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| Author | Message / Information |
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Barriminge
Rank: Jasper |
Aaron Williamson
replied on: 4/8/2004 4:53:14 PM quote: Well done, Matey.You are indeed carrying out your true role in life as "intellectual ears to the ground". |
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Derradah
Rank: Toyah |
an angry sausage does not mince his words
replied on: 4/8/2004 5:13:10 PM quote: Well here's an interesting objet trouve as reward for information retrieval: The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum by James W. Cook The Birth of Irony A Review by Jackson Lears I. To its devotees as well as its detractors, postmodern thought lacks a history. The fragmentation of truth, the ascendancy of appearances, the fluidity of self, the breakdown of master narratives, the triumph of ironic detachment: all the tendencies that we loosely label "postmodernism" are commonly assumed to be the products of mass-media technology and multinational capital, or to have burst full-blown from the brains of Frederic Jameson and Jean-Francois Lyotard. Most attempts to trace the origins of postmodern sensibility stop in the early 1960s, when advertising began to mass-market irony, and quotation marks descended over whole segments of our cultural life. Postmodernism, we tend to assume, was born yesterday. This assumption provides relief to all concerned. It reassures celebrants of postmodern culture that they are on the cutting edge of change, which apparently is still the hip place to be. It suggests to critics that what they deplore is merely an ephemeral fashion ? that it will only be a matter of time before a single standard of truth is restored to its proper place as the foundation of philosophical debate. But if postmodern tendencies have a longer history, then an alternative interpretation surfaces. The origins of postmodernism are traceable to the primal scene of market society ? to the atmosphere of suspicion surrounding the interchange between buyer and seller. The postmodern sensibility is significantly less novel than its cheerleaders or its critics imagine. A relativizing tendency has long been embedded in our psyche as a consequence of our commerce. Whether terrorism and war can dislodge it remains to be seen. These are the larger implications of James W. Cook's important book, though he does not spell them out. Cook focuses on American commercial culture from the 1830s through the 1880s. It is P.T. Barnum's world ? the emerging street carnival of urban entertainment, oddities, extravaganzas, and curiosities too numerous to mention. Its representatives included Johann Maelzel and his amazing automaton chess player; Signor Antonio Blitz and his "modern magic" (which replaced supernaturalism with sleight-of-hand skill); William Harnett and his trompe l'oeil illusionist paintings; and above all Barnum himself, whose exhibits had a way of blurring familiar boundaries (truth or illusion? ape or man?) and provoking audiences to raise a series of unanswerable epistemological questions. In Cook's account, Barnum and his contemporaries were commercial versions of the mythical figure of the trickster ? patron of the crossroads and of trade, of risky business and of new beginnings. Traditional tricksters inhabited the cosmological margins, defining themselves against principles of order, opening portals of possibility to unseen worlds. Commercial tricksters played a less exalted role. In market society, they moved from the margins of mythology to the center of everyday life, into the cities, where they mutated into confidence men without any vestige of a sacred aura. But Cook does not want to leave it at that. He is an imaginative cultural historian who excels at teasing complex significance from apparently straightforward artifacts, practices, and events. His commercial trickster is not a messenger from another world, but neither is he merely a conniving cheat. He is an "artful deceiver," juggling cultural meanings in a chronically unstable society, challenging the rigid taxonomies that the Victorians used to organize human experience. Sometimes Cook strains too hard to locate complexity and loads his evidence with too much interpretive freight. This is a common occupational hazard, and Cook mostly avoids it. More often he provides fresh insight into the impact of commerce on consciousness. The Arts of Deception is a subtle and illuminating work of cultural history that tells us more than its author realizes about the history of postmodern thought. II. According to Cook, the emergence of Barnum and his fellow artful deceivers in antebellum America was not simply a colorful instance of capitalist chicanery: it was also a chapter in American intellectual history. From this view, Barnum was an especially important figure. Playing with fraud, shamelessly spreading contradictory rumors, constantly prodding his audiences to test and to re-test the evidence of their senses, the showman created vernacular philosophy for a society on the make. By promoting the idea of trickery as an art form, Barnum implicitly incited speculation about the authenticity of his exhibits and encouraged the acceptance of uncertainty as a condition of everyday life. Yet there was nothing solemn about this game: it was all for fun ? and for Barnum's profit. Epistemological doubt could be good business. "The public," Barnum shrewdly observed, "appears disposed to be amused even when they are conscious of being deceived." Certainly Barnum and his contemporaries were on the cusp of intellectual change. They ritually re-enacted the perplexities of knowledge at the core of market exchange: What's this guy up to? What's the catch? Bringing philosophy to the streets, they unwittingly helped to accelerate the shift from an Enlightenment ideal of universal Truth to a post-Enlightened preoccupation with many particular truths. Cook somewhat melodramatically dates the birth of American popular culture to "that fateful afternoon in July 1835" when Barnum decided to exhibit an elderly black woman named Joice Heth, first claiming that she was George Washington's one-hundred-sixty-one-year-old nurse, then planting rumors that she was an India-rubber automaton operated by a ventriloquist, and later leaking hints to the newspapers that she was a simple fraud. Granting the arbitrariness of Cook's dating, he is on to something. Maybe Barnum and other artful deceivers did preside at the birth of contemporary popular culture. The genealogy of postmodernism can be traced to the anonymity of the antebellum city, where nothing was as it seemed and no one could be sure that his neighbor was on the square. Artful deception, Cook claims, defused epistemological doubt by turning it into a democratic puzzle, a harmless game that could be played even by teetotalling Protestants. (Barnum made sure that his premises were free of alcohol, and minimized the presence of the disreputable "sporting crowd" so that married women and their children would feel welcome.) As the Joice Heth exhibit unfolded, Cook writes, Barnum transformed it "from a plausible work of realism into a far more slippery work of illusionism, one which interwove seemingly straight biographical information with provocative public encouragements to inspect this very same information for evidence of artificial manufacture." Barnum's antics provoked tongue-in-cheek reporting and nods and winks in the newspapers, but no earnest cries of humbug. The artful deceiver turned fraud into family fun. The transformation of the trickster from god to entertainer was not simply a disenchantment of traditional culture. There was more going on than the loss of old allegorical meanings. New meanings, albeit ambiguous ones, were being created as well. Barnum and other commercial tricksters played a crucial role in promoting a vernacular philosophy for a post-Enlightenment age. They created opportunities for antebellum Americans to grapple with ambiguities of representation that surrounded many forms of social intercourse. In fact, as Cook observes, "representation" was the "curiously precocious term" that showmen and the press used to characterize the museums' stock-in-trade. Antebellum New York, like postmodern Los Angeles, was engulfed by the traffic in images. The key to the philosophical significance of artful deception was its recurrent slide from realism to illusionism, which raised the constant question: was this astonishing marvel really an elaborate fake? The rapid alternation of outrageous claims, bogus exposés, heated denials, and re-asserted respectability led to the spread of self-conscious sleuthing by ordinary museumgoers as well as by newspaper reporters. Ultimately this turned the exhibits into a perceptual contest between the showmen and the audience. Barnum was especially adept at pulling back one curtain after another, keeping the audience in a state of panting uncertainty, perpetually postponing the revelation of what was "really" going on. Mass-circulation newspapers fed the public fascination with the continued oscillation of alternatives ? fakery and authenticity, enchantment and disenchantment, the suspension of disbelief and the exposure of fraud. Moving back and forth across the mimetic threshold, Cook argues, the commercial trickster created an atmosphere of "representational indeterminacy." But this did not make him a postmodernist avant la lettre. In fact, what made Barnum & Co. historically interesting was that they and their audience ? for all their uncertainty ? remained at least ambivalently attached to literalist notions of reality, and to static taxonomies for dividing it up. In America in the middle of the nineteenth century, there were still many boundaries for an artful deceiver to cross. A society thronging with imposters clung to an Enlightenment conception of universal Truth, reinforced by a Protestant cult of sincerity. For all their epistemological playfulness, urban audiences shared an earnest Victorian desire to inhabit a society where people said what they meant and meant what they said. Yet this was not the sort of society in which they actually lived. The American republic was pervaded by "universal mistrust," as Charles Dickens observed when he toured the young country in 1842. This diffuse doubt about motives helped to foster longings for an unproblematic fit between appearance and actuality, and to sustain a mania for classifying character in accordance with surface markers of race, intelligence, and morality ? down to and including the phrenological reading of bumps on the head. Artful deceivers operated within this labyrinth of taxonomic categories, sometimes re-affirming them and sometimes calling their rigidity into question. At their most inventive, they performed the classical trickster's role, raising the curtain of convention and pointing to a larger world elsewhere. Whether they still do this is an open question. In Cook's view, the trickster's game is a recurring motif in our cultural history. "Artful deception never disappears for long," he observes. In any era, tricksters provide "the indeterminate object, the uncertain image, the morally suspect act ? an engaging assortment of cultural deceits with which an eager public gauges its moral and aesthetic thresholds, defines its worth." But his sole example from our own time is "professional" wrestling ? a form of mass entertainment in which the deception is anything but artful and the audience is so inured to fakery that they assume even serious accidents are part of the show. The World Wrestling Federation is not in the business of promoting perceptual games. Neither are the makers of "reality TV." Nor is Andy Warhol another version of William Harnett. By assuming continuity in commercial tricks, Cook neglects the transformations in the role of the trickster from Barnum's time to our own. Some of those changes involved the corporatization of the consumer economy. The Barnumesque trickster was a playful egalitarian: shifty and not to be trusted, but on a more or less equal footing with his audience, whose speculative curiosity he constantly courted. He survived into the era of corporate capitalism, but he was increasingly consigned to the fringes of the economy, where he consorted with peddlers and carnival barkers. During the twentieth century, the corporation's promotional tricks were rationalized by the wizards of the modern advertising industry. The mass culture that they created was hardly egalitarian. Its deceits allowed little public space for measuring their moral or aesthetic thresholds, or for defining their worth. Within the boundaries of corporate-sponsored entertainment, the trickster was reduced to a clumsy confidence man or a sitcom wise-ass. If trickster gestures preserved any cultural significance, it was in twentiethcentury art and literature. Often avant-garde tricks were little more than an elaborately extended middle finger, but sometimes they raised enduring questions concerning the caprice at the heart of experience and the futility of attempts to master it. Devotees of disorder, from Marcel Duchamp to John Cage, played counterpoint to the techno-utopian theme of the perfectly managed society or self. But eventually the avant-garde rituals of transgression, meant to shock an ever-shockable bourgeoisie, sank into predictability. Older literalist conceptions of reality had been eroded by a broad range of intellectual developments, from psychoanalysis to quantum physics to the sociology of knowledge ? as well as by artful deceivers in the marketplace. Taxonomies had toppled. By the late twentieth century, there were few epistemological boundaries left to transgress. In some intellectual circles, modern knowledge had devolved into postmodern knowingness. III. Cook documents the early stages of this cultural revolution, beginning with the automaton chess player that brought artful deception from late-Enlightenment court circles to the sidewalks of New York. The automaton chess player was a robot dressed as a turbaned Turk. It played with physical awkwardness but tactical brilliance, handily defeating seasoned opponents on both sides of the Atlantic. The secret of its success was the chess master concealed in the cabinet beneath the robot, directing its moves. The automaton was built in 1769 by Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen. A mid-rank Hungarian official at the court of Queen Maria Theresa, Kempelen epitomized the Enlightenment virtuoso, the gifted amateur artist-technician who provoked the ire of professionals but still won the respect of the public. Kempelen exhibited his automaton in the tradition of "marvelous objects," which by the late eighteenth century had become a free-floating entertainment industry. Mechanical curiosities as well as natural ones circulated independently of any court, cabinet, museum, or fair; and the cognitive struggle that they aroused ? occult intelligence or ingenious fakery? machine or man? ? sustained vernacular science while it entertained popular audiences. Kempelen was an impresario as well as a virtuoso, and his decision to dress the automaton as a Turk was a shrewd show-business appeal to racial exoticism. The fear of the Eastern Other jostled with the desire to master him by penetrating his secrets. Kempelen's automaton exuded a whiff of the amusement hall....... A text for you to hang on to. |
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Derradah
Rank: Toyah |
an angry sausage does not mince his words
replied on: 4/8/2004 5:33:05 PM And here's the way things may turn out: As Freud acknowledges in 'Analysis Terminable and Interminable' transference was an idealisation, a fictional tool that provides a way of working through messy life. It is the resistances, skids of meaning, clarifications, pun-loops that provide transference with its opening chance, but also its interminability, that we can take as something more, as the material for composition. Information transference here becomes a kind of laboratory sickness in which conceptual, disciplinary, juridical, cultural, political and other 'norms' or expectations of meaning and linkage - the switch tongue bound, made orderly - can also be adopted. Each search, but also each piece of software can usefully be approached as a transferral, a synthetic agglomeration of knowing, sensing and doing. When you drive a car your mind fills out to the space occupied by the vehicle. You sense its shape in order to manoeuvre safely, or however. Equally, conceptual proprioception can be elaborated in order to negotiate the multiple levels of meaning making in a search. The user mobilises and becomes infested with, composed through, flocks of sensoria, a billion symptoms, neurosis at the service of knowledge, or a simple sticky or slimy crawl of the switch-tongue at the point of slipping away into babble and the learning of language 1 http://www.mongrel.org.uk 2 There are also archive of sections of the net - the search engine DejaNews is working towards an archive of all usenet posts going back to its inception in 1979. 3 see info on the Echelon system http://caq.com/CAQ/CAQBackIssues.htm 4 http://www.mongrel.org.uk. This project (Coordinated for Mongrel by Harwood and MF) essentially presents itself as a straight search engine. When however any of several thousand words which are either directly racist or which have racialised connotations are entered as search strings, the Natural Selection search engine returns innocent looking results (those from whichever search engine it is currently sitting on top of) that when the link is actuated drop the user into one of the over thirty other sites on and off the mongrel domain. Collaborators in producing the work include: Hakim Bey, Byju, Critical Art Ensemble, Stewart Home and Daniel Waugh, Mervin Jarman, Richard Pierre-Davis, Dimela Yekwai, and others 5 http://www.mongrel.org.uk/BAA a site produced by Mervin Jarman 6 http://www.mongrel.org.uk/Venus a site produced in collaboration with Dimela Yekwai 7 Claude E. Shannon, A Mathematical Theory of Communication, The Bell System Technical Journal, Vol. 27 p379-423, 1948 8 Sigmund Freud, 'Transference', Introductory Lectures on Psychanalysis, the Penguin Freud Library vol 1. eds. Angela Richards |
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BrummieExpat
Rank: Jasper |
an angry sausage does not mince his words
replied on: 4/8/2004 5:37:28 PM Did you type all that out yourself or cut and paste? If you typed it you must have way too much time on your hands |
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peakyblinder
old hand Rank: Chinny |
satan doesn't love the unemployable
replied on: 4/8/2004 7:46:54 PM quote: Exactly what I was thinking. It seems that the devil doesn't always find work . . . |
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Mittonsmate
Rank: Jasper |
Barnum
replied on: 4/10/2004 8:38:18 AM So Paglia's polemic implying that pomo philosophy is basically a con-trick perpetrated on the gullible is historically confirmed then? Interestingly, regardless of whether Barnum was a proto-postmodernist, Ken Wilber suggests he was a proto-Darwinian evolutionist, as two decades before the publication of the Origin of Species he was advertising an exhibition of, quote - "the Ornithorhincus, or the connecting link between the seal and the duck; two distinct species of flying fish, which undoubtedly connect the bird and the fish; and the Mud Iguana, a connecting link between reptiles and fish - with other animals forming connecting links in the Great Chain of animated Nature." Wilber also points out that the term "missing link" in this context derives from the notion of the "Great Chain of Being," which constiutes the core concept of the mystical "philosophia perennis." |
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DocSausage
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Ken Wilber
replied on: 4/13/2004 12:37:44 PM Ken is always right |
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Derradah
Rank: Toyah This message was updated on 4/14/2004 3:40:45 PM by Derradah |
Found Objects
replied on: 4/14/2004 3:38:55 PM quote: The answer to this question is surely in the posting itself, and the one that follows. They are in fact objects found by chance.My own view(and it would be,would n't it)is that it is tangential but very relevant to the drift of the Mitton threads right from the beginning.As for having too much time on my hands, you don't know how fast I type. |
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Barriminge
Rank: Jasper |
Found Objects
replied on: 4/14/2004 4:00:03 PM Cut it out,Jack.And paste it.I thought this was the new Mitton thread.As for Charlie, I hear that he is back from the Burnley Blues Festival where his performance of both postmodern and traditional blues went down a storm.He did a paid set at the Keirby Hotel in front of an audience that included a whole rake of Northern guitar pickers.Matey will be interested to know that his recital included the National Assistance Blues.He sold 5 CD's and swapped one with bluesman Dave Speight for one of the latter's.He also was at Padiham Town Hall for the performance of Otis Grand and his Big Blues Band.He had a chat with Otis after the gig and did another CD swap.Kyla Brox, the daughter of Victor of John Mayall and Aynsley Dunbar fame was also on the bill at Padiham and she told him that her old man was still in Bordeaux and living frugally,doing small gigs in the area.Charlie ate two hearty traditional breakfasts at his B and B and had a Lancashire meat pie on Saturday evening before watching Big Bill Morganfield's Band.He is the son of Muddy Waters. |
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Mittonsmate
Rank: Jasper |
Keep playin' those eerie blues, man
replied on: 4/15/2004 1:29:46 PM Yes, Charlie can really get it together when he manages to stay off the booze. |
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Barriminge
Rank: Jasper |
Keep playin' those eerie blues, man
replied on: 4/15/2004 3:01:19 PM quote: Too right,man.I'm rooting for him.In fact I'm told that last night he played with the Sutton Blues Collective at the Station in Sutton Coldfield with his long time friend from when they were both beatniks at the Stage Door coffee bar in the now demolished New Meeting St.near Carrs Lane,Jez 'Harmonica'Parsons.Their renderings of such seminal pieces as 'Key to the Highway','Back Door Man'and 'So Many Roads'was warmly received.Unfortuneately none of the tight-fisted bastards bought a CD.Mind you ,he did n't say that he had any.By the way Big Red's out of the loony bin and wants to meet for a drink.Always a bad sign.Fancy it? |
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Mittonsmate
Rank: Jasper |
Keep playin' those eerie blues, man
replied on: 4/15/2004 3:37:37 PM quote: Yep, O.K. Any particular park bench in mind? Or how about taking Big Red to see Trevor Burton at the Actress on Monday night? Bring Zsa-Zsa along too. |
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Barriminge
Rank: Jasper |
Keep playin' those eerie blues, man
replied on: 4/15/2004 4:27:10 PM Yeh man,let's have a party.Also though Fish is here and he says that you should get a life. He recommends a break in Hastings. |
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Mittonsmate
Rank: Jasper |
Keep playin' those eerie blues, man
replied on: 4/16/2004 3:57:28 AM quote: Tell Fish to go f*ck himself. |
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Barriminge
Rank: Jasper |
Keep playin' those eerie blues, man
replied on: 4/16/2004 10:29:00 AM quote:quote: I think that it was a veiled reference to the fact that Iain Sinclair has a flat in Hastings.Don't ask me why.Sinclair is doing a talk at The London Review Bookshop in Bloomsbury on the 29th.I've told Charlie who has said that he is going to do like Gregory Corso and go along to heckle.Fancy it? |
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