GRAFTON TANNER. BABBLING CORPSE: VAPORWAVE AND THE COMMODIFICATION OF GHOSTS. ZERO BOOKS 2016.

Examining the intersections of glitches, object-oriented ontologies, and popular nostalgia, writer and musician Grafton Tanner’s first book uses Vaporwave as a lens through which to contextualize the confluence of pop and subcultures, consumer capitalism, and web 2.0 reality. In Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts,Tanner gives no history or definition of this late 2000’s / early -10’s musical genre, though it typically encompasses a largely internet-based phenomenon known for looping, sampling and blending cultural artifacts from the 80’s and 90’s with elevator music, smooth jazz, and other ambient genres. Specifically employing Vaporwave to dissect the internet and its hauntologies--the notion of yearning for futures never fulfilled-- Babbling Corpse uses the genre to reveal its parent culture of trauma and regression in the age of late capitalism (xi).

Tanner takes effort to situate the reader within the contemporary digital moment. He observes how the presence of low-cost digital audio workstations make what is referred to as haunted media ubiquitous. Haunted media, in Tanners terms, animates the dead through sampling long-forgotten hits, uses the persistence of looping to evoke the uncanny, and shows how the glitch further disorients listeners by signaling something has perhaps gone wrong. Tanner argues that there is something inhuman about the current historical moment and, though Vaporwave’s role in foregrounding the eeriness of electronic media and the emptiness of media technologies is not uncommon in contemporary culture, it can be traced to recent philosophical trends to de-center the human being in favor of an object-oriented philosophy. What this reveals for Tanner is the “end of humanity’s privileged reign” (13).

Citing Graham Harmon’s work on object-oriented philosophy, Tanner builds upon this notion of de-centering the human perspective. He reads Vaporwave through this project of de-privileging the human, as it incorporates non-human contributors and enacts atypical temporal perception through conventions of dispersed and anonymous authorship, digitally-generated effects like glitch and distortion, and the overlay of past and present. Pulling from pop culture moments to demonstrate how the internet as a technology lends itself to unseating the tradition of anthropocentrism, Tannner claims that the culture born from it seeks to destroy all history and start anew. To illustrate this, he looks to the 2012 film Cabin in the Woods in which a group of scientists keep a menagerie of iconic horrors entirely ripped from context in order to bring about the end of the world. Tanner also unpacks the Adult Swim short Too Many Cooks, which presents the audience with a seemingly never-ending 80s/90s family sitcom intro. As an example of an endless, looped, pop culture reverie, this stream of content becomes increasingly surreal and culminates in a madman murdering the entire cast. For Tanner this murderer represents our contemporary culture traveling backwards in time to destroy the past -- a reminder that a pre-internet, pre 9/11 world will never again exist (28-29).  

Babbling Corpse then takes up music’s function within capitalism and examines  Vaporwave  as the music of “non-times” and “non-places” (39). In this way, the genre is directly critical of the mainstream genre of periphery music, also called  “vaporized” music (Similar to Muzak from previous decades). Tanner describes how Muzak was designed to function in department stores to increase employee productivity, smooth the process of retail transactions, and was also used in calming cows on their way to slaughter (42). For Tanner the difference between vaporized music and Muzak is that today’s vaporized music is meant to be encountered, not listened to (57). It does not seek to make us more productive or ease a transaction. The purpose today is to give people fearing the future a commodified nostalgic space to retreat into.

For Tanner, Vaporwave offers not only critique through regurgitating, sampling, distorting, and re-presenting music on the periphery of our lives, but it also performs an act of resistance throughout its entire production process: Vaporwave uses pre-made music, is given away for free, and possesses largely anonymous authorship, an act that defies the logic of the age of personal brands.

In his conclusion, Tanner states that this text is not a manifesto, but instead focuses on a flashpoint in culture and points to something that resists global capitalism. Even though some of its elements have entered the mainstream, he contends that Vaporwave allows us to reframe our history and reevaluate the emotional appeal of music from decades past. The ghosts we are haunted by need not be sold back to us, these ghosts can mobilize us to move beyond the cultural nightmare of global capitalism.

GOLUMBIA DAVID. THE POLITICS OF BITCOIN: SOFTWARE AS RIGHT-WING EXTREMISM. UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS, 2016.

In The Politics of Bitcoin: Software As Right-Wing Extremism, professor David Golumbia provides an overview of the philosophical framework underpinning Bitcoin and most of the internet. He examines the interplay between cyberlibertarianism, right-wing conspiracies, central banking paranoia, and the rise of cryptocurrency technology in relation to these ideologies. In addition to looking at the explicit politics of this software, Golumbia expands on this, analyzing the confused and misinformed economic beliefs of Bitcoin evangelists.

This book begins by looking at the politics promoted by right-wing ideologues: the idea that central banks use inflation to steal value from the masses, that the world’s economies are on the verge of collapse because of these practices, and that gold or other “hard” currencies will provide protection from such events (2). Golumbia argues that to understand how cryptocurrencies come to embody these ideals we must situate Bitcoin within both cyberlibertarianism and libertarian economics. He asserts that while many Bitcoin enthusiasts wouldn’t put themselves in the same category as Alex Jones or the 14-year-old boys who assume they have found the answers to the world’s problems after watching Zeitgeist, their enthusiasm and reasoning ultimately rests upon explicitly right-wing assumptions.

The assumptions Golumbia brings into focus are conceptions of both freedom and government. Under these frameworks “freedom” is taken to be understood as “free” in the sense of the “free market” and leans heavily on the idea of negative freedom. When it comes to the role of government, cyberlibertarians are against regulation of the internet. To this, Golumbia points out that in most non-rightist theories of government, the government exists to promote human freedom. However, this justification is lacking under the cyberlibertarian worldview, which instead operates as if government is synonymous with tyranny and power, and that the internet is positioned as oppositional to rather than aligned with power (6-7). Golumbia finds the words “tyranny” and “liberty” worth noting for how easily they slip between right-wing extremist conversation and the mainstream discourse. When used by ideologues, these words are invoked to stoke anger against democratically enacted projects like Social Security or Medicare, that were explicitly designed to stem the abuses of economic power against personal liberty (11).  He continues this analysis by examining the medley of conspiracy theories that Bitcoin enthusiasts unwittingly endorse. For example, many enthusiasts cite as one of Bitcoin’s merits that it is not subject to the inflation and deflation that “central banks cause.” This line of argument usually belongs to rightist economists as most mainstream economists believe that central banks exist to respond to the external economic pressures that cause inflation and deflation (22).

After explaining the explicitly right-wing origins of Bitcoin and its relation to central banking conspiracy theories, Golumbia takes issue with the notion that Bitcoin is a currency. He argues that of the three classical functions of money, (medium of exchange, store of value, and unit of account) Bitcoin only really serves as a medium of exchange. It’s here that Golumbia notes that virtually anything (fine art, scraps of cloth, your filled-out cafe punch card) can be used as a medium of exchange without posing a threat to national sovereignty over money (50-51).  The idea that cryptocurrency can be a used as a unit of account is problematized by the fact that it is rare for any economy to price its goods exclusively in Bitcoin, that Bitcoin is not tethered to any mechanisms to buoy it such as taxes or international exchanges, and that instead it floats freely, only valuable in relation to its exchange rate with other government currencies (52). The final metric currency is usually measured against is its function as a store of value. Generally when something functions as a store of value that implies it is stable and can be expected to be valued at the same amount over periods of time. Ironically, one of the qualities Bitcoin is most known for is being extremely volatile.

From here Golumbia discusses the variety of paradoxes that exist when trying to peg Bitcoin enthusiasts down on defining money, why Bitcoin is inherently more valuable than government issued currency, and how because Bitcoin exists outside of legal structures it is more vulnerable to the schemes, scams, and abuses that enthusiasts claim come from using standard currencies and banking. Golumbia concludes the chapter by pointing out that given capital’s ability to influence the price of Bitcoin, it functions more as commodity and speculative investment than currency (63).
Golumbia concludes his argument by looking to the future of this technology and how enthusiasts manage to interpret every Bitcoin-related occurrence positively despite events such as banks buying into cryptocurrency being opposed to their stated goals. Golumbia argues that this fact may demonstrate above all else that cryptocurrencies are an ideological project. As for alternative uses of cryptocurrency technology, he points out the oft-mentioned “Decentralized Autonomous Organization” (DOA) or the “Decentralized Autonomous Corporation” (DAC), which are corporations meant to run without any human involvement based on a set of predetermined goals with its resources distributed among all of the stakeholders. Golumbia points out, “One might say without exaggeration that the last thing the world needs is the granting to capital of even more power, independent of democratic oversight, than it has already taken for itself” (72).  In the final pages he argues that it is not impossible for Bitcoins cryptocurrencies, or blockchain to be used by those outside of the right-wing, but that any non-rightist vision of this technology has much to overcome and the way to reign in software is not through more wars between algorithms and individuals but “a reassertion of the political power that the blockchain is specifically constructed to dismantle” (76).

CHEW-BOSE, DURGA. TOO MUCH AND NOT THE MOOD. FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX, 2017.

*Chew-Bose is co-founder of http://www.writersofcolor.org/, a resource for editors (or anyone) to find writers of color by subject and areas of expertise.

DURGA CHEW-BOSE: TOO MUCH AND NOT THE MOOD

In a collection of fourteen meandering autobiographical essays, Durga Chew-Bose’s Too Much and Not the Mood takes its titular phrase from Virginia Woolf’s moony reflections on editing for an audience and crafts the sentiment into the structure of its writing. Giving the book a sense of historicizing its own conception, Chew-Bose’s sentences evoke the feeling that they are in an active, self-conscious state of edit—not contradictory or unsure, but self-revealing and evolving— with the printed book reading like a furtive negotiation between the writer’s thoughts and the backspace key. This gives an interrogative, exploratory, and personalized presence to the author’s knowing revelations which so acutely reflect the state of coming to understand what you know you already know. This book, as a careful engagement with affect, memory, the physical body, and self-analysis, aptly exemplifies how the personal is political, how feelings are critical material, and how personal narrative can function as a rich, revealing method of research.

Writing about the material, bodily, and inherited nature of memory, Chew-Bose discusses affects as elusive and abstract as the attitude of living alone or nostalgia for your parents’ lives before you were born, and frames this materiality of both intellectual and physical knowledge through her experience as the child of Indian immigrants to Canada. This is an identity wrapped up in her various roles as a daughter, a Canadian, a writer, a New Yorker, and—often—a woman. Sorting through memories, feelings, questions, and family stories she materializes the complex experience of living and understanding her self-situation. Densely populated with references to music, literature, film, and visual art, her essays construct a variegated patchwork of cultural context, fleshing out the vastness of a millennial, first-generation frame of reference. Through a folding analysis, kneading lived experience and musing abstractions into each other, Chew-Bose interrogates the entanglement of the performed and felt self, inherited memory, culture, relationships, isolation, and bodily-manifested nostalgia. The politics of engaging and dis-engaging with an imposed feeling of otherness, the confusion of moving this feeling through childhood into adulthood, and mapping the (inherited) bodily, material marks of growing into, around, and against this sense of difference are major recurring thematics.

INDIVIDUAL ESSAYS, SELECTED

HEART HOSPITAL

The opening essay in the collection, Heart Hospital operates as an autobiographical foundation that contextualizes the subsequent shorter pieces. Driven by the observation that hearts, sometimes amazingly, continue to beat through the wrenching events that we colloquially claim are heart-stopping—alarm clocks going off, an old name popping up in an inbox (4), seeing a good friend for the last time before a big move (11), falling in love and breaking up —Chew-Bose affirms that this beating is a testament to resilience in the face of life events that elicit such big emotions that they intervene on our physical body. Heart Hospital allows readers to piece together an introduction of the author from a series of anecdotes about herself, her writing practice, her social life, her childhood, her family, and the heavier emotions and thoughts that saturate existence. Running from musings on life to death, the piece ebbs and surges with the irregular rhythm of a heartbeat alternately accelerated and lulled in response to the world surrounding it.

PART OF A GREATER PATTERN

Here, Chew-Bose introduces the notion of childhood innocence as split into the experiential, nostalgic categories of innocence as both custom and asylum (123). She describes a sort of homesickness for childhood—not as a romantic refuge from the harsher realities of adult life—but as the state before certain realizations are made, for the unique normalcy and infiniteness of the presumption of stasis. This is a homesickness for assumed regularity, for the taking of things like the rhythm of a childhood home for granted.

She develops this idea of a customary not-knowing alongside a notion of her body as a physical anthology of her childhood (125), for mixed amid the not-knowing is some already-inscribed self-knowledge. With a retelling of her experience of outsidership in the presence of “older girls,” –vividly relatable for anyone who felt envy for others just outside of their peer group when they were younger—she describes the bodily awareness of difference and self-consciousness, before she fully understood the feelings, injustices, and politics that helped to plant awareness that would grow into lifelong insecurities and internal battles. This otherness, inscribed against the older girls’ “physical comfort with each other” (101), their whiteness, their mannerisms, is present in her adolescent body long before it’s intellectually understood. The draw of childhood innocence for the author is this state before these bodily inklings surface and demand the ability to put words to, socially situate, politically trace, and defend yourself from them.

THE GIRL

This essay starts off with a mental statement directed across the table towards what is, presumably, a bad date, an unimpressive date, a typical date: “The girl you want doesn’t exist” (145). A bitterly concise outline of what it is to fight against the delusions of (male) dates re-creating the women that sit across from them to their own liking, this essay responds to all versions of the saccharine but sinister pseudo-complement, “I can’t believe you exist,” (149). In naming and problematizing this all-too-familiar sentiment reeking of romanticism, projection, and manipulation, Chew-Bose breaks down some of the pervasively gendered and deeply-felt dynamics at play in the realm of dating and relationships. Framed from a young woman’s perspective, this piece stands in defense of the individuality and specificity of every one that has found themselves the victim of toxic fantasy-based flattery while asserting the relatability and consistency of this experience. Speaking directly to the perpetrator, she answers the question of “existence’ directly, and shuts it down, retorting “You’ve been encouraged to believe since boyhood that your fascination has manifested her,”(147). You can’t believe I exist? She doesn’t exist. But I do. We do. You do. This essay is a tired but necessary analysis of a fantasy-based co-opting of personhood that has long been a widely encouraged and romanticized toxic behavior, as well as a breath of validation for those who have been the mirror used to materialize someone’s made-up dreamgirl.

D AS IN

In this piece, Chew-Bose looks at her own tendency to introduce herself to new people as “D,” abbreviating her first name to avoid questions and discussions around where she’s ‘from.’ Through this habit, she looks at issues of self-erasure and self-assertion, of knowing herself and relating to others from the primary point of having a name that situates her identity as linked with a place other than where she lives. In this discussion, Chew-Bose again explores the theme of embodied history and inherited affect. She speaks of her DNA as carrying not just her family’s genetic information, but the inheritance of their move from India to Canada, their displacement and their re-establishment (160). Part of her and yet not part of her, this move has mediated not just her life, but her physical relationship between her body and her world. She looks at how, similarly, her name carries this move, and is something both inside and outside of her, a small but large part of who she is, and a prime arbiter of both her self-identification and how others see her. Furthering this, the author goes on to look at how her relationship with her own name foregrounds her struggles with using the first person as a writer, and discusses the politics of using the word “I” as a first-generation author, and the delights and struggles of its anonymity, in relation to her first name, Durga (161).

TRESSIE MCMILLAN COTTOM. LOWER ED: THE TROUBLING RISE OF FOR-PROFIT COLLEGES IN THE NEW ECONOMY. THE NEW PRESS, 2017

In about two-hundred pages, Doctor Tressie McMillan Cottom examines not what for-profit colleges are but why they are – the policy, market, and social reasons for their existence. Many ascribe the phenomena of for-profit, non-traditional colleges to the rise of neoliberalism, however, neoliberalism predates the explosion of these schools. Doctor McMillan Cottom’s work grants a fuller context for understanding this phenomenon.

Cottom begins with an account of enrolling a student at a technical college she worked for. Using this as a framework she then highlights how ideological and economic changes allowed the emergence of national share-holder for-profit colleges. She cites the shifting risk of corporate responsibility for training, retirement savings, and healthcare costs from companies to individuals (15).

The following two chapters discuss the author’s personal experience working in for-profit environments contrasted with the experiences of interviewed students enrolled in for-profit style programs. In these sections the context of why the students landed at an expensive, non-traditional for-profit university instead of a traditional college is examined. McMillan Cottom’s view is that much of it comes down to time; the prospective students targeted by for-profits are largely non-white, women, have children or families, and/or can’t afford to exit the labor market.  Often, for bureaucratic purposes related to welfare, the targeted prospectives must prove they are pursuing a credential that might get them work. By tying the pursuit of higher education to access to welfare, this encourages recruitment campaigns to target lower class segments of the population.

Through understanding what types of students are targeted by and enroll in these programs, Cottom unveils the institutional differences between for-profit and traditional colleges. Two interesting facts arise. The first is that for-profit schools enstate a shorter period between enrollment and the deposit of student loan refund checks. The second is that the alternative non-traditional colleges have an intense bureaucratic system for admission and enrollment that all but necessitates a middle-class upbringing to provide the social connections, foundational support, and implicit understanding of the structures required to navigate them.

Parallel to this nexus of class, race, and circumstance runs policy choices that drives the growth of share-holder colleges such as the decline of labor participation in unions which has led to increased risk for workers and families, the bleeding of public funds for education, welfare reform requirements demanding either proof of work or proof of effort towards education, and--perhaps the most glaring--an overall lack of public safety nets that allow people the means necessary to engage in long-term decision making.

Doctor McMillan Cottom admits that sociologists are not good at solutions, but highlights movements like Black Lives Matter, The Fight for 15, The Rolling Jubilee, and a Federal Job Guarantee that could shift us from a negative social welfare program where all of the risks and costs rest on the individual to a world where social policy guarantees the social contract of the old economy and insulates us from the deleterious effects of our present situation.

LIPPARD, LUCY. UNDERMINING: A WILD RIDE THROUGH LAND USE, POLITICS, AND ART IN THE CHANGING WEST. THE NEW PRESS, 2014.

Lucy Lippard’s UNDERMINING centers around the erosion of foundations, be them geological, cultural, ideological, or bureaucratic. Titled with a word that evokes a myriad of literal and metaphoric themes related to land use in a late-capitalist world, Lippard’s book interrogates the bureaucratic and ideological factors that threaten the sustainability of human habitats. Now living in New Mexico, the former New York curator takes her new home as a starting point that leads her through a far-reaching discussion that exposes the fractal-like relationship between the global and the local. The American West, as a site that represents particularly urgent resource depletion and complicated colonial land disputes haunted by the expansionist policies of the Manifest Destiny, serves as a potent jumping-off point for an examination of the current state of human-land relationships. Consistent with her earlier involvement with the Conceptual Art of the late 1960’s, Lucy offsets the main text with thoroughly captioned photographs on each page of the book, mobilizing her investment in conceptual and documentary photographic practices. These photographs and their captions deepen the discussion of the text and serve as part of Lippard’s project towards the de-isolation (and thus the increased relevance and effectivity) of art and the disintegration of the lines between art, life, and activism (168). She ultimately concludes with a proposal of this trifold approach to making and change as a main line of defense against further misallocation and destruction of hospitable land and dwindling vital resources, solidly reframing the relevance of her earlier curatorial and theoretical work for the new millennium.

UNDERMINING opens with an overview of choice examples of land dispute cases played out over the past few decades in the West. These cases make evident the dizzying complexity of colliding interests and the far-reaching consequences of colonialism, industrialization, and capitalism as well as offer perspective on the deep(ening) reservoir of instances of exploitation, both human and ecological. Lippard chronicles a mess of occurrences of disregard for native land rights, water waste, human precarity, mining and fracking abuses, legislative and bureaucratic blockages, political backtracking, and intertangled interests both noble and self-interested which stand in the way of future-focused conclusions. (18)

Factors of the obscurely affective and the asininely technical run throughout these conflicts and the author goes on to sow them through a contemporary re-evaluation of Land Art in the tradition of the 1960’s and 70’s. Admitting to having initially somewhat written off this conspicuous artform, in the 21st century, Lippard now contextualizes Land Art within a sociopolitical conversation around sacred sites and a contemporary, ‘post-nuclear’ reconsideration of the sublime. She pits the consideration of the local history and specificity of place against generalized touristic escapism, and critiques the insufficiency of the art world’s notion of “site-specificity,” which routinely trades the local reality of the land for an aestheticized, ideologically removed artistic reading. (81)

Lippard expands on this with a jarring example of just how intensely local lived experiences of land can differ from an outsider’s view. She discusses the notion of “atomic culture,” citing the case of Uravan, an ex-uranium mining town in Colorado that was dismantled and evacuated, deemed too hazardous to occupy. Reportedly more regretful at having lost the town and the mine within it than the family and friends that had been lost to complications from the radiation, the former residents of the town were strongly in favor of re-habiting the town and introducing a mandate for it as a destination for “nuclear tourism.” The hazards of living in a known toxic environment were considered by the locals as an “accepted risk” which characterizes a mindset and relationship to land that is distinctly formed by a reality saturated with toxicity and depleted of resources, in which the ideas of danger, tragedy, and livable land are adjusted to accommodate corporate industrial interests and to disregard sustainability. (116)

UNDERMINING is a focused yet meandering book that is replete with memorable anecdotes. The most poetic of these is perhaps the mention of the ongoing interrogation of the “Forever Problem,” or how to mark nuclear waste sites that have half-lives of (and will therefore be dangerous for) ten millennia or more. The various propositions by artists, engineers, scientists, and linguists are thoughtful (though perhaps futile) exercises on conceptualizing the future and the different ways we might read and communicate threats from the land we inhabit. Considering the proposed fields of plants engineered to grow in unnatural colors, forests of concrete spikes fifty feet high, and giant black holes dug out of the ground, the problem of matter and signification’s inability to outlive radiation immediately becomes daunting. (119)

The word “undermining” evokes the notion of having the ground dug out beneath you, but it also invokes the challenging of power. Lippard’s book is laced throughout with both precise data and overarching concepts that arm the reader with the intellectual tools to intervene on our future trajectories as landed, resource-dependent beings. Notably, this is all in self-interest. Lippard is well aware that the environment can adapt more infinitely and elastically than we can, that evacuated, toxic, exhausted lands become “nuclear sanctuaries” taken over by wildlife formerly displaced from destroyed habitats much more quickly than we could ever re-inhabit them (180). The world will change and leave its present species behind. The Forever Problem presumes human resilience, but the problem of a human future demands a much less optimistic view. Looking towards the possibility of sustainability, Lippard proposes the erosion of boundaries between art, life, and activism and between academic and professional disciplines only as an initial tool for a more necessary total undermining of the priorities of late-stage capitalism, colonial and expansionist policy, and post-atomic “accepted risk.” Excavating the sites of these collective missteps, Lippard theorizes the work, art, and values necessary to carve ourselves into a near future that will come regardless of our ability to survive it.