The Bitchcruiser

It is so horrible I leave the appropriate eloquent critiques to others more qualified than I:

http://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/2008/03/14/the-bitchcruiser/

The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis

I took a pic of this 1974 edition of some Clark Ashton Smith short stories, not so much to highlight the camp nature of the cover art work, but rather to help draw attention to the fact that it clearly predates the film "Alien". The book was given to me, along with a random bunch of other titles, around 25 years ago, and since then it has pretty much just sat around my parents' house, without me paying any attention to it. I just happened to walk past the bookshelf the other day and noticed the title, and couldn't remember what it was, so I picked it up.

I mention it on this blog because the volume turns out to be a superb distillation of many of the personal obsessions of Acheron's contributors. Although a contemporary of H.P. Lovecraft and a fellow contributor to Weird Tales, Smith grabs your attention with his recurrent themes of obsessed individuals who unwittingly destroy themselves and others when they attempt to act on their interests. More in the vein of a satire of capitalism's fixation on the market for rare commodities, than a pious morality tale, Smith intimates a viable alternative when his dispossessed characters learn to cross species/cultural barriers and forge new forms of solidarity. I can only wonder at this stage how much of a potential influence on readers this may have been, who were later drawn to later writers such as Samuel Delaney for whom such themes were of paramount importance.

I also have yet to research any of the journals dedicated to Smith, whether "The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis" (first published 1932) has ever been identified as a precursor to "Alien". The setting is basically that of the astronauts at the beginning of Scott's film, who are exploring the derelict spacecraft on Acheron. Smith describes the discovery of a mummified alien, reminiscent of the Space Jockey, which shows signs of a parasite having attached itself to its face. Further exploration of the cavernous vault soon leads to an encounter with the parasite, which indeed attaches itself to the face of its victim, and proves difficult to dislodge:

"He moved back, but not quickly enough to evade me, when I stabbed with the four -inch blade at the black turgescent mass that enveloped his whole upper head and hung down over his eyes....a great slug, with neither head nor tail, nor apparent organs...Out of it there gushed a sickening torrent of human blood, mingled with dark, filiated masses that may have been half dissolved human hair, and floating gelatinous lumps like molten bone, and shreds of a curdy white substance" (p180).

Incredible stuff, and the resemblances even extend to the description of the architecture where the extinct race of Martians are housed. I have no idea if there was any actual influence exerted upon the likes of H.R. Giger or Dan O'Bannon, but I am sure that Smith presents as a more worthy precursor than the much cited "It! The Terror From Beyond Space".

Moreover, I feel that if Smith corpus proves consistent enough to be understood as critically dystopic, then there is also an imaginative, utopian streak running throughout. Indeed, with culture mediating between structure and agency in this way, one has another means of navigating back to the focus on creativity that has arisen in recent social theory, as well as in strands of cultural studies (the turn to Gramsci; Jameson's interest in science fiction etc). It is only those who fail to grasp this who can speak solely in terms of "schlock" produced by the "culture industry". Fueled by ressentiment, and ministering to a misearble congregation in the manner of a hellfire preacher, the lack of imagination in such an approach unsurprisingly in effect amounts to the reduction of Gramsci's maxim to, "pessimism of the intellect, pessimism of the will".

It will also be interesting to discover if even in Smith's "dying world" stories, where not even science and technology as featured in some other apocalyptic fiction is available, he still maintains the creative "optimism of the will". Imagine the possible comparison then to some of the "First Hundred" characters in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy (in addition to his more recent ecologically themed works). This coud validate my point, not least because Robinson studied under Jameson, and Jameson in turn has written about Robinson's fiction.....

"Indoctrinate U"?

As if we needed further reminder that the academy is a contested public sphere, and thereby cannot be equated in a knee jerk fashion with antiquated notions of "the ivory tower", "ritual" etc, the debates featured in this [right wing] documentary come readymade with the strategies familiar from "the science wars", the questioning of the academic legitimacy of cultural studies, and "political correctness" more generally. What is novel though is the forums in which they are opening up, as the presence of this trailer on youtube attests.
For the record, a debate between opposing sides, namely a progressive academic and the libertarian filmmaker, can be found from this link, which amounts to an excellent rejoinder by the former, as well as a resource worth monitoring in the future [given the resurgence of such debates].

Context Crawler: Enter the "Socioblogosphere"

Here I note some blogosphere developments in a more recognisably social theory/sociology vein than the CRU discussed in my "Crash" post, or those who position themselves in opposition to such an "interpretive community", such as my own interlocuor in aforementioned post, and perhaps others such as Cultural Parody (I leave the latter characterisation open though, and won't comment on anything else approximating scattershot rhetoric and character assasinations, unless I come across them).

I find the links here far more interesting anyway, and I hope derridata might be able to offer some complementary blog links and commentary on information science that could contribute a lot to my own thumbnail sketch of an emergent blogosphere. From this link one should certainly check out in turn Cass Sunstein's more sobering assessment of the democratic potential of blogging, and then move to Context Crawler from there, where one can link to Craig Calhoun's blog (replete with podcasts).

Finally, I hope to have a chance to compare the socioblogosphere with the more culturally studies inflected interpretive community coming into being, as it would be fascinating to discover if in the new forum there are any parallels to the older institutional histories I traced in the "Crash" post.

Shift Happens

Is this merely technologically determinist "information society" newspeak? Perhaps so. But I think it reinforces the thrust behind my previous post that disciplines are mutating, in part because the university is attempting contingency planning for the advent of what they regard as "the digital age" (in a way, Sadie Plant was speaking of its cultural manifestations in other areas, although it is debateable whether she was doing so in such a programmatic fashion).

Indeed, Beloit College in the U.S. produces a "mindset list" to draw attention to the technoculture which has socialised the latest influx of students, thus assisting the efforts of faculty to communicate with them. The video I've included was intended likewise as a pedagogical tool, some might say a "meme", which has, appropriately enough, grown at an exponential rate into a series of successor versions. But whose agenda are the much vaunted changes most likely to serve?

War and Culture Studies

Regrettably I'm too swamped these days with other projects to update as much as I should. I can only check in irregularly for the next 8 months or so. Sometimes this can be a dispiriting experience, giving sense to the old adage, "the more things change, the more they stay the same". I experienced this sensation recently when this blog was flamed on account of some passing comments I'd made about one of my favourite topics; "cultural journalism". I found it curious to be targeted as an academic gatekeeper prepared only to give short thrift to the blogosphere, which is the exact position I defended against in my earlier debate with a philosopher on this blog, along with comments on "scholarshit" etc etc (and this is to say nothing of the pairing of such an accusation with the contradictory characterisation of this blog as dedicated only to the reproduction of the commodified banality Adorno described in terms of "the culture industry"!!).

Therefore what is really at stake in these kinds of debates is the ambiguous status of "popular culture". No wonder it confuses the taxonomies of both [some] academics and bloggers alike. Cultural studies has taken this fight up to the academy, but any proper sense of a "double hermeneutic" or the "public sphere", should make us wary of tracing to an origin. What interested me in the "crash" post was the self-reflexive attempt to describe this process, and to acknowledge that while it has an institutional history, the associated "interpretive community" respects no such institutional boundaries, and this is a fact that trends in the blogosphere can alert us to. Interestingly enough, the details of that particular case are relativised further in acknowledgement of the dynamic I've described, so as soon as you start speaking about interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary developments, you are not far from speaking about a "postdisciplinary" era in which our traditional idea of what a "university" is becomes more problematic...

Encountering the following new journal got me excited as I thought in these terms; not only does it have the potential to speak to elements of this blog's mission statement, it also appears that its very existence attestifies to the relativisation of disciplinary boundaries I have been describing. I will try to monitor it in the future, as I wonder will this extend to a dialogue with the journal FUTURES, regarding future studies, and even the cultural manifestation of dystopian/utopian treatments of these themes in a popular culture context? Will this be Manuel de Landa, Paul Virilio and Ken Wark again?

The first issue can be accessed free online, so I've picked one piece here to follow up:

Journal of War and Culture StudiesVolume 1 Issue 1 (free issue)Cover Date: August 2007View Table of Contents
Opening up the battlefield: War studies and the cultural turn
Authors: Martin Evans
DOI: 10.1386/jwcs.1.1.47/0
View PDF article
Keywords: military history,cultural studies,war history,war and gender,war and memory

Abstract

This paper considers the evolution of war studies from its beginning as what was essentially military history, to the ‘cultural turn’, when scholars began to challenge these restrictive disciplinary boundaries to produce a more inclusive vision of the study of war.

Worst Case Scenario

Worst Case Scenario