Brian Massumi at SLSA

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“Signs of Danger: The Political Ontology of Threat”

This was quite a talk. Massumi set out, step by step, the arguments used by Bush and his cronies to justify war in both Afghanistan and Iraq and every other vile act they’ve committed. And as was lucidly explained, the same trick was used every time: a feeling of threat was created based on what bin Laden/Hussein/terrorists would do if they could. This equation can’t be denied with factual evidence because it exists always in a speculative future–no WMDs? Well they would have had them if they could have. No evidence of terrorist acts by those prisoners in Guantanamo? They would have done it if they could have.

The way Massumi described the tactics was often extremely funny, but often I felt I was laughing more in pain than amusement, especially when remembering how hard people worked against our going into Iraq and how that accomplished exactly nothing. In the end though, I hoped he would say something about how humor operated in or against this dynamic of fear, and there was even a question about that. But he didn’t address possible counters, humorous or otherwise, and in a way seemed strangely distant from the whole subject.

After this talk, everything was over, the weather was foul and we tried to regroup for dinner and many drinks, as we’d been vowing to really enjoy since Thursday, leading to another sort-of adventure, but that’s another story.

Finally news on my blogging chapter, and identity projects more genrally

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Quick burst of good news: finally I’ve heard from the editor of International Blogging; it’s coming out from Peter Lang in 2008 and my chapter will be the conclusion. 🙂 A draft of the intro is here.

It’s weird; I wrote this so long ago and now that it’s appearing, my work has moved on in another direction, focusing much more on participation, subversive cultures, and on the institutionalization of discourse around new media. I still work on identity, just not so much national identity by itself. I look at it in other contexts, like in comics, or genre fiction, or video games. Just recently I was searching for articles on this, and found some entries in Henry Jenkins’ blog that discuss comics and games and national identity in Poland, which he visited in 2006.

He goes on in later entries to also talk about Russia, Japan, and globalization, but I haven’t gotten to those yet. But anyway, he mentions a series generally referred to as the “Witcher” books that sound like I might like them, but they don’t seem to be out in English or maybe just not in the US. I’d really like to see what reviewers mean about the stories incorporating national characteristics. The author, Andrzej Sapkowski, seems cool; he even has links to fanfiction–one of the few words I could decipher, since the site is in Polish. But here’s another page with some info in English.

Where was I? Oh yeah, identity in genre fiction. Right, so I think I will have to take that up pretty soon.

Back to SLSA — Code Play panel

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Ok, backing up to talk about what I think was actually the last panel I saw. Speaking were Dene Grigar, Jamie Bono, and, well, I’ll get to that later. I’ll go out of order…Dene spoke about an interactive kinesthetic system she and others are developing that creates a live game space that they are trying to use in a pedagogical way. The original system was used in dance clubs (and looked really fun for that). The presentation basically described the system, but I would have liked to hear more about how they had actually tried using it. At the end, even though Paweł tried to ask about what kinds of classes or material would work with the system or not, we still didn’t get much more detail. I think though that while the right design the system’s application beyond obvious subjects and categories, still some kinds of knowledge and classes work better as, say, discussions, or through textual exchanges.

Jamie argued that players who searched out and used cheat codes were little different from scholars who engaged in close reading and who used esoteric textual knowledge to glean further, new, and richer knowledge of the text. That’s an interesting proposition and I wish Jamie had gone through just a few examples and really traced the parallels. But as often happens to people speaking about their dissertations, the details (of user behavior in this case) overwhelmed the larger structure some, which I think led to our grilling Jamie at the reception later, wanting further explication.

The most interesting point, I think is the relation between the game authors (!) and players. Clearly those creating the games do deliberately plant easter eggs, trapdoors, and so on, and they rely on gamers to find these hidden treasures and figure out how to exploit them. But more than that, the desire for gamer to play games that contain these kinds of elements have shaped game design–really I wish Mirko had heard this talk; it’s right up his alley.

Finally the talk I thought would be most interesting, about how we exist in an info-cloud and where the borders between ourselves and others lie in the all of the communities in which we participate. Now this sounded like it fit right right in with my work, so I was really looking forward to it. Well, the speaker spent the first 20 minutes defining list after list of terms that were all just for background info. Then, in the last 5 minutes or so, he raced through about 20 more slides of what looked like the heart of the talk so quickly that I couldn’t even read one word. And I read pretty fast. So I was completely irritated. Thanks goodness it was the last talk (except for Massumi) and I had the reception and pleasant conversation to help revive me.

We interrupt this broadcast of SLSA fun…

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After spending the last two days “putting out fires” in the comp. program thanks to our usual scheduling nightmare, I am now even more behind, dammit. So of course I spent an hour this afternoon reading back issues of the SFRA Review newsletter. And over an hour skyping with a friend on what started as the problems in the introduction to his dissertation and which ended with a much more interesting, but perhaps not as urgent discussion of why video porn, and a lot of netporn especially, is so boring and yet still addictive to the people who watch it–which rarely includes me, but (apparently always) includes him. Also porn and participatory culture, which is also now being discussed on one of the many email lists to which I subscribe, this one for the Institute of Distributed Creativity. And if I want to write run-ons or sentence fragments, I will. grrr.

OK. So maybe more conference news tonight.

Or maybe more scheduling nightmare, since it turns out that the office that’s supposed to report to us every term how many courses (minimum) each non-tenured instructor should have, which changes every term, sent us a spreadsheet so poorly designed and labeled, that we ended up using the wrong figures entirely. Which means completely redoing the schedule and recalling all the offers we just made to these teachers. I hate scheduling!

SLSA Saturday evening reception

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After the last Saturday panels, there was a nice reception at the Portland Museum of Art. I went over with Paweł and some other SFRA folks; once there we found Istvan, Sherryl, Ed Chang and everyone, actually. We continued talking to Jamie Bono about video game cheat codes…I realize now that I forgot to describe that panel. Damn, now it will be out of sequence…well, anyway.

People had another good chance to talk and I had the feeling that we had all finally been there long enough and gotten to know some people enough that really good conversations were underway–so of course it was the last evening. So, right, cheat codes. We reached something of an impasse on whether or not searching for and using cheat codes should be compared to close reading and/or digging into textual history, partly because we had never spelled out what we meant by close reading and partly because (I think) we were all rather conferenced-out and possibly a little buzzed. I think I need to ask Jamie for a copy of whatever he’s actually written on this so far.

Also at this point it was clear that people had settled on who they were hanging out with at the conference–I mean, that while this probably happened by the end of the first day, I could actually see it at this reception. Because this conference was small enough that we all saw each other every day, and because most people went to most sessions, we soon recognized most of the faces. So it was pretty easy to see that the same people were together in panels or at receptions, lunches, and so on.

I find this interesting because I realized some time ago that most professional collaborations began as friendships, or at least between schoolmates, and often between people who were romantically involved. You may be thinking “what about the internet? Doesn’t that make it easy to connect?” Actually, I heard a quite convincing talk at New Network Theory in which a study of scientific collaboration had found that they largely occurred between people in close proximity, or who had at least one face two face meeting that began the relationship.

So when these groups form at a conference, I’d bet that within 6 months we could spot the professional results, if we looked for them. I think the need to meet in person suggests something interesting about the importance of embodied experience. More on this after I report on Massumi.

More on SLSA — Zippy the Pinhead and Will Eisner

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Saturday–another full sleight of panels though I missed the 8:30am strand thanks to the primitive business center at the Holiday Inn. Having been convinced by Paweł and the combined charm of the other SFRA-ers to join, I saved the html form to my computer, edited it, saved it to a usb drive, and figured I could print and mail it at the conference… Well, the old PC was not thrilled with my “high-speed removable storage” since it only had low-speed usb ports, and then the printer to which the computer was connected had a jam. So finally I had to email it to a woman working on the other computer which was connected to another printer… And then I had to walk 4 blocks to the post office for a stamp…

Really it was ridiculous, but by then my rare but powerful stubbornness was fully engaged and I was determined to send that damned form. Which I did, but at the cost of a whole session. Nice walk though.

So the next round I saw was themed around Cartoon Images. The first speaker, Ellen Grabiner, presented “Wild About the Box: The Disruptions of Zippy the Pinhead.” This was a really good talk. Not only did Grabiner make interesting point about the way creator Bill Griffith plays with visual conventions in order to subvert our narrative and linguistic expectations in a humorous way; raise real ontological questions; and challenge visual conventions of the comix medium, but I love Zippy and she picked great, hilarious examples. Combining solid analysis with humor is no mean trick. And I think a number of the other people in the audience hadn’t encountered Zippy before, and it was nice to see how much they enjoyed it.

Next was a paper by Chris Couch, “The Geometry of Emotion: Doorways in Will Eisner’s Comics.” I was interested to hear that Chris had been part of Kitchen Sink Press and now was teaching Comp Lit at UMass Amherst, where I did my MA and PhD. Kitchen Sink was such a cool press, not least for their support of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and the once embodied Words and Pictures Museum of Northampton. (That was such a great place; I spent so much time entranced by the rotating exhibits and there that I first saw the ever-so-cool Devil Girl chocolate… anyway he quite an interesting talk, once he got going. It was a pretty straightforward analysis of window/door/portal images in Will Eisenberg’s comics, which was cool (if only because comics were treated exactly like any other subject of art historical study).

My only quibble is that I didn’t really see the science connection, or the code, or anything that connected this paper to SLSA. (Unless we are just going to say the portal metaphor is code enough.) But I suppose it doesn’t matter too much, because it was really informative lecture on Eisner–I’ll edit this later to add just a few more details on that, after I locate my notes… 😛

Finally, the last presenters were talking about I don’t know what–nuclear bombs, bio-art, fruit flies, mutations…they spent way too much time on the fruit flies and not nearly enough on the main point. They shall remain nameless.

SF panel 1 at SLSA

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SF panel 1 at SLSA
Originally uploaded by cuuixsilver

Here we see some post-talk discussion. The panels at SLSA all lasted longer than normal, which was great when they only had 3 people on them. There was ample time for questions and since most panels had at least 8 people attending, this was actually useful.

The SF panels were quite good and since many of the interesting SF talks (like Paweł’s here) were from people who were in SFRA, I have to think seriously about attending that conference.

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Paweł spoke about Digitized consciousness in Cyberpunk, specifically focusing on Richard Morgan‘s work. It was a really good close reading (for a change!) because Paweł gave a sufficient introduction the the main things we needed to know about the books to follow the argument, then managed a good balance between general claims and specific examples and explanations, and then made clear why understanding what Morgan was doing is useful. –Because Morgan reinstates the body in the Cyberpunk genre in which it has been traditionally deprecated. And, even better, we learn that one reason for Morgan’s doing this is (probably) his Marxist beliefs that of course lead him to think that material circumstances, including embodiment, are of inescapable importance. The economic and political aspects of this fiction sound really cool, and after wards Paweł was raving (a little) about Morgan in the way I know I do about authors I think are just the best, so now I will have to read him for sure. (Follow up: started Woken Furies and really like it. Look for a review in Tart next month.)

The next panel I went to had papers about SciFi heavy metal; the way Shelley’s Frankenstein and Huxley’s Brave New World are used in debates over cloning; and about the way gadgets are used in films to represent cognition (essentially).

The heavy metal presentation was clear in the way it explained how lyrics, compositional choices, and visual style were used to communicate fears and hopes about technology, but I wish there had been a bit more explanation of the “so what” aspect. I mean,what does this tell us about ourselves, about heavy metal, about our experiences of and attitudes toward technology? Some of that came out in questions, but should have been part of the conclusion, I think.

The cloning discussion was a quite good rhetorical analysis of public debate over cloning–if I were still at MIT it would have been a perfect text for my science writing class. In particular, two important tropes were explored: the monster in society — the mere existence of a clone will destroy us — and society as monstrous — cloning means we have turned into the hellish thing we feared. (And as a corollary will of course enslave and otherwise mistreat the poor clones.)

Finally, a presentation about the brain and memory being represented as a file system and video clips in many many films. Most interesting points: this represents a focus on use rather than architecture, and “gadgets are a technology of the imagination for ordering the imagination.”

After this panel, there was another reception at which I hung out with Paweł, Christian, and Sherryl Vint (for who I can’t find a personal website, so far) and I think this is where I also first met Istvan Csicsery-Ronay...but no, we were introduced at some point earlier…well anyway. Then we went in to see N. Katherine Hayles. Since she gave the exact same speech as when I saw her at Utrecht, I won’t go over it again. Paweł and I muttered a little about that as she hit each familiar point, while trying to stay awake. –The latter got easier when they turned on air-conditioning and it got really chilly. I guess I don’t really see anything wrong with it; no one else ever heard it before and it’s a pretty good talk.

I was then swept up into a mob of the SFRA folks and we went for Indian food. Really good conversation with Istvan, Paweł, and Jason Ellis. Really glad to have met Istvan and had the chance to talk politics, SF, and teaching, all in the same conversation. This makes me realize how much I miss being able to do that most of the time.

Finally we washed up at the Holiday Inn bar for some drinks and more talking, and so ended the day.