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06/15/2005 Archived Entry: "Ctheory"
I feel a little "wow-ed" by the little attention I've seen the Ctheory "Detroit" essay get on the Web. Such is the network - things get picked up quickly at times. This thread is interesting for both the side that likes what I said, and the side a bit skeptical and critical. Both are cool.
One thing, though, which still interests me the most about writing about technology is the "it's not possible" response. Possibility, potential, ability, get too bogged down in terms of the familiar. If we don't recognize the familiar, we are quick to dismiss - all of us. Writing instruction is one of the quickest to dismiss (at least as I professionally frame this issue - since this is my profession) but in general, we are too quick to close down conversations if the project doesn't seem feasible. Why? Conservatism. The desire to conserve/maintain what is recognizable. Not a crime by any means, but it is an obstacle to innovation.
And this is the biggest disappointment of the critique on the thread: the over-familiar critique of deconstruction as "wankery." Besides the fact that the essay is not about deconstruction or Derrida, the mere conflation of any kind of theoretical position (the unfamiliar) with the easy target of critique (in this case, deconstruction – it’s obtuse so it must be bad) is a bit sad. Sad not because I have said anything great - sad because it means that whatever is said will be quickly ignored. But some of that is also a product of the very reasoning I'm moving away from and critiquing (referentiality and clarity). The consequences of keeping things simple and clear are extremely problematic (as well as contributors to how we are controlled or control), but I'll leave that for now.
If you conceptualize space outside of a grand narrative (more capital investment will save the city) and instead propose something based in a logic of new media (tagging/assemblage), that this image seems odd (which it, of course, is) somehow translates into either:
1. That's just deconstruction hogwash
2. It could never happen
To the first I say: Huh?
To the second: based on a current understanding of space, maybe. But I'm not working from that understanding, and my aim is to push thought away from that understanding because of its limitations.
If anything, the naming/renaming process of categorization tagging allows for poses a whole different way to experience space.
And, what the critique seems to miss as well as that this is an essay about writing. It is a project to conceptualize another way to write about space. The open-nature of tagging - the ability to use the digital vision of tagging to fill in space - is different than a print logic of referentiality. Referentiality insists that this = that. What I write represents/refers to a specific thing/idea. More money = more prosperity. Obviously, and particularly in the case of Detroit, that doesn't happen. The RenCen is the best example of how that reasoning fails.
Replies: 3 comments
"Like, graffiti is so self-centered. It's like a dog pissing on a pole or something -- 'I was here.' Grafedia, at least the stuff I was trying to do, people see something totally new that they hadn't noticed," he said.
Uh, like, since taggers and graffiti artists write with anonymous alter egos, like, the "self" of "self-centered graffiti" is not nearly as self-glorifying as this jerk uploading his own poetry.
Posted by Jenny @ 06/16/2005 09:52 AM EST
Ah, nice. Very relevant. When HP introduced the concept of CoolTown, there was also the possibility of this. The whole idea of rethinking place through renaming (i.e. tagging/re-tagging) is very intriguing. That it is not bound to physical space is what moves it outside the limits of referentiality and expectation.
Advertising (as usual) sees the potential here. But so far, the rest of us are slow to catch on.
Posted by jeff @ 06/16/2005 09:18 AM EST
expansion of grafedia?
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,66992,00.html
Posted by jakaa @ 06/16/2005 04:26 AM EST