Maggie McDowell – ENGLISH 890S-01 Contempory Literature and Digital Media

November 20, 2017

Bad Novels, like Good Novels, change nothing

In the Guardian interview Hannah helpfully linked us to, Kobek professes awareness of his limitations: “Every era has its unanswerable questions, so maybe the thing to do, which is what I did in the book, is just to acknowledge the inherent hypocrisy of it all. Though maybe that’s an easy dodge.” I’m trying to think about the Guardian’s criticism, which I think is in line with issues made by my fellow posters this week, and Kobek’s self-awareness about taking an easy way out, which is akin to stating “this is a bad novel,” in terms of how Bellamy and Killen describe the New Narrative movement. Specifically, I’m thinking of Camille Roy’s belief that she could suddenly “engage critically with my whole life in writing” (v) and of the writers’ concluding conviction that New Narrative “presaged the fragmentation, the information overload, the frenetic bleed of emotions, and the general mess of the digital era. The writing was anticipating a new era of multivalence, a new concept of the very boundaries of selfhood, and when the new era finally arrived, we had in some mystical fashion midwived it” (xx). Contrasting Kobek’s professed self-awareness of his limitations with the New Narrativists’ naïve (?) earlier conviction that they might be on the cusp of something groundbreaking I wonder why we expect that I Hate the Internet might be able to achieve anything at all. Moreover, what does it mean if it can’t? Mike McGurl reminds us that, even in the Internet age, the phenomenologies of reading and web browsing remain distinct. Is it not the surprising, then, that a print book about the Internet can tell us nothing about how better to use the Internet?
The Wikipedia page, which I feel comfortable citing for this kind of subject matter, states that I Hate the Internet “is presented as a non-linear narrative with tangential commentary on real-world people and events, as well as the story of Adeline and her friends.” I’m quoting Wikipedia because someone—presumably a fan of the novel, if not Kobek himself—was so impressed by Kobek’s distortion of the timeline (reminiscent of the New Narrativists’ mistrust of absolute narrative and preference for modernist stylistic strategies, p. ix) that they saw fit to commit it to the novel’s encyclopedia entry. What strikes me most about the particular non-linearity here, though, is that the novel ends up exactly where it starts: Adeline, on the side of the street on the cusp of 2014, being called a “Drp slut” on Twitter. In order to explain the relevance of “Drp slut,” Kobek’s narrator turns not to the future, to Adeline response or personal enlightenment at the hands of an Internet commenter, but embarks instead on an exegesis of Adeline’s past. This bad novel, beyond alerting us to our hypocrisies, does nothing to make us “more woke” in the future because it admits no future. Drunk and alone, surrounded by fanboys of 1960s fiction, Adeline does not look so much into the year ahead as she does stare blankly at her phone and dwell firmly on what has transpired in her past.
I’m wondering what concretely the Internet has changed. Our self-consciousness about our own wokeness, perhaps? Or the target of our vitriol? The New York Times Review of Books ran a piece about I Hate the Internet that concluded, “Like all jeremiads, ‘I Hate the Internet’ is far better at posing questions than formulating answers. You will sometimes wish that a woman, or an African American, had composed these acid observations about feminism and race.” New Narrative’s “critical engagement with life in writing” seemed also to be more about questions than answers, especially once the 1990s hit and AIDS made concrete that words cannot materially change the world. From McGurl’s perspective, this (basically) self-published book has done its job if it makes us feel good about having intellectually grappled with the ills of our time (I appreciate Jordan with his marginal yeps). This has, in its own way, been if not pleasing then at least affirming content. The Internet casts a wider net than a bookshop in San Francisco in the 70s, so maybe we’re more sensitive now to specifically a woman or specifically someone with eumelanin in the basal cells of their epidermis raising questions about women or about eumelanin (or maybe pointing out someone’s XY chromosomes or lack of eumelanin makes us feel better about ourselves, either way). And certainly, now we have racism and sexism in the digital realm to engage critically. We’ve moved past in-person bigotry to attack each other at great distances with more anonymity. At its most basic level, though, I wonder if the questions we’re asking I Hate the Internet to solve really do require turning to the past for answers. Kobek traces the histories of the corrupt institutions he’s alerting us to across decades, even centuries. Did the iPhone change everything? Maybe the way we talk about everything, now that the blurred line between public and private, self and social, that New Narrative pointed towards has effectively been crossed.

Perhaps it’s telling that Kevin Killian and Dodie Bellamy make cameos in Kobek’s novel by creating the space for Adeline to commit her Unforgivable Sin. The Unforgivable Sin is not airing slightly dated, controversial opinions, but only not realizing that you are being recorded when doing so. The conversation hasn’t changed, any more than has the cast of characters. The only difference seems to be that, the lesson of New Narrative learned, we’ve got to reckon now with the new problem of how our technology affects the way we deliver our diatribes.

October 29, 2017October 29, 2017

A Backwards Glance

Reading both of this week’s essays reminded me of our Margaret Atwood conversation about the inevitability of new technologies quickly becoming obsolescent. Brock, Kvansky and Hales’s 2010 essay about Black feminism, social media, and the power of technology struggles to deal with all three broad categories equally, or with even one sufficiently. I came away from the piece wondering if the problem was that the scope of the questions asked was inappropriate for such a short paper, or if Brock et al. were limited by their own astonishment of the newness of the blog form. The laboriousness of the task they set themselves was evident when they wrote, “The limitations of critical technocultural discourse analysis lie primarily in its ability to scale and the strength of the interpretive framework employed. The thick description necessary to connect interface design and ideology leads to lengthy exposition that often decenters the narrative flow of research conducted with this method. Also, the conscious decision to display large chunks of user- generated discourse, while reflecting the methodological desire of representing disadvantaged groups in their own words, must be properly contextualized by the interpretive framework in order to maintain narrative cohesion” (1046). Even as they fumbled over the language to conceptualize and theorize a new medium, I was reminded of the degree to which I take such things for granted today with the Internet always at my fingertips. Similarly, Rettbergs’ earlier essay sounds laughable to our modern ears: it is clearly no longer the case that “only 54 per cent of US households have Internet access”[1] or that Americans spend a half hour each on the Internet and reading newspapers every day (44-45). But our wonder at the pervasiveness of our technology seems to have faded, even as it proliferates at alarming rates. It is notable, though, that even as we take the technology for granted we wonder more about our personal responsibility when using it. What’s hinted at in Rettberg in the evocation of Habermas’s warning about the fragmentation of the public sphere in the digital age (48) now has obvious and material political and social implications that make Rettberg’s evaluation of the conversational strengths of blog comments (34) and Brock et al.’s wonder at the openness of the medium (1052, for example) sound naïve today.

I see two possible implications of the kind of temporal disconnect produced by essays like these. My gut instinct, and my less critical impulse, is to shrug them off as artefacts of the early Internet age that, at best, remind us of how far we’ve come and how quickly, and encourage us to marvel once more at the miracle of our technology until this impulse inevitably wears off. The other option is to consider readings like these as a return to the source, and to mine them to see what kinds of questions shaped the Internet age, and to inquire as to how these questions have evolved in the interim. What struck me as particularly interesting in the Rettberg was the question of co-construction, “that emphasizes the mutual dependencies between technology and culture” (53). It seems that we have crept a bit closer to technological determinism since the time of writing, but it is still useful to remember that we are, so far, ultimately in charge of what happens in the blogosphere, and that we can control (the civility of) our own discourse. We need not, for instance, report on new Tweets as if they are news that springs from a vacuum.

With regards specifically to Americanah (published in 2013, if we want to talk about its place in the timeline of the two essays), the novel illuminates issues the essays barely touched on, if at all. Specifically, Brock et al. bring up commodification in passing when they talk about Time Warner’s purchase of Essence, but the novel demands a more nuanced discussion of the line between commodification and identity-formation. I’m thinking of Ifemelu’s doubt on p. 231: “She should have accepted Letterly magazine’s offer to buy her blog and keep her on as a paid blogger.” I’m thinking of the way that Ifemelu imagines blog titles, and even the opening sentences of posts, in social situations—even after she’s quit the blog—, as if the tool that was once an empowering mode of self-expression has turned into the only lens through which she can view even her personal life. Her automatic blogging impulse seems so contrary to the Wambui’s original encouragement that motivated her to write: “This is so raw and true. More people should read this. You should start a blog” (Adichie 366). What is more, all the ways Ifemelu feels out of place in the second half of the novel, upon her return to Nigeria, problematize what Brock et al. only hint at regarding the accessibility of electronic resources to a diverse readership. To the extent that blogging helps Ifemelu understand her place as “Black in America,” the blog ties her to a public identity that becomes difficult to translate back into the Nigerian way of life.

I hope we’ll talk in class about what such temporally disparate texts can teach us about our current moment. Each of this week’s readings raises a different set of questions about our online and offline identities, but perhaps a common theme is that there will always be a lag between what our technology enables us to do and the critical understanding we have of it. If this is the case, then it is indeed helpful to return to older writers, to remind ourselves of the questions we would bring to our technology if we still did not take it for granted. These kinds of questions, I think, may generate productive skepticism and more awareness of the way the media inevitably changes us.

[1] The most recent Pew statistic that comes up on Google states that as of 2014 this number was closer to 73%.

October 15, 2017October 15, 2017

Careful with your uncreativity

Briefly: I am fascinated by the role of language and narrative in identity and meaning-making, but I’m still searching for the right words to speak about it. Maybe I, too, should turn to Google for the answers. 10 tips on how to write a poem: “If you are writing a poem because you want to capture a feeling that you experienced, then you don’t need these tips. Just write whatever feels right. …If, however, your goal is to communicate with a reader…writing what feels right to you won’t be enough.” Reader: I’m preemptively grateful for your consideration of the following. Perhaps, in the style of the audience of these new [art?] forms, you’ll read some new meaning into the matter I lay out below.

I’ll leave the poetry to Jordan and Abigail, and to Jessica too. The fact that I’m struggling with originality here only belabors my point. Forgive me if I sound like a broken record but—there’s nothing new about flarf, or about conceptual poetry. At least Dworkin nods to his inheritance as an ancestor of modernism in the internet-age. If I had a Twitter I’d @kg_ubu: “If you have to call yourself avant-garde, are you really?” (Note: If you’re bored, absolutely take a moment to read through Goldsmith’s Twitter and roll your eyes with me). Dworkin helpfully points out that “the rejection of a concept is itself a concept” (“The Fate of Echo” xxxiii) but I want to force our awareness to the fact that the concept itself demands scrutiny beyond our blasé dismissal of yet another batch of self-congratulatory artistes.

I don’t understand how a [Flarfer? Conceptualist?] can conceive of sitting down to create something meaningless. “Why use your own words when you can express yourself just as well by using someone else’s?” (Goldsmith, “Flarf is Dionysus. Conceptual Writing is Apollo,” 2). As Bernes points out, “detached from its context, [a statement] magnetizes to itself all kinds of projected material, confirming the deep anxieties…that the initial statement might have assuaged” (774). In other words, someone else’s words take on a meaning of your own. Why do we not understand the bestowal of a new magnetic charge to a fragment of text as a creative act in itself? Does not the conferral of a new meaning to words beyond what their original speaker intended not constitute communication? These words, if they do not reflect the authors’ identities, at least enter into discourse with their audience. These are not empty words if they awaken something in us, bring us to consciousness of a new set of connotations and consequences for the way we, too, use words in our quotidian. This is what we saw in Embassytown: that the ability to infuse words with new meaning, to live in the powerful in-between space of the metaphor, is a fundamental part of our human identity.

I read “The Swiss Just Do Whatever” and I want to understand, but I don’t. “The Swiss Just Do Whatever” reminds me of my human cognitive abilities (limitations?) and creates in me the bizarre urge to find parallels between Sadam Hussein and Neil Patrick Harris. I read the notes on “Fact” by Craig Dworkin and I’m irritated on the artist’s behalf that a piece of self-reflexive writing needs to label itself “self-reflexive” to facilitate comprehension but—from whence this need to be understood? Someone’s subjectivity is being revealed here. I’m not sure if it’s mine, or the artist’s, or some deeper cultural awareness, but there’s clear meaning behind this self-proclaimed process.

Dworkin also suggests that “compositional tactics are never inherently significant, but that they do always signify; their meaning simply changes with the cultural moment in which they are deployed” (“The Fate of Echo” xlv). We might do well here to inquire about the dangers of the unreflecting jumbling of words. I’m grateful to Jordan for linking us to “Chicks Dig War,” which I read with a suppressed laugh and promptly sent along to some radical femme friends who will understand it as a tongue-in-cheek critique of warmongering and gender roles. I don’t know anything about Drew Gardner, the title of whose other works could lead a careless reader to suspect that he hates Flarf as much as I do, but, out of a need for meaning, I read sarcasm and anger and something a little revolutionary in his recycled phrases. Words are tools, but they’re heavy, and ought to be wielded with care so as not to destroy the structures they build. Goldsmith invites us to “pick our poison,” unconscious, perhaps, of the connotation that, like poison, an artist’s medium and material still need to be carefully selected and distributed, with an eye to their target (context) to ensure the intended effect.