Differences & Repetitions

Malcolm Gladwell’s review of Chris Anderson’s latest book, Free! The Future of a Radical Price (Hyperion), is out in this week’s New Yorker. As with all things Gladwell, it’s smart and insightful. Above all it stresses the practical and conceptual limits of “free,” as in this pithy excerpt about how Anderson misunderstands the economics of YouTube:

So how does YouTube bring in revenue? Well, it tries to sell advertisements alongside its videos. The problem is that the videos attracted by psychological Free—pirated material, cat videos, and other forms of user-generated content—are not the sort of thing that advertisers want to be associated with. In order to sell advertising, YouTube has had to buy the rights to professionally produced content, such as television shows and movies. Credit Suisse put the cost of those licenses in 2009 at roughly two hundred and sixty million dollars. For Anderson, YouTube illustrates the principle that Free removes the necessity of aesthetic judgment. (As he puts it, YouTube proves that “crap is in the eye of the beholder.”) But, in order to make money, YouTube has been obliged to pay for programs that aren’t crap. To recap: YouTube is a great example of Free, except that Free technology ends up not being Free because of the way consumers respond to Free, fatally compromising YouTube’s ability to make money around Free, and forcing it to retreat from the “abundance thinking” that lies at the heart of Free. Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube will lose close to half a billion dollars this year. If it were a bank, it would be eligible for TARP funds.

You can find the review — which is indeed worth reading in its entirety — here. Chris Anderson responds to Gladwell on his blog, The Long Tail. Seth Godin (siding with Anderson) chimes in here.

I’m still gathering my thoughts on the subject, though I’m quite persuaded by Gladwell’s infrastructural (as opposed to Anderson’s artifactual) orientation. I suppose that’s why The Guardian recently labeled me a “distribution nerd.” Anyway, more to come….

I’m beginning a new project that explores the relationship of religious book publishing to mid-century (i.e., the 20th) liberalism in the United States. What better way to begin, I thought, than to read Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination (1950)? There he makes the controversial claim that liberalism was “not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition” prevalent in the United States at the time that he was writing. That much I expected to find in the book; what I got was so much more — an education, really, and a glimmer of one of the paths-not-taken of U.S. cultural studies.

One of Trilling’s themes is untimeliness, and indeed the term aptly describes his own work. He perceptively anticipated many theoretical developments whose “discovery” most would attribute to English and French intellectuals working decades later. Take his definition of culture, for instance: “Culture is not a flow, nor even a confluence; the form of its existence is struggle, or at least debate–it is nothing if not a dialectic” (p. 9). Sounds a lot like E. P. Thompson to me. Or consider this passage, which almost could have come from Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge:

Yet another thing that we have not understood with sufficient complication is the nature of ideas in their relation to their development and in relation to their transmission. Too often we conceive of an idea as being like the baton that is handed from runner to runner in a relay race. But an idea as a transmissible thing is rather like the sentence that in the parlor game is whispered about in a circle (p. 191).

Trilling also argues that literature produces ideas, or philosophy, an argument that brings him within shouting distance of Deleuze. There’s more: he was anti-relativist, believed in the activity of audiences, and understood well the relationship of knowledge production and social control.

But it’s not enough simply to locate Trilling as an unacknowledged forebear of some of our more contemporary theoreticians. It’s also crucial to understand his intellectual style. Trilling could say more in a single, pointed sentence than most highly skilled writers can say in an entire essay, maybe even a volume. What’s more, he did so with the barest minimum of theoretical terminology or jargon.

So, for example, while it’s clear that he drew near to what, two decades later, would become the Foucauldian understanding of discourse, never did he long to coin a phrase to describe self-propagating communication. Trilling insisted that we engage not with catchy theoretical words that one could either “use” or “reject” depending on one’s allegiances. Instead, he demanded that we engage with the full substance of his arguments and reasoning.

Is his having done so a cause of the present abandonment of his work? Did Trilling expect too much of us, his readers and interlocutors?

A partisan of liberalism Trilling may have been, but in all affairs of the heart, mind, and politics he seems not to have been an ideologue. This is reflected, for example, in his discussion of literary criticism, where he deftly navigates the Scylla of historicism (or conditionalism) and the Charybdis of New Criticism. Ultimately he upholds the value of both, but in a masterfully dialectical way in which the one exposes the weaknesses in the other, ultimately opening up both to repair.

Trilling worked at a time when academics, for better or for worse, still were able to write “without apology or self-consciousness” (p. 253). There is evident in his work a deference to tradition and a sense of accountability to what others may hold dear, culturally or politically. Yet there remains a boldness to his work, even a brashness, that would seem almost unimaginable in academic discourse today.

In Trilling’s worst moments, as in his discussion of homosexuality and the Kinsey Report, the change of tone is a welcome one. But in Trilling’s best moments, which are far more numerous, one can register not only the tenderness with which he approached those with whom he disagreed, but also the lack of graciousness endemic to our own critical conversations today.

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Perhaps the only thing more daunting than squaring off in front of the United States Supreme Court is having to go head-to-head with Stephen Colbert on his television talk show. Lawrence Lessig handles things beautifully in discussing his latest book, Remix: Making Art & Culture Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (Penguin, 2008). Bravo, Professor Lessig.

Be sure to check out Lessig’s Blog for some creative remixes of the segment.

P.S. Happy 2009, y’all!

Wow.

It’s rare that I read a book and feel compelled to reread it immediately. But that’s what happened when I finished Gerard Jones’ Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book (Basic Books, 2004). It offers a fascinating look into a nascent industry full of fast-talking hustlers, shrewd accountants, and nerdy young men all struggling to make their mark on U.S. culture in the 20th century.

Jones is an outstanding writer. I say this having read a fair amount of work by other comic book authors who’ve decided to switch genres, turning either to novels or to nonfiction. Usually the work isn’t a disaster, but then again, neither is it all that memorable. It’s a different story for Jones. He penned Batman, Spider-Man, and Superman early on in his writing career, where he developed a knack for exposition and an ear for engaging dialogue.

He uses both skills to his advantage in Men of Tomorrow. The book moves nimbly between large-scale social/cultural history and more intimate, narrative reconstructions of the lives of the early comic industry’s key figures. What results is a precarious yet perfectly executed balancing act. Jones’ account is rich with historical detail, yet he never manages to lose the plot.

The book opens with an aged Jerry Siegel, co-creator (with Joe Shuster) of Superman, learning that a blockbuster movie featuring the Man of Steel would soon be making its way onto the silver screen. It was the mid-1970s. Siegel was working as a mail clerk in Southern California, barely making ends meet and seething inside about having signed away rights to the lucrative character decades before. Men of Tomorrow then takes a sharp turn back in time and space: to New York City’s Lower East Side, circa the early 1900s, where we’re introduced to the sons of Jewish immigrants who’d go on to become the authors, illustrators, editors, printers, and distributors of a peripheral print genre that would, with time, become a part of the American cultural mainstream. Eventually the book returns to Siegel’s desperate, last-ditch effort to secure rights to Superman–a success, it turns out, owing the rallying of fans and others to the cause.

Jones isn’t only an outsanding writer, he’s a talented historian and analyst. He’s read practically all of the secondary literature, scholarly and otherwise, on comic books. He interviewed most of the early industry’s key players at one time or another, in addition to their family members. He meticulously reconstructs contested information and never tries to pass it off as anything but. Beyond these more insular, disciplinary concerns, his research displays a remarkable sensitivity to comics’ critical reception by midcentury academics and politicians who, owing to experiences far removed from those in the comic book industry, fundamentally misunderstood the genre’s psychosocial and cultural impact. Jones is a historian with a deft touch.

Men of Tomorrow ends with a provocative claim, namely, that U.S. culture today is significantly the product of geeks. And in this respect it shares something of a kinship with another book I admire: Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture, which I’ve mentioned in passing on this blog. In their best moments, both texts capture something rare. They manage to put into words what Raymond Williams called a “structure of feeling”–what it felt like to live (for some, at least) in 20th century America.

This is the mark of history at its best. Excelsior!

As you can see from my recent post about summer reading, I’ve been spending a good deal of time these past few weeks getting caught up on all sorts of good books. One that didn’t make it onto the previous list, which I just finished, is Lawrence Lessig’s Code v2.0 (Basic Books, 2006). Like Kittler’s Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, it’s one of those books I should have read ages ago (in its original edition [1999]) but never quite managed to. It’s smart, accessible, and, honestly, something that everybody living at the dawn of the 21st century ought to read.

The book, in a nutshell, is about two types of “code”: what Lessig calls “East Coast code,” or law, and “West Coast code,” or the algorithms that make computers and other digital technologies work. There’s too much depth and subtlety for me to do justice to the argument, but suffice it to say that Lessig’s interested in the ways in which both types of code are (or can be) used to regulate digital environments. He seems most anxious about the increasing use of “West Coast code,” since it tends to be private/proprietary and therefore exists significantly outside of democratic process. (And here, there’s an obvious resonance with my own rants about digital rights management [DRM] technology.)

It occurred to me in reading Code v2.0 just how ill-equipped the American citizenry (myself included) is when it comes to living in the world Lessig describes. I gather that the vast majority of computer classes taught these days are geared toward basic “computer literacy.” This I take to mean general instruction in how to run major commercial applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and others. More advanced training in actual programming tends to occur in the realm of post-secondary education, and only then with a small, largely self-selected group.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t think learning how to run major commercial applications is a problem per se. What is a problem, though, is that most of us knows next to nothing about what goes on “behind” the windows we see. Really, these windows are also screens, because they hide at least as much as they reveal. Put differently, most of us at best have only a basic working knowledge of West Coast code. And given all the ways in which, as Lessig shows, this type of code is coming to regulate our lives–quietly in the background, as it were–we need to know much, much more about how it works, and about how to manipulate it, in order to become a better informed citizenry.

I’m not saying that all we need to do is to become computer programmers in order to be better citizens. I don’t buy the “netizen” argument, and I haven’t fallen under the spell of The Matrix trilogy that much. I am saying that computer programming ought to be a primary subject taught in our schools, just like math, science, foreign languages, and social studies. It’s not just a practical skill anymore. Increasingly, it’s a matter of civic responsibility.

This summer’s hardly been lazy, to be sure. That said, the break from teaching has given me some time to catch up on my reading. And in that spirit, I thought I’d say a few words about my summer reading list. I’m quite excited about it. They’re all academic books, so for those of you anticipating literary recommendations, you’ll have to look elsewhere (although recently I enjoyed Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex, which just became an Oprah’s Book Club selection).

I loved McKenzie Wark’s A Hacker Manifesto (Harvard U.P., 2004), and so I was thrilled to pick up Gamer Theory (Harvard U.P., 2007) at the Prairie Lights Bookstore in Iowa this past April. I wasn’t disappointed. Though perhaps a tad uneven compared to Hacker, Gamer Theory is definitely worth reading if you’re interested in everyday life, digital (and non-digital) gaming, and what it may be like to live in what Gilles Deleuze has called “a society of control.” (This is a theme I develop in my forthcoming book, by the way.)

I met Alex Galloway, author of Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization (MIT Press, 2004), when we were graduate students (he at Duke, me at nearby UNC-Chapel Hill). At the time I didn’t really know what he was working on, so I became intrigued when I ran across Protocol about a year or two ago. I knew I’d like it, but I just never had the time to read it–until now. It’s a gem. Not only is it an insightful elaboration of how control works in contemporary networked societies, but it’s smart about the technical aspects of computer programming and networking. I’d describe it as a “must read” for those interested in new/technology studies.

Friedrich A. Kittler’s Discourse Networks, 1800/1900 (Stanford U.P., 1990) is a book that’s been in my library for some years now. I’ve only just begun reading it, so I don’t have a whole lot to say at the moment–except that I should have read Discourse Networks ages ago. The foreword provides a wonderful contextualization of Kittler’s work, and I’m especially enjoying the “1900″ part of the book.

There are two more books that I’ve been sent recently, both of which I’m hoping to get to before summer’s end. Last year on D&R I reviewed Daniel Heller-Roazen’s amazing book, Echolalias (Zone Books, 2005). By the good graces of the folks at Zone, Heller-Roazen’s latest tome, The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation, arrived on my doorstep. I can’t wait to read it. It’s about the perception of perception–a heady topic that couldn’t be in more capable hands.

Last but not least on my list is Tarleton Gillespie’s Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture (MIT Press, 2007). I had the good fortune of meeting Tarleton at an intellectual property symposium in Iowa in 2005, and we’ve corresponded off and on since then. As with several of the books on my summer reading list, I suspect it’s going to have a lot to say about control. And did I mention I just love the title?

Okay–that’s it for now. Of course, I’d welcome any suggestions for further reading.

I have a special category to which only some, particularly special, books in my library belong. It’s called, “books whose significance I intuit but cannot yet comprehend.” Daniel Heller-Roazen’s remarkable Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language (Zone Books, 2005), which I just finished reading, is my latest addition to the category.

Echolalias is challenging to describe–a bit of a paradox, really. It’s among the most erudite books I’ve encountered, but at the same time, it’s also surprisingly readable. Its accessibility stems, I think, from Heller-Roazen’s gift at telling poignant stories about language, all of which revolve around the central theme of forgetting. His range is astonishing. Most of the stories he recounts and subsequently develops were rendered originally in Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, Latin, French, German, and other non-English languages. (The book itself is in English, a few untranslated passages notwithstanding.) The result is what can only be described as among the most subtle and culturally plural intellectual-historical meditations on the philosophy of language that I can recall.

I’m taken above all by both the idea and phenomenon of an echolalia, which refers to a kind of “babble,” stuttering, or blurting out that’s prior to language. (The term has particular uptake in relation to individuals with Tourette’s Syndrome, many of whom have great difficulty controlling language.) It’s precisely this kind of activity, argues Heller-Roazen, that we must forget for language to form, and yet echolalias persist despite language. Think, for example, of all the “uhs,” “ums,” and other nonsense words that permeate speech that aren’t categorically language.

Having read Echolalias, I’m beginning to think of language/speech through the image of walking, which I gather from kinesiologists is basically a controlled fall. Perhaps language is, after all, something of a controlled echolalia, or a strategic reining in of our capacity to produce resonant sound. And like walking, its purpose is to move us forward.

The closest work to which I can compare Echolalias is John Durham Peters’ Speaking Into the Air, which similarly investigates the nature of communication by exploring its absolute limits. And whether you liked, loathed, or haven’t read Peters’ book (it’s a masterpiece in my estimation), make sure to pick up Echolalias. You won’t be disappointed–though perhaps, like me, you’ll take some time to figure out just what’s so significant about this elegant book.