'Nothing But Morons'? Confessions of a record collector part 2

My experience of record collecting is not much like this. I go into record shops, ask for Field Mice 10" LPs and endure the scorn of the famed Record Shop Git. 

In fact, much like this:



(Although he is right about those particular bands). I read High Fidelity when it came out and felt that Hornby rather uncomfortably knew me far too well. I went to see the film too, and watched at a 90 degree angle, craning to see what records were on the shelves, which essentially proved Hornby right about us. My sister observed at the end of the film that I was 'just like Rob'. She then thought better of this comparison, having pointedly noted that 'he gets a girlfriend in the end'.

So yesterday, I droned on about record collecting and Walter Benjamin's piece about unpacking his library. Today, I thought I'd point you towards Jean Baudrillard's The System of Objects, and in particular the section 'A Marginal System: Collecting'. Although he doesn't explicitly say so until a long way in to the essay, his concentration on the 'passion' of collecting is derived from Freud's work on fetishisation and sublimation. I'm not a Freud (or Baudrillard, or anything) expert so I won't push this point too far, but the essence is that the object need not be at all interesting or special to raise passion. Baudrillard's very keen to emphasise that while we're all obsessed with 'human' passions, our enormous investment in owning things goes relatively unnoticed.

they become mental precincts over which I hold sway, they become things of which I am the meaning, they become my property and my passion

This isn't use value: I will never again play some of my records, or re-read some of my books. Indeed a few of them will never be read – I wanted them as objects, not as functional carriers of information. Baudrillard differentiates between objects which mediate between the self and the world (refrigerators, spoons) and therefore can't be objects of passion but remain functional tools (although people with Object Sexuality might disagree, particularly the woman who left the Berlin Wall for a fence) and objects which can be wholly possessed, through which the individual constructs their senses of him/herself and a private world. Books and records, for me, fulfil this purpose at the moment though I must admit that my record collecting mania is fading and I'm trying to read more books than I buy. 

Some objects can be both functional and possession, or move from one status to the other (usually functional to possession): for instance a chair which starts off being useful and ends up as an antique with a 'do not touch' sign on it, valued for its rarity, age or beauty. Something like this, for instance:



What is it?



(I took those pictures at Neuadd Gregynog Hall, the stately home owned by the University of Wales). It's an extreme example proving that anything can move from functional to possessive status. It can go the other way too: witness Dublin's mania for demolishing grand Georgian houses in the 1960s and 1970s as an anti-colonialist gesture, now sorely regretted.

Once a thing becomes an object, an extension of its owner's psyche, it is part of a collection, and cannot exist alone, according to Baudrillard.

And just one object no longer suffices: the fulfilment of the project of possession always means a succession or even a complete series of objects. This is why owning absolutely any object is always so satisfying and so disappointing at the same time: a whole series lies behind any single object, and makes it into a source of anxiety.

 I could own one record by The Field Mice, but it wouldn't be a collection and it wouldn't be significant.

Here's some Field Mice:





and my favourite track by their successor band, Trembling Blue Stars:



(They're dedicated to Ben, who thinks my affection for The Field Mice demonstrates everything that's wrong with me, and indie music).

The object becomes important once it is part of a network (Field Mice records, Sarah Records output, Field Mice records I won versus Field Mice records I don't yet own). The last bit is essential but also destructive. Possessing everything is I guess possible, but without the quest, life would be dull indeed. Not possessing everything though: that's awful.

And just one object no longer suffices: the fulfilment of the project of possession always means a succession or even a complete series of objects. This is why owning absolutely any object is always so satisfying and so disappointing at the same time: a whole series lies behind any single object, and makes it into a source of anxiety.

That's what keeps capitalism going: the anxiety caused by not possessing the entire set, the latest phone or the best shoes – desire is always temporarily satisfied and simultaneously de-satisfied. This is the permanent state of the collector. And, says Baudrillard, the same goes for sexual relations. The person you're sleeping with right now is a unique being, s/he/it is one of a series of possession you're currently pretending constitutes the totality of objects you can possess.Your current lover is significant because s/he/it refers to all the other potential, abstract lovers. The same goes for my books.

It's complicated: that's why it's so vital and enthralling:

Our ordinary environment is always ambiguous: functionality is forever collapsing into subjectivity, and possession is continually getting entangled with utility, as part of the ever-disappointed effort to achieve a total integration. Collecting, however, offers a model here: through collecting, the passionate pursuit of possession finds fulfilment and the everyday prose of objects is transformed into poetry, into a triumphant unconscious discourse.

Baudrillard sees collecting as a childish urge, in the purest sense: it gives the child a sense of structure and control in a world which affords the child no power or control. It's illusory, and immensely satisfying. Perhaps it's the same for me: I can fool myself that reading – or just owning – all these books makes me a viable human being, despite knowing that it's a very long time since it was possible to read all the books or know everything (i.e. everything Western European white men thought was worth knowing). There were several candidates: Thomas Young, Athanasius Kirchner, Alexander von Humboldt and a few others (this was of course before Foucault et al. got rid of 'knowledge' and replaced it with 'knowledges', but that's another blog).

But let's take Batman's advice and return to Baudrillard:

The child dominates the world through endlessly rearranging the collections: cars, dolls, worms, whatever. For most of them, puberty puts an end to it, but it re-emerges in forty-something men – known in the music business as £50 Man after his habit of appearing in a record shop and frantically splurging £50 every time. It wasn't like that for me. I read books obsessively but didn't own anything until my mid-teens. Getting to university, I began acquiring books and records on a grand scale. I looked down on £50 Man as a miser and an amateur. As I've detailed elsewhere, Cob Records in Bangor became the equivalent of a drug dealer with me as a desperate, dependent user. 

In short, there is in all cases a manifest connection between collecting and sexuality, and this activity appears to provide a powerful compensation during critical stages of sexual development. This tendency clearly runs counter to active genital sexuality, although it is not simply a substitute for it.

Perhaps the single-sex education retarded my development even more than I suspected, because acquisition has become a depressing mainstay of my existence. I can dignify it by restricting it to goods with high cultural capital, but that's just snobbery. Basically, Baudrillard reckons that collecting is the unsatisfying sublimated expression of unfulfilled sexual desire required by losers (later on he calls it 'a tempered form of sexual perversion'). (My friends can add their observations in the comments box). He uses Freud's terms ('the anal stage') to categorise adult collectors as men (Freudians seem utterly uninterested in women's experiences) who require orderliness and accumulation to make up for what's lacking on the sexual front, with a side-order of defensive snobbery:

It is this passionate involvement which lends a touch of the sublime to the regressive activity of collecting; it is also the basis of the view that anyone who does not collect something is ‘nothing but a moron, a pathetic human wreck’.

I used to tell people about the student many years ago who looked disdainfully at my office shelves and remarked 'You're just like my mum. She reads books and keeps them'. When I said I liked the sound of her mum, the student replied 'No, it's stupid'.  Good god, I would remark: we're admitting students who have no interest in books, knowledge, learning for its own sake'. But according to Baudrillard and Freud, she got it right. She's psychologically healthy because she doesn't need to develop strong attachments to objects, whereas I'm compensating for some lack.

Baudrillard's post-Freudian insight is that the actual object doesn't matter at all. It's the object's existence in a chain or a network of other objects which the collector will attempt to acquire (though objects never possessed are as important as those which are eventually acquired). The collector adores each individual object and simultaneously desires all the others: the objects are the occupants of a harem:

the collector loves his objects on the basis of their membership in a series, whereas the connoisseur loves his on account of their varied and unique charm, is not a decisive one.

Collecting is thus qualitative in its essence and quantitative in its practice…there is something of the harem about collecting, for the whole attraction may be summed up as that of an intimate series (one term of which is at any given time the favourite) combined with a serial intimacy.

This is of course a disturbingly gendered analogy which deserves its own critique at some point, but Baudrillard's point is that the collector maintains a degree of cognitive dissonance: when communing with one object in his collection he thinks he's monogamous, but really he's polygamous and can never stop adding to his collection. In a sense, he points out, being a collector is even easier than negotiating the complexity of human relationships.

Human relationships, home of uniqueness and conflict, never permit any such fusion of absolute singularity with infinite seriality — which is why they are such a continual source of anxiety. By contrast, the sphere of objects, consisting of successive and homologous terms, reassures.

The problem with humans is that they want things. I'm told that they have feelings, and they definitely don't do what they're told. It's very inconvenient. They have, in short, agency. This is what the collector can't deal with. Object are much better: they don't move out when you're not looking, or object to your Marmite-based perversions etc. etc. They lack agency and therefore allow you the illusion of control (an illusion because the collection is never complete). I don't know if this is true, actually. I collect things and manage to maintain cordial relations with fellow human beings. As far as I can tell I'm relatively well-adjusted to the notion that other people have agency which needs to be respected. I haven't hobbled anyone to keep them in the house for weeks.

(don't watch this if you're of a nervous disposition)



For Baudrillard, collecting is a monstrous act of egomania which makes up for the inconvenient truth that humans are hard to bend to one's own will unless you take drastic steps as depicted above.

In the plural, objects are the only entities in existence that can genuinely coexist…they all converge submissively upon me and accumulate with the greatest of ease in my consciousness.

Collecting is the defensive act of the loser:

But we must not allow ourselves to be taken in by this, nor by the vast literature that sentimentalizes inanimate objects. The ‘retreat’ involved here really is a regression, and the passion mobilized is a passion for flight.

And it's hard to disagree when you meet adult Bronies (men who collect and obsess about My Little Pony) or see them stigmatised in the appalling and misunderstood Big Bang Theory, though my feelings about that show can wait for a future entry. Here's a clip from a show which explicitly addresses the tension between functional objects and possessed objects, though its resolution (Sheldon breaks the toy he's persuaded to treat as function, against his instincts, proving him right but still a loser):

In the end, any object in a collection, and the collection as a whole (though that's not strictly possible)  is a mirror, a narcissist's fantasy:

what you really collect is always yourself.

This makes it easier to understand the structure of the system of possession: any collection comprises a succession of items, but the last in the set is the person of the collector.

The series and the collection allow the collector to integrate with his objects in a hermeneutic state of perfection. Even if you reduce your collection to one perfect example, you're still a collector, because, JB says, that object is simply a referent for every other similar object, a realised version of the Platonic ideal.

Most strikingly, Baudrillard asserts that the unobtained object is the most important one in the collection. Its value to you increases because it will (perhaps temporarily) complete your collection. That one missing book in the series, that final Zimbabwean double-A side live recording is valuable not for any intrinsic worth, but simply because you don't have it. And yet you don't really want it. It symbolises death.

One cannot but wonder whether collections are in fact meant to be completed, whether lack does not play an essential part here — a positive one, moreover, as the means whereby the subject reapprehends his own objectivity. If so, the presence of the final object of the collection would basically signify the death of the subject, whereas its absence would be what enables him merely to rehearse his death (and so exorcize it) by having an object represent it.

madness begins once a collection is deemed complete and thus ceases to centre around its absent term. 

If your psyche is completely invested in collecting, what happens when you have to stop because you've got everything? Quite often, collectors switch arbitrarily to other collections, demonstrating that the objects are worthless too them: it's the process that gives the collector meaning and value. John Laroche, the notorious orchid thief, wasn't always an orchid obsessive. First it was turtles, then fossils, lapidary, then tropical fish, collections he took up arbitrarily and dropped arbitrarily. Clearly the fossils, fish and orchids don't matter in the slightest: they're just a way of keeping score.


I don't think I'm that bad. Books are my delight, my leisure and my occupation. Music moves me emotionally. And yet: having these things is a major part of my enjoyment that I can't deny. It's true, though, that these things no longer drive me. When I was young, Cob Records would drip-feed my items I couldn't afford in one go. I happily spent more on books and music than on rent and food, to the extent that my finances were a mess. I'm no longer like that. The completist urge is still there, but paradoxically the easier it is to satisfy those desires, the less I try to. Now I can afford to buy most of what I want, I don't buy them, because the search felt more authentic than the possession. There's no pressure to find the missing Field Mice albums because I can now wave a cheque at a time of my choosing, rather than sacrifice other things to acquire them. Like I say: it's not the object that matters, though if any of you do have any Field Mice 10" and gig-only Stereolab releases, let me know.

Baudrillard knew I'd say that, by the way:

every collector who presented his collection to the viewing audience would mention the very special ‘object’ that he did not have, and invite everyone to find it for him. So, even though objects may on occasion lead into the realm of social discourse, it must be acknowledged that it is usually not an object’s presence but far more often its absence that clears the way for social intercourse.

Ultimately, collecting is a denial of mortality for anxious, ephemeral Man (again, Baudrillard universalises habits he previously noted were a male domain):

What man gets from objects is not a guarantee of life after death but the possibility, from the present moment onwards, of continually experiencing the unfolding of his existence in a controlled, cyclical mode, symbolically transcending a real existence the irreversibility of whose progression he is powerless to affect.

the object is the thing with which we construct our mourning: the object represents our own death, but that death is transcended (symbolically) by virtue of the fact that we possess the object; the fact that by introjecting it into a work of mourning — by integrating it into a series in which its absence and its re-emergence elsewhere ‘work’ at replaying themselves continually, recurrently — we succeed in dispelling the anxiety associated with absence and with the reality of death.

We collect because we cannot stop time, nor death.  Which isn't far from my personal view that on the cosmic scale of things, anything we do is merely whiling away the brief, purposeless time between black nothingnesses. So why not obsess about Smiths records? It's better than committing war crimes or voting Tory. It's not totally grim, says Baudrillard: collecting integrates onrushing death into life, thereby allowing us to live, paradoxically, because collecting expresses and is driven by desire.

While I have my reservations about Baudrillard's argument (and it's early, heavily Freudian work which he superseded), I do recognise many aspects, including this section on book collecting:

Research shows that buyers of books published in series (such as 10/18 or Que sais-je?33), once they are caught up in collecting, will even acquire titles of no interest to them: the distinctiveness of the book relative to the series itself thus suffices to create a purely formal interest which replaces any real one. The motive of purchase is nothing but this contingent association. A comparable kind of behaviour is that of people who cannot read comfortably unless they are surrounded by all their books; in such cases the specificity of what is being read tends to evaporate. Even farther down the same path, the book itself may count less than the moment when it is put back in its proper place on the shelf. Conversely, once a collector’s enthusiasm for a series wanes it is very difficult to revive, and now he may not even buy volumes of genuine interest to him. This is as much evidence as we need to draw a clear distinction between serial motivation and real motivation. The two are mutually exclusive and can coexist only on the basis of compromise, with a notable tendency, founded on inertia, for serial motivation to carry the day over the dialectical motivation of interest.

Put simply: sometimes my desire for completion overcomes my acknowledge lack of interest in a book's intrinsic artistic worth. It's offensive and decadent, especially in a time of deprivation, and yet I still do it.

There's a lot more to Baudrillard's argument, but too much of it is structured by a crude sexual division which makes me uncomfortable, and I strongly suspect I've outstayed my welcome. If you've got this far: thank you. I doff my hat to you. Here's Baudrillard's parting shot for people like me (and you?)

…he collects objects that in some way always prevent him from regressing into the ultimate abstraction of a delusional state, but at the same time the discourse he thus creates can never — for the very same reason — get beyond a certain poverty and infantilism.

So if non- collectors are indeed ‘nothing but morons’, collectors, for their part, invariably have something impoverished and inhuman about them.

Awesome! Destruction pornography and the loss of empathy

You might know that one of my hobbies is photography: landscapes, architecture, fencing and occasionally events I'm at. While I've never photographed serious disorder or destruction, I can really feel the pull for the photographer.

Today, I've been writing a lecture on Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, a novel which alternates between the documentary and the mythic as it attempts to explain the mass misery of the Dustbowl and the suffering of one fictional family within the fleeing mass, the Joads. I'm thinking aloud about the tensions between the novel form and wider society, about didacticism, naturalism, propaganda, proletarian fiction and bourgeois form etc. etc. I'm illustrating the lecture with a series of pictures from the Dustbowl, particularly those of Dorothea Lange, whose most famous image is a kind of Okie Madonna:

Is this photograph exploitative? It looks posed, to evoke the traditional Christian Madonna and Child, building in all sorts of cultural expectations about gendered expectations, motherhood and maternal emotions. It's a didactic picture to some extent: perhaps we're meant to feel outrage at these people's condition even while we admire her fortitude and beauty.

These images make me think too of the very popular trend for what I call destruction porn. You know the kind of thing: evocative pictures of wrecked buildings or even cities. They seemed to start with the destruction of Chernobyl, then Detroit and were popularised by urban explorers breaking into abandoned hospitals, cinemas and factories (I've done a little of this myself) and all share an aesthetic.

Detroit

The lighting is low and natural. Wrecked machines feature strongly, while an abandoned toy or dusty medical implement lies in the foreground.

Chernobyl

That Chernobyl one is pretty much the money shot of the urban destruction photographer: a gas mask for an apocalyptic thrill, a child's shoe for added pathos. (That shot, by the way, is from totallycoolpix.com, which tells you all you need to know about the moral sensibility of its photographer and fans). Damian the unscrupulous war reporter in Drop the Dead Donkey always carried around a broken teddy bear and a 'blood-stained plimsoll' for this very purpose.



These pictures are always urban, perhaps because the photographers and viewers get a little frisson from the sense that Western Industrialism isn't – as we were promised – Progress, inevitable and one-way.

Im starting to think there's something entirely decadent about this kind of thing - the idea of taking the photographer's tour of derelict Detroit fills me with horror. It feels like a tour round Bedlam or a colonial trip to the Reservation. Why not just hang about in a funeral parlour or A+E snapping the dead and wounded for Instagram? It's not even difficult photography. Decent SLR, no flash, tripod, prime lens, long exposure and narrow aperture. As to composition: lazy and clichéd. Gerard Manley Hopkins got it right:

NOT, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more.

Which leads me to the latest twist on this vampiric art. I've been following the reports of Kiev's rebellion through the newspapers and social media. I read the Guardian, which has a particularly brilliant picture editor. There's always something to make me gasp or admire the skill of the photographer. Today's images from Ukraine were no different.

It's hard to photograph this kind of scene. Once you've seen one riot, you've seen them all, though the architecture and the rebels' knowing medievalism (a full size ballista!) helps them stand out for the cameras. It's also dangerous, obviously. To take 'good' photographs and not be killed in the protest is astonishing.

But. The Guardian has a photo-gallery up of these and similar images and I'm not convinced that they're offered as evidence of an awful, awful event. They seem to be offered as a spectacle, something technically stupendous (the composition!) and begging for comparison with so many other apocalyptic: in Baudrillardian terms, the spectacle has replaced the event, which can't be so neatly captured.

But the Guardian isn't what most bothers me. On Twitter, these and many other images are being passed round without any reference to what's actually happening in the Maidan. Instead, 'before and after' shots are offered to emphasise the sheer scale of destruction: this isn't empathy or political support. The images which are circulating are those which most resemble video games, particularly the 'Cursed Earth' ones in which heavily-armoured players fight off radioactive mutants or aliens. They also resemble John Martin's massive Victorian canvases:

Pandemonium

The Eruption of Vesuvius

Martin's work perhaps had the effect of making his viewers consider their own hubris and folly, but mostly what paintings like this do is aestheticise suffering and play on the viewer's knowledge of what's about to happen, which those in the pictures lack. I find this utterly smug, decadent and pretty repulsive. 

Fallout 4 deliberately mimics a well-known Chernobyl shot here, reducing a massive catastrophe to a violent Bildungsroman with an evocative backdrop:

while Resistance is merely one of many which sets ultimate battles between humans or humans and aliens in a ravaged urban backdrop reminiscent of Homs or Kiev:

Which is all a very longwinded way of saying that the kinds of images circulated today, and the comments people are making, disturb me. They aren't empathetic. They seem informed by the scale of destruction and the aesthetics of the image rather than what's signified: a classic state of Baudrillardian hyper-reality, fuelled by video games, but also by the propaganda of states which encourage 'shock and awe' while simultaneously promoting the idea that war is as clinical and harmless as playing a video game.

As for those in Maidan Square? Great pics, guys! Good luck with whatever it is you're after! See you!

Update: moronically, I'd completely forgotten until reminded by @qui_oui that Susan Sontag has already considered all this in her book about photography, Regarding the Pain of Others in which she attacks the way news photography fuels a consumerist appetite for destruction shorn of compassion or empathy. Every new atrocity is simply food for our jaded appetites. Yes, we need to know about the horrors of the world, but what are we doing with this knowledge other than marvelling at the images? Much as I object to the Guardian's photo-gallery, Sontag objects to the glossy magazine presentation, shorn of intermediating, interpreting words.

A preview of a record I haven't listened to yet.

I got Euros Childs' ninth solo album last week, Situation Comedy. It's on double-vinyl, spread across three sides, in a lovely gatefold package. As consumer fetish items go, it's lovely. Every time I buy one of his albums, it comes with a personal note, which is wonderful, though it makes me worry that he doesn't have enough fans to make personal notes unviable. And this delightful touch is clearly an attempt to remedy the implied impersonality of the exchange too: it highlights one of capitalism's problems. Which made me think about things more closely, as you'll see if you read on…

What's the music like? No idea. I haven't taken it home to play it yet. But in a sense, that's beside the point. You see, I buy most of my music on vinyl when it's available. There are a number of reasons why: mostly for the romance of it. When I started buying music as a fresh-faced, well, fresher, the local shop was Cob Records. It mostly sold vinyl because it mostly sold indie, prog and Welsh-language stuff. Vinyl was cheap, and it was rather conservative way of asserting difference to (from?) the shiny consumer futurism of CDs. Britpop's nostalgic element fuelled the vinyl craze, releasing multiple versions of songs on coloured vinyl at 99p each, all 'limited edition' which just fuelled my completism. I loved the sleeves, the numbers, the little messages on the run-off grooves, the ritual of placing the needle on the disc and getting up to turn over a record. I have at least 20,000 circular oil-based discs in my flat now, too many to play particularly often.

I can't claim that sound quality was foremost for me: I was using a cheap early 1970s record player with horrible speakers connected with cables thinner than shoelaces. By the mid-2000s I'd acquired my parents' 1985 Sony hi-fi but that wasn't much better. I've only had a decent-ish system for a couple of years now. No, in all honesty, I bought vinyl because I thought it was cool, and because it didn't feel as acquisitive as 'mainstream' consumption. Which it is, of course. It's the 'leftfield dollar', as Bill Hicks would no doubt call it: self-deluding hipsters eagerly hoovering up resistance on a pressed black disc.

But at least in those days, I could claim that vinyl was a mainstream, respectable format rather than purely a fetish object. When I unwrapped Situation Comedy last week, I realised that something had changed. The record player isn't just a slightly hypocritical act of lame defiance with which I can live, it really is a betrayal of modernity. Why? Well, I'm used to LPs now coming with a slip of paper bearing a download code, so that I can get the music on my computer and iPod. It's an explicit, if slightly shameful, recognition on the part of musician, record label and listener that the slab of vinyl is meaningless. It's virtually never going to be used. It's a luxury item whose semiotic meanings (time, luxury, conspicuous superiority over those oiks downloading ragged Rihanna MP3s) have completely overwhelmed the format's use-value. That sneaky bit of paper implies that even the most purist music snobs are actually going to dismember the album into its constituent parts and listen to random songs on Shuffle. If not, then at least it's going to be played on the bus, in the gym or used as background to washing-up or solitary self-abuse. Whatever.

What gave me pause with Situation Comedy is that no slip of paper fluttered out of the packaging and it bothered me. Who does Euros Childs think he is? He's written a set of songs which he wants me to settle down and listen to in order, from beginning to end. It's possible to skip songs on an LP but it's a bit fiddly. At the end of each side, you have to get up, lift the needle, turn the record over, put the needle back on the disc and start up the player again. In case that becomes too automatic, Childs has left a side blank, so that if you unthinkingly drop the needle on that side, you'll get a foul screeching noise and the pristine smoothness will be forever scratched.

It's a brave thing to do. Childs has decided that his art is no longer to be the soundtrack for other activities, it's to be an event in itself. The album is available on CD too, of course, or you can download it for free here, but the stand-alone LP implies that for those of us reactionary enough to insist on a heritage format, we'll have to really commit to the experience. Without the download option, it's no longer a postmodern joke: paying close attention to the aural and physical album is our only option. It is, in a sense, an implied challenge to we vinyl fans: face the consequences of what might have seemed an easy choice. Though one could of course argue that offering the MP3s for free is a coded critique of the downloader: buying the vinyl means buying restriction, commitment, time and attention. Downloading the music for free is to acquire something which is going to be pulled apart and treated like junk food. In a sense, paying Euros Childs for an untransferable format like vinyl is an investment in oneself.

Walter Benjamin wrote about this nexus of experience and feelings in 1936, in 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'. In it, he differentiated between the experience of viewing a painting and viewing a photograph of a painting. To him, every further reproduction distances the consumer from the 'aura' of an authentic piece of art. Into this space, he suggests, is silently introduced an authoritarian dullness: without the immediate experience of the artwork, we're at the mercy of the reproducer's choices and intentions, while we develop an unhealthy reverence for the artist of the 'original' piece of work. A Monet painting, it seems, is only worth millions because we're all overly-familiar with postcard reproductions. Although there are positives to the loss of 'aura', Benjamin worries that by becoming captivated by the process of mechanical reproduction (the wonder of CDs, vinyl, or moving pictures), we're abandoning the ability to enjoy or appreciate an artwork autonomously or subjectively.

To Benjamin, the vinyl record is merely a mechanical reproduction of a real event. It isn't as good, and it has different qualities. If Euros Childs had been around in 1936, the 'event' would have been his performance, and the recorded versions a pale imitation (though the divergence between live recording and the production of music designed to be listened to on any format adds another layer of complexity: some records can never be performed live). Yet the act of listening to the record in other situations would have had a very different meaning to the act of experiencing the live creation of music in a concert hall or studio.

In the 1980s, Jean Baudrillard returned to Benjamin's theme with his notions of simulation and simulacra. To him, postmodern society had interposed layers of imitation between itself and reality, to the extent that 'reality' had been replaced, or even sought to imitate the imitation (Apple's use until recently of paper-and-leather-effect skeuomorphism, I think, betrayed a certain discomfort with simulation, while ironically and accidentally distancing us even further from 'authentic' paper and leather).

When vinyl was the only available format, it was a 'first-order' simulation: a recognisable illusion standing in for the 'real' event, the original performance. The closest one could get, having missed the concert or wanting to hear it again. With increasing technical wizardry, the LP became a second-order simulation, so all-encompassing and convincing that it both pays homage to and threatens to overwhelm the 'real' – such as when the music heard on a record couldn't possibly be performed in real-time. Finally, in the postmodern period, then vinyl record becomes a third-order simulation, in which it appears to be both real and non-real, leaving behind any concern for authenticity and reality.

I doubt they'd agree, but I think Situation Comedy is both a third-order simulation and an attempt to deal with the loss of 'aura' in Benjamin's terms. Because Euros hasn't included a handy download for convenience, he's insisting that the experience of listening to his music becomes more 'real': it demands that I set aside time, that I pay attention to the physical object, to the grooves and the end of each side, that I listen to each song in the order its composer ordained. Yet at the same time, because a mechanically-reproduced event becomes my aim, the musician's original performance disappears completely. I chose not to have a CD, and therefore chose to add the complications and delights of vinyl. The experience was meaningless when only vinyl was available: so to choose it over CD or a download is to insist that the music is actually less important than the experience of the format.

I'm sure that Situation Comedy is a superb album, because Euros Childs' music always is. But what seemed like a slightly nostalgic decision actually turns out to be more complicated than I thought. And not entirely one as anti-capitalist and rebellious as I thought! Will I get the free download and solve all my cultural problems? Maybe, but not yet: having committed to the vinyl and the listening experience it demands, I'll at least go home, drop the needle and pay proper attention first.

Anyway, if you've got this far, you deserve some kind of reward. Here's some Euros Childs, starting with the single from Situation Comedy.





Here are a couple of tracks from Euros's first band, Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, as a teenager. True to form, I have it on 10" vinyl…



My favourite GZM song. Always cheers me up:

The wanderer returns to a scene of devastation

To judge from the media coverage, I was returning to a smoking, post-apocalyptic ruin, or - as the BBC's celebrity Tory slaphead Nick Robinson put it - 'a city living in fear'. What do I see? Ok, there are lots of shops boarded up, but most of them were before the riot. The major vandalism that greets me is the economic vandalism of a government which puts its financier friends' interests before those of the citizenry.

Obviously I haven't been back to my flat yet (work first!): if that's looted, I'll join you in the queue for a pitchfork and a copy of the Daily Mail. But in the meantime, let's do a little light thinking.

There's a dead French philosopher called Jean Baudrillard. He liked getting headlines with gnomic pronouncements guaranteed to annoy empiricist Englishmen, but sometimes he made very salient points.

One of these is the notion of potlatch and the gift, which he tripped over during his anthropology/sociology days. Gifts, in most cultures, create obligations. Except of course, for those of my social circle who remain unfamiliar with the concept of buying one's round. Now, if you're permanently placed in the position of recipient with no hope of ever reciprocating, you're in a hard place: shame, resentment and anger are common responses.

We could think of these street rioters as eternal recipients of gifts they neither want nor need, often in the form of ineffectual schemes, politicians of photo-opportunities, or simply the constant presence of wealth, always out of touch: in London or on TV. The response to this 'gift' is fury.

These kids aren't political, but they are - as all mobs are - part of politics, though they lack the language to express it (partly because politics has become a private and self-perpetuating tribe). They've been encouraged to consume even as our leaders have deliberately removed all the opportunities to legally acquire: EMA withdrawn, university access removed, decent wages cut - and at the same time, the rich are becoming obscenely richer, even those who've smashed our economy to pieces in pursuit of private gain.

You know I don't condone the random violence we've seen; but that doesn't mean I can't understand where it's coming from.

One of the most disgusting responses I've seen over the past few days is the plan to throw offenders out of their council houses. A few problems with this:
1. Councils have a legal duty to house the homeless. So they'll just be moved on.
2. Offenders' families are being thrown out too - made homeless because of the actions of someone else.
3. This means that poor criminals are being punished twice. I rent my flat privately, so if I go looting with a lad from a council house, I'll only get half the punishment he does.

This last point is serious: we have a legal system which supposedly hands out impartial punishment. But then, David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson were once part of a gang which operated in the Oxford area, the sole purpose of which was to smash up law-abiding people's property. After they'd had their fun, they'd hand over bundles of banknotes to hush it up. They clearly think there's a difference between 'pure criminality' which requires a crackdown, and 'high-jinks'. I wonder if their victims agree. So does this gentleman.

No monopoly on modernity

This is an old point if you've read Baudrillard or Stockhausen on what we're forced to call 9/11 instead of 11/9, but it's worth repeating in the light of these explosives parcels found on cargo planes originating in Yemen.

The globalisation model asserts that bringing western capitalism to the rest of the world should somehow 'civilise' them, dissolve old ideologies such as race or religion. One world under consumerism. Once everybody has a McDonald's, the argument suggests, we'll live in a shiny world of modernity in which technology and efficient markets will serve our needs, cutting out the fighting and barbarism of the past.

The counter-argument is that modernity has made us more savage: the Holocaust wouldn't have been possible without an efficient, modern railway network, high-tech chemical factories to produce Zyklon-B and IBM's accounting machines. We wouldn't have considered dividing the world between capitalism and communism, leading to the horrors of Vietnam, Cambodia, Matabeleland and many others were it not for the shiny clean tech of nuclear weapons.

The latest bombing attempt underlines this. Modernity has given everyone the chance to participate in globalisation, but only the West is shocked when globalisation is used as a weapon against us. '9/11' used the air network: this weekend's attempt utilised the fact that even a failed state like Yemen has access to DHL. Where governments fear to tread, a capitalist parcel delivery operation still has offices. No global parcel network, no bombs sent to very specific addresses in Chicago.

Baudrillard talks about this in terms of 'potlatch', the sophisticated system of gifting and obligation employed by 'tribes' (as if only Others live in them). We're outraged that we've 'given' Others the privilege of joining us and DHL and McDonald's and the UN etc. etc. etc. and they've turned those networks against us because the 'gift' is too unbalanced, too great for comprehension.

Fukuyama and his fans who claimed the 'End of History' were utterly wrong. Modernity didn't settle the old arguments, it swept them under the carpet until the Others realised that they too could turn the structures, systems and mechanics of Modernity against us. All this is encapsulated in a bomb-maker going down to queue at a postal office in some flyblown Yemeni village.

Steve Bell sums it all up rather well:

Postmodernism in the classroom

We're on to the 'grammar of identity' - how we narrate ourselves and our histories. What's the risk: 'producing a static genre of self' (Hill, 2000) - the idea that the individual has reached a point of perfection which experience shouldn't change. This is something I've experienced in class - students who aren't curious because their lives are fine exactly as they are. But I really don't think that ending 'celebrating diversity', as we've just been told to do, will help. We're being told to go beyond the 'piety' of evoking the cultural wounds of oppression to avoid 'refus[ing' any type of modification, amplification, or meaningful metamorphosis in the face of unfamiliar experiences' (Hill).

This is dodgy. Yes, identity politics is limited, but I can't reconcile a privileged Anglo-Saxon white bourgeois telling the poor, black and colonialised that it's time to move on from the effects of empire and colonialism - despite the effects still being experienced. I'm not convinced that many people are 'held' by their cultural inheritance - they already are dynamic and individual, while not forgetting their histories.

Another colleague singled out.

The solution seems to be that individuals are 'singular'. Yet this makes the mistake of assuming that we are somehow self-created, rather than a confluence of experiences and cultural inheritances. The experiences and the inheritances aren't unique - but the combination is. We aren't stable and fixed - we are dynamic constructs rather than fixed points.

As an aside: Last of the Summer Wine has been cancelled, after 37 years.

Student should 'organise who they are through ambition'. Hmmm…

We should forget 'cross-cultural encounters' and encourage students to distance themselves from their roots. Implicitly, this means the black and foreign ones - implicit because we don't 'celebrate' the Anglo-imperialist pasts of our white English students. We shouldn't only 'celebrate' students' roots - but how does this apply to a diverse classroom? All this would be fine if we didn't exist within a society that is still culturally white, imperialist, Western and capitalist. It's not a level playing field. We still need to critique the dominant narrative, to learn more about the marginalised cultures which she's trying to move past.

We should 'move beyond self-defeating concepts of difference', especially nationalism. Fine if we're combatting BNP nationalism - not so fine if you're nationalist Northern Irish, or Palestinian.

Baudrillardist's being mentioned again - apparently his book on Baudrillard is beautiful and more intelligible than Baudrillard (proved by her definition of Baudrillardian exchange).

Maybe I'm being cruel, but I've heard a melange of 30 year old theorists used to basically say that it's time to stop worrying about global inequality, cultural hegemony and so on - individual 'exchanges' are what matters, so let's be nice to each other on a personal level and our students will be 'global citizens' without having to know a single thing about global politics, history or economics. No sense of how this is meant to tie in with teaching, nor any of how British students are meant to experience the world other than by sitting in class with overseas ones.

Questions.
Executive Board Professor at the heart of the new curriculum:
doesn't too much conceptual fluidity affect mental health?

Response: there needs to be safe pedagogical strategies to avoid this. Eh? Are some questions off limits?

Dean of Students:
Student discomfort with classification - should we not get involved in asking for some classifications?
My thoughts - doesn't self-classification give some people strength?)
Her - there's a debate to be held about that. We should have a box for 'prefer not to say'.

An outsider!
Please don't attack 'assistant bricklayers' (it was a snide aside in the speech) - don't throw away cultural inheritance.
A - I don't think you could even if you wanted to.

The V-C!!!!
'Safe environment' is important. Identity is therapeutic. What about creating a safe environment for students who can't all go on exchanges?

A- 'put in their path experiences' - 'virtually' - this is vacuous - 'in modest ways'.

I'd like to chase the useless appropriation of Baudrillard, but as there's a colleague here who wrote a book on him, I'll leave it to him.

Colleague from philosophy:
Can't underestimate the conflict between equality and diversity agendas, and what motivates a more humanist encounter-based system of encounters. Latter eliminates the need for the first. The first will have effects. What we want to do is not have events which remind us of what we are/were, but these things happen.

I'm very uncomfortable with this discourse. It individualises identity and therefore ignores the fact that if you're white, Western and middle-class, you're going to have a sweet life compared with others, in this country or elsewhere. If you're black, you're likely to have a lower educational level, lower earnings, fewer employment opportunities, worse housing, a degraded environment, a criminal record, worse nutrition and so on. We need to remember and examine this and the effects of this.

I've just asked about this.
'not a satisfactory answer, but there's a line between understanding the power structures and taking up a victimist structure. Students should look for room to manoeuvre'.

Baudrillarist:
You do understand Baudrillard (!) But Vole's criticised you for being postmodern but you're not.

Her - it's postmodern-light.

Him. We don't have identities. You could say that mental illness emerges from identities. Taking identity too abstractly causes problems.

So: let's all be lighthearted postmodernists and institute safe 'exchanges' between students rather than harp on about boring old cultural politics (and actual politics).

That's all folks. Hope you're enlightened.

Bookrape

One of the interesting emergent features of students' work at the moment is the prevalence of Google Books as a reference source. It's something we haven't addressed in any meaningful way yet, but it needs thinking about.

It's not plagiarism - the book is usually referenced, plus a weblink to the Google source. But I'm still agin' it. It's a matter of usage. Reading a book, for pleasure or enlightenment, is a commitment. You need to read it all, or a complete chapter. Academic work is rarely simple enough that a sentence can be read and quoted in isolation. Baudrillard's description of Disneyland as 'toxic excrement', for example, might seem like a glib soundbite extracted from a single page, but means something very different if you've read the whole essay.

Google Books facilitates this smash-and-grab approach: googling a phrase leads to a single page of a book. You then copy a sentence, note the page number and stick it in your essay - it now looks like you've read it.

Except: I can tell. When you've read a whole chapter, or book, you can summarise and argument and discuss it. The telltale sign of Google Books is the presence of a quote without discussion: it exists as an ! to 'prove' the essay writer's point. Formally, it's not cheating, but intellectually it is. It's the equivalent of sex with a prostitute - totally goal-oriented rather than an emotional experience. It's the offside goal: the ball's in the net but the spirit of the game has been ignored.

Google Books is great if you've read a book and can't find the exact location of something (as I've just done for the Baudrillard quote). But it's no replacement for slowly and thoughtfully absorbing and debating nuanced arguments. It's not a travel guide, it's an A-Z: there's no joyful journey. That said, it's perfect for the pedagogical climate in which we now exist.

Mischief managed

Well, that's graduation done. Decent speech from the Students' Union vice-president, worthy ones from the worthies. The honorary degree went to Sathnam Sanghera, who despite his day job with the Murdoch press, wrote an excellent memoir of growing up in Sikh Wolverhampton, Love, Secrets and Lies in Wolverhampton, and gave a great little acceptance speech. Other highlights were a card from Christine, and seeing the engraved Pen Anna-Maria gave to William. He's a Baudrillard expert and she's spent the summer at Disneyland, so the pen quoted JB: 'Disneyland is paradise…' - the other half of the quote speaks of 'toxic excrement'.

I felt a little less like Laura Ashley curtains circa 1986 this evening, after a student pointed out that our robes are in Gryffindor colours. Now to the pub to accept libations from survivors (or graduates, as they're technically called).

PS. I almost forgot. According to the platform speeches, Wolverhampton is the greatest university in the world, with a bright future. And not a place which is sacking 250 employees (management exempt), cutting degrees and modules, reducing student workload, increasing surviving staff's workload and increasing class sizes at all! How wrong I've been.

In defence of Media Studies

You'd expect me to defend it, of course, as it's half my job. So I won't, other than to point out that everything we experience (yes, everything) is mediated, and that a course taking in Adorno and Baudrillard can't be that easy.

So anyway, have a read of this.

I Get Reviews

Occasionally I post on Chronicle.com, an American higher education website. A while ago we were talking about the Vietnam War, something I teach. I noticed today that a university teacher, no less, left this charming response to myself and 'one who served': Needless to say, I'm surprised by the claim that the media should be 'loyal', especially as it totally contradicts his objection to Baudrillard's point that mediatised war can't convey the 'truth' of war.

Hey, “one who served,” ever consider how the disloyal press manipulated film footage to undercut our efforts in Vietnam (as in Iraq) and ennoble the campus cowards who protested the war in Vietnam? And “Plashing Vole,” faithfully invoking the patent Baudrillard rubbish that the Gulf War didn’t happen makes one wonder why you are allowed to teach anything, even in a shameless pc-ridden nanny-state like what the UK has devoled into.

Needless to say, I'm surprised by the claim that the media should be 'loyal', especially as it totally contradicts his objection to Baudrillard's point that mediatised war can't convey the 'truth' of war. He doesn't seem very keen on evidence, intellectual coherence, grammar or reasoned argument - and yet according to him I'm the one who shouldn't be teaching!

Watching the Detectives

I seem to be in the mood for quoting, so here's a little bit that reminds me of the up side of teaching (those of you who've endured my lectures, or William's on Baudrillard, will appreciate it):

The great Doctor Potter, who was for a brief time Bishop of London, had been at cambridge with him in the 'nineties, and had once heard him deliver a scintillating sermon on an abstruse heresy which but twelve men in England could possibly have appreciated to a congregation of four shopkeepers and their families, five small boys, and a deaf old lady. When he had remonstrated that nobody could possibly have followed him, Avril had clasped his arm and chuckled contentedly, "Of course not, my dear fellow. But how wonderful for him if by chance one of them did!"

In ordinary life he was, quite frankly, hardly safe out.

It's from Margery Allingham's The Tiger In The Smoke, a late (1952) addition to her Albert Campion detective series. I'm not really a fan of such things, but this one's fascinating. Albert's a minor aristocrat, whose heyday was the interwar period when the aristocracy was merely dying. By this point, the misery, poverty, greyness and desolation of the postwar period hangs over every person like the London smog which chokes the characters. It's like Sherlock Holmes has been forced into Wire in the Blood or some equally bloody modern drama. The plot centres on an innocent war-widow who suddenly gets sent pictures of her supposedly-dead, but loved husband on the eve of her second wedding five years later, presumably for blackmail purposes.

Simulate that

Last week, my colleague William proposed that the vocalisations human make at the point de crise (for the Map Twats, the vinegar strokes) are a perfect example of Baudrillardian simulation: learned, inherited, imbibed from popular culture or other people.

Lying awake last night, trying to read (some Jonathan Culler, if you must), I learned that my neighbour barks like a dog. Make of that what you will.

This is a simulation

Huge swathes of Baudrillard today - I enjoy his work, but the students are getting restless. Some understand him, some don't and won't, however much we try. Potlatch, symbolic exchange, simulacra and hyperreality are tough concepts - but education isn't about providing nice chunks of digestible fare: it's about provoking students to explore the ways we conceptualise existence, even if - especially if - it leaves you defamiliarised and nervous.

The people have spoken - the bastards

I've had an anonymous vote (from a Blueyonder subscriber in the region of Wolverhampton and Telford) against more discussion of media studies - so an addition to the rules: identify yourself in some way (a link to your own blog is enough) if you want an opinion! As to the substance: half my job is media studies and it's more complex than you might think. 

Surely everybody should know, for instance, what Baudrillard or Bourdieu or Bauman (see, three very serious philosophers and I'm only up to B) have to say about our increasingly mediatized, simulated societies? Or who owns the webosphere? Or how online 'communities' relate (if they are communities)? Or how audiences process and understand Jeremy Kyle? If we don't know about, the bastards who MAKE Jeremy Kyle win without a fight… But seriously, there's a large dollop of philosophy, cultural studies and sociology in media studies, and none of it helps the kids get onto Big Brother (thankfully). 

I received my Bad Science 'I Think You'll Find It's A Bit More Complicated Than That' T-shirt the other day and wore it for my economics lecture/seminar. I think they got what I was saying…

Face/Off

No-longer-cynical Ben has withdrawn from Facebook - presumably because it was a facile waste of time. His decision is reinforced, according to his account of proceedings, by the blackmail tactics employed by that august institution, which extended to flashing photos of 'friends' with the logo 'X will miss you'. But the simulation fails - Ben's married to one of his 'friends' and the rest of us will still see, know and love him - symbolic exchange rules! Screw Facebook. He's going home.