Shannon O’Neill

Glad you asked.

I’m embarrased to admit that I’d never heard of him. But I’m keen to find out more. He was influenced by Nietzsche, and went on to influence Stanislaw Lem. Sounds like my kinda guy!

This Is Not Art is on in Newcastle this weekend. It’s my favourite Australian festival - if you’ve never been, you should check it out. I’ll be doing a couple of talks and a couple of performances.

I finished reading Greg Egan’s Diaspora the other day. What a great novel - it really scratched my posthuman itch. Sure it’s not perfect: some of the plot and character development was weak, but the world he creates is plausible, detailed and compelling. Bring on the Introdus!

I’d love to see someone try to make a film of it. It’d be the ultimate FX challenge, with its scapes and multidimensional macrospheres.

It’s embarrasing that it took me so long to get around to reading it - a friend bought me the paperback a few years ago. It was published in 1997 and has been very influential, especially among Antipodeans involved in electronic music, eg:

• Julian Oliver aka de|ire, released an album called Diaspora in 2003.
• Graham Freeman’s blog Virulent Memes was, I think, named after a phrase from the book.
• Brisbane sound artists Lloyd Barrett and Joe Musgrove have a project called Diaspora.

And I know that Peter is also a fan of Egan’s work.

I was a big cyberpunk fan in the 80s but haven’t read much SF since then. Now I want more! Any recommendations?

I’ve started reading Terry Eagleton’s After Theory. It’s quite enjoyable - less rigorous than Literary Theory - An Introduction (not surprising as it’s a different sort of book - he’s not obliged to summarise key thinkers one after the other) and more like a curmudgeonly rant, albeit a lucid, witty and ethical one.

What’s missing is his own biography (although he has written his memoirs elsewhere). It looms large in the background, but I want him to acknowledge it more - maybe he will later in the book. For example, when he says that cultural theory is “really a product of an extraordinary decade and a half, from about 1965 to 1980″ (pp. 23-24) and that “Not much that has been written since has matched the ambitiousness and originality of these founding mothers and fathers” (p. 1) he sounds a lot like those irritating baby boomers who drone on about how music was so much better in their day.

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationships between art, theory and politics, so I found the following passage interesting:

Marxism had been badly tarnished in the West by the monstrosities of Stalinism. But many felt that it had also been discredited by changes in capitalism itself. It seemed ill-adapted to a new kind of capitalist system which revolved on consumption rather than production, image rather than reality, the media rather than cotton mills. Above all, it seemed ill-adapted to affluence. The post-war economic boom may have been on its last legs by the 1960s, but it was still setting the political pace. Many of the problems which preoccupied militant students and radical theorists in the West were ones bred by progress, not poverty. They were problems of beaurocratic regulation, conspicuous consumption, sophisticated military hardware, technologies which seemed to be lurching out of control. The sense of a world which was claustrophobically coded, administered, shot through with signs and conventions from end to end, helped to give birth to structuralism, which investigates the hidden codes and conventions which produce human meaning. The 1960s were stifling as well as swinging. There were anxieties about packaged learning, advertising and the despotic power of the commodity. Some years later, the cultural theory which examined all this would itself be at risk of becoming one more glossy commodity, a way of touting one’s symbolic capital. These were all questions of culture, lived experience, utopian desire, the emotional and perceptual damage wrought by a two-dimensional society. They were not matters which Marxism traditionally had much to say about.

Pleasure, desire, art, language, the media, the body, gender, ethnicity: a single word to sum all these up would be culture. Culture, in a sense of the word which included Bill Wyman and fast food as well as Debussy and Dostoevsky, was what Marxism seemed to be lacking. And this is one reason why the dialogue with Marxism was pitched largely on that terrain. Culture was a way for the civilized, humanistic left to distance itself from the crass philistinism of actually existing socialism. Nor was it surprising that it was cultural theory, rather than politics, economics or orthodox philosophy, which took issue with Marxism in those turbulent years. Students of culture quite often tend to be politically radical, if not easily disciplined. Because subjects like literature and art history have no obvious material pay-off, they tend to attract those who look askance at capitalist notions of utility. The idea of doing something purely for the delight of it has always rattled the grey-bearded guardians of the state. Sheer pointlessness is a deeply disturbing affair.

In any case, art and literature encompass a great many ideas and experiences which are hard to reconcile with the present political set-up. They also raise questions of the quality of life in a world where experience itself seems brittle and degraded. How in such conditions can you produce worthwhile art in the first place? Would you not need to change society in order to flourish as an artist? Besides, those who deal with art speak the language of value rather than price. They deal with works whose depth and intensity show up the meagreness of everyday life in a market-obsessed society. They are also trained to imagine alternatives to the actual. Art encourages you to fantasize and desire. For all these reasons, it is easy to see why it is students of art or English rather than chemical engineering who tend to staff the barricades.

Students of chemical engineering, however, are in general better at getting out of bed than students of art and English. Some of the very qualities which attract cultural specialists to the political left are also the ones which make them hard to organize. They are the jokers in the political pack, reluctant joiners who tend to be more interested in utopia than trade unions. Unlike Oscar Wilde’s philistine, they know the value of everything and the price of nothing. You would not put Arthur Rimbaud on the sanitation committee. In the 1960s and 70s, this made cultural thinkers ideal candidates for being inside and outside Marxism simultaneously. In Britain, a prominent cultural theorist like Stuart Hall occupied this position for decades, before shifting decisively into the non-Marxist camp.

To be inside and outside a position at the same time - to occupy a territory while loitering sceptically on the boundary - is often where the most intensely creative ideas stem from. It is a resourceful place to be, if not always a painless one. One has only to think of the great names of twentieth-century English literature, almost all of whom moved between two or more national cultures. Later, this ambiguous position was to be inherited by the new ‘French’ cultural theorists. Not many of them were French in origin, and not many of those who were were heterosexual. Some hailed from Algeria, some from Bulgaria, and others from utopia. As the 1970s wore on, however, quite a few of these erstwhile radicals began to come in from the cold. The passage toward the depoliticized 80s and 90s had been opened.

Terry Eagleton, After Theory, pp. 38-40.

Two very different American critics endebted to Freud are Kenneth Burke, who eclectically blends Freud, Marx and linguistics to produce his own suggestive view of the literary work as a form of symbolic action, and Harold Bloom, who has used the work of Freud to launch one of the most daringly original literary theories of the past decade. What Bloom does, in effect, is to rewrite literary history in terms of the Oedipus complex. Poets live anxiously in the shadow of a ’strong’ poet who came before them, as sons are oppressed by their fathers; and any particular poem can be read as an attempt to escape this ‘anxiety of influence’ by its systematic remoulding of a previous poem. The poet, locked in Oedipal rivalry with his castrating ‘precursor’, will seek to disarm that strength by entering it from within, writing in a way which revises, displaces and recasts the precursor poem; in this sense all poems can be read as rewritings of other poems, and as ‘misreadings’ or ‘misprisions’ of them, attempts to fend off their overwhelming force so that the poet can clear a space for his own imaginative originality. Every poet is ‘belated’, the last in a tradition; the strong poet is the one with the courage to acknowledge this belatedness and set about undermining the precursor’s power. Any poem, indeed, is nothing but such an undermining - a series of devices, which can be seen both as rhetorical strategies and psychoanalytic defence mechanisms, for undoing and outdoing another poem. The meaning of a poem is another poem.

Bloom’s literary theory represents an impassioned, defiant return to the Protestant Romantic ‘tradition’ from Spenser and Milton to Blake, Shelley and Yeats, a tradition ousted by the conservative Anglo-Catholic lineage (Donne, Herbert, Pope, Johnson, Hopkins) mapped out by Eliot, Leavis and their followers. Bloom is the prophetic spokesman for the creative imagination in the modern age, reading literary history as an heroic battle of giants or mighty psychic drama, trusting to the ‘will to expression’ of the strong poet in his struggle for self-origination. Such doughty Romantic individualism is fiercely at odds with the sceptical, anti-humanist ethos of a deconstructive age, and indeed Bloom has defended the value of individual poetic ‘voice’ and genius against his Derridean colleagues (Hartman, de Man, Hillis Miller) at Yale. His hope is that he may snatch from the jaws of a deconstructive criticism he in some ways respects a Romantic humanism which will reinstate author, intention and the power of the imagination, Such a humanism will wage war with the ’serene linguistic nihilism’ which Bloom rightly discerns in much American deconstruction, turning from the mere endless undoing of determinate meaning to a vision of poetry as human will and affirmation. The strenuous, embattled, apocalyptic tone of much of his writing, with its outlandish spawning of esoteric terms, is witness to the strain and desperateness of this enterprise. Bloom’s criticism starkly exposes the dilemma of the modern liberal or Romantic humanist - the fact that on the one hand no reversion to a serene, optimistic human faith is possible after Marx, Freud and post-structuralism, but that on the other hand any humanism which like Bloom’s has taken the agonizing pressures of such doctrines is bound to be fatally compromised and contaminated by them. Bloom’s epical battles of poetic giants retain the psychic splendour of a pre-Freudian age, but have lost its innocence: they are domestic rows, scenes of guilt, envy, anxiety and aggression. No humanistic literary theory which overlooked such realities could offer itself as reputably ‘modern’ at all; but any such theory which takes them on board is bound to be sobered and soured by them to point where its own capacity to affirm becomes almost maniacally wilful. Bloom advances far enough down the primrose path of American deconstruction to be able to scramble back to the heroically human only by a Nietzschian appeal to the ‘will to power’ and ‘will to persuasion’ of the individual imagination which is bound to remain arbitrary and gestural. In this exclusively patriarchal world of fathers and sons, everything comes to centre with increasing rhetorical stridency on power, struggle, strength of will; criticism itself for Bloom is just as much a form of poetry as poems are implicit literary criticism of other poems, and whether a critical reading ’succeeds’ is in the end not at all a question of its truth-value but of the rhetorical force of the critic himself. It is humanism on the extreme edge, grounded in nothing but its own assertive faith, stranded between a discredited rationalism on the one hand and an intolerable scepticism on the other.

Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory - An Introduction, pp. 183-185

The first par in particular suggests a psychoanalytic approach to thinking about appropriation, originality, influence, etc. I’m skeptical of psychoanalysis, but it’s still something to which I should give some consideration.

Actor-network theory

Feel Tank Chicago

Global Cemetary Online with Sad News Update

The Interruptor - VST Devices

Possible and Impossible Aporias

Resounding the Cinematic - Resonance, Proximity and the Acousmatic in the Apparatus

The Shannonizer

Sprockets (television)

Through the Keyhole

Urbanomic

The ‘work of the break’ is Barthes’s astonishing study of Balzac’s story Sarrasine, S/Z (1970). The literary work is now no longer treated as a stable object or delimited structure, and the language of the critic has disowned all pretentions to scientific objectivity. The most intriguing texts for criticism are not those which can be read but those which are ‘writable’ (scriptable) - texts which encourage the critic to carve them up, transpose them into different discourses, produce his or her semi-arbitrary play of meaning athwart the work itself. The reader or critic shifts from the role of consumer to that of producer. It is not exactly as though ‘anything goes’ in interpretation, for Barthes is careful to remark that the work cannot be got to mean anything at all; but literature is now less an object to which criticism must conform than a free space in which it can sport. The ‘writable’ text, usually a modernist one, has no determinate meaning, no settled signifieds, but is plural and diffuse, an inexhaustible tissue or galaxy of signifiers, a seamless weave of codes and fragments of codes, through, through which the critic may cut his own errant path. There are no beginnings and no ends, no sequences which cannot be reversed, no hierarchy of textual ‘levels’ to tell you what is more or less significant. All literary texts are woven out of other literary texts, not in the conventional sense that they bear the traces of ‘influence’ but in the more radical sense that every word, phrase or segment is a reworking of other writings which which precede or surround the individual work. There is no such thing as literary ‘originality’, no such thing as the ‘first’ literary work: all literature is ‘intertextual’. A specific piece of writing thus has no clearly defined boundaries: it spills over constantly into the works clustered around it, generating a hundred different perspectives which dwindle to vanishing point. The work cannot be sprung shut, rendered determinate, by an appeal to the author, for the ‘death of the author’ is a slogan that modern criticism is now confidently able to proclaim. 1 The biography of the author is, after all, merely another text, which need not be ascribed any special privilege: this text too can be deconstructed. It is language which speaks in literature, in all its swarming ‘polysemic’ plurality, not the author himself. If there is any place where this seething multiplicity of the text is momentarily focused, it is not the author but the reader.

Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory - An Introduction, pp 137-138.

aut-op-sy

BK SynthLab

Boston, Massachusetts

The Contradiction of Trotsky - Claude Lefort

Fat Ass Plugins

Fate, Resignation, Persistence, Affirmation, Endurance: Beckett and Stoicism

Hardwired to seek beauty

iZotope

The Lenin Legend

Looper’s Delight

Ressentiment

Sample Rate Conversion Comparisons

Voxengo

Zone Mobius

AudioMasters Forum

bcontrol forum

BCR video

The catalogue of UK Entrances to Hell

digitalfishphones

electro-music

Electronic Music 411

energyXT

Freeware 2005 VSTi/VST Roundup

The Grey Commons - strategic considerations in the copyfight

How to take ownership of a file or folder in Windows XP

InstaJungle 0.3

i, robot by Cory Doctorow

KVR Audio

MIDI NRPN and RPN

mulch-discuss

SIR - Impulse Response Processor

Inspector and InspectorXL

smartelectronix

Synthedit and SynthMaker

Tech Talk with Exile

theoria: Zizek!

Tobybear Productions

Word

100 things we didn’t know this time last year

AudioMulch 1.0rc1

Behringer B-Control Presets & Templates

Dungeons & Dragons

Increasingly Clear

Stuckism

Traveller (role-playing game)

The University and the Undercommons

X-Men