*This strange thing is just bonkers and radically scattered, and yet as I forged through it, sentence by sentence, I found myself enjoying it more and more.
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CTHEORY: THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL 34, NOS 1-2
*** Visit CTHEORY Online: http://www.ctheory.net ***
TBC 026 10/19/2011 Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
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THEORY BEYOND THE CODES
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~Joe Milutis in conversation with Eugene Thacker~
Introduction
————
Joe Milutis is one of those rare breeds of media scholars – someone
who has the "vertical" depth of historical scholarship as well as the
"lateral" breadth to see connections across disparate fields, events,
and contexts. In fact, it's inaccurate of me to tag Joe as an
academic, since he has been equally active as a writer, performer,
visual artist, and sound artist as well. His book _Ether_ (published
in 2006 by the University of Minnesota Press) is a wonderful hybrid
of media history and religious studies, a sort of history of an idea
that has persisted to our own era of media that is ubiquitous and
pervasive. For many, evocations of the ether bring to mind the
strange and intriguing concepts from the history of science, from
electromagnetism to mesmerism. But as Milutis shows, ether – itself
a strange non-object – is an equally important concept in the
history of religion, influencing theosophists as much as yogic
philosophy, as well as in modern culture, from the fantastical,
speculative fiction of Edgar Allen Poe to the many evocations of
spiritualism in the films of Federico Fellini. As Milutis notes,
"[w]hat is clear about ether is that it is a mediating substance
between technology, science, and spiritualism, and the historical
relations between these three terms determine its perfume." This
manner of working across disciplines has been a long-standing
interest for Milutis.
I first met Milutis at a strange conference called "Postmodern Piracy
and Transgendered Subjects," convened by Doug Rice in 1999 and held
at Kent State University. At the time his writing was appearing in
the magazine Artbyte, and already he was exploring the
intersections between media, mysticism, and science fiction. Over the
years he and I have had an ongoing conversation about our shared
interests, ranging from Japanese noise music to supernatural horror.
Recently I had a chance to talk to him about his previous and current
projects.
———————————————————————-
Eugene Thacker (for CTheory): Your book _Ether_ does a wonderful job
of creating a unique genealogy of media. It cuts across both cultural
contexts and historical periods, tracing this concept of "ether" from
Mesmerism and Renaissance alchemy, to Spiritualism and the radio, to
the emergence of network culture. One of the main conceptual
dichotomies in _Ether_ is that of the material and the immaterial.
Ether is at once omni-present and yet diffuse, amorphous, intangible.
Is this a constant in all of the variations of the concept? Is there
a key moment or moments in which ether becomes "technologized"? What
changes when we move from a mystical notion of ether to a technical
one? Many of your examples – early radio being a primary one – seem
to suggest that the spiritual and the technical go hand-in-hand...
Joe Milutis: As I point out in the book, it's technologized from the
beginning. It is a product of the way our devices, including
language, parse out the natural world. That's not necessarily a bad
way to look at it. In a sense, it implies pure positivity, a kind of
difference engine, to speak in Deleuzean terms, where certain
manifestations are more territorialized than others, some allowing
for more access and creativity, others more authoritarian.
So the problem of misrecognition becomes a theme. The radio seems to
promise a materialization of mystical, creative, anti-authoritarian
energies. And it enables them to a certain extent. Radio, when it was
first introduced, reenergized the etheric imagination after the ether
had been debunked scientifically in the Michelson-Morley experiments.
But then radio gets tied to the military machine, the money machine.
Time slots become regimented, who can talk on radio becomes
professionalized, etc. etc. The Apollo launches in the 1960s had a
similar dynamic—they seemed to get people to really think about what
it would mean to evolve one's consciousness. It instigated new forms
of action and thought. But of course, it was a huge industrial
enterprise, and as Norman Mailer pointed out, the kabbalistic flames
of a NASA rocket might very well be demonic.
Henri Bergson, who has a substantial, if not entirely sketched out,
place in this book, and who will have a more central role in my next,
is important to think about regarding the ways in which spiritual
ideas get aligned or misaligned with new technology. You know,
Bergsonian ideals have been in the boardroom for a long time,
especially when it comes to the selling of consumer technology. But
usually, the only thing that is focused on is the more
action-oriented, vitalist aspect of Bergson, and only if sanctioned
by the device. I think when you add Deleuze to Bergson, he becomes
less of a corporate huggy-bear; the Deleuzean reinterpretation brings
out the powers of the virtual, which is not the digital, but rather
something like the ether in its most radical, deterritorialized form.
We seem to want vitalist instantaneity for all the wrong reasons;
similarly, we have very backward notions—no pun intended—about the
powers of memory. Instant checking! Check your account online! Why
are Word programs slower now than they were in 1997? The whole system
is now engineered so that you can effortlessly activate a tremendous
(yet, of course, limited and thus, not virtual) corpus of the past,
yet someone who has an attachment to an old technology is considered
overly precious; and then, of course, how you use that corpus has
been subjected to the legalistic whims of a few corporations. Or
think about online reading. Some supporters of Kindle are arrogant
about the idea that people have a lifetime of emotions and sensations
related to paper, related to the book as something that, if you
wanted to, you could pick out of the trash and read. Do you know how
many books I have found for sale on the street that then became the
core of my research interests because they were lovable and they were
mine and they entered into my life in a specific and powerful and
aleatory way? That's how memory works, and it is the irrational
aspect that is impossible to argue for, but it is what makes us
creative.
CTheory: In _Ether_ you are also attentive to the cross-cultural
instances of the ether concept – for example, the influence of Hindu
and Buddhist concepts in Theosophy (e.g. Leadbeater, Steiner). To
what extent is "ether" a Western concept determined within modernity,
and to what extent is it a cross-cultural phenomenon?
Joe Milutis: I initially received ungenerous comments suggesting that
ether, as presented in the book, was capital-W "Western," that I
wasn't attentive to these cross-cultural instances, even though, for
example, I had also been writing about how these ideas filtered into
Afrofuturism and circulated around Islamic thought. It seems there is
something that strikes people about the "ether" as perhaps located
squarely in the realm of white, technologically privileged culture,
but I don't really buy it since the ether has always been such an
outsider concept. It did, for a brief window of time, provide the
basis for a global scientific elite, but it rapidly fell into
desuetude afterwards, and was left for anyone to take up. You could
say, then, that it started as a cross-cultural, even sometimes
heretical idea, was co-opted by a western elite, and then became the
basis for two-hundred years of various mystical cargo cults,
unpredictable and far-flung.
CTheory: You also pay attention not only to the immateriality of
ether, but to its materialization and privatization. Would you see
this as an early stage of post-Fordist capitalism, in which
information becomes commodified and also produced as a service? Is
"ether" an early form of what Negri and Lazzarato call "immaterial
labor"? I find the juxtaposition of Fludd's diagrams and the FCC
charts very evocative...
Joe Milutis: I wrote an essay, "Superflux of Sky," that discusses the
multiple paradoxes of immaterial economies with respect to ways in
which they have come to be visualized. However, one thing to remember
is that perhaps one major philosophical high point in the ether's
evolution comes as a response to Tayloristic principles, as time-work
studies directly generate mystical fourth dimensional theories, as
well as the birth of the cinema at the end of the 19th century. At
that time, the apparent "lessening" of our mystical commons through
industrial systematizing of time and space created a kind of
intellectual panic, and ether theories effloresced as a coping
mechanism, while the birth of film allied with them in various
interesting ways. By the time "immaterial economies" become more
standard, ether as a supplemental, irrational time-space that
explains a floating economics neither seems far-fetched nor difficult
to conceive.
CTheory: Ether is also a drug. Are drugs media? Have you tried it?
Can I buy some off you?
Joe Milutis: I'm a little bit of a sissy when it comes to these
things, so I'm not really the one to ask. But you know, I think that
a well-considered hit of smack is healthier for you than a joyless
hummus platter. Personally, I really just keep to the boozes (I'm a
big fan of homemade infusions), but even then, I am much happier when
I eat little, drink little, and can actively seek out energy,
sunlight . . . that said, I've become very suspicious of Zen and yoga
discourses throughout all the years of practicing them, so I'm not
going to lay that on you. Just do it. Or don't do it. And don't get
attached to your practice! Otherwise, it just becomes another bad
Christianity, or martini infusion.
But drugs, well there's that famous story about Ram Dass's Guru
taking LSD and he was totally unfazed. Jordan Belson became so
embarrassed by the clichés of drug culture that he got rid of what
were really great, grungy psychedelic soundtracks to his films, and
he also changed the name of his film LSD to something more innocuous.
Drug culture has a huge impact on 60s etherealism, and it was really
shocking to me the way in which whatever experience of this scene
some had caused them to discount it entirely. Camille Paglia said
something very interesting, that you had so much advanced knowledge
about consciousness and creativity in this historical moment, but
relatively none of it could be communicated to future generations
because of the drugs. And whatever did get through, I would add,
tended to be disavowed by much of the next generation of artists and
scholars for a variety of reasons, some understandable, others
lamentable, that I won't go into here.
CTheory: Recently at The Public School New York
(http://nyc.thepublicschool.org) you presented some of your current
work, which focuses on _Hamlet_. Tell me about how this came about.
Is this related to your media projects? Why _Hamlet_, why now?
Joe Milutis: If by "now," you mean, sometime in this century, then
even then it wouldn't be completely accurate, since I've been working
on this piece for over ten years. Some pieces just stay on the
backburner until there is an audience. Since it is a piece about
Shakespeare, and I'm not a Shakespeare scholar per se, there was no
reason to force it. So every summer for a long time I've had it on my
to-do list, but it wasn't until I started a relation with the
internet journal _Triple Canopy_ that I found a good venue. I'm very
audience conscious, and I'm not interested in the genre of "academic
publishing," so that requires me to be a little bit more inventive,
but also very idealistic about bringing these ideas to a wider
audience.
I didn't actually read _Hamlet_ until I was thirty, which is an
appropriate age since I think Hamlet was about thirty during the
fictional tragedy set in Elsinore. You tend to read those kinds of
things when you are younger, but Shakespeare was just something I
waited to read. However, I *had* been reading things like language
poetry and poststructuralist theory since I was a teenager, and was
interested in language-media experiments like Michael Snow's _So Is
This_. By the time I came to _Hamlet_, it was glaringly obvious to me
that Shakespeare was doing the same thing with deixis—especially with
the word "this"—that you see in Snow's film, and in the work, for
example, of Ron Silliman. I just kept tracing meta-uses of "this" for
years as a minor hobby. And what became interesting for me in this
piece—especially because a lot of my work has been dealing with
artistic forms of data mining—is that if I started today, with the
electronic tools at hand, on the same project, I wouldn't get at the
answer faster; "this" is ultimately unsearchable electronically,
since it is so ubiquitous. This project then, becomes a
metacommentary on concordances, and I even inserted a book
concordance to the word "this" in the work of Silliman as part of the
multimedia content. (This concordance has become my favorite part of
that project, not only because it works very well as a POD
book—extending the multimedia experience back into the physical
world—but also because the afterword allowed for a dense and complex
prose style that I felt had been lost in the translation of my
original writing to a screen experience.) "The Quiddities" follows my
essay "R, Adieu" as an instance of analyzing "literary minutiae," and
I imagine doing more essays in a similar vein.
CTheory: At the University of Washington you're also teaching a
seminar on genre horror. Is there a particular concept of horror that
you have in mind? It seems that there are many thinkers out there
that have always been sidelined, but who might be relevant for
thinking about horror and media – Chardin, Steiner, and Bergson.
Joe Milutis: I'm also a little squeamish with proper horror, so
"supernatural" is the operative term for this class. The supernatural
is the genre of the "un": the unspeakable, the uncanny, the
unnatural, unwholesome, unholy, unnamed and unnamable. As such, it
has a lot of connections to the virtual. I'm interested in uncanny
phenomena like the double. You know, my grandmother was a twin, and
my grandfather had a brother who wasn't a twin but who looked exactly
like him. My grandfather and his brother lived across the street from
each other for as long as I can remember, but they maintained such
completely separate lives, that I never really met his double. There
was something terribly Sicilian about that set-up. My aunt who I am
very fond of was considered not worth caring for when she was born,
since the doctor thought she would die as a result of sharing the
womb with my grandmother. Well, whatever psychic competition that
engendered, my aunt is the one still living, in her 90s, and this
fact is still an important identifying feature for her. For a long
time I felt like I had to deal with similar issues or rather *issues
of apparent similarity*, and felt my childhood was particularly
influenced by the uncanny and the psychic rivalries of doubles; I
think this is not uncommon when you have an extended family all
living within walking distance. Not to mention, my childhood
coincided with a minor cultural boom concerning interest in
paranormal phenomena; I grew up watching shows like ~In Search Of . .
.~, and I was not only tested for, but *trained in* ESP while in
grade school. Memory as it relates to the supernatural, then, has
become an important theme for me and this class, obviously because of
my Bergsonian interests, but also my own memory, is tenacious and
unforgiving, quite Sicilian in fact. But luckily I'm redeemed by a
more fanciful, forward-looking relation to consciousness owing to my
early schooling as a telepath. So I'm part Sicilian, part precog.
Not to elide the Italian-American experience with its ~bête noire~,
but if you are interested in my approach to horror, it is a very
expanded one, and you know, the ~Godfather II~ is a great monster
movie, with powerful supernatural dimensions as well. In the sequel,
Michael is dealing with all these virtualities—not only the pressure
of the past, which was always his burden, but also the ways in which
he must deal with various forms of information that threaten to
overtake him. It's much more intellectual than ~Godfather I~; and
that little cottage on Lake Tahoe, which is at once home, CPU, and
bunker is pure Universal horror. It's really subtle set design, but
if you watch it enough, all the tacky woodsy details of the cottage
are totally horror-show, especially those window panes. There's even
a cast-iron cobweb gate, which puts it over the top, but thankfully
we only see that in one shot.
My grandmother never liked the Godfather films, for the obvious
reason that Italian-Americans have had to spend a long time shaking
those associations, but she did love ~The Silence of the Lambs~. I
don't think I would have seen it if she hadn't raved about it, and
the Italian side of the family has very good taste in movies,
probably because many of the sisters at one time or another used to
play piano for the silent theaters. So unless I get similar types of
recommendations, I won't see many modern horror films, at least not
alone. I just don't dig torture/slasher films. Or the teen stalker,
psycho-in-the-woods thing: so boring. Someone, an experimental film
maker at that, once took me out to see one of those ~I Know What You
Did Last Summer~ films, and the only thing I came away with was that
it was an elaborate, ultimately Puritanical, framing device for
Jennifer Love Hewitt's breasts. If that's your goal, at least take
notes from ~The Entity~. Unless it's formally Argento-esque (I did
show Phenomena this quarter), or has some of the good humor to it,
like the old Universal horror films, I'm not interested. Or if it
uses horror to explore some interesting eroticism, then I'm
interested. For example, I have a creative project based on Jean
Rollin's ~Night of the Hunted~. He's a true auteur of erotic fantasy
horror; the sexuality in these films—and Rollin straight-out uses
porn stars, and makes porn as well—is Reichian, non-Puritanical, and
lyrically intense.
I think, in the end though, the real horror I'm compelled by is
economic horror. Chaplin's ~Monsieur Verdoux~ . . . Faulkner's ~Wild
Palms~. I think you could even put the ~Magnificent Ambersons~ and
~Citizen Kane~ in this category. I'm an admirer of Houellebecq
precisely to the extent he is able to convey economically-determined
desolation, appropriate to the era (most of his critics seem to think
that literature is written within a moral and historical vacuum, and
a lot of it currently tends to be); it is no fluke that he is a fan
of Lovecraft, even though his books betray no superficial affiliation
to typical genre horror.
CTheory: Are you focusing on the supernatural in certain media (e.g.
film vs. comics, etc.)? And I have to ask – your favorite story or
film?
Joe Milutis: I'm not a big one for having "favorites" or "bests." I
am constitutionally averse to rating things in that way. But given
that part of asserting such is to put things in view that normally
wouldn't be recognized, I would say that Cleveland Moffett's "The
Mysterious Card" and its sequel "The Mysterious Card Unveiled"
together is a great, relatively unknown curiosity that I came upon
while participating in Gaslight, an early listserv about
nineteenth-century popular fiction. I won't spoil the story for you,
but what is remarkable, given my interest in how a creative use of
the interval—temporal or memory effects—engenders the supernatural,
is what happens in the gap between the story and its sequel,
published about a half-a-year apart. The first story brings us to the
depths of an unknowable degradation, and leaves us there. The second
returns with such a different optics—literally and figuratively,
since emerging photography asserts its presence—that it almost seems
like the author has created an entirely new cosmology to explain the
previously inexplicable events. And the audience for this story
literally had to dwell in its uncertain interval for at least eight
months, something entirely more radical than what you get with "tune
in next time." You see a similar creative use of interval, both
formally and thematically, in "The Great God Pan" by Arthur Machen,
an author I've been reading recently as well, who had a big impact on
Lovecraft.
Something like Hoffmann's "The Sandman" is always good too,
especially for teaching this material. One thing I realized about
teaching "The Sandman" this time was that in order for the story to
have power, you have to identify with Nathanael's "lacerated soul."
Not a completely groundbreaking realization, except that Hoffmann's
asking you also to identify, as a consequence of your identification
with Nathanael, with literature itself; this is the real source of
the story's uncanny power. It's an ultimatum: either you accept the
terrors implicit in literary creation and consumption or you accept
Klara's more bland, mechanical idealism. I found students did not
want to allow themselves to fully experience the uncanny double-binds
of the story, which in the end implicate the story itself, making one
a non-innocent reader. They seemed more apt to pathologize Nathanael,
or write off the author, and side with Klara, even though it seems
Klara's "quiet, domestic happiness" that she ends up with is
undoubtedly ironic. And we had just read the "The Yellow
Wallpaper"—the narrator of which is in a situation quite similar to
Nathanael's—so it was interesting to see how Klara still emerged as
the hero, even though she acts very much like the dismissive husband
in "The Yellow Wallpaper."
But you know, Freud thought Klara was a hero in that story too, which
is ultimately why I don't trust Freud's account of it. I think that a
Bergsonian reading would be much more fruitful, especially since
Klara seems to embody the brand of Kantian idealism that Bergson
critiques, something that usually goes unnoted as such because it is
a mode of thought that has historically won, and hence comes to us as
good sense. Bringing in Bergson would also bring into relief the
question of the literary, something that Freud himself, in the
"Uncanny," admits he's not quite equipped to deal with. And the
virtual is the literary's uncanny double.
CTheory: Another writer much neglected is Charles Fort, who was
already thinking about media and the supernatural in the 1920s and
30s. In fact, Fort seems to stand somewhere between the fiction of
supernatural horror like Lovecraft, and the supernatural philosophers
like Steiner or Chardin...
Joe Milutis: Lovecraft's "Call of the Cthulhu," as well as its
immediate predecessor, Machen's "The Great God Pan" are about data
management. I love that Cthulhu has as its ratiocinative center a
"clipping agency"—something that I don't think exists anymore, or
exists only in highly rarefied modes, because of the web. It comes as
no surprise that these weird stories have as their core, an engine of
information technology, or even just the impulse to make meaning out
of information gone awry, since it has always been recognized that
the supernatural is also a type of allegory of information—no more so
than in Bram Stoker's _Dracula_ of course. We can talk about Dickens'
"The Signal Man" also, and things like _The Hunchback of Notre Dame_
which, at least in the 1939 film version, has at its core, a debate
about the merits of the Gutenberg press. We could go on and on with
examples both obvious—dealing with the "uncanny" impact of any new
technology—and implicit: that all supernatural literature
spectacularly stages the absences that communication both exacerbates
and attempts to repress.
But there's something a little different going on in Lovecraft and
Machen that I think might be directly related to what Charles Fort
was doing with his "data of the damned." Fort seems to have been his
own voracious clipping agency, yet at the same time he was compiling
all these news stories about blood falling from the sky, vampire
cattle mutilation, and girls spontaneously combusting on beds, he was
reflecting on the ultimate absurdity of the human mind to make sense
of this data. I'm going out on a limb here, because I haven't read it
in a couple years, but I think _Dracula_ is ultimately positivistic
about the ways all the modes of communication that comprise its text
allow us to see the vampire in a way that each individual character
can not. Whereas, what you start to get with the Lovecrafts and the
Forts is this clear sense that data-overload itself is a kind of
monstrosity.
CTheory: This brings us back to media, and in particular to that
strange field called media studies. Media studies has been going
through a lot of changes recently – not only are there a host of new
degree programs and textbooks dedicated to media studies, but the
field itself seems to continually diversify, both drawing in other
disciplines, as well as focusing on new sub-fields (e.g. video game
studies, urbanism, mobile & wireless, etc.). So, a general question
– where do you see media studies going? Where should it be going?
Joe Milutis: I guess, first off, don't ask me to be oracular! This is
not Delphi. But of course, the "oracular mode" is the problem, isn't
it. Everyone's a visionary. You are constantly dealing with people
coming to the table saying, it's all going to change, and it really
is tiring and tiresome. My personal discipline, which may or may not
jibe with how things are going to look on the horizon, in the
university or elsewhere, is to create a space for the broadest
possible inquiry and creativity. But again, I'm just a guy trying to
make his way in the world, with a very idiosyncratic set of things to
offer it. While I might enjoy the authority that comes from making
pronouncements, I know that, having worked at a variety of
institutions on just getting some basic infrastructure in place, that
this ground level work is very difficult: how do you create these
kind of spaces if just getting faculty administrative access to their
computers is seen as some kind of revolution? A further frustration
is that attitudes towards the future have become absolutist, they
feed off desperation in the academy, and they lack subtlety. Perhaps
the hyper-diversification you speak of is part of the problem. I'm
all for a scholar doing mobile phone media research, for example, but
they have to convince me that they know a lot more than that, and are
not just enchanting people with concepts that will be embarrassingly
quaint in ten years. There is no such thing as "mobile media
studies," just as there is no such thing as the "Department of John
Keats."
The separation of media studies and production from other forms of
university research, the tyranny of the new, as well as bad forms of
economic rationality seem to be the biggest obstacles to the future
of media studies and the university in general. I think what Al
Filreis et al. are doing at Penn State with media is more interesting
and sustainable than what tends to go on in new media programs
proper. But that's perhaps because I'm literary-minded and find
there's an anti-literary mentality in many media programs. But I have
an anti-literary strain, too, at least in the way one thinks of the
literary as a kind of sanctified preserve, which is why I've been
writing on the concept of "virtual literature" as the literature of
the unpublished, the fragment, the illiterate. In some ways, it has
been a way for me to get back to some vital core of what it means to
be creative, especially since I'm linking these ideas of data junk
and the unliterary back to Henri Bergson's original concept of the
virtual, not to data gloves or online avatars. I somehow think that
Henri Bergson will save the world. That's my big pronouncement if you
want one.
CTheory: Media studies have always had a contentious relationship to
history. There are, of course, traditional histories of media –
names, dates, inventions, etc. – but beyond this there is often a
sense that the field is polarized between, on the one hand, a
sometimes-obsessive focus on the contemporary and new, and, on the
other hand, a disciplinary obligation to dig back into history. Would
it be fair to say that your own work seems to chart a path in between
these poles? What are some ways of avoiding *both* extremes of the
forgetting of the past and the forgetting of the present?
Joe Milutis: Let's stick with Bergson and the virtual on this notion
of history. It's really very simple. If I'm on a bus, and everything
is going OK, I caught it on time, the sun is flickering by, so I know
that once I get off the bus there will be no adversity in getting to
my destination. I have the leisure to read, to think, and to
effectively remove myself from the situation of my actual presence in
the bus. In fact, if I want, I can see the bus better, choosing to
move from my reflections, to the faces of the other passengers, to
the people on the street moving by, sometimes slow, sometimes fast,
like a passage of music. It is all very nice. Now, same bus: I'm
late, it's raining. The bus will take the same amount of time to get
to my destination. However, now I can't read. I'm on the edge of my
seat scrolling through multiple mental scenarios of what's going to
happen as soon as I get off the bus: how I will manage the small
window I have to get to my destination without total failure, what
are the most effective scenarios (quickly dwindling) and how, in the
face of failure, will I reassess the value of the idea I had of
"getting there on time."
Travel in space is the same as moving through intellectual data; and
this is not a metaphor, it is literally one and the same. You need to
know when to kick in the scenario-creating-mind, which is important!
It's not just a rainy day drag! Conversely, you need to know when to
dream and relax the mind, so that virtual images come in. Are you
completely caught up in the labyrinths of self-referentiality or
buried by a responsibility to the past? Or is your work drained of
depth since you've molded your intellectual output on the buzz du
jour? For me, I don't want my intellectual life dominated by the
"constant revolutionizing of production," although I find that it can
be exciting to tap a particularly energetic flow, since I don't feel
satisfied by my research until it finds a way outside of itself. Do I
have more place in my heart for the untimely rather than the timely?
Situationally, I'd have to say yes because that's the position in
which I have been more squarely placed. The academic is untimely.
That is the strength of this particular endeavor, don't mess with it.
However, with my own personal attitude, I'm not quite sure from day
to day. I wouldn't be able to synthesize as much history and data as
I do without a really strong sense of timely action. Bergson creates
a common sense path between these two positions, hermit and huckster,
if you will.
CTheory: Much of your own work as a theorist and practitioner centers
on sound and performance, two areas that are often sidelined in media
studies discussions (e.g. in media studies or new media textbooks).
Why do you think there is so much emphasis on the image and not on
sound in media studies?
Joe Milutis: One thing that comes to mind is practical and has to do
with the physical limitations of teaching certain disciplines. Look
at Art History lecturers: they can really be charming, unflustered
ciceroni. Click: the silent image comes up. Click, another. They can
point and discuss and go into the depth of this silent, still image.
They can spend as much or as little time as they like, and they have
the added benefit that the history has been codified in such a way
that students parrot back their mastery of forms, styles, schools in
an easily assessable manner. Everybody's more or less on board. There
are good stories to tell. Film studies works the same, with the sound
off. Now imagine lecturing, let's say, about the sound-image
relations in a film. You know how hard it is to talk about sound and
point things out in the soundtrack *as the sound is going*? And of
course, it *goes*. For it to be activated, it is there, and then it
is gone (viola, the virtual in its purest form). I've developed
strategies, but it's still not easy, especially because some of the
more interesting things to talk about are just not obvious to the
untrained ear, and may even be undetectable—not only because of the
multiple layers and temporalities of sound production, but also
because there may be no historical data on how that sound was
produced (so, for example, I encourage students to listen
archeologically—knowing what is possible at the time a film was
produced, are we hearing production sound, playback, a dubbed track?
Is this dual system? Is there a click track? Etc.). And, while
Hollywood sound has a pretty good history to tell, there are a lot of
forms of sound production that just don't have a really easily
identifiable center.
For example, I've taught a lot of sound production classes with a
heavy emphasis on documentary forms, but how do you teach sound
documentary as an "area of study," with a history and a literature?
Well, the most interesting material on the documentary is written on
film. And there is no good reason to rewrite those insights that were
made in film studies for an audio context, which may be why there is
little to no useful literature on sound documentary. Is then this
notion of having a theoretical and conceptual armature outmoded? I
would say "no," but with reservations, and an openness to other forms
of learning, without expressing ressentiment towards the intellectual
output of media theory. Can you get this armature just by listening
to and discussing various important exemplars of the form, while
engaging in hands-on production: somewhat. But the fact is that it is
precisely this lack of disciplinary armature and openness that leaves
sound vulnerable, easily misrecognized ("so, you mean you teach
music?"), and ultimately marginalized as a course of study.
The fact is, though, that I don't really like being known as "the
sound guy," and the position I'm in now allows me to teach within and
draw from the multiple fields in which I have expertise, especially
the literary. My training is completely in experimental,
interdisciplinary departments (I was in Modern Culture and Media at
Brown at a time when its many sub-degrees were transforming so
rapidly that I didn't know what my degree was called by the time I
graduated; my graduate studies were in the Modern Studies program in
the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee,
also a node of much convergence and transformation in its time).
Consequently, I've learned to respond contingently and constructively
not only to different teaching environments, but also to how my own
research interests mutate and evolve. I knew from an early age that I
would be in a unique position to speak to both the rich histories of
the past, as well as newer forms. I saw how influential someone like
McLuhan could be if he was, for example, quoting Shakespeare, or for
that matter Joyce, while at the same time positing new forms of
creating and being, and I realized that without trying, I had found
myself in a similar position. I thought at first my advantage would
be to convince the old-guard of the new ways, but now that has
flip-flopped. The new needs olding. It's sad to me that many even
very smart new media proponents thrive only if they are in a room
with either completely like-minded people or people cowed by the
future, and who are put on the defensive when someone who knows a lot
about new media speaks up for some of the old ways or even merely
tries to engage them critically and intellectually. There are many
heart breaking realizations when you stand at so many proliferating
cross-roads, but the notion that because of some self-satisfying
notions of progress, certain paths into the future will definitively
cut off older bailiwicks seems to me the saddest.
—————-
Joe Milutis is a media artist and writer whose interdisciplinary work
includes experimental sound and radio; video works; new media;
experimental narrative; theoretical writings; and various media and
literature hybrids. Currently, he is completing a large scale audio
piece based on the relation between William Carlos Williams'
_Paterson_ and the city of Paterson, NJ. Milutis teaches in the
Department of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University
of Washington Bothell. His book, _Ether: The Nothing That Connects
Everything_ was published by the Univeristy of Minnesota Press, 2006.
Eugene Thacker is the author of _In the Dust of This Planet – Horror
of Philosophy vol. 1_ and _After Life_. Thacker teaches at The New
School in New York City and is a member of the CTheory editorial
board.
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