Perfectly intelligent persons are pleased to take Bruce Sterling seriously. It's actually a fine time to be Bruce Sterling or someone like him, as the celebratory abjecting of high culture, and its companion modernism-is-so-over rhetoric, revel in the inverted world wherein genre fiction is more suggestive and vital than Great Books (for a minute we called this Cultural Studies, but now it's just one of the corridors in the English Dept). But the thing is, said youngish English prof tends to feel a little guilty about this transaction's incoherence, wherein they profit by being the smartypants critic explicating the significance of the non-smartypants author, a process which really calls into question the abjecting of smartypants-ness intrinsic to their abandonment of the modernist project, avant-gardes, High Culture, experimental literature, etc.
In short, it's discomfiting to pose as the cultural elite of populism.
So a genre fiction writer who is thoughtful about his genre, and particularly about its social bases, and who is even a little scholarly but not in a scholarly way, well, it's a real relief for a certain kind of academic to be reassured that his (usually his) intellectual spirit is not reviled but shared amongst hoi polloi.
Which is all well and good but Bruce Sterling is sort of a dope. In his essay on "The Life and Death of Media" (the speech version of which can be found here) he walks through the Dead Media Project, expounding on why it's important to recall and grasp all the, well, dead media. Here's his rising peroration at the end:
Ladies and gentlemen, let me implore your pity and understanding for dead media. If you're really electronic frontier people, then in all justice, you ought to eat what you are killing. Let's try to see the greater sense of tragedy and majesty in this whirlwind we're creating. Perhaps this realization will free us from the hypnotism of our own PR. I dare not suggest that it will make us better artists -- but at least it may help establish where we are and what is coming. Somehow, it might help us survive. It might even help us prevail.What remains entirely unclear is what exactly we are supposed to "prevail" against or over. Live media spinning out of control? Ourselves? "Our own PR"? WTF?
Let me simply propose that there is currently no real thought without an account of living antagonisms and of where value comes from. This is not a transcendental claim; one could imagine an era not organized by dynamics of antagonism and value accumulation. Indeed, such imaginings are another horizon of real thought, equally dependent on understanding antagonism and value as what must be overcome. Which leads me to a sentence or two from Sterling's talk that comes just a few paragraphs earlier, as the addresses the rate of innovation and obsolescence:
We can examine it whenever we like, and the frantic pace is entirely our own fault. What's our hurry anyway? When you look at it from another angle, there's an unexpected delicious thrill in the thought that individual human beings can now survive whole generations of media.
This is a potentially interesting inquiry, except for the suggestion that the pace of the making, selling, and replacing of stuff — you call it media, I call it "the economy" — can be mellowed out through some mental reattunement, like if everyone just breathed. I believe we used to call this idealism. Still no explanation of where the antagonism might lie, what role value might play — in short, no reading of why this process he decries might be the way it is. What the crisis is. And still no clue about what kind of prevailing we're looking at. And that's when the great sentence arrives, a sentence which requires no analysis, a sentence that ends in an exclamation point as symptomatic as a slip on the tongue, a sentence in the late midst of this talk from 1995, given to the Sixth International Symposium on Electronic Art (italics ours; we are trying to point out all subtle-like that this Symposium started in 1989):
It's like outliving the Soviet Union once every week!Posted by jane at August 1, 2008 08:12 PM | TrackBack