Letter from the Editors

Abstract

The articles in this issue of JAPPC are based on the annual Inhuman Screens Conference held at the Sydney Underground Film Festival and convened by Aleks Wansbrough and Stefan Popescu. Given the coronavirus in 2020, the conference was entirely virtual. This was strangely fitting for a conference about the way humans are mediated through the screen, as technology has changed the very concept of the human and therefore also of culture. But it is therefore relevant also to the theme of the journal as popular culture emerged as a concept from technological developments.Pop culture, like the cognate term popular art, is, as Noël Carrol puts it, “an ahistorical term.”1 In a modern and commercial sense, it is tied to the emergence of mass culture. While exploiting folk culture in the form of kitsch, popular culture began in part as the product of “the culture industry”—an extension of—or encroachment by—corporate industry into culture.2 Culture became something technologized and instrumentalized that could be divorced from locality, and instead was created by masses of people in a manner that resembled an assembly line—tested and approved before being released into a public that was ordered, conditioned, and manipulated into massified audiences, on a global scale. Such a claim may sound judgmental but it is a statement of fact: advertising, test audiences, media executives, and corporate funding are all part of cultural production. Mass culture, in short, required mass production and therefore also standardization.This observation is not to deny the persistence of public spectacle that had previously trafficked on a more localized level. The arrival of mass culture conjured like nothing before mass and massive experiences. Often linked to the emergence of totalitarian regimes, mass culture also inaugurated shared experiences and the ability for mass mobilization and change. It thereby issued forth a concretization of a relatively new political category: that of the collective masses, the multitude, the many rather than the few. The media forms of mass culture provided a return to mythic entertainment, portraying even banal or fanciful stories on large screens to large audiences, and thereby providing a shared reference point after the vaporizing processes of industrial modernity. Marx claimed in the nineteenth century that all that was solid had been melted into air.3 Mass culture in some sense provided a salve; a return to custom, order, and routine via standardization and Fordist production, amply supported by a state managed capitalism that persisted through the 1960s.From one vantage point, popular culture in the mid-twentieth century reflected the social conceptions and developments of embedded liberalism, but from another vantage point it could be framed as a component of a Weberian “shell as hard as steel” or iron cage.4 (Popular movies from the ’50s, for example, affirmed the value of being a good citizen, and contained warnings to those who would defy the norms of society; with arguable exceptions and subversions present in the genres of the Western and Film Noir.)Adorno, heavily influenced by Weber, belonged to the latter category and complained bitterly, and critiqued relentlessly, what he saw as the return of a false salvation that glossed over the suffering fracture of modernity—recall his famous dictum: a “splinter in your eye makes the best magnifying glass.”5 Yet Adorno argued against a romantic or reactionary critique of mass culture:Adorno’s pronouncements are bleaker than the position that we would adopt regarding the merits of mass culture. We both firmly believe that individual works of mass culture and popular culture should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. But the development of mass culture conveys a transformation within capitalist society. Given what has been described as the Anthropocene or, more precisely, capitalocene,7 Adorno’s words have proved prophetic as entertainment can conceal serious issues, and provide a distraction from planetary crisis. The innovations of popular culture become insufficient reprieves that only help to condition people toward labor, claimed Adorno. (Today, we might think of how smartphones keep us constantly updated with notifications from apps; priming us to reply to work emails.) As such, Adorno detested much of popular culture, arguing that only high art and kitsch provided insight as both defied at least partially, processes of standardization—kitsch embarrassingly falling below mass standards of taste and high modernism negating them all together. Even then, both could be co-opted by the system of cultural production under a branded and commoditized noncomformity.While popular culture and mass culture are complicated subjects that do provide at least some ability to gesture to the contradictions of capitalist (post)modernity—think of how catastrophes populate the screen amid growing ecological precarity—Adorno was nevertheless able to anticipate some of the issues facing us online. With incredible foresight, Adorno intimates what Franco “Bifo” Berardi would later term “semiocapitalism”—where processes of production become semiotic processes, and set the stage for what would become, to borrow terminology from Jodi Dean, “communicative capitalism,” where both the capitalist market and the internet are heralded as democratic systems of exchange.In The Culture Industry, Adorno describes a situation that predates social media, google searches, digital communication technology, predictive algorithms and influencers and yet somehow recalls them as though a message in a bottle: “If mass culture has already become one great exhibition, then everyone who stumbles into it feels as lonely as a stranger on an exhibition site. This is where information leaps in: the endless exhibition is also the endless bureau of information which forces itself upon the hapless visitor and regales him with leaflets, guides and radio recommendations, sparing each individual from the disgrace of appearing as stupid as everyone else. Mass culture is a system of signals that signals itself.”8The prescience of this passage cannot be understated as Adorno predicts that culture will become a matter of signals that fuse entertainment and information as they become integrated interchangeably into an all-prevailing cosmos of commerce. This analysis bridges the gulf of time to tell us of our own experiences online where ads are recommended via microtargeting algorithms, parading commodities to us and at us. Adorno was mercifully ignorant of influencers on social media, and yet they embody his prophecy. With a greater predictive power than a horoscope (which he also analyzed in relation to mass culture), Adorno even notes a proto-interactivity in advertising, whereby “the information communicated by mass culture constantly winks at us.”9 After all, social media influencers wink at us, sometimes with emojis. And online recommendations effectively wink at our direction, generated by algorithms. Only now, with interactivity, we effectively are encouraged to wink back.One must take care not to underplay the fact that social media has generated new forms of popular expression that signify some sort of break with mass culture and even the culture industry as users generate fads through viral memes in a manner that would be impossible via mass media. While digital disruption has been overstated and over-valorized as proponents of the post-digital hypothesis contend (the post-digital turn designating a stage after the romanticization of digital tech, and therefore a long-overdue disenchantment with the digital),10 there is a transformative change that entrenches a division between mass and interactive media. After all, the decline of VHS, DVDs, and print media, as well as the competition between Netflix and cinema chains underscore a division between the power structures. Digital platforms allow users to be absorbed in their devices in new ways as the internet caters to the niche. Online platforms abandon any concept of the mainstream, which is reserved for the fossilized artifacts of pre-digital normies and boomers, who have survived the death of analogue but not the death of cool, evident with the rise of nerd fandoms.The distinctions between mass and interactive media shift, though. As with mass media, people still feel both atomized and massified: we’re increasingly aware of our manipulations at the invisible hands of algorithms, machines and corporations. Mass media was associated with mass movements, but digital technology is too: one may think of the Arab Spring and Occupy Wallstreet. More recently, the spread of the extremist views of the far right (coinciding in part with the spread of COVID—online radicalization has increased since the pandemic) inspired Neo-Nazis and QAnon conspiracy theorists to march on the US Capitol, thereby illustrating the power of social media echo-chambers to mobilize. In a more emancipatory way, Black Lives Matter protests have been rekindled by phone video recordings of police murders of unarmed black US citizens. As such, social media still massifies (think of the way, PokémonGo flooded areas with potential consumers to particular destinations). But it also trains us to be competitive and exhausted, breaking down public and private spaces in ways unthinkable in the heyday of mass media technologies such as cinema and even television. A tweet with friends in mind may risk going viral; and our private searches become data for corporations.As Raymond Williams reminds and cautions us, the means of communication are means of production.11 The internet has changed both cultural production and consumption, turning us all into commodities, workers and consumers at the same time. Often this has a deleterious psychical cost: a sense of being exhausted on a continual basis. As Byung-Chul Han has pointed out, we live in a “burn-out” society. In his words, we are all “auto-exploiting,” and suffer from digital neoliberalism’s belief that anything is possible, “The complaint of the depressive individual, ‘Nothing is possible,’ can only occur in a society that thinks, ‘Nothing is impossible.’ . . . Depression is the sickness of a society that suffers from excessive positivity.”12Yet Han goes too far in asserting that we are all entrepreneurs and misunderstands key Marxist categories of labor and work. Han courageously states that “no proletariat exists under the neoliberal regime at all. There is no working class being exploited by those who own the means of production.”13 This is patently false, and almost perverse in the time of Amazon warehouses, and at a time when computer parts are produced in overheated, overcrowded factories in China. It isn’t so much that the factory has disappeared as Han claims in favor of users owning the means of production, but rather that the factory has been extended to a virtual realm, colonized by Big Tech, in what Shoshana Zuboff frames as a “coup from above.”14 Mario Tronti in the early 1960s already observed that while it may appear that the factory is disappearing with post-industrialization and de-industrialization, the factory is in fact extended as a principle of society. In Tronti’s words, “When the whole of society is reduced to the factory, the factory—as such—appears to disappear.”15Contra Han’s dismissal of the social factory hypothesis, immiseration is extended through the digital. Most of us do not, for instance, own our means of communication. The young are forced to save up for smartphones without the hope of affording homes. We do not own many of the apps on our phones and laptops; we rent them even though they harvest information from us. We do not own the internet or WiFi, we rent the service. We do not own social media sites or what we produce on those sites, which can be shared with ease by others, and sold by tech giants. We do not own our data. We are immiserated workers, stressed about our posts and competing for virtual currencies; not cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, but likes, reacts, comments, and shares. In this way, Han is deceived by neoliberal terminology that promotes the idea that class and Marxist conceptions of struggle and exploitation are outdated. Strikes and attempts to unionize Amazon prove that they are not.It is however true that we live in a period where Silicon Valley promotes transhumanist fantasies of self-overcoming, of immaterial transformations where even the body can be hacked. But this is all the more reason to turn toward a Marxian concept of the inhuman to bypass the rhetoric of neoliberalism. For Marx, the inhuman should be understood as a challenge to the human. Marx used the term extensively to situate the human’s abilities being both extended and also exploited by technological demands on the worker. The human is reshaped by the machine and must operate at inhuman levels of production. Itself a product of labor, the machine is dead labor. According to Marx, the machine generated a new type of labor; a labor that was monitored and timed, a labor that was deadening, abstracted, and extracted in equal measure and thoroughly draining. The machine that sped up production was created not to ease human work but rather to expand it while cheapening commodities.16More and more this expansion includes posting to social media. At first this could not appear more different from factory labor. But in the words of Benjamin Noys: “No longer, as in Marx’s day, are we all chained to factory machines, but now some of us carry our chains around with us, in the form of laptops and phones.”17 Smartphones are labor: they enable us to post and generate content at any time and reply to our bosses at any time. They are based on manipulation in order to create data to be sold, entailing a constant surveillance and harvesting of users—what Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism.”Surveilled labor has its tolls. In the late nineteenth century, Clara Zetkin noticed how scientific advancements coupled with capitalist immiseration created the emergence of “mental-work proletarians.” As she explains: “Within the bourgeois intelligentsia, another circumstance leads to the worsening of the living conditions: capitalism needs the intelligent and scientifically trained work force. It therefore favored an overproduction of mental-work proletarians and contributed to the phenomenon that the formerly respected and profitable societal positions of members of the professional class are more and more eroding.”18Today, this shift can be categorized in terms of cognitive labor and precarity. But this exists not just within the official workforce as cognitive labor now eats up our leisure time. Jodi Dean has used the term proletarianization to situate the increased exploitation, an exploitation that we see online where users are not paid for their content. As Dean defines it, proletarianization is “a process of exploitation, dispossession, and immiseration that produces the very rich as the privileged class that lives off the rest of us.”19 (We are lucky enough to feature an interview with Dean in this issue.) After all, the top wealthiest people on the planet made their money from tech. Moreover, this observation describes how audiences of social media become workers, a point underscored by Christian Fuchs in Critical Theory of Communication.20 The user is effectively commodity, worker, audience, and consumer.None of these observations should be mistaken for technophobic anxieties. Marx reminds us that humanity has always been mediated by tools, whether these tools are fingers, nails and teeth, or a knife and fork, or even Uber Eats. Technologies always shape humanity, and humanity has never been without (re)shaping technologies. In Marx’s words, “the hunger gratified by cooked meat eaten with a knife and fork is different from hunger from that which bolts down raw meat with the aid of hand, nail, and tooth.” Marx explains this tendency in terms of production, and as technologized production as “production thus produces not only the object but also the manner of consumption, not only objectively but subjectively.”21Moreover, Marxists are conscious of technologies’ potential for liberation. For instance, Walter Benjamin marveled at technological reproducibility and its potential for political engagement. As did Dziga Vertov, who proclaimed, “I am kino-eye, I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, show you the world as only I can see it. Now and forever, I free myself from human immobility, I am in constant motion.”22 For Benjamin and Vertov, the Inhuman represented a liberation of visual production. Indeed, Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera anticipates a cyborgian perception. For Vertov, the camera had too often been enslaved to human perception. Different angles, movements, and perceptions were offered by the kino-eye. In this way, the technological not only extends the human but outshines, out-aestheticizes the human.The technological thereby potentially embarrasses the human, disembodying spirit from body. In his Lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel argued that human beings are amphibious animals situated between the physical and the virtual.23 The intellectual and spiritual on one side seem unbounded and then on the other, the human being must be physical, weighted, and bodily consisting of organs and beset by embarrassing needs to expel solids, gas, and liquid. We are uneasy about “our” bodies and their limitations. In this scheme, art, as the experience and product of sensuous mental and material labor, heals the wound between mind and body. More than that, art provides the spectator with a spiritual transcendence only possible through looking or hearing. From this vantage, technology as an art can be healing. As increasingly self-consuming, self-modifying entities why not render the human being art? Perhaps the amphibian condition can then be exchanged for a cyborg one.Adam Geczy has spoken of the “natrificial” condition to designate “a relationship between biology and technology.” Inspired partially by Donna Haraway’s theorization of the cyborg, Geczy develops a conception of the cyborg in terms of bodily transformation, where the body is rendered a “malleable, alterable, perfectible body [to the extent that] one effectively wears a body.”24 In his words, “the body is therefore not only the site of technology (work), but performs technologically.”25Such a prospect is tantalizing and terrifying in equal measure. But it may ultimately prove to defer the amphibian contradiction rather than overcome it: for the natrificial cyborg’s anxieties are reconfigured and re-emerge: we’re anxious that we are no longer natural but at the same time we are anxious to be less inhibited by the natural. Geczy skillfully charts how anxieties reconfigure around that of the human as cyborgian doll.Such anxieties are manifested in Snapchat and selfie dysmorphia, where people seek plastic surgery to look more like their heavily-filtered selfies. But it is also manifest in tendencies toward Grinding and bio-hacking that seek to render the body code that can be revised. One may be reminded of Jean Baudrillard’s delirious observation, which, while hyperbolic, approximates something of our current condition: “Virality is closely related to fractality and digitality. It is because computers and electronic machines have become abstractions, virtual machines, non-bodies, that viruses run riot in them (they are much more vulnerable than traditional mechanical machines). It is because the body itself has become a non-body, an electronic, virtual machine, that viruses seize hold of it.”26While the statement is clearly excessive and gestures to a science fiction future, it does indicate the way that the body is reconceived in digital terms. Such a reformulation of the body not only depends on inhuman demands placed on the subject but also would seem to require the rethinking of the very notion of the human. It may therefore be tempting to update the inhuman to the posthuman amid the dominance of digital technologies. However, as Rosi Braidotti contends, the inhuman can coexist amid the posthuman, where “the posthuman condition has engendered its own inhuman(e) dimension.”27 Indeed, technology’s influence over us is multifaceted and multivalent. This is demonstrated by the eclectic and often profound interventions on the subject by the authors included in this issue on the inhuman.The first article in this issue of JAPPC underscores the power of the technology to capture the transcendent and the melancholy. In their essay, “Sounds of Unridden Waves and the Aesthetics of Late Romanticism,” Ilmar Taimre and Sean Lowry sensitively and evocatively explore the “surf film” Sounds of Unridden Waves via Romantic frameworks. What their analysis attests, is the way that technology can resurrect transcendent themes captured by Romantic painters and poets. As they note regarding the relationship between art and photographic technology was more nuanced and mutually reciprocating than any simplistic either/or distinction that might be made.”Something of the Romantic imagination persists, in a very different (and perverted) form, in North Korean propaganda. Anna Broinowski navigates and complicates the reception of North Korean propaganda by focusing on the centrality of the heroine, against the militaristic authoritarianism that usually supposes a masculinist ethos. Propaganda thereby intimates tensions beyond itself: and how we conceive of the totalitarian “other” to “our” (post)democracies.The darker potentials of technology are heeded by M. G. Michael, Katina Michael, and Terri Bookman, who adopt a rich, theological framework in their contrast between recent technological “advances” and Wim Wenders’ masterpiece, Wings of Desire. Developing the concept of uberveillance, they explore a contrast between the intimate and tender character of the angelic (but also humanistic) perceptions in the film and the threat of surveillance technologies that envelop and warp perception. They provide an impassioned plea to evade the grasp of technologies that strip us of complexities and layers, and force our eyeballs to the screen, and into the screen.Another rich analysis of film is provided by Binayak Roy in an examination of Satyajit Ray’s Agantuk and his plan to make The Alien, a film that remained sadly unproduced but was ahead of its time. Ray is often considered a humanistic filmmaker. But Roy argues that Ray was also capable of exploring the posthuman, and contends that Agantuk signifies a turn away from Ray’s previous liberal humanistic faith.Questions of how the screen can represent conditions of the psyche are approached in a rather different way in the articles by Kimberley McMahon-Coleman and James Thompson, whose articles are welcome additions to the issue though not related to the Inhuman Screens Conference. McMahon-Coleman explores and contrasts how mental illness has historically been depicted (or not) in television juxtaposed with the comedy-drama You’re the Worst. McMahon-Coleman evaluates the accuracy of the show and explains why the show is so distinctive in its depictions of mental illness. Thompson frames Roger Corman’s attempts to capture Edgar Allan Poe’s brilliant gothic renditions of psychical disturbance.To conclude the issue, we are very excited to include an interview with the political scientist Jodi Dean. Dean’s work has been an inspiration for so many, and it was with a great pleasure that I was able to conduct an interview with her. (She also provided an insightful presentation on the emergence on communicative capitalism for the conference.)We are grateful to Penn State University Press, the editors of the JAPPC, the Sydney Underground Film Festival, and all the contributors who have provided wonderful articles for the issue. I would also like to thank my co-editor, Stefan Popescu. We hope that readers enjoy the issue.