the structure of the network can have as great an influence on the success or failure of an innovation as the inherent appeal of the innovation itself….As much as we may want to believe that it is the innate quality of an idea or product that determines its subsequent performance, or even the way it is presented, the model suggests that for any wild successes, one could always find many equally deserving attempts that failed to receive more than a tiny fraction of the attention. It could just be that some innovations–Harry Potter, Razor Scooters, Blair Witch Project–hit just the right vulnerable cluster, while most do not.

This is, for me, a double underlined, starred quote. And there is much in here with which to agree. I have to especially note the qualifiers (suggests, can have, could always find, could just be that) that turn this from an iron-clad law into a supposition.

And indeed, there’s an immense amount of factors in cultural and social trends. How would Blair Witch Project have faired if a studio exec had eaten bad clams that day, been in a horrible mood, and then received that presentation? For something to work, obviously there needs to be a certain degree of blind luck.

However, in spirit, I’m not 100% sure if the book believes in these qualifiers. It is very easy to plow through this and think “hell, luck in hitting the proper segment of the network seems to be the only real predicator of success.” And I think that would be a major mistake.

Marketing is important. While Harry Potter needed a certain amount of luck to get published, once it was, it was fairly crafted in terms of marketing. Producers of culture do not just throw stuff out into the wind. Everything that is mass produced and distributed has at least some degree of marketing behind it, and that generally means aiming towards specific groups, specific segments of the market, specific subcultures.

Also, producers of works are themselves coming from cultural positions (and, as such, from positions within the network(s)). As such, their work will reflect (to some degree) that network position, thus most likely affecting reception in that same network position.

Furthermore, we also have to think about ideology, preconceptions, mores, enabling assumptions. Those of the author/producer will show up in the work in question. Those in the text will interact with those of the audience in some way. This may not be a perfect system (everything marketed towards metalheads, for instance, did not hit metalheads…which might say something about the producer, the producer’s ability to imbue the product with his/her beliefs/morals/assumptions/preferences (whether consciously or not) in a manner that can be transmitted, the level of literacy of the audience in order to understand/interpret whatever meanings/beliefs/whatever from the text, and so forth.

This is obviously not a perfect system, and there are tons and tons of places where this can break down. However, you just cannot discount the power/effectiveness of marketing (whether consciously (on the part of the producers and distributors) or unconsciously (in the act of creation). After all, the latest Rush Limbaugh book will never become a hit with the clusters of the network which are in fact antithetical to its message.

Maybe I’m missing something. However, this might just be an area where Watts, as a mathematician turned social scientist is not used to thinking about such issues. Cultural artifacts are not entirely mathematical points on a graph. While there are of course generalized lessons from network theory that can apply to a large range of areas, ranging from crickets to tulip speculation to post 9/11 NYC, these things do have inherent differences.

Is this an in for a culture studies scholar like myself? Hey, Dr. Watts, if you’re reading, I’m available for hire!

My first thought has to do with Watts’ discussion of infections. This seems like a very good metaphor for how cultural trends spread. Indeed, he does talk about this in many instances. But if one wanted to be a subculture expert, it seems vital to know how trends operate, why some stuff (artifacts, trends, whatever) stays confined to limited groups, and why other stuff breaks through to the mainstream. Simple co-opting doesn’t really come across as an adequate explanation, because it’s still too tied into the logic of centrality.

I grew up in the eighties, and I always knew there was something going on there. So I started to look for stuff written about popular culture in the eighties and was surprised at how little I found. This was the first clue that this might be a fruitful area of study.

My first research project on the eighties was on the miniseries V (and its sequel). Right away, I ran into some interesting issues that showed me I needed to think about my choice of topic a little more carefully. V was a fairly interesting piece of science fiction. Plot-wise, it was about contact with an alien species. The species seemingly looked like us, talked like us, and “came in peace.” However, it was all a lie. The aliens weren’t really like us…they were lizards in disguise. And although they could communicate, there was very little of their words that were not lies. They were not here to help us out. Instead, they were here to steal our water (which they used for hydrogen fuel cells) and kidnap humans (which they used for food). The series focused on a group of underground resisters who battled the aliens…the official government in the miniseries were little more than dupes for the alien cause.

Now, when I thought of this, a few things came to mind. This was not all that far off the Republican/Reaganism party line as it first seemed. Reagan too portrayed himself as working against the government, famously declaring “government is not the solution to our problems; it is the problem. As such, Reagan set itself up as the freedom fighter, fighting the tyrannical overlords of entrenched government.

Such an argument was pretty illogical, though, once Reaganism actually took power. After all, how could one be in charge and not also be the power? Could you explicitly be the leader and still resist authority? It never really made sense to me. Of course, there are plenty of postmodern readings and arguments on the relationship of Reaganism to authority, but they, for reasons I’ll get into later, never really struck me as adequate.

There was a deeper problem I encountered with the V miniseries, however. I knew this miniseries was in fact very popular [how much? stats]. In spite of that, this never really felt like a work of mainstream culture. After all, it was entirely about an underground cell of resistance fighters…so the subject matter explicitly dealt with a minority. Furthermore, it was a work of science fiction, itself a minority literature (at that point, though, very few would call it literature–it was more a genre of adolescent boys, geeks, and other non-mainstream groups). The leader of the resistance was a female (at least in the first series). The resistance was a multicultural affair. How could this then be a mainstream work of culture, in spite of the level of popularity?

What made all this doubly weird was how far off the radar of 80s scholarship (what little I could find) and nostalgia (just then starting to hit in force) this was [time for a discussion of each?]. What I got when I read about the eighties in either of these was big hair, pop music, yuppies, frivolous, light, fluffy culture. In fact, most of the stuff I read about the eighties depicted the cultural artifacts as either mainstream (see the yuppies) or escapist/inconsequential (see the big hair).

The very status of this as a cultural product also gave me fits. Was this by default a mainstream product because it was on a major tv network (which held a certain amount of power, back then in the days before cable completely obliterated the “broadcast” model)? Could you have a resistant cultural product released on a mass market cultural network? If it was widespread, did that make it mainstream?

V just didn’t fit into this worldview.

Furthermore, my understanding of V also didn’t fit into the culture studies theories I was learning. When I took classes, when I did my readings, when I read my fellow students’ essays, when I went to my first conference, I saw mostly work which analyzed culture as existing as a mainstream/oppressed dichotomy. Mostly, the scholarship focused on the oppressed, particularly dwelling in the “race/class/gender” triumverate of culture studies topics.

V didn’t fit in here either. It did focus on a minority group, true, but that minority group was diverse, pluralistic, from all over the map. The freedom fighters were oppressed, but there was also the little matter of the governmental dupes to deal with….they certainly did not fit the stereotype of majority. Hell, there were even resisters amongst the alien overlords, including the janitor [what's his name?].

Dichotomies, binaries, and all that just didn’t fit in.

I was having a real problem defining what was going on (which, incidentally, showed in the paper). Standard definitions were not really working for me.

The real issue, in many of these areas, was the assumption of centrality (although I didn’t know the term or wasn’t even familiar with the concept at the time). When you look at mainstream culture, society, media, government, all that, structures were obviously at work…but, the more I thought of it, the relationship between those cultures was not as obvious as most people thought. Too much stuff going on was based around the idea that if there were these large structures, there was obviously something going on that gave order. There was obviously a central command structure. And everything in this structure had a certain tie back to that central command.

The model of Reaganism, at first glance, held up the idea of centrality. After all, Reagan swept into the highest office in the land riding a tremendous wave of popularity…so he was obviously both mainstream and authority. So much of culture worked for the same goals and by the same theories as did Reaganism, so these were also based on centrality. The very real existance of authority, of structures, made the arguments of postmodernism (with which I wanted to have sympathy–expand this) less convincing in explaining all this.

The problem was, V had too confused of a relationship to authority, and that largely blew the whole centrality bit for me. And the more I digged, the less clear centrality got.

[later--I gotta tie this into the concept of interstitiality (see below post)...V becoming, in my reading, an interstitial text, existing between the clear boundaries of ideology, of culture, of philosophy, of all that. And one possible way to build this as a book is, along with the breakdown of the standard definitions (particularly of mainstream) is to move to the supposition that all texts are interstitial in this way. Man, who is the great philosopher of the interstitial?]

More later.

If one was to take the novel literally, at its word (which, incidentally, i think would be a huge mistake), the story is largely about interstitiality. Case starts the narrative caught between his disdain for the physical (“the meat”) yet unable to enter the technical (cyberspace). He’s living in Chiba, which is in Japan but isn’t…it’s an outlaw zone, outside of official control. He then gets hired by Armitage, but his real boss is an AI who is trying to escape the no-man’s-land between technology and sentience. Case is romantically entangled with Molly, who herself resists easy categorization (being caught in the posthumanist female/assassin, human/cyborg constructions). And it goes on.

It would be very easy to read Neuromancer as largely about the interstitial existence of characters who don’t belong to or identify with any of the previous, recognizeable labels, identities. To read the novel this way would be perfectly in line with both postmodernism and posthumanism.

However, how true is the interstitial interpretation? The characters seem to believe it, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. In many aspects, I don’t trust any of these characters farther than I can throw them.

The example I’m thinking of now is Case, after the run to get the Dixie Flatline construct from Sense/Net. Right when the action reaches the denouement, he feels exhaustion. Says the narrative: “After the concentration of an actual run, he could remain jacked in and still retain awareness of his body.”(66)

So much for the meat/tech divide. So much for Case being in one or the other realm. What’s the real answer? He’s in both. Each existence is not mutually exclusive of the other.

If you can be in two places at once, does being in-between places really have a meaning?

Neuromancer is about a lot of things, but if you believe the critics, it is predominantly about technology.

The two major strands of critical approaches to this novel that I’ve seen are either postmodernism (of either the Baudrillard or Jameson variety) or cyborg (a la Haraway), both of which privilege the role of technology.

Postmodernism can be seen as “now we have all this communicative and memory technology, how does it alter how we view ourselves [or, as they would say, change the essence of our existence. I'm not sure our essence changes at all--sometimes, critics get carried away in their absolutes--but that is what they say]? For Baudrillard, technology has made representation so important, so central to our existence, that it is the defining feature. Moreover, technology has improved in its ability to capture reality, that it can now provide a more realistic image than can reality. If representation is more real than real, we are trapped in it and removed from reality…and by extension, ourselves, since we have only simulation with which to work, with which to use for context in subjectivity-building. Jameson says more or less the same thing, but he blames and explicitly ties this into the tendencies of late capitalism, and he makes more of a big deal about the loss of agency, perspective, and all that.

[tie that into the Famiglietti bit in N11]

Cyborg stuff sees a technological landscape which is remarkably similar, but the major difference is that instead of seeing the elimination of all these humanizing elements, the technology, having decentered everything including the dominant, offers new possibilities for transcending the political realities of our situation (in this, it is more in tune with the FJ than the JB pomo). Technology allows us to transcend humanisim, which is a good thing, because humanism brought along with it racism, sexism, otherism in general (in that you had humanity and not-humanity).

At least, this is how it initially was for the Haraway constructions of cyborg. Those who use her concepts have less success and therefore are often more pessimistic about tech. Plus, Haraway was (I believe…need to read it more) not tied to the tech as tightly as the other cyborg writers were.

[Do I import the technology Reaganism Star Wars stuff from Horror? It would make the chapter structure a whole lot more consistent]

The Popular Culture Association’s 2009 conference is in New Orleans from Wednesday, April 8, through Saturday, April 11. The deadline for submissions is November 30. On their website, they have a complete list of areas, each with its own address or call for papers.

While this conference is used by some academics as simply a vacation spot (and, hint-hint, it is in New Orleans, a great place for a vacation), there are still good panels and papers (including mine). So everyone I know should go.

Plus, it’s New Orleans. Jazz clubs. Awesome food. Drinking on the streets. Voodoo stores. How could this not be fun?

Please go. I want to get everyone I know there, so we can act like a street gang and take over the place.

Things definitely do not start off well here. In paragraph 3, Olsen compares Neuromancer to...wait for it...The Odyssey: "[The Odyssey] is the product of an integrated culture that has a strong sense of morality, hierarchy, and totality, while [Neuromancer] is the product of a disentegrated culture that knows only amorality, contradiction, and heterogenous change” (Olsen Neuromancer). Yes, if you don’t have a hierarchy, you have no morality, stability, or anything else. This is basically a combination of the Baudrillard pomo of total confusion and the Jameson pomo of oppression…except Olsen spends no real attention to the major forces.

Personally, I find the comparison kind of offensive, but I also (and this is probably worse) find it cutesy-pretentious academic. It’s not the only example…later, he says “Not only are characters raised from the dead by a number of fictional magicians [really? who?], but also various genres are “raised from the dead” by the very real magician of magicians–Gibson himself” (Olsen Neuromancer). Yes, he actually said it.

There’s very little attention given to macro structure in this analysis. “humans are steered by larger bewildering and malignant forces. For Gibson, those forces tend to take the form of AIs or megacorporate entities whose weapons are information” (Olsen Neuromancer). He does talk about the Wintermute/Neuromancer merger, but he chalks it up to Marie-France programming it into the robot…and this is something we’ve covered before. Yet Olsen will take any character speech literally, as when he interprets one of the Molly “wired” statements with “To be, according to Gibson, is to do. Action preceeds essence” (Olsen Neuromancer).

The Wintermute/Neuromancer-Marie France thing is puzzling, because if she did program the desire to merge, this is a manifestation of corporate control. However, Olsen also says later that the reunion could be read as “the potential danger of out-of-control cybernetic entities” (Olsen Neuromancer)…which he then proves by reading Tron, 2001, and Frankenstein. Okay.

And finally, there’s gearhead talk. “Gibson once again posits two mutually exclusive possibilities as correct. This is a typically postmodern strategy. An attack upon reason, logic, and borders. Gibson’s first novel postulates a situation that goes nowhere (and everywhere) while travelling at an astonishing velocity” (Olsen Neuromancer).

Postmodernism bad!

This is one where I look back on my own writing during graduate school, particularly my own Neuromancer article, and I have to wonder what kind of stuff I would’ve produced if I had the theoretical background going into coursework.

Famiglietti’s paper is attempting to provide an alternate interpretation of gender, specifically masculinity, than the one given by feminist critics. He is reading the male characters in the Sprawl series (to which he adds “Fragments of a Hologram Rose”) for “the way they derive a source of agency from their bodily experience of superspecific sensory detail…[which] articulates a possible way for subjects embodied in dominant positions to move away from serving hegemonic power and re-align themselves with the subaltern” (Famiglietti 3). In other words, there is a meeting of neo-Marxism and postmodernism of a sort.

This is indeed the holy grail, being able to deal with the multi-representational reality of life while at the same time being able to manipulate power structures in order to affect social change. For Famiglietti, the postmodernists are right in their disdain over the “modern subject [which] was built on subjugation and selective memory” (Famiglietti 6). Gibson’s texts are mined for suggestions on how do do exactly this. As such, it’s not quite postmodern (although it does exhibit some postmodern tendencies).

Famiglietti, for instance, does not see cyberspace as either the land of masculine priviledge or as a feminized landscape (as does Nixon). Neither is it a space void of meanings. Instead, “it is the skull of the hacker that is figuratively penetrated upon entering cyberspace” (Famiglietti 9), where Case enters a landscape dominated by corporate power and his hacking is his way of manipulating that power. His postmodernness means he cannot act as an independant agent, but there is still agency. There is, however, a difference between his bodily and sensory experiences and those of ” technology, ideology, and other forms of discursive power” (Famiglietti 15)…and this is an “in” for agency.

How well does Famiglietti ultimately succeed? That would require a few more read-throughs and closer examination all around. But at this point, I have to be very focused in my findings. The main thing that I want to pull out of this is his very concise understanding of postmodernism, particularly of the major varieties of:

“For Baudrillard, the postmodern moment is one in which the real and the discourses meant to represent the real have collapsed into each other, forming a singular whole…It can thus be inferred that the project of liberation, as far as Baudrillard is concerned, is the project of rejecting such “realist” fallacies as the modern self as merely power projections and accepting the hyperreal nature of reality. Without the constraints of the supposedly real, we will be free. Frederic Jameson’s understanding of the postmodern moment complicates this libratory project. Far from seeing the rejection of the “realist” subject as a libratory move, Jameson sees the dismantling of such subjects as a projection of the economic power of the dominant interests of multinational capitalism” (Famiglietti 3-4).

Short version? Baudrillard says “there is no real, and that’s good” while Jameson says “there is no real, and you’ve been duped by corporate interests into thinking this”

Famiglietti’s short version: “Baudrillard elegantly reveals the fallacy of the singular self and Jameson shows us the difficulties of formulating political agency after the singular self has been done away with” (Famiglietti 6)

One thought with the above. For Baudrillard, he seems to thing that the disintegration of the self has extended into the realm of the macro. For Jameson, the macro is what dupes us into thinking the self has been done away.