I was re-reading some sections of Virno's A Grammar of the Multitude this week in search of a a little story - one which, after nearly combing the entire text, I realized was actually written by Zizek. Oops.

The story was the one of the "empty wheelbarrow," in which a guard suspects a factory worker of stealing, so every night as the worker leaves, he carefully searches his pockets, his wheelbarrow, and his hands - all of them empty. This goes on for months, and the guard is never able to find a stolen item. Years later the guard meets the worker by chance and tells him that he knew he was stealing something, but could never figure out what. The ex-worker replies that he had been stealing wheelbarrows all along.

When I first read this story (in what I thought was Virno...) it struck a tone of familiarity - I had read a children's book with this same tale one summer, years ago, when I was visiting my grandmother. I can't recall the name but the book was printed sometime in the 1950s. The basic narrative was the same, except instead of a worker, there was a child; instead of a factory guard, there was a policeman; and instead of a wheelbarrow, there was a red wagon.

Another key difference was that the wagon, unlike the worker's wheelbarrow, was not empty, but full of sand, cans, or some other sort of junk. The policeman would search through the junk and fail to notice the stolen wagon carrying it.

I was searching for this story, not for the same reasons that Zizek raised it (for him, the wheelbarrow is the Iraq war), but because I think the idea of the junk-filling the wagon, distracting from the wagon itself is a potential analogy for networked subjectivity - and, particularly, many common readings of it.

One quote I did unearth in my re-reading of Virno was this: "The subject is a battlefield." This is the pivotal description of subjectivity in an networked-archival environment. Multiple pre-individual elements are in a constant state of motion and an endless shifting game within the concept of the individual, and this fact is underscored in a networked-archival situation which allows the reification of multiple tendrils of identity.

Yet, like the boy's red wagon, this internally stormy and uneven individual is obscured by its contents. If we focus on a single MySpace profile, a particular thread of blog entries, a record of purchases from an online store, we are likely missing the underlying point. Creating these things is the act of creating a pre-individual element. Together, however, they create a situation through which we can sneak a wagon.

Posted by Nathan at 09:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Ah, it's the eve of that date that rolls around every year, reminding me to add another hash mark into the age column. It is not a time conducive to blogging.

Here are a few interesting pieces from elsewhere, however:

• "A Google Horror Story: What happens when you are disappeared" - It seems everyone has been passing this entry around. It re-raises some critical issues for those of us watching subjectivity dislocating more and more into archival-networked environments. It asks what happens when their are failures in the process?


• "All Problems of Notation Will be Solved by the Masses" - Murphy's Law, I suppose: it seems that Mute Magazine comes out with a series of interesting articles in the issue after I let my subscription lapse. This one ties together relational aesthetics, technology, and distributed labor - rarely a bad thing in my view.


• "Public Intellectuals, Inc." - A genuinely interesting look at the decline in status of public intellectuals in America. Strangely, the writer avoids talking about the influence of the blogospheres.

Posted by Nathan at 09:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There has been so much happening this week that it seems impossible to write about anything else. As I write this entry, the "super Tuesday" results in the primaries are rolling in, but earlier in the week, a certain sports team brought disappointment to my doorstep and Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo!. At least the first and third topics would be fair game for this blog, but the first and second have occupied much of my mind. Two items that have caught my eye this week, however, have been:

• Lauren Cornell's review of Bad Beuys Entertainment on Rhizome.org: On the one hand, I enjoyed this review because of its subject rather than its substance - the clever name, the pointed use of video, and the approach of the collective (criticism through embrace). Yet the reason I cite the review rather than the collective is Cornell's brief observation that "[l]ong before the onset of video-sharing platforms, the [late 90s video work of the collective] would be an amazing Youtube find: an amateur homage to the culture industry that winds up as a critique not only of media's power, but our own consumption of it." In a way, an observation like this provides a glimmer of hope for a culture that increasingly looks to its YouTubes. These tools do indeed make it easier for more people to engage in cultural critique - knowingly or otherwise. Yet it is only through a type of nostalgia that we can see exactly what we are experiencing now.


• Jean Babtiste Bayle's MyOWNspace: admittedly, I did find this thanks to the previous item, but it is worthy of its own mention. MySpace is nothing if not an easy target for cultural and artistic criticism. There is an unrefined, raw, unselfconscious air about the site and its users' pages that lend themselves easily to parody and theoretical target practice. The site sports sorely dated designs in a design conscious Web 2.0 net-world, and relies on crude markups and hacks for users to personalize their little corners. MySpace is technostalgia alive and well. MyOWNspace serves as a particularly clever parody. The creator has fun in sending up every little detail, from the premise, to the Google ads. It is parody as it should be, fun yet insightful.

Posted by Nathan at 11:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)