Dear Michael, and empyre,
When Simon was invited to participate in this discussion, I resubscribed
to empyre to see how the conversation went... (the volume of the list
has in the past forced me to opt out as I just didn't have the time to
adequately follow it). As his co-founder at Mute (now
publisher/contributing editor), and the co-editor of the Proud to be
Flesh anthology you mention, I was interested to see how our activities
would end up figuring in this discussion (especially as - like you say,
Michael - the thematics of this session are so enormously broad).
I hope Simon doesn't mind me jumping in a little prematurely... He's
been too busy to reply, but I'm anxious to get your questions answered
lest all the issues you raised sort of fall off the proverbial cliff.
Apologies in advance this has become overlong - I feel it's important to
do justice to the detail and am far from a neutral observer, of course!
As regards our 'neo-humanism'... I suppose we kind of asked for it when
we titled (and designed) the book the way that we did, using a jokey
early strapline (Proud to be Flesh), and a meat-version of a global map
as our title/cover catch-alls for content which is ultimately much less
obsessed with flesh and/or 'the human' than this might indicate. What we
hoped it would achieve, more, was a kind of insistence on and
undeniability of material substrates of all kinds - allowing 'the human'
to stand in for important other categories we felt were being obscured -
or even actively denied or suppressed - in a rush for virtuality that
encompassed everything from ill-conceived models of direct democracy to
extropian personal fantasies of downloading brains, and retellings of
economic reality.
Anyone who followed debates around the internet and new media in the
early nineties will know that both this attitude and its critical
object/s were very much part of the zeitgeist: perhaps it's only now,
looking back so many years, that this arguably simplistic opposition
between flesh and matrix gains the flavour of 'neo-humanism', rather
than - as it did at the time - act as a stepping stone to, for want of a
better word (since that's also a pretty problematic catch-all),
'critical net culture'. (For anyone who's interested in going a little
further, we did an interview close to the launch of Proud to be Flesh
that covers this all in a little more detail, including the nerdy
intricacies of all our various straplines! (That also means your fave,
Michael, 'Culture and Politics after the Net'... which has stuck it out
longer than most...) This was conducted by Max Hinderer for Austrian
culture/politics journal Springerin and is online in English language
at: http://www.springerin.at/dyn/heft.php?id=61&pos=0&textid=0&lang=en
(in Net Section). I've also pasted it below as the URL doesn't take you
straight there.
But you raise further important questions about the magazine and
organisation... like our 'collective voice'.
I hope my answers on this won't be frustratingly vague. I think it's
undeniable that Mute's voice has been far from consistent, not only
across time - as its editors' interests and passions intensified,
developed and even radically changed, from those loosely connected with
culture and technology to those more obviously associated with the
global conditions of capitalism - but also in time, right now. I think
this is borne of very obvious things - like the fact that it's hard to
dedicate yourself monogamously to one, carefully encircled, subject area
for as long as we've been in publication, and this stringency was by
definition also impossible to maintain via the model of a professional
journal staffed by a straight sequence of editors (since it's been the
same two people running the organisation all along and there's been
similar continuity on editorial, making Mute more of a living,
personal/social venture, I suppose, than an official journal with a
circumscribed subject area and editorial policy...) You'll also often
find us saying that, at the point this seemed a distinct possibility
(I'd say that was around 1998/99), we were also loathe to turn Mute into
a kind of sector journal servicing the discursive needs of a nascent
art-and-technology/digital-art/new-media community... (we thought the
questions raised by the advent and then massification of the internet
were way too big to parcel them off into a distinct set of genre- or
approach-based concerns within so little time). Then there's the fact
that, continuity notwithstanding, there *have* also been - mostly
gradual, and quite organic, sometimes more dramatic - changes in the
editorial group, which, following on from the above, have significantly
altered editorial direction over the years. In terms of any present
collective voice, then, I think the current editorial board (which, in
addition to editor, Josephine Berry Slater, Simon and myself, includes
Anthony Iles, Benedict Seymour, Matthew Hyland, Demetra Kotouza and Hari
Kunzru) tend to be quite happy to state that Mute *has no* unitary,
collective 'voice' as, while there's a commitment to a critical and
broadly left analysis of our core topics (and research threads that are
always in development), each of us have - sometimes subtly, sometimes
not so subtly - different takes on them.
As such, though, it's also very hard to really guess what 'Mute has come
to represent over the years', as it tends to mean different things to
different people: very few have read it right along its whole
trajectory, and there's a lot of opinions (as well as some
misconceptions) as to what it currently 'is'. So, for one Mute might
mean the abdication of responsibility to stick with a properly informed
critique of the internet and all the creative and activist cultures it
has spawned; for the other it might represent a proper 'waking up' to
the all-encompassing nature of capitalism; for yet another it might mean
the disappointing inability to translate this into a properly coherent
programme of revolutionary articles. Having been there from the
beginning, I'm obviously alive to more than most interpretations; in my
most hopeful mode, I'd like it (just for starters?) to represent an
independently-minded but heterogenous critique that can treat capitalism
as a governing global condition without losing out on the specificity of
its manifestations; serious but not academic; experimental and
irreverent; ready to treat politics and culture as equally worthy of
sustained analysis; errrr... oh, *and* ready to go on exploring the
visual as much as the textual. (I think this is called the
eyes-bigger-than-stomach syndrome!)
Anyway, it does tie into your latter question on theory and practice...
It may be significant that Simon and myself are the products of art
school (rather than university/academy) educations... and the
academically trained among us are at the least oriented towards creative
practice... it may just be that people can't help themselves :) But yes
(as also discussed in the Springerin interview), as much as the message,
we *have* always been excited by the medium too. Although they were also
desperate attempts to find a publishing model that worked financially,
this has led to a crazy and seemingly never-ending sequence of print
formats, web platforms, organisational models and mission statements,
through which we tried to solve the content/carrier conundrum over a
period that these started pulling at each other and, as Katherine has so
eloquently described, altering the reading experience in a myriad
different ways (by the way it's wonderful to have Katherine post here as
she was such a major inspiration to Mute at its outset!). In many ways,
we're still not there (the PPS system Simon attached shows us thinking
through aggregation, print on demand and remuneration models with
openDemocracy and a possibly extended consortium of 'progressive
publishers' we're hoping to develop a site, or service, with; and we are
about to launch another iteration of Metamute.org this Summer, which
profiles our OpenMute Press publishing and POD support activity better).
But, again in my hopeful mode, this diversity should - for all the
pressure it's put on us (normalisation of free content; new ways of
locking content) - at least also testify to the potential the digital
environment still holds for small/alternative/independent publishing.
In conclusion and as a caveat, I do think 'independence' is a vastly
over-used term. As a recipient of Arts Council England funding here in
the UK, and part of an organisation that has *always* had to subsidise
its publishing activity with other work (CD design/authoring; web
development; print on demand support), I wouldn't be able to classify
Mute as such and get irritated at the proud declaration of 'independent
media' scenes in countries or continents where there is a massive
history of cultural subsidies and public funding. On the other hand,
this awkward betwixt and between position may, as you infer, bestow
benefits, although I'd argue that these are shrinking in an age where,
here at last, funders have acquired a host of instrumentalist agendas
around social cohesion, second, they keep organisations tethered ever
closer to their own raison d'etre and operating principles (not only
growing monstrous managerial systems but gradually managing to shrink
organisations' potential character and scope), and now, are forcing us
all into an austerity/value-for-money/doing-more-for-less programme
whose whole societal narrative and overall economic rationale is so
totally bogus it really begs the question how government and culture are
supposed to coexist in any 'civilised' way!
But that's enough for now. I realise I've hogged the airwaves with this
extended rumination, but your questions open out onto so much...
Thanks,
Pauline.
***
'/Proud to be Flesh' /-- a bastard child
- /The Mute anthology 'Proud to be Flesh' is about to be released. As
you state in your introduction, rather than an editorial 'best
of'-selection the orientation of the book aims a 'reflection of the
magazine itself'. Could you explain your own magazine strapline 'Culture
and politics after the net', now looking back to the beginnings in 1994,
when broader internet platforms where just arising? /
The strapline came about after much soul searching. When we started
publishing as a magazine in 1997, /Mute/ -- which had been coming out as
a digital arts newspaper since 1994 - used two straplines, one at the
top of the page, and one at the foot. Proud to be Flesh, which had
featured from the beginning, was placed at the foot.
'Critical/Information/Services', which replaced a few other
preliminaries ('digitalartcritique', 'The Art & Technology Newspaper'),
sat next to the title logo. These two statements played provocatively
against one another -- the first was a two-fingered salute to the fad
for immateriality that accompanied the 'cyber revolution. The second
detourned business speak into a challenge. So you want information?
You're going to get it. The pursuit of 'critical information' however,
led us to constantly revise our focus on digital technologies. In as
much as /Mute/'s early life was propelled by a deep enthusiasm for
networked computing and its possibilities, there was always a critique
of technocracy and the 'dialectic of enlightenment' ITC participated in.
As time passed, and we as much as the culture we covered, became swept
up in the anti-capitalist movement, we needed to acknowledge that the
net was now part of our world -- for better and worse. The new
strapline, which we adopted in late 2002 (on the occasion of yet another
format change), registered a moderation of enthusiasm for the net, but
also a commitment to seeing contemporary reality as forever changed by
it. Perhaps that kind of -- less techno-determinist - formulation was in
the air more generally too, viz curator Steve Deitz's phrase 'art after
new media', which was a popular and much discussed descriptive tag for
art forms otherwise known as 'new media art', 'net art', or 'digital art'.
/- What does the technological shift from 1994 to now, from web 1.0 to
web 2.0 mean to your project?/
This question is closely related to the first. /Mute/'s attitude to Web
2.0 can be encapsulated by the title of an article we published by
Dmytri Kleiner on the same subject -- 'Info Enclosures 2.0'. The first
wave of enclosures of the net focus on the corporatisation of its
infrastructure, all those 'mom and pop' ISPs, the small-time enthusiasts
who were gobbled up by telcoms companies. The second round of enclosures
associated with Web 2.0 relate to the brilliant realisation on the part
of big media companies that they didn't need to waste all that money
creating commercial content -- they could get us to do it for them.
However, the enclosure of what Kleiner calls the 'means of sharing', or
peer-to-peer networks, goes further than that -- it relates to the wider
capitalist phase of real subsumption in which all of social life is
assimilated into the production of value. A lot can be summed up by the
adulteration of the verb to 'befriend' into 'to friend'.
/- The anthology's title 'Proud to be Flesh', alludes to a certain
relation of materiality and immateriality in contemporary culture
production. This can be seen as a main point of reflection in many of
the contributions to Mute brought together in this book. May I ask you
as editors: Are you very proud? And what kind of flesh do you mean?/
Well, we're not fitness fanatics or arch narcissists if that's what you
mean! Our flesh is very imperfect. Perhaps Proud to be Flesh is our way
of playfully expressing our Marxist materialism -- in an age of
enthusiasm not just for freakish ideas like 'extropianism' (the desire
to upload oneself into the net, to become encrypted as data), but on the
autonomist left, for 'immaterial production' and the belief in its
potential to effect communism within capitalism. At the high point of
that particular fad, we wanted to concentrate on who and what sustains
the immaterial realm, the symbol-pushing of a global elite. Flesh
relates to the poor on whose backs the net is built, and reminds us that
we cannot live on 'thin air' like New Labour think-tank favourites such
as Charles Leadbeater would have us believe. It also reminds us of our
animal selves, that we, as bodies, are vulnerable like our biosphere.
And why should we shun our flesh? We are proud to be human animals.
/- Allow me a little excursion on a specific notion of flesh: One
persistent expression of colonialism's legacy is that, specially in some
Latin American countries, you still have the catholic-sexist tradition
to celebrate the 15/^/th/ / birthday of young women as their transfer to
adulthood. That has often been criticized by feminists as a reification
or commodification ritual. /
/Being aware of that and sort of on the other time/space end of ethics:
What do we have to expect for the 15/^/th/ / anniversary of an indirect
child of Thatcherism, as -- I'm afraid to say -- Mute could be seen as?/
Yes, I believe the publishing equivalent is producing an anthology; in
that case, rather than occurring on the threshold to adulthood, it
usually marks the threshold to death! More seriously though, much as we
say in our book's foreword, it would be delusional for /Mute/ to regard
its 'heritage' as unproblematically radical or oppositional. Like so
many other publishing projects of its day, it is a bastard child of many
contradictory social, political and economic tendencies -- one of which
is indeed the notional 'entrepreneurialism' of Thatcher's Britain.
Viewed from a certain perspective, the project could even function as an
advertisement for the kind of 'mixed-economy' enterprise New Labour went
on to lionise, and which it tried so hard to engineer. (After all, not
only is /Mute /a product in the marketplace, but it is a cultural
initiative funded with state monies, which in the UK often means an
increasing entanglement with government agendas.) However, we would of
course also challenge any simplistic denigration based on our
'complicity' by pointing to our efforts to develop the magazine in a
critical dialectic with our subject matter and audience; our refusal to
build the stable profile that is a prerequisite for the kind of
commodification you're referring to.
In terms of the upcoming anniversary you ask about, /Proud to be Flesh/
may seek unashamedly to make /Mute/'s output of the last fifteen years
more accessible, but that of the next fifteen years should be considered
more directly in light of the open publishing model we adopted circa
2005/6. Although this has been slow to gain momentum and opening up an
editorial process to 'the wisdom of crowds' by no means guarantees
decentralisation of authority |(or any other state of editorial
utopia!), it has been fascinating to develop our agenda more consciously
in tandem with readers' opinions and material, the quality and relevance
of which continually amazes us. A few years into the process, the stream
of self-published content we now host (ranging from articles to images
to books) makes it impossible to envisage a scenario for our future in
which the active reader doesn't loom very large. The consequences for
our commodity form will as ever have to be considered as we go along.
*
/Mute has always counted on non-European contributions. Still it
is an assumed London-based project. How would you re-connect the
relation of materiality/immateriality to the more technological
fact, that a web based magazine project constitutively
re-structures the relation between the local and the global?/
True, the internet restructures the local/global, but, time and again
during the editorial process, it is proven how hard it is to escape the
tendrils of a variety of materially rooted networks -- be they
institutional, social, or economic. As far as we can see, in this
situation the only viable methodology is to be alert and totally engaged
in the contradictions of your position/ing, never presuming an
organisational innocence, and to use as many avenues as possible to get
to your material. However, any notion of unmediated editorial contact
with a sort of virgin non-local 'voice' must continue to be regarded as
another (colonialist?) phantasm... (The figure of the lone 'Third World'
or 'conflict zone' blogger that is a firm favourite of the UK press
comes to mind here...)
/- What potential do you see in reviewing publicity strategies of the
90's for today's political agency (as for a web/magazine project as yours)?/
It's complicated. With Facebook etc. being held up as the panacea in the
context of any kind of communicational/organisational challenge whilst
these platforms are obviously so utterly compromised, returning to the
period prior to their arrival -- when a sort of isomorphism between
politics and its infrastructures seemed possible - might seem just the
ticket. Back to the non-corporate web and all that... But, as many
authors in /Mute/ have been at pains to discuss, this image of a free
internet taken over by big, bad business was a gross distortion to start
off with, and so to be handled with extreme caution. As mentioned
earlier, the story is more one of corporate consolidation and value
extraction from 'free' and 'collective' activity (itself entirely
symptomatic of global power imbalances), not the capitalist takeover of
an erstwhile egalitarian space.
Similarly, as we ourselves have perhaps demonstrated, an intense
engagement with the relationship between content and 'carrier' can flip
over into a sort of format-fetishism, where the carrier is tasked with
the full load of signification, and content is demoted to a sort of
incidental second. In this context, the mass availability of free,
effective tools for organising and publishing can only be a good thing.
With /Mute/, I think it's fair to say that, as time has passed - and
notwithstanding our continuing experimentation - we have been happy to
follow a less stringent formal/technological agenda, while making
increasing demands of our content... To see /this/ as the battle ground
for 'critical information services', not which content management system
or paper type you use.
"Proud to Be Flesh: A Mute Magazine Anthology of Cultural Politics After
the Net"
Eds. Pauline van Mourik Broekman & Josephine Berry Slater with Michael
Corris, Anthony Iles, Benedict Seymour and Simon Worthington
Mute Publishing in association with Autonomedia
624 pages, 48 pages of illustrations
_http://www.metamute.org/en/proud_to_be_flesh_
Great to have you on the list! There's really so much range to Mute's
activities that it can be overwhelming for those who are immediately
confronted with the various projects that have evolved from the initial
magazine publication.
So I have a series of general questions. Feel free to respond to any.
While I'm still waiting for my copy of 'Proud To Be Flesh' to arrive - the
massive anthology of articles from Mute recently published in association
with Autonomedia (http://www.metamute.org/en/shop/ptbf) - I was just
reading Charlotte Frost's review over at Rhizome this afternoon:
http://rhizome.org/editorial/3576#more She picks up on notion that there's
a kind of broad critique of new media hype that underpins the agenda of
Mute, but the implication of a kind of nascent neo-humanism that defines
the publication as a whole (I might be extrapolating a bit here). I was
wondering if you could speak a little more about the collective voice of
Mute, and whether you agree with this assessment? In other words,
especially having undertaken this huge retrospective, what do you think
Mute has come to represent over the years? (I've always liked the slogan
"Culture and Politics After the Net" - turning the futurist logic of 'the
new media' into a pragmatics of the present somehow).
There might be an additional point here about institutions and
independence - Mute is obviously a massively important and influential
publication for new media, yet is deliberately positioned outside the
academy. What sort of hybrid space is this? What advantages (or
disadvantages) are there to this way of working?
Following this, I want to ask what the relationship between theory and
practice is for Mute? Obviously the two are closely intertwined, and
perhaps there is no hard and fast distinction here. Nevertheless, I was
wondering what kind of approach Mute takes to translating conceptual
frameworks into software services or initiatives (and vice versa),
especially given the consistent engagement with issues around publishing
'after the net'? I'd like to know more about the Progressive Publishing
System project too (checked out the slides, but am not great with
flowcharts!)
Hope this isn't too much!
- M.
Last off we have a speculative proposal out to build an online software
system to help with the conversion of works into the different
ePublishing formats, publication management in the distribution
platforms and for remixing of content (free and paid). See
http://www.slideshare.net/metamute/progressive-publishing-system
_______________________________________________
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