Mark Poster is an emeritus faculty member at the University of California, Irvine. You can find his faculty page here, although he is not listed in his department’s current faculty listing.

Wikipedia has the only extensive bibliography of his I could find. His last major publication appears to be his book, What’s Wrong With the Internet (2001).

His faculty homepage trumpets an award from Lycos (seriously…).

Interestingly, his output seems to have tailed off right about the time the internet started to turn much more participatory in nature.

“Postmodern Virtualities”

Poster constructs an analysis of the then-still-emerging internet in the mid 1990s as a vehicle for exploring the dynamic nature of subjective identities and relationships that inhere to postmodern culture. He quickly narrates the development of mass media as a (mostly) one-to-many system of information distribution falling under the hegemonic control of those with the financial resources to manufacture the necessary equipment and distribution infrastructure. The “bidirectional communication systems” constituted by the internet asked for a reassessment of media consumption and production as relatively cheap means of production/distribution could be more widely disseminated to the average consumer.

From this, the notion of the “virtual” leads to a realization that “culture is increasingly simulational” so that “‘reality’ becomes multiple” (p. 538). Poster correctly predicts a few key shifts that will later happen in the late 1990s, including the impact of these information distribution systems on media products like music. We all know the infamous Napster debacle. A key and interesting point to take from that is how cheap and massive distribution systems altered the political landscape. For instance, Metallica wasn’t always so hostile to fans who gave away recordings of their music:

The use of Lars Ulrich’s image in this video was purely unintentional, and I did not want to violate said intellectual property…I swear…

But just in case he’s pissed off at me (WARNING: NOT EVEN REMOTELY SAFE FOR WORK):

Back to the point… Poster acknowledges the formulation of identities in these networks as contingent upon the interrelationships of subjects within “virtual” communities that seem simultaneously “real” (phenomenologically) and fictional (p. 543). Since the realities within these networks are “fanciful imaginings” that “evoke play and discovery…a simulational practice is set in place which forever alters the conditions under which the identity of the self is formed” (p. 539) — something Metallica apparently knows rather unwittingly…

The materiality of these communication systems highlights the nature of identity as a practice, therefore more explicitly rendering identity as “unstable, multiple and diffuse” (p. 540) as participants become more aware of the alternatives afforded to them for identity exploration. Immediately after this statement, Poster turns this recognition toward the collapse of communication and economic binaries into each other — perhaps one of the earliest formations of the “produser” or “prosumer.”

Thoughts

Though dated at this point, we can see within Poster’s analysis the kernels for a media studies analysis of the participatory web and the cultures that have grown alongside it. Though the idealized virtual reality systems he discusses have never really come to fruition, we’ve still managed to invoke a wide array of communities, and even “worlds,” online that command our attention and focus it in unanticipated ways.

(b. 1934

Currently the William A Lane Professor of Comparative Literature and Romance Studies at Duke University.

His list of publications is downright mind-boggling, officially listing nearly 150 journal articles.

Our reading, published in 1984, would form the basis for Jameson’s 1991 book of the same title.

Here, you’ll find a YouTube video of a keynote lecture that “Fred” gave at Duke in 2008(?). [Would have embedded it, but Duke disabled the option.]

“Postmodernism…”

Where to even begin? The article is encyclopedic in its scope, both in terms of art objects discussed and in terms of the different valences that postmodernism had taken by 1984. To risk VASTLY oversimplifying this, the basic principle Jameson explores is the one most often attributed to postmodernism: namely, that a postmodern culture is one unmoored to any referent beyond itself, or one of its own creation. The results, Jameson suggests, stem from 4 “constitutive features of the postmodern” (p. 487):

1. Depthlessness — a flattening of meaning so that art no longer lends itself to hermeneutical analysis (p. 488) because it rejects the metaphysics of the Cartesian dual subject (p. 490).
2. Weakening of historicity — history is no longer to be found at the base of a work of art, as it is replaced by pastiche, historicity, and nostalgia.
3. Intensities — a replacement for genuine emotion and affect that is driven by quantity rather than quality, detached from concrete situations and context that give rise to real emotional attachment.
4. Technology — the impact that technological innovation has had on the work of art, both as formal and aesthetic artifact, as well as political and economic vehicle.

Jameson states, “The world thereby momentarily loses its depth and threatens to become a glossy skin, a stereoscopic illusion, a rush of filmic images without density. But is this now a terrifying or an exhilarating experience?” (p. 504).

1. Depthlessness

Though Jameson never uses the term, it’s difficult to avoid the implicit presence of Benjamin’s aura as an underlying concept. Jameson states of the origins of the work of art, “Unless that situation — which has vanished into the past — is somehow mentally restored, the [work of art] will remain an inert object, a reified end-product, and be unable to be grasped as a symbolic act in its own right, as praxis and as production” (p. 487). Contrasting van Gogh and Warhol, Jameson explores this inertia as the product of art not only as the object of mechanical reproduction, but of mechanical reproduction as a theme within postmodern art.

Peasant Shoes

Diamond Dust Shoes

Jameson argues that “depth is replaced by surface” (p. 490) since Warhol’s “Diamond Dust Shoes” neither care nor attempt any sense of connection beyond the spectacle of the image itself. “Here…we have a random collection of dead objects, hanging together on the canvas like so many turnips, short of their earlier life-world as the pile of shoes left over from Auschwitz” (p. 488). By removing the contexts that support some sort of “hermeneutic gesture,” the image evokes nothing more specific than a general melange of disconnected, or “schizophrenic,” perceptions. The image can no longer carry specific meaning because there is no longer a distinction between the internal and external worlds of the perceiving subject.

Hence, fully formed emotional responses, tied to concrete, material experiences, are no longer possible either — what Jameson labels the “waning of affect” (p. 489-490).

2. Weakening of historicity

This disconnect between representation and referent leads to a distancing of historical origin — even to its wholesale dismantling, to be replaced by “the random cannibalization of all the styles of the past” (p. 494) so that pastiche is nothing more than a “neutral…mimicry” of parody (p. 493), nostalgia nothing more than the longing for a vaguely defined past that never existed (p. 495). Instead of lying under representation as a subtext injecting context into the work of art, history becomes a co-constructed node within the dynamic relationships that mutate around works of art, the artists, and the audiences. More importantly, the postmodern artist works to highlight that this is the case through increasingly sophisticated meta-textual movements, like intertext or metanarrative.

We need only look as far as Disney films or superhero reboots for examples. At one point, Jameson highlights moments in which nostalgia is mobilized as a form of critique against contemporary society. After looking at the visual style of van Gogh’s “Peasant Shoes,” I couldn’t help but think of Fievel Mousekewitz. An American Tail (1986) was repeatedly shown to me as a kid in school as an example of families pulling together in times of crisis, viewing their challenges as opportunities rather than obstacles. Using the (literal) rich fat-cat image as a symbol of greed and corruption, the film tied together the worst aspects of late 19th century political corruption with the rising mid-80s awareness that corporate corruption was a major issue. We, in rural Eastern Kentucky, identified with a small house trying to survive as an outsider in a world that was largely hostile to his existence. As a nostalgia piece, the film opened itself for us as kids to identify with the Mousekewitz’s as a repressed-yet-optimistic family who could overcome anything with a little faith. (We had a vague idea that they were Russian, itself an interesting concept in the mid-1980s. However, that Fievel and his family were Jewish was never, ever mentioned to us.)

3. Intensities

As stated earlier, intensity replaces emotion as one of the primary responses the subject can have to the postmodern work of art. Intensity is never explicitly defined, but can be vaguely reconstructed as a disbursed and ephemeral set of responses at work because the self is dead. “This is not to say that the cultural products of the postmodern era are utterly devoid of feeling, but rather that such feelings…are now free-floating and impersonal, and tend to be dominated by a peculiar kind of euphoria” (p. 492). This euphoria seems a byproduct of mechanical processes that push receptive processes to the point of “schizophrenia.” Quoting Lacan, Jameson describes schizophrenia not as a clinical diagnosis, but as a semiotic meltdown: “a breakdown in the signifying chain” that gives rise to meaning simultaneously arranged sides that mutually co-construct context(s) for each other (p. 500). This fragmentation reduces emotion to intensity by disconnecting perception from the work of art. If the semiotic operations within the work are unintelligible beyond an arbitrary imposition of meaning, then true emotional response is impossible. The audience isn’t responding to the work of art as an object, but to their own internalized perceptions that are only ambiguously and vaguely connected to anything actually represented in the work. Think Transformers or GI Joe as just a mustering of little boys’ fantasies about themselves.

4. Technology

Here is where the “logic of late capitalism” starts to emerge as an economic force that operates alongside postmodern culture. Drawing on Ernest Mandel’s historicization of capitalism into three distinct stages, Jameson ties the demands on the audience as active participant into the economy that sees mechanical reproduction as an end unto itself, rather than a means of supplying necessary goods. Though written well before its introduction to consumer markets, it’s easy to see the internet as the next logical step in the progression of late capitalism from pure production of goods into an information economy that values distributed knowledge production. The products themselves are less and less valued in the face of the [often free] work used to create them as well as the distribution networks that perpetuate their existence.

Thoughts

As seen in the fights about intellectual property that arose in the late 90s/early 2000s, the concept of the “product” has, itself, become a simulacrum. In an information economy, the truly valuable commodities are all either the practice of the audience, or often have a hidden material reality. The digitization of information makes knowledge work (the work of a participatory culture) much easier since the tools of production (computers and software) and the distribution systems (the internet) are far more readily available than the heavy machinery of industrialization could ever be. The tools on the “back end” of information systems are things that most participants are, at best, only vaguely aware of. Overlaying interface systems that simplify the use of these tools means that the truly important aspects of information economies can take place underneath the noses of participants, without them ever catching a whiff of the processes themselves.

In essence, one Jamesonian reading of participatory cultures might see a re-emergence of a duality within postmodern culture. The duality of the ephemeral and the material have reinstated themselves, only now the ephemeral information while the material is the systems (hardware and software) that make work possible. At leas that’s my application of his theory. Take it for what it’s worth.

Barthes’ father was killed in WWI when he was only a year old. Raised by his mother, he dealt with repeated illness issues his whole life, including Tuberculosis. These problems kept him out of WWII. They also meant that he often had difficulty procurring teaching positions throughout his career.

He was also gay, and much of his work is often read in light of this fact. His resistance to bourgeois cultural values is often interpreted as a function of his sexual identity.

Barthes published extensively, solidfying his reputation as a scholar and theorist. “The Death of the Author,” his famous 1967 essay, argued that text created by the author supplanted the author’s authority within culture. Ironically, it also led to Barthes’ great critical reception by other literary theorists. Wikipedia has long bibliography of Barthes’ work.

“Mythologies” and “The Eiffel Tower”

Barthes saw myth as a set of semiotic relationships. And though, as any reader can see, he offers a meticulous and complex analysis of the semiotic operations at work, I’ve tried to keep it relatively simple for my own benefit. He calls myth an example of “speech” primarily because he sees it as a semiotic system. The easiest place to start are his assertions about myth‘s function and character — that it commits “language robbery” (p. 131) by aiming for “immediate impression” rather than allowing thoughtful analysis (p. 130). Myth can do this because, through an elaborate semiological system, it “distorts” meaning by “distancing” history from the signifier. It doesn’t destroy this meaning, needing it as a vague and fuzzy base upon which to build. Instead, distance can be filled with whatever the bourgeois deem culturally or politically expedient by appropriating what they want from the meaning underneath. (Barthes sees myth as a distinctly bourgeois, right-wing phenomenon.)

His most prominent example is this, the young black boy in French soldier’s garb, seen here. The image is an amalgamation of French colonialism and patriotism, expressed through visual signifiers, that is instantly recognizable as an attempt to perpetuate the myth of French Imperialism. Barthes’ purpose is to establish a rigorous method that can uncover the mythic operation at work in the image, and hence offer resistant readings of it. In Barthes’ terms, “he is the very presence of French imperiality” (p. 128, emphasis in the original). What he means is that recovering this image from its mythical structure is an act that simultaneously exposes the myth‘s operations, as well as the history that is being marginalized. Repeatedly, Barthes argues that this marginalization, or distancing at work in the semiological system, amounts to a “naturalization” of the myth.

In some sense, there is a connection to be made between Barthes and Benjamin’s concept of the aura. In effect, Benjamin is arguing this same distancing between the foundation of reality and the experience of stories about reality. The mechanically reproduced work of art is a myth that can be understood as a decontextualization of the hard reality of the artwork.

Barthes applies this method to the Eiffel Tower as a way of explicating its differing relationships to Parisians versus outsiders. The feeling imposed by an experience — that which evokes sentimental attachment to abstractions about time, place, or event — can serve as a way of distancing the observer from the history that might be found in the pre-mythic semiological system.

But Stephen Colbert can explain it better than I can: