[rohrpost] Hypertext pre0.2

["Henning Ziegler" <hziegler@zedat.fu-berlin.de>]

[...hier Teil 2 des Texts]

2  The Political Interpretation of New Media Objects

Form and content in discourse are one; once we understand that verbal
discourse is a social phenomenon.
—M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination

Before I go into a discussion of hypermedia and their socio-political
function, I'll attempt to justify my belief in the primacy of a
political interpretation of new media objects.  European cultural
critics Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron have took some steps in that
direction with their essay "The California Ideology," but the result
remains far from being a coherent theoretical position.  In their text,
Barbrook and Cameron suggest that "a loose alliance of writers, hackers,
capitalists, and artists from the West Coast of the USA have succeeded
in defining a heterogeneous orthodoxy for the coming information age."
This 'heterogeneous orthodoxy' is what the two critics call 'California
Ideology:' the idea that new media will make everybody "both hip and
rich," being able to "express themselves freely within cyberspace."
Barbrook and Cameron hold that this new media utopia is grounded in a
"wilful blindness towards (...) racism, poverty, and environmental
degradation," so they see a need for European theorists to step into the
picture "to develop a more coherent analysis of the impact of hypermedia
than can be found within the ambiguities of the Californian Ideology."
Although I find this position somewhat overstated, I would like my
article to be seen as part of the theoretical project to ground new
media theory more firmly in the social and political sphere instead of
the lofty U.S. West Coast cybertopia that Barbrook and Cameron describe.

	
In a somewhat less polemical approach, then, I'll try and make several
key concepts from Fredric Jameson's seminal book The Political
Unconscious fruitful for my approach to a politics of the interface.
Basically, remembering that "men represent their real conditions of
existence to themselves in an imaginary form" (Althusser 1971: 163), it
is not hard to see how the political could enter the analysis of
hypermedia at all: The interface is a cultural object that is indexical
to the dreams and hopes that we have, as well as to the conflicts that
are raging across the socio-political sphere.  What's harder to see is
the primacy of a political reading over other readings from theoretical
schools such as psychoanalysis, feminism, or deconstructionism; this
primacy, however, is precisely what I need to establish in order to make
a reading of new media objects in purely political terms sound
plausible.  In The Political Unconscious, Jameson asserts that he is not
calling for just another 'method' of political criticism.  The social
and the political, for him, form the very backdrop of cultural
production, so he rather holds that "Marxism subsumes other
interpretative modes or systems; or, (...) the limits of the latter can
always be overcome, and their more positive findings retained, by a
radical historicizing of their mental operations, such that not only the
content of the analysis, but the very method itself, along with the
analyst, then comes to be reckoned into the 'text' or phenomenon to be
explained" (Jameson 1981: 47).  In Jameson's view, then, text, method,
and analyst all become part of a larger political configuration that can
be uncovered by a historical analysis of the methods' mental structuring
of material; zooming into a code-only version of cultural life, from
this viewpoint, is too quick a move for an understanding of the
structural limitations (and possibilities) that are at work in the
culture the new media object originates from.  When applied to new media
studies, this means that the feedback loop from the new media object
(such as the interface of Netscape 7 or an authoritative hypermedia
CD-ROM) to socio-political reality has to be scrutinized alongside with
the code in order to see how we present reality to ourselves numerically
encoded through the interface.

On level of the philosophy of history, he does away with the fashionable
notion that ‘everything is a text’ (in a similar way, Régis Debray does
away with the ‘sign’ in favor of the structure in media studies ).
Without receding to an essentialist notion of history, Jameson holds
that “that history is not a text, not a narrative, master or otherwise,
but that, as an absent cause, it is inaccessible to us except in textual
form, and that our approach to it (...) necessarily passes through its
prior textualization, its narrativization in the political unconscious”
(Jameson 1981: 35).  When uncovering this narrativization in the process
of textual interpretation, however, history never reveals its ‘true’
meaning to the critic; the ‘real’ history remains the ‘absent cause’ for
the ‘text’ as a cultural production.  The structure of any text or new
media object becomes an expression of a specific historical
configuration whose ‘authenticity’ can never be finally established; it
remains a cultural object that is indexical to a non-existent cause—the
political unconscious.  Significantly, Jameson also points to the
necessity of reading history through cultural objects: We are left with
them as ‘traces’ of the political unconscious, or of our ideas of
historical power configurations.  In my mind, Jameson’s move of
deconstructing essentialist notions of ‘history’ by calling history an
‘absent cause’ while also establishing a kind of ‘formalist
essentialism’ with which struggles over the interpretation of history
can be discovered in the structure of cultural objects convincingly
establishes the primacy of a political reading of old and new media
objects.

This takes us to Jameson's understanding of historical reality.
Generally, Jameson's does away with the fashionable notion that
'everything is a text' (in a similar way, Régis Debray does away with
the 'sign' in favor of the structure in media studies in his notorious
Media Manifestos).  Without receding to an essentialist notion of
history, Jameson holds that "that history is not a text, not a
narrative, master or otherwise, but that, as an absent cause, it is
inaccessible to us except in textual form, and that our approach to it
(...) necessarily passes through its prior textualization, its
narrativization in the political unconscious" (Jameson 1981: 35).  When
the critic uncovers this narrativization in the process of the
interpretation of a cultural object, however, historical reality never
reveals its true meaning, but rather remains the absent cause for the
production of the cultural object.  What's uncovered is not reality but
the form of its interpretation.  Significantly, Jameson also points to
the necessity of reading history through cultural objects: We are left
with them as 'traces' of the political unconscious, or of our ideas of
historical power configurations.  Jameson's move is thus twofold: While
receding from essentialist notions of 'history' by calling history an
'absent cause,' he also establishes a kind of 'formalist essentialism'
with which struggles over the interpretation of history can be
discovered in the form of cultural objects (books, CD-ROMs, etc) and
their structural limitations (and possibilities).  Political criticism
of any cultural object, then, will attempt to extract structural
antagonisms that are indexical of a historical dialectic as 'absent
cause.'  Furthermore, when one understands form as "sedimented content"
(Jameson), "the individual narrative, or the individual formal
structure, is to be grasped as the imaginary resolution of a real
contradiction" (Jameson 1981: 77).  The cultural object can now be
interpreted as a strategy for unification of differences which retains
certain traces of those differences in its form.  How does an interface
make the world coherent?  Are authoritative hypertexts simply a strategy
for cutting something coherent into pieces, only to paste the parts into
a mosaic whole again?  What's the function of an authoritative hypertext
if, given the right computer program, many people can authorize texts
that enhance or contradict the original version?

But let's inquire a bit more into how hypermedia can be said to be
political for now.  Starting from a Jamesonian, formal approach to new
media studies, I think that Ernesto Laclau's post-Marxist notions of
hegemony, decision, antagonism, and articulation will provide a few more
interesting ideas for the discussion of particular new media objects.
Laclau's theoretical framework starts from the understanding that
"self-determination is not the expression of what a subject already is
but the result of its lack of being instead" (Laclau 1996, 55).  This
point nicely enhanced Jameson's theory, in that it lays the foundation
for a questioning of how new media objects might be used to influence
users economically and politically: The pointing and clicking subject
emerges through interaction with the human computer interface (HCI); it
does not meet with a computer program 'on an equal level.'  Determined
to constitute herself, then, the user identifies itself with various
interface objects/designs, since "self-determination can only proceed
through processes of identification" (Laclau 1996, 55).  The critical
point here, of course, is the decision taken with whom or what to
identify.  For Laclau, this decision is undecidable in the final
instance, so the subject (simulating its own completeness) emerges in
the distance between the undecidability of the structure and the
decision: I can not really decide why I browse the Web with Microsoft
Internet Explorer of Netscape 7, but my decision makes me (personally) a
Netscape 7 user.  The subject/user's decision is further complicated due
to the fact that she is a part of a larger socio-political group and is
therefore necessarily represented by an individual that hegemonically
'stands for' this group (nobody can decide on all issues all the time).

Now if this theoretical outlook sounds like a gloomy perspective for
what some analytical philosophers call the free subject, let's not
forget that the antagonisms of the interface contain possibilities for
resistance as well: Hegemony is an "experience of the limit of all
objectivity" (122) since "the presence of the 'Other' prevents me from
being totally myself" (125).  The impossibility to fully constitute
oneself (let's say, for the AT&T telephone company in the face of severe
hacker attacks in 1990) opens up a sphere for the critical "rewriting of
the (...) text in such a way that the latter may itself be seen as the
rewriting or restructuration of a prior historical or ideological
subtext" (Jameson 1981: 81).  To come back to the 'California Ideology:'
It incorporates into its world view the idea that politics has come to
an end and that resistance is merely a matter of 'culture jamming.'
These radical cultural turns, which, as Barbrook and Cameron have
pointed out, ironically comes from the very people that participated in
the 'countercultural' movements of the 60s, overlooks the ways in which
political antagonisms are inscribed into the limitations and
possibilities of new media objects as indexical strategies for the
unification of socio-political differences.  Or, as Jameson argues in
The Political Unconscious, "the convenient working distinction between
cultural texts that are social and political and those that are not
becomes something worse than an error: namely, a symptom and a
reinforcement of the reification and privatization of contemporary life"
(Jameson 1981: 20).  So it's important to keep in mind that the
political criticism that I have layed out in this chapter will not lead
to the 'unmasking' of new media objects as feedback loops into an
economic system which they were originally opposed to: The benefit of a
formal, political analysis is that it won't automatically lead to the
theoretical dead-end for new media or cultural studies of seeing
opposition as only preparing another underground trend for the
multinationals to recycle in their next campaign.  Jameson puts it this
way: The "lesson of the 'vision' of a total system is for the short run
one of the structural limits imposed on praxis rather than the latter's
impossibility" (Jameson 1981: 91).


::

Henning Ziegler
http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~hziegler 

New article:
"The Digital Cowboys - Hackers as Imagined Communities"
in NMEDIAC, The Journal of New Media & Culture, Summer 2002
http://www.nmediac.net


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