The Blur
We are beset by static — in the thrall of constant, relentless movement, we lose ourselves to the permanent accumulation of momentum. We have been primed to charge forward, into a direction unknown, and while everything else recedes into periphery, there are other things coursing through the slipstream, catching up with us. All this movement, this ‘progress’ — where does it lead?
Contemporary reporting, in all its breathless, pounding rhythm cares little for the context out of which movement emerges, nor how momentum steers us towards the void. The result is a kind of blur that systematically annihilates our sense of history and, with it, our capacity for Déjà vu. Memory is subject to the corrosive effects of capital, so how do we recognize that something has been lost — that we have been here before?
Wrapped in the briar of enterprise, critics under capital are incentivized to perform discovery — that is, framing their critique as the first, unique approach to any given topic — which remains convention because it places individual contribution at the center of an ongoing conversation. Of course, credit must be given where credit is due: critics perform labor, after all. But as capital pushes the communal components of all labor further into the margins, the erasure of pre-existing work for the sake of building personal legacies seems all-encompassing; we must, as Devyn Springer put it, cleave individualism from our practice, reject the description of ‘creatives’ and think of ourselves as participating in the production of a culture from which to strike at reactionary elements that seek to prevent harmony and productive labor. We must remember that we do not conjure from the void.
It should be noted that this culture does not have to be ‘popular’ in the sense that ‘popular culture’ is; it can remain separate for as long as it is necessary. But, in the same vein, the totality of ‘popular culture’ and its many fragments cannot be conceded to reactionary ideology.
People are taught to breach the confines of lines and letters — explicit text — to do excavations upon marginal spaces. This, of course, holds financial benefits in an age where the rapid pace of communication complicates how we capture attention and revenue: it should be apparent, then, that to drape the self in discovery is a practice of domination; it is the colonizer’s impulse. Avant-garde, a term with decidedly militaristic connotations that originates in the Metropole, should clue us into its use: artistic expression and thought are delineated as a ‘frontier’ unto which ‘pioneers’ may move to mark territory, but, of course, not all are permitted to do so equitably.
To perform discovery in this way can be read as a desperate attempt by subjects under kyriarchy to rupture the relentless rhythm of enterprise and insert permanence into capitalist structures driven by the demands of mobility and flexibility. But, of course, that is an extraordinarily charitable reading. To practice discovery means to cut deeper into wounded flesh: it romanticizes a heightened individualism under which writers must fend for themselves. Violently obscuring foundations is not a trivial offence, regardless of whether it happens consciously or not; after all, intent is not required to produce negative consequences.
Attribution of marginal work as a counter-practice has been discarded almost entirely. To bring it to the forefront demands conscious effort. Stitching back together the histories that ‘discovery’ has torn thread from thread to weave a propaganda of the ego requires a delicate sort of restoration; the seams are scars, after all, and the needles must puncture flesh. Of course, it comes at great personal cost: the market demands the performance of discovery: participants are required to frame themselves and their work as products; the profitability of commodities, in contemporary economy, hinges on being distinct and separate from those that came before; the market adores novelty. Historicizing within the constraints of word count limitations can be a difficult proposition, but it must be undertaken whenever possible.
Marginalized ingenuity has been openly sacrificed on the altar of novelty, but as aspiring keepers of the record, we may attempt a resurrection of sorts: the task of reconstructing histories must serve to train an audience that has previously been unwilling or unable to confront the injustice of life at the margins. ‘Critics’ who present themselves as ‘charting’ or ‘taming’ a previously ‘wild’ and ‘uninhabited’ space in contemporary discourse need to be exposed for what they are: their discovery is nothing but the colonization of the vast landscapes of marginalized thought and criticism that have been violently cast aside. But exposure is not enough: radical attribution and the re-thinking of our relationships under capital must follow.
The rhythm of contemporary journalism (of capital) cultivates the impression of movement to obfuscate not just the pace at which popular culture moves but the direction in which it moves: it is the grand theater of progress, a sleight of hand. To speak of ‘growth’ or ‘dynamism’ is foolish, because we know these acts of accumulation are performed to distract from the elemental truth that there is no ‘automatic progress’ in all this movement. It is a mechanism meant to prevent introspection, the act of ‘taking stock’ that would reveal the tides of history.
It is a conventionally held position that the financial viability of platforms that practice criticism depend in large part on their ability to capitalize on the rapid pace of information that flows from industry; this applies, in particular, to those that cover popular culture. But that information comes with an expiration date; access is compromised. It is the speed with which such information needs to be processed that requires writers to navigate corporate content at breakneck pace. This relentless schedule occupies a disproportionate amount of any worker’s most precious resource: it devours time, all of it.
Observing and describing the status quo in this way are crucial activities, because the minuscule shifts and adaptations performed by capital to capture wholly our discourse horizon are pre-requisites for understanding and envisioning an alternative future. But, we need to see these shifts and adaptations as what they are: minuscule. This requires knowledge that can illuminate the contexts in which these adaptations occur.
As analytical tools with which we see the world, observation and description thus require constant re-calibration; they cannot remain static. Rather, what needs to be observed and described are trends over time, so that the context of individual events is not lost in the furious rhythm of digital publishing. Otherwise, organized thought perishes in our desperation to capture a permanent moment that, in truth, does not exist.
Curation is frequently presented as a natural process built on the observation and subsequent interpretation of publics. As such, the process is often directly linked to the behavior of publics. It should be clear, however, that the practice of curation is not a natural process in which actors possess a supernatural disposition to sense the ‘zeitgeist’ and act accordingly, but a series of decisions made by institutions that determine the boundaries of their actions.
We tend to frame curation as if publications are receptacles for publics, as if the direction of reporting naturally emerges from a realm external. But this has become part of a larger strategy to relocate and externalize the labor of curation unto systems perceived to be ‘organic’, such as social media, to shun and obfuscate a responsibility for elevating the margins that every self-respecting institution of journalism should embrace.
A refusal to see the ways in which our work may produce culture, of course, reiterates on a politics of apathy, and seamlessly transitions into the reproduction of the status quo. To rely on technology is seen as a way of observing the world on its own terms, a lens unto ‘objective’, ‘natural’ reality that arises organically from the will of the public. But even as we accept this dubious claim, the observation of such unreliable, massive amounts of data still requires the observer to make a series of decisions: attention is limited, so it follows that what we may observe is limited, too.
Information and communications technology cannot be permitted to slip into the role of an invisible hand that determines what appears on any platform. It is not autonomous, neutral or objective: algorithms, as experts never tire to tell us, are crafted by people. It is important to recognize the myriad ways in which the technical architecture of popular networks and platforms shape what individuals and publications are able to see online. But the limitations of such architecture do not provide salient justification for publications to capitulate in the face of the enormous task that curation presents.
Rather, publications need the resources to engage in an active process of seeking out material that constitutes real alternatives to the doctrines of industry. Observing social media is part of the repertoire, but, even there, unpaid labor engages in a process of curation that remains invisible, and visible only if it acts in aggregate; attribution is crucial. Popularity determines coverage, when coverage, ideally, should introduce publics to new works, which may or may not become popular; curation is work. We cannot rest on the assumption that what is ‘worth covering’ will somehow ‘trickle up’ — defying gravity — to the editorial board, re-asserting the primacy of viral success and/or corporate backing. Publications are active participants, complicit in a process that turns our collective understanding of ‘value’ into something that is not a threat to the status quo.
Attribution, contextualization and curation are tools with which we can avoid making the same mistake as the institutions currently writing about popular culture; they have become so thoroughly compromised that ‘transformation’ is not longer a sufficient prescription. It must be annihilation. The short-term memory evident in the problem-of-the-week dynamic is a problem that is rooted in the rhythm of digital publishing and capital, which seems to ward off any attempts to build momentum for causes that are capable and robust enough to support more radical ideologies. To break this cycle, these institutions need to be fought.
