“Ours is a world where Google is valued at 200 billion dollars, and the Amazon rainforest is valued at nothing at all.” UK-writer Jeanette Winterson is the next in line to sing her swan song about the Decline of West.
Like others, she presents art as an alternative way out. Art, says Winterson, is “the essential equipment for the task of being human. It provides a basic kit for life. Don’t leave home without it.” Art remains the best way Winterson knows “of passing on the complexity and value of human experience, generation to generation, across time.” Art cleans the retina.
When I read her rage against popular culture, banality and pseudo democracy I agreed with most. What made me wonder is why Winterson includes internet, a medium that she herself has mastered so well, in the long list of popular items that spoil our lives. What happened to see Wikipedia ending up that fast amongst the McDonalds and Britney Spears of this world? Is Winterson simply wrong here or should the new media branch simply accept that the internet is fully integrated in our messy world and can therefore no longer claim an outsider status?
According to Winterson the human race is facing a future where each generation will have to re-invent its own wheel. “This may suit short-term consumerism and the cynics who love to promote the new new thing, so that they can keep making money, but the throw-away mentality of late capitalism is hitting every aspect of human interaction; people don’t value their friends or their partners – you can get a new wife, list your hundreds of new friends on FaceBook.” Success rates of online dating tell another story, but Jeanette is right: social networking sites are to blame for a hyper-inflation of the term ‘friend’. Despite this, new media have made it possible to stay in touch with friends in a way that is almost addictive.
“Most of what we call popular culture now, is like a flimsy plastic sieve that is no use for holding anything – the valuable and the worthless alike flow straight through.” Managers have become addictive to change. The organization has to be on the move, otherwise it slips into a deadly routine and the competition can take over. “Experience is not valued in a society that is always moving on,” so Winterson.
We should not read this lecture as example how Western intelligentsia embraces conservative agendas. What strikes me is the way in which the internet is instrumentalized and ‘naturalized’ as a recognized player, which architecture is taken for granted. Instead of calling for a critical analysis of the underlying software and ownership structures, we often see opinion leaders stating that “the internet” does this or that, much like computer games, its evil partner-in-crime. The simplicity of the argument is what amazes me. One can get away with a lot when it comes to internet. Winterson couldn’t do that with film, let alone her beloved writers of the Western canon. What we should instead emphasize is the internet as an emerging set of protocols, an area where there is still room for a multitude of different cultural, technical and economic agendas.
The FAQ of Winterson’s website says: “A lot of modern work is rootless and shallow because the writer has no literary resources – nothing to draw on, in a way that is often unconscious. It doesn’t matter how you’ve been educated, if you can read you can educate yourself. Ignorance has no advantages.” Why then should internet ignorance be exempted? It is not sufficient to say that internet is too technical. If this were the case, then call for media literacy to be included in the school curriculum – and that would only mean more internet time, and less time for literature, visual arts, theatre, music and painting. It is too simple either to play around with the generation divide argument. We are light years away from understanding of art in which free software training is seen as a vital human quality. Code is the music notation system of our time.
Winterson: “Art should be part of everyone’s education so that later it can be part of everyone’s lives.” Agreed. But the canon debate should not be played out against the need to master today’s creative instruments. “How can a young person know what is out there if nobody tells them?” I propose that we reformulate this question: How can a young person know what is out there if nobody outlines the underlying architecture of search engines, blogs and social networking sites?
Winterson writes: “Our education system and our media do nothing to show people what art really is, why it’s important, and why they might want it. What we call popular culture is a fake – imposed on us by those who want to take our money. There’s nothing democratic about it, and there is nothing genuine about it. The fact that art, the real thing, is more and more for the better off and better educated is a disgrace. It’s been left that way because education is inert, the media is philistine, and the big money wants quick bucks.”
The mechanism Winterson describes here is all too real, and the internet hasn’t done much to change this situation. The embrace of pop culture, as Henry Jenkins performed lately in the new media context, is a mere repeat of 1980s cultural studies strategies, without reflecting on its 30 years history. The problem is no longer to interest the elite for pop culture but involve the expanding underclass in the arts, books and demanding forms of culture that require a critical understanding of the wider context in which a work of art situates itself. “We’re told that rubbish TV, Disney, the X-Factor, Dan Brown and Posh Spice, Soap opera, and celebrity torture shows are what people want – it’s democratic. Well, how do people know what they want when they have no choices?”
Fan culture is big enough and no longer needs the support of intellectuals that once intended to overcome the hi-low divide. Web 2.0 social networking cultures can hardly be called subcultural, and these sites are not in need of media attention or arts funding. The discussion has yet to begin how social networking fits into our broader cultural landscape – let alone its (non)relation to art. Read Nicolas Bourriaud’s 1998 Relational Aesthetics with the rise of Web 2.0 in your mind and find out some surprising links – and gaps. Are We Relational Enough?
Winterson is right in her observation that the art system is kept separate so that we do not have engage the masses — and initiate them. “In the false democracy of the West we don’t ban books or burn them – we don’t exile artists, we don’t close the theatres, if we did a lot of people might get the idea that art has something in it for them. Instead we trivialise the arts – call them entertainment, call them luxury, as opposed to the essentials of TV and clone bands. Our censorship of the arts is clever – we call literature ‘elitist’, we call the visual arts ‘specialised’, we call classical music ‘highbrow’, we say that only the middle classes go to theatre and opera.”
The answer to PhotoShop Society is not a reality watermark, hidden inside the digital picture files, but a lively art practices that function as antidotes to counteract image poisoning. Winterson calls her solution poetry. “The poetic text, rich and complex, can open up our feelings, sometimes, even violently rip us out of negative and destructive emotions, slit the baleful cocoon of denial and self-doubt, set us free.” Agreed, but why not include contemporary forms of poetic expression such as texting, graffiti, blogging?
What is poetry today? Winterson: “If children read poetry in schools everyday, they would find a precise and full language, that gives them the words forbidden by bogus authority and popular culture alike. They could cut through the dead language of jargon and legalise, the baffling non-speak of media reporting. They could stab the rotten heart of their own inarticulacy – because we are reducing language to its most basic components.” Jeanette, isn’t this what local rap songs are already doing? How can we reverse the shrinking language abilities with today’s tools? “Without language we are defenceless.” But can we also use visual language as self-defence? When will writers make the long anticipated ‘multimodal turn’? This is the inner fight of my, and Jeanette Winterson’s generation, stuck halfway between the typewriter and the PC, television and internet, vinyl and CD. We can still switch back to the old reception of ‘poetry’ and see the loss in complexity of cultural expression, while managing alright with the new skill sets. This in-between position puts in a unique position: we can look back and embrace present opportunities.
“I think it’s time for a new system – and I think that art, while not the solution, is part of the remedy.” The unique quality of art is that it’s not mere surface. “Art recognises that life has an inside as well as an outside. Art by its very nature reveals and celebrates the inside of life, the parts of us that are not satisfied by, and do not depend on, the busy world of markets and money, machines and management.” The same could be said of the internet: it is not mere interface design, the networks have an inside logic – one that most users are not aware of. What we should prevent ourselves from doing is to project ‘truth’ in old notation systems such as print or painting. Art can pop up anywhere – even out of your Blackberry or iPhone. Modern life, so Winterson, deadens people. In art we experience moments of awakening. “Art won’t change the world, but its remedy lies in awakening us to those buried longings and desires, to live differently, to live well.” – irrespective of the media we find ourselves using.