martha rosler’s partial, partisan blogroll

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 18:49:11 +0000

This is the first post in a three-part series by Martha Rosler. Read the second post here and the third post here; Vera List Center director Carin Kuoni introduces Rosler’s blogroll project here.

Introduction

The political “blogosphere” is a dynamic reticulation whose many skeins are formed by the different ways in which people organize communications about politics and the public sphere – occasional, sporadic, or regular, fantastical or prosaic – using the tools available for production and dissemination of words and images on the World Wide Web. Political blogs are websites (or blogsites, if you prefer), and in what follows I do not differentiate between these terms. The term “blog” suggests a personal, authorial voice and stands in contrast to websites that claim some degree of research, objectivity, and accountability and, moreover, to rise above mere musings of ephemeral interest. The development of the blogosphere, and of the Internet platform generally, is naturally in the process of canceling this rule of thumb.

Political blogs are written and produced by activists, amateurs, professionals, or those trespassing across discipline boundaries, and by people with different degrees of interest and abilities, some with laser-like attention on one field and others with the broadest concerns.

Some blogs aggregate articles from mainstream organizations, especially print publications and television networks, others collect left, activist, think-tank, or “progressive” posts from other sites (with or without added comments) – or their equivalents on the other end of the political spectrum – while others produce their own critical analyses.

The pioneering left-populist internet bloggers constitute a relatively small group of people (estimates of the most influential left blogs fall south of 100) who gained influence at about the same time, during the campaign for president of antiwar candidate and Vermont Governor Howard Dean, and many of their blogs provide links to others of this group. This corner of the blogosphere helped engineer a revolution in political communication, activism, and campaign fundraising – witness their influence in promoting and fundraising for the next antiwar candidate, Barack Obama – but are themselves often precariously funded (see below). Some of these bloggers, attracting some degree of criticism, have jumped in and out of campaign advisory roles, have set up elite, nonpublic email lists to form campaign strategies, and have helped set up blog advertising networks to solve the financial problem. As with the activist group MoveOn, however, the fact that the pioneering blogs focused so heavily on electoral politics or gained access to politicians means that with their man in the White House, there is little room for serious criticism to take hold.

“FAIR,” screen grab by Martha Rosler

Work and society

Except for the few who draw salaries or other financial compensation for their blogging, most political bloggers contribute their labor free. Ironically, these platforms were originally intended to open easy communications between academics and other researchers for the sake of national security – which may be understood in part as the weapons’ research and development complex. But the collective labor creating the blogosphere today can be seen as a response to precisely that war machine and to the fixed hierarchical relations between political elites and the rank and file, or grassroots, polity. Since robust communication is widely acknowledged to be at the heart of any democracy, it is worthwhile to revisit the relationship between work, personality, and modes of communication. (Skip to “Historical notes,” below, if you can’t be bothered with theory.) I suggest rereading Habermas in the light of contributions such as Paolo Virno’s Grammar of the Multitude. A taste of Virno’s much-discussed work:

At this point we can sketch some of the consequences of the hybridization between Labor, (political) Action and Intellect. Consequences occur both on the level of production and within the public sphere (State. administrative apparatus).

The Intellect becomes public as soon as it links itself to labor; we must observe, however, that once it has been linked to wage labor, its typical publicness is also inhibited and distorted. This publicness is evoked over and over again in its role as productive force; and suppressed over and over again in its role as public sphere (in the proper sense of the term), as possible root of political Action, as a different constitutional principle.

The general intellect is the foundation of a social cooperation broader than that cooperation which is specifically related to labor. … [Consider] the prevailing nature of the post-Fordist regime. … The affinity between a pianist and a waiter, which Marx had foreseen, finds an unexpected confirmation in the epoch in which all wage labor has something in common with the “performing artist.”… The salient traits of post-Fordist experience (servile virtuosity, exploitation of the very faculty of language. unfailing relation to the “presence of others,” etc.) postulate, as a form of conflictual retaliation, nothing less than a radically new form of democracy (Virno, Grammar, pp. 66-67).

Some of Virno’s salient points, oversimplified for our purposes: the new forms of (globalized, post-Fordist, often intellectual) “flexible labor” – which has bred the much-vaunted flexible personality in its workers but imposed a more or less permanent state of job precarity for so many – allows for the creation of new forms of democracy. (One difficulty for my remarks here is that for Virno the general intellect becomes public only when applied to paid work.) The long-established dyads of public/private and collective/individual no longer have meaning, and collectivity is enacted in other ways. Central concepts for Virno are the multitude and immaterial labor, which produce subjects who occupy “a middle region between ‘individual and collective’ ” and so have the possibility of engineering a different relationship to society, state, and capital. It is tempting to assign the new forms of communication to this work of the creation of “a radically new form of democracy.”

Historical notes

Although weblogs, or blogs, were initially devoted to personal journals, the political blogosphere grew in part out of prehistoric (though still operative) Usenet newsgroups (especially its “alt” hierarchy) and bulletin boards, or BBS’s, and the fading but still important listserv (or list serve) phenomenon of targeted emails, which has supported or created communities of discourse. Blogs became possible only after the protocol of the World Wide Web (perhaps the grandest killer app of all) was invented by physicist Timothy Berners-Lee to allow for the posting of widely accessible content on the Internet in the 1990s.

A typical political blogsite, with its signed essays, photos, cartoons, and embedded videos, looks more like a printed magazine than like, say, Facebook, Twitter, or other social networking services that came into prominence on what some marketers and scholars call Web 2.0 – although blogs too are an important part of that nebulously defined state. It also presupposes a shared public interest among its writers, readers, and regular commenters, whereas the social networking sites are merely premised on interlocking circles of individuals acquainted with one another (“you,” as Time magazine decided, putting a mirror on its cover for Person of the Year in December 2006).

Twitter, in its brief life, has functioned during notable foreign political crises as a source of rapid information, and even quasi-insurrectionary crowd organization, more reliably than cell phones, but it is fueled by rumor; as authorities in various countries become more adept at controlling its use, it may fade as a source of political organization or breaking news, or it may form part of a wider phalanx of political communications.

Gossip and rumor (by their nature unsourced) are always in play in human societies, but their role in political blogs appears to be decreasing. Although they continue to drive many professional, civic, and art world blogs, the influence of the most prominent right-wing online gossip sheet, the Drudge Report, has greatly diminished as “serious” or responsible blogs and news sites (with growing access to political decision-makers) grow in prominence and number.

Part two of three, forthcoming.

We welcome your comments. Please write to vlc@newschool.edu.

“Black Commentator,” screen grab by Martha Rosler

Art in General, Mobile Archive + Liminal Spaces

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 19:35:03 +0000

On September 15, in conjunction with the North American debut of the Israeli Center for Digital Art’s Mobile Archive, Art in General and the Vera List Center co-hosted a conversation between Galit Eilat, founder of the archive and director of the Israeli Center for Digital Art, and Ramallah-based curator and art historian Reem Fadda.

In the context of a discussion of issues ranging from art and civil disobedience to the politics of popular contemporary exhibition formats like the archive or the tour, Eilat and Fadda discussed Liminal Spaces, a long-term project examining the possibility of joint action in light of the ever-growing existential hardship of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation.

Video works that were produced during this project will be on view at Art in General from September 24 to October 17, 2009, as part of the Mobile Archive, a cross-national library of video art. For more information:

Vera List Center for Art and Politics » Community

martha rosler’s partial, partisan blogroll

Introduction

Work and society

Historical notes

Links

Art in General, Mobile Archive + Liminal Spaces