the antithesis to Reception Theory, the idea that a work of literature is created by its readers' creativity, criticism, community. Not at all, says Production Theory. An author doesn't just write a book, he writes its ideal audience too. That's why, when I read a John Grisham novel (and I did once, when I was writing reviews for the Glasgow Herald), I feel much more that Grisham is writing me than that I'm writing Grisham. It's not so much that I don't like the novels Grisham writes; it's the ME he writes that I don't like, just as it was the ME invoked by Alexa that I didn't like. It's Alexa and Grisham's efficiency in producing nominally happy MEs that is the real threat. Their knowledge of what "I" want, and their skill in giving "me" it.
Grisham and Alexa are temporary, passing threats: I can soon head back to my Thai grocery, my avant cinema. But what if I lived in a small town with only Grisham in its library, only Hollywood blockbusters in the video store? I suppose I'd move, as soon as I could, to a place with more "me choices". Assuming, that is, that there's some shred of a "real me", enough to say "What this town provides isn't enough, somehow".
One of the main pleasures of going to the kind of experimental, hip events a city like Berlin supplies in abundance is that, while I'm there, I really like the "me" I become. The event produces not just a spectacle that I can enjoy, but also a certain implementation of "me": a radical, liberal, sexy me! A Berlin me! This explains why a lot of avant events are, in themselves, pleasureless, and yet also deeply satisfying. Sure, all we got was some contact mics attached to a ping pong ball, and some painful feedback. But what satisfies is the self-image I get from the event. The feeling that I'm in the right place, being the right person. Not necessarily a person I was ever meant to be, but one I somehow became. One in a million, and so free!
Notice how the Romantic ideology creeps back into the narrative-of-self here, though. Through force of will, I overcame difficulties, I travelled the world, I exchanged a mainstream idiocy for a marginal intelligence! Mein fucking hipster Kampf! And yet doesn't the margin produce me too, with its rituals, its drugs, its habits, its non-conformist conformities? I'm still schlepping, produced by the hipster mill rather than the shopping mall. The best I can do is experience as many different "producers" as possible, and change contexts often. Or perhaps stay rooted in one place forever, the place I was born, say. In my case, that would be Paisley. It has several shopping centres but, as yet, no pecha kucha event.
I won't say I didn't like my visit to Alexa; rather that I didn't like how I liked it. The vast Media Markt contains an Apple Store where I got very absorbed in testing Leopard (wow, flipping through my files with CoverFlow! I didn't need this, but I like it!). Down in the mall, a living statue handed me a real orchid which contained gift vouchers inside its petals. We sniffed at the food in the Food Court and rode the escalators to the top floor to look at the Model Railway World and the Children's Playzone. Then we rode back down on 1920s-styled elevators.
I felt a familiar strangeness in Alexa. It was the same feeling I get in Disneyland. It's a feeling of being drugged, becoming stupid. There was something in the air -- I felt like I was breathing differently in there, the air wasn't clear and fresh but warm and drowsy, and a lack of oxygen was closing down parts of myself. To resist this retail befuddlement, to retaliate, I began criticizing the place to Hisae. We enacted, in the course of our conversation, the same conflict which made headlines when Alexa first opened, and bargain-hunters smashed glass to get into Media Markt while protestors catcalled them and waved anti-capitalist placards. Hisae and I had the same conflict going on in ourselves. For me it was all the stranger because, exactly 20 years ago, I made my first visit to Alexanderplatz, then the centre of a communist country. Some of the buildings are the same, but it might as well be a different planet. I remember going into a shoe shop (they asked me to take a basket at the door), then, later, being impressed to see people queuing outside a bookshop in the rain, waiting to get the newly-published books.
What I felt in Alexa was that the mall was producing me quite successfully, but in a way I didn't want to be produced; as someone stupid, someone easy to understand. I thought again of the way places can produce the people in them when I read a striking phrase of Etienne Balibar's in an essay by Zizek last week: "Man is made by citizenship and not citizenship by man".
The idea, at its most basic, is one that displaces Romantic and Humanist notions of human agency. We are produced by our context, not by our individual will. The play makes the audience, the book creates the reader, the pet produces its owner's behaviour patterns, the baby produces the mother, the shopping centre creates the shopper. That's really the impression I got at Alexa. Here we are in this city where nobody has any money, everyone is unemployed. And yet you make a new shopping centre -- despite that! -- and it's full of people, as if you'd just plonked one down in Sim City and little schlepping shopbots had populated it. As if the shopping centre itself had created them. Created us.
Let's call this process -- for want of a better term -- Production Theory. Production Theory doesn't just reverse Romantic notions of individual will. It also stands as the antithesis to Reception Theory, the idea that a work of literature is created by its readers' creativity, criticism, community. Not at all, says Production Theory. An author doesn't just write a book, he writes its ideal audience too. That's why, when I read a John Grisham novel (and I did once, when I was writing reviews for the Glasgow Herald), I feel much more that Grisham is writing me than that I'm writing Grisham. It's not so much that I don't like the novels Grisham writes; it's the ME he writes that I don't like, just as it was the ME invoked by Alexa that I didn't like. It's Alexa and Grisham's efficiency in producing nominally happy MEs that is the real threat. Their knowledge of what "I" want, and their skill in giving "me" it.
Grisham and Alexa are temporary, passing threats: I can soon head back to my Thai grocery, my avant cinema. But what if I lived in a small town with only Grisham in its library, only Hollywood blockbusters in the video store? I suppose I'd move, as soon as I could, to a place with more "me choices". Assuming, that is, that there's some shred of a "real me", enough to say "What this town provides isn't enough, somehow".One of the main pleasures of going to the kind of experimental, hip events a city like Berlin supplies in abundance is that, while I'm there, I really like the "me" I become. The event produces not just a spectacle that I can enjoy, but also a certain implementation of "me": a radical, liberal, sexy me! A Berlin me! This explains why a lot of avant events are, in themselves, pleasureless, and yet also deeply satisfying. Sure, all we got was some contact mics attached to a ping pong ball, and some painful feedback. But what satisfies is the self-image I get from the event. The feeling that I'm in the right place, being the right person. Not necessarily a person I was ever meant to be, but one I somehow became. One in a million, and so free!
Notice how the Romantic ideology creeps back into the narrative-of-self here, though. Through force of will, I overcame difficulties, I travelled the world, I exchanged a mainstream idiocy for a marginal intelligence! Mein fucking hipster Kampf! And yet doesn't the margin produce me too, with its rituals, its drugs, its habits, its non-conformist conformities? I'm still schlepping, produced by the hipster mill rather than the shopping mall. The best I can do is experience as many different "producers" as possible, and change contexts often. Or perhaps stay rooted in one place forever, the place I was born, say. In my case, that would be Paisley. It has several shopping centres but, as yet, no pecha kucha event.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-11-12 10:30 am (UTC)In what ways do you think daily blogging has created a new "you"?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-11-12 10:57 am (UTC)I'm interested in this belief -- and it comes up here quite a lot, in discussions of Relational Aesthetics, for instance -- that powerful and challenging ideas are only to be considered for their newness. After their "invention", they're just supposed to go away, and anyone who refers to them is "reinventing" them, and therefore a dunderhead. (It's a combination of the charge "You're wrong" and the charge "You're stating the obvious" -- charges which are obviously at odds.)
This idea was useful enough for Balibar to insert into a 2004 essay, and Zizek to quote in a 2005 essay. But if, two years later, it appears on the Momus blog, I'm "reinventing structuralism". Just think yourself lucky I didn't relate it to the economics of J.K.Galbraith!
As for your second point, isn't it obvious that this blog creates both me and its readers? The blog is created by my computer keyboard typing "me", and the keyboard is produced by workers in China, who are produced by Steve Jobs, who's conjured out of thin air by the sheer collective will of Apple fanatics, who are produced by the boringness and inadequacy of PC computers, which are produced by Bill Gates, who's produced by Satan.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-11-12 11:38 am (UTC)"The book passes through me. I am the place where, for some months or years things are elaborated or put into place, and then they become separate through some kind of excretion. In the end, it is immaterial whether the thought processes of the South American Indian take shape through the medium of my thought or whether mine take place through the medium of theirs."
(no subject)
Date: 2007-11-12 11:51 am (UTC)As for the "elegance" question, if the sort of bloodless, cautious prose you quote excites you, fine. But where are the vivid flashes of comedy, the memorable turns of phrase I've provided here? Where the "schlepping shopbots", the "Mein fucking hipster Kampf"s?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-11-12 12:01 pm (UTC)But seriously, don't you think it's a bit of a contradiction that someone who is so quick to claim things 'over', so equally quick to claim every micro-movement in the art world the coming thing, and so relentless in his criticism of pop culture for its use of exhausted tropes, that this person should also be someone who relies so heavily on recycled philosophy constructs, 101-stylee, from sixty years or more years ago, ideas that, in most philosophy departments across the academic world, have been pretty much 'over', or at the least very heavily qualified, since at least 1987?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-11-12 12:09 pm (UTC)Things are over and then back. Look at what Lacan did with Freud, for instance. We may simply be in disagreement over what's "over" and what's "back". And some of that disagreement may well be political. Perhaps you find Balibar and Zizek too leftish for your tastes. Perhaps you don't appreciate attacks on the Romantic Humanist subject. You want all this stuff under the carpet. Well, here it ain't under the carpet. It is the carpet, and a very handsome one at that!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-11-12 12:27 pm (UTC)As for things being over and things coming back, Romantic Humanism is like rock'n'roll, Momus, amazingly it's still with us, it's still with you even, in your romantic conceptions of the boho artist's life. Humanism/anti-humanism is a tired binary, redolent precisely of the structuralism/poststructuralism interface of all those years ago. There's nothing there that Foucault hadn't delineated 40 years ago in Les mots et les choses. Even Foucault moved on, to his more interesting work on sexuality. It's not a binary that's ever going to solved, only dissolved.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-11-12 12:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-11-12 01:00 pm (UTC)The Balibar quote came up in an essay about human rights, and last week I was debunking the concept of natural, universal human rights. That stays topical as long as people keep promoting the idea of natural, universal human rights -- just as Marxist ideas stay topical as long as there are vast concentrations of wealth.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-11-12 01:37 pm (UTC)And no, I don't really understand your beef with Amnesty. With so many bad things happening in the world, so many rotten institutions, you pick on Amnesty? Even Mr arch-anti-humanist himself ultimately accepted that the concept of 'human rights' might be useful (Foucault: "What we call humanism has been used by Marxists, liberals, Nazis, Catholics. This does not mean that we have to get rid of what we call human rights or freedom, but that we can't say that freedom or human rights has to be limited at certain frontiers.")
(no subject)
Date: 2007-11-12 01:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-11-12 01:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-11-12 01:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-11-12 02:04 pm (UTC)Discipline and Punishment
Date: 2007-11-12 10:51 pm (UTC)Now I'm feel sort of screwed.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-11-12 02:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-11-12 02:50 pm (UTC)But, as I say, this page is not the place to rehash those arguments, which are far from "specious".
(no subject)
Date: 2007-11-12 03:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-11-12 04:14 pm (UTC)"Internationally-recognized standards" is the clincher for you, is it? It's the same vague, pompous waffle the Court of Europe puts on its website when it says "The basis of human rights... can be found in most of the world's great religions and philosophies". O'Really?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-11-12 01:14 pm (UTC)Or was that some other song?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-11-12 01:23 pm (UTC)even better in italian
Date: 2007-11-12 01:39 pm (UTC)Re: even better in italian
Date: 2007-11-12 07:46 pm (UTC)Its like the love child of Gordon Giltrap and David Tibet has just discovered "I Know an Old Lady that swallowed a Fly"!