Mar 11 2009
“Trans” and “Post-post”
A very good friend of mine, a natural philosopher, once said “The world is full of everything”. We laughed—she was ahead of her time and we didn’t get it—but I’ve thought a lot about this ever since. It sums up what I think’s worth thinking about. Much of the work that I enjoy is multi/inter/transdisciplinary, and I’m attracted to large questions, a range of key social issues, and a range of interesting new approaches to dealing with these. I want to know how things might sometimes come together differently. It’s this that led me to the crossroads (and crossed signals) between ideas, society and technics.
By the latter I do mean, in part, technologies, but I’m probably more interested in techniques or practices (and technologies themselves are a gathering of techniques). If there’s one thing that is constant for me—it’s an interest in how techniques (models and even concepts) work out, quite specific, in daily life, in, or even sometimes as “the social”. I didn’t know it at the time, but when I began directing theatre and performance works seriously at university and after, I was getting a thorough going over by the question of technique in the context of social interaction. As a theatre director, you’re not only analysing what’s going on on the stage for weeks at a time. You’re also constantly trying to drag up some technique from the depths of everyone’s souls that is going to make what’s going on on stage work for an audience. I’m only now realising how much this experience has influenced everything else that followed. For one thing, the kind of theory I’m interested in, from Deleuze and Guattari’s “mecanosphere” or understanding of philosophy as the creation of concepts, to postconnectionist theories of thinking processes, is to do with how things work, technically—and again how understanding this allows them to change/be changed.
What do I mean by “theory” (transversal theory at that)? Well that’s a bit of a winding road. As an undergrad studying theatre and literature in the late 70s in Armidale, we didn’t do much “theory” as we know it now, not beyond Brecht and Aristotle in any case (Chekhov was my favourite). Then, the first time I tried my hand at a PhD, before I got distracted by the theatre again, I took up structuralism and theatre semiotics. I found it interesting but kind of stuck in a fairly fixed views of things. Encouraged, over games of Space Invaders and Galaga, by Tony Twaites, I quickly moved to post-structuralism and had it all sorted. I read Lacan’s Ecrits (it took me 3 months, 3 hours read 10 pages a day), Foucault’s The Order of Things (which I still think is a mess of a book), Derrida, Irigaray, Kristeva .. the whole canon. I was decidedly Post (modern, structuralism, Marxist, whatever) and had all the answers—a fix for everything. It was a lot of fun and I still love it all.
As it happens, however, I didn’t have all the answers (surprise, surprise). First up, my favourite supposed “postmodernists”, Deleuze and Guattari, explicitly hated postmodernism. They thought, along with most supposed “postmodernists” (who are actually usually critical of postmodern culture), that pomo was a vacuous if not dangerous expression of late Capitalism, marketing and apolitical banality. Second up, I became interested in a whole lot of other things. For one thing —via a great reading group run by my friend John Sutton—I became interested in “postconnectionist” cognitive science, eventually embodied and extended mind, human-computer interaction and neuroscience. Third, there was the eternal return from my past. I never really lost an interest in performance, and somewhere along the way had gained interests in technology and performance (currently in VJing, which I’ve enjoyed trying my hand at), art, and electronic music. More recently, all this has branched out into interests in critical accounts of performance management systems, education, the questions of models and concepts as they play out (rightly or wrongly) in society and technics, biophilosophy and biopolitics, a questioning of innovation. In short, technological change (broadly conceived) and what this might mean for what Guattari called the three interactive ecologies of socius, self and environment. I seem to be developing an interest in ecology, in Gregory Bateson, and in Buddhism, Whitehead, not to mention biosemiotics, new forms of collaboration, open access publishing, and most of this coming together in questions involving contemporary media (I edit an international refereed journal, the Fibreculture Journal, that deals with this) … the world is full of everything. Luckily, over the last few years, I’ve been working with others with similar broad interests—I guess across philosophy and sociology, art, science and technics. In particular, I’ve had some great experiences with the people at Senselab in Montréal. It’s the reading and work I’m doing at the moment that might be seen as somewhat “post-post”, but in many ways a return to something like critical theory combined with the fostering of new forms of social organization (including those close to my heart, research and education, networking and collaboration in response to social issues).
I have to say for some weird reason I think it’s all coming together for me at the moment. This is partly in the ongoing question of technics, and partly through the connections across often previously heavily-defended territories as the whole world is not only full of everything, but goes transversal as everything connects up (a sad example is the synchronous economic crisis at the moment). A major research question at the moment concerns the tensions between territory and transversals in what are becoming very complex ecologies (for example, drawing together media, global warming, politics and the everyday technics of living). I guess, like a lot of people, I feel these kinds of issues are no longer obscure. Being trans and post-post are everyday experiences, and there’s an urgency to dealing with the complexity involved much better than we seem to be doing.
More specifically, I work on an Australian Research Council funded project I’m working on with Anna Munster, Brian Massumi and Adrian Mackenzie—Dynamic Media: Innovative Social and Artistic Development in New Media in Australia, Britain, Canada and Scandinavia since 1990. We’re currently building an online database for this. We’ve also interviewed a lot of interesting and innovative people, and hope to have some of that material online soon. It’s a comparative analysis—transversal in fact— and we’re particularly interested in the material ecologies of code as they challenge and transform older cultures and models based on concepts of representation.
I’m also writing a couple of books (but isn’t everyone?). I’m getting more involved with open access publishing, research, collaboration and education. I’d like to explore VJing and other forms of visual media from a creative practice perspective, and I have an ongoing interest in electronic music - Australian and otherwise.
So this blog could visit a lot of topics.
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