Jon Greenaway - TheLitCritGuy
Jon Greenaway is TheLitCritGuy. He’s a horror fiction scholar, a media critic, and a political theorist, reader and writer who makes his living exploring the heaviest of important texts, contemplating the deepest of issues and explaining the Very Big Picture. And this seems like a very good time for that.
He talks about the reason contemporary politics is quite literally a horror show, our uneasy relationship between technology and the human body, what it means to make art in the age of late capitalism, the role of the public intellectual, the failings of the education system, what we should perhaps be doing with our brains (regardless of whether we are scientists, artists, academics, business people or ‘consumers’) and how to be hopeful in the face of it all.
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Photo: Steve Lawson
Music: Upgrading Alone by Kathali, used under licence from Artlist.io / reCreation by airtone (c) copyright 2019
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.
AI Transcription
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
people, wrote, horror, technology, world, cultural, political, culture, capitalism, point, deeply, talk, knowledge, intellectual, twitter, university, called, book, drawn, jon
SPEAKERS
Andrew Dubber, Jon Greenaway
Andrew Dubber
Hi, I’m Andrew Dubber. I’m the director of Music Tech Fest. And this is the MTF podcast. It’s a strange time, a time for deep reflection, a time for thinking about the things that really matter. It’s also a time when we can see what works in our society and what falls apart the moment things go outside the realms of what we might ordinarily think of as normal. And a times like this, it pays to have access to some big picture deep thinking, capital B, capital P, capital D, capital T. Fortunately, sequestered away in Manchester, and maintaining respectable social distance is such a big picture deep thinker. Jon Greenaway is better known online as TheLitCritGuy, his whole thing is to go deep into the deepest of thinkers come up for air, look around at society and culture, and paint the big picture for the rest of us. And it’s not always a pretty picture. He’s a horror fiction scholar, a media critic, a political theorist, and the old school definition of a well read serious young man to help us out with what it all means. Here’s Jon Greenaway. Enjoy the ride. Jon, thanks for joining us on the MTF podcast today. And it might be a little bit of a mystery why you’re here because music tech is not something that you’re known for your writer and a thinker in areas of literary domains, but I’m kind of really interested in getting to the bottom of how you think about the world and how what you think helps other people to think through the situations they’re in. So let’s start with how you described to other people what you do.
Jon Greenaway
Okay, yeah, my name is Jon, I am a writer and teacher from, from Manchester. So what I what I do is sort of exist in between two disparate institutions. So I did a PhD in English literature. And at the same time as doing that, I was starting to do kind of lots more public facing work doing lots more digital pedagogy through through Twitter, mostly as a way of kind of surviving, because the economic realities of the contemporary university system being what they are, it’s not a great way of trying to make a living anymore. So what I, the reason that I started doing what I was doing was one, the kind of cultural criticism and what we might call capital T theory, that idea is often very institutionalised and deeply inaccessible. And the internet is a great space for the distribution of knowledge. And to, I started doing it because the kind of traditional career path of a PhD into an academic job just doesn’t exist. And there has to be another way of kind of making a living. And the only tools to hand are digital distribution and technological tools and digital, digital and social spaces in which you can put information and knowledge out and receive it back as well.
Andrew Dubber
So you became TheLitCritGuy on Twitter? And yes, how did that help.
Jon Greenaway
Um, so I like one of the books that I always remember having is the Norton Anthology of literary theory and criticism, which is this big, 1600 page, behemoth that I bought in the second year of my undergraduate degree and loved it. And then when I started doing a master’s degree, I was doing a lot more work in that kind of area. And I just thought, you know, this, this will maybe be interesting to talk about publicly. And I thought maybe it would, it would find a kind of limited audience of other people. But then I realised that if something has been previously inaccessible to people, or even if they were not previously aware of it, it’s a very common specialised subfield, it becomes really, really engaging. And so it turned into it turned into a kind of much bigger project than I originally envisioned. And, and I’ve been doing it for probably about five or six years now, in a way that is, I’ve started more as a hobby and increasingly, I’ve tried to take it a bit more seriously as time has gone on. So it’s, it’s turned into a great way of networking of kind of building, building a name in a body of work outside of the restrictive institutions of higher education, and trying to put social media to work in a productive and interesting and intellectually stimulating way.
Andrew Dubber
Right. So a lot of people when they hear literary criticism, what they think of is probably book reviews, do you want to tell us what what kind of really is
Jon Greenaway
and this is, this will get me in trouble because you ask you ask anyone who describes themselves as a literary critic, what it is, you know, you ask a dozen people, you get 15 different answers. So, it is essentially about the the critical engagement with cultural products and even that answer reflects my point of view on On the what literary theory and criticism is. So from my point of view, I just finished writing a really long piece on the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. And Gramsci wrote a lot about culture. And he said that the point of any kind of cultural exposure is not to give you more facts that you can pull out a dinner party to impress somebody, which is in a way, you know, if we’re being a bit cynical, that’s what that’s what book reviews are for right there. So you can impress the next people that you’re having drinks with? And tell them Well, did you know Yeah,
Andrew Dubber
without actually having had to wait,
Jon Greenaway
yeah, you don’t need to, like in a way book reviews actually limit your cultural engagement, because you don’t need to engage with it now, because there is a professional book person who will do that for you. Graham, she said that the point of culture is actually to come to a fuller knowledge of who you are, your place in the world, your connections with one another with other people and your responsibilities towards a collective struggle for political liberation. You know, he was a he was a member of the Italian Communist Party, and was took culture profoundly seriously. And I think, even as it’s become much more widely accessible, I think it’s still necessary to take culture extremely seriously and to treat to treat it, even if even if we think of it as a form that is like disposable or kind of cheap, you know, I think it’s really, really important that culture is taken seriously. And I think if there is a good definition for what literary theory and criticism tries to do, it’s to take culture in all of its plurality as seriously as possible is something that not just aesthetic value or moral value, but also deep political value and significance.
Andrew Dubber
How important to you is the political element of what you do?
Jon Greenaway
Well, deeply important to me. I think I described myself as as a as a Marxist, but that’s in terms of method. So Marxism is often seen as a very prescriptive set of political positions, which is really very uncharitable way of thinking about it. And something that obviously lots of Marxists have argued about for the last hundred and 50 years, they do as we do as we do we love a good argument. And so for me, it is it’s a Marxism is principally a method. And the method is that before, before his before kind of philosophy, or anything spiritual or abstract or artistic, what you have is you have the struggle for material need. So that question of that question of materialism is actually foundational to everything that we consider cultural, culture, culture, and politics are intimately bound up with one another, by their very nature, because you can’t really have a culture until we have an economic system that provides enough of a surplus that some people can sit around, talking on podcasts without having to be out kind of producing stuff that we need to survive. So in a way, it’s a it’s a cultural criticism as the ungrateful child of contemporary capitalism, because instead of being so grateful for the world that we live in, we turn around and go, actually, there’s an awful lot about this, which is deeply, morally repugnant, and deeply unfair. And we would never be able to make that reversal, unless capitalism are developed to a certain point in position. So yeah, I think to talk about culture is to talk about politics. And it’s especially the people who say, culture is a political that are making the most kind of political gesture.
Andrew Dubber
Right, right. And academia is kind of thought of as trying to be the critic and conscience of society. How well is it doing that?
Jon Greenaway
Oh, it isn’t. It’s completely abdicated that responsibility. I mean, to make a few sweeping generalisations, I think on an individual and subjective level, there are certainly academics who are still trying to perform that function. The university, capital U is now essentially a it’s a corporation. You know, we don’t exist in educational institutions. Now we, we are corporate executives if you’ve climbed a certain way up the ladder. So what we’ve become what the university has become, and to be honest, arguably, this is what it always was, is a an ideological arm of capitalism, that that denies its own ideological investments. Again, unpack
Andrew Dubber
unpack that a little bit.
Jon Greenaway
Again, Gramsci wrote about this a huge amount, but he said that the intellectuals the kind of traditional sense of intellectuals always say that they are non political, they but what they do is they provide legitimacy to the outstanding order and give it a kind of narrative to tell about itself. The context that I think of is the Harvard Business School. Harvard is, you know, the great, most famous university in the world. Scholarly, it’s there to further our intellectual inquiry, but it’s also the same place that will give somebody like Sean Spicer, Donald Trump’s former press secretary visiting fellowship, to make $300,000 giving, you know, six lectures a year on their experience telling lies for racist, a xenophobe, and okay. To semi fascist, so to say that they are deeply apolitical is them washing their hands, giving themselves an kind of veneer of intellectual respectability, while at the same time trying to uphold the political structures which they are supposed to be the critic and conscience of. The most famous thing that grumps he wrote about this is the difference between organic, that is the section in the prison notebooks on on the intellectual. In his time, the big the big, intellectual class was there was what he called the ecclesiastics, the catholic church which provides this legitimacy to a repressive state whilst at the same time disavowing its own political involvement. And I think in many ways, that’s what the university does. Now, arguably, you could say that the university especially in the UK, has always done that certain universities, the red bricks were established as training centres for bureaucrats a class that was supposed to administer a colonial empire. So in I think, but now if anything, the the the display of intellectual disinterestedness in the patios, as a politics is getting much harder to kind of maintain, I mean, academics are on strike just this week, they work for institutions that the institution I work for has cash on hand of 300 and 50 million pounds. The institution that’s next door, is spending a billion pounds over the next 10 years on buildings and corporate events, to kind of generate revenue. And so when you start to see students as consumers, they are also products that you desperately have to compete for. So this kind of eventual corporatization of the university is what has kind of drawn out a lot of its radical potential.
Andrew Dubber
And so what’s our response to that as I guess, inverted commas consumers of education products?
Jon Greenaway
Well, I think, firstly, I, firstly to think if education can be thought of as something other than a product is really important. If education is a product, then you know, eventually the middle of the the end point of a university, for example, is that you turn up you cut, you cut them a check for 65,000 pounds, and you get given a bit of paper that gives you access to a labour market, that’s what a degree is for right to get to get you the good job. However, if education is something other than a product, which you can purchase, but is in fact, a kind of condition of what it means to kind of live a good life, to engage with the fullness of knowledge and become who you are supposed to be. And I think then you can’t think of that in terms of economic exchange. And that’s why I think, actually, social media and digital spaces can be really interesting, because there are a lot, you can’t necessarily commodify the relationship of giving away knowledge for free on the internet. But what you can do is ask for the economic support that allows that giving away to continue.
Andrew Dubber
Right? So we’ll come to that the the idea of how you’re kind of supporting the the being a public intellectual thing that you do. But before we get to that, is this an age of the public intellectual? Or is this Well,
Jon Greenaway
I kind of hope so. I hope so. Because if anything, we have technological tools of greater sophistication than at any time in human history. And we have institutions, which are sclerotic and slow to adjust to change, and desperately afraid of losing their own institutional privileges. So I think actually, it could well be but on a much more kind of localised scale. And you will probably have, like, micro public intellectuals, so but people who are known by maybe like six and a half thousand people who will visit blog, or will subscribe to YouTube channel or listen to a podcast. And but whether but but you won’t necessarily have the kind of public intellectuals that used to have in, you know, the 50s to 70s, where you would have kind of public intellectual debate on mass media that will be watched by millions upon millions of people. I think there’s the potential for this to be considered a kind of age of public intellectuals. But whether that comes about depends upon whether we think it’s possible for you to, to think and write and debate publicly in a way that doesn’t slide into either kind of in group validation, or, as we’ve seen, actually in a lot of the internet into deeply reactionary politics.
Andrew Dubber
So what you’ve done is set it up so that there are lots of people who can give you small amounts of money, so that what you do can be sustainable.
Jon Greenaway
Yeah, absolutely. So they I’ve written quite a few things, which, basically, they’re the 21st century equivalent of pamphlets that old socialist organisations would do with to try and kind of giveaway and I think some of the best educational work in in Britain certainly has come out of things like and the working man’s Educational Association in the early 20th century, Socialist Workers clubs in the 19th century, who believed that education was not just a product, but was an essential part of it. Establishing the working class from their point of view so that the working class will be able to free itself. So what I’m interested in is, can you kind of have that same kind of pamphleteering spirit, in order to give people knowledge not to kind of give them additional facts, but to give them ways of understanding their own material and social conditions, without that being inscribed upon them by an external authority. So it’s about helping people come to realisations about themselves, and about their own connections to the political and cultural spheres in which they exist. Rather than being an external kind of capital, a academic that emerges to go well, here’s how to make sense of your current situation. Right? What you do is you provide people knowledge, so they can make sense of the situation to themselves.
Andrew Dubber
Right, and the kind of the received wisdom is that is a very common unmediated communication. And I suspect that you’re sort of very aware of the fact that the mediation and the relationship with technology is something that adds its own, I guess, problematic.
Jon Greenaway
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, do do I know, do we know anybody, you know, for about 26 and a half thousand people I exist as as a kind of small square on a on a screen. But in a way, all human relationships have a degree of mediation to them, you know, the Keynesian psycho analysts would say that you actually require a degree of mediation, because to be confronted with the real, the capital, our ontological truth of everything would be too traumatic. So we need that kind of mediating factor between us. And in some ways, it can be deeply alienating space. Richard Seymour has written a great book about this called the twittering machine, about the ways in which the social industries are psychologically and politically damaging. But I think the danger there is you kind of right off agency, and you write off the individual’s capability of kind of engaging knowingly and critically, with this, this zone of communication, even if it is mediated,
Andrew Dubber
while still being complicit in whatever the context that Twitter is a resonant?
Jon Greenaway
Yeah, exactly. So you can never step outside of the political consequences of it, you know, the kind of slogan that gets thrown around is there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. And I’m like, Yeah, that’s true. But that doesn’t mean the attempt to act in a way that is consistent with your own sense of ethics is completely meaningless. You know, all of us might be be hypocrites. But that doesn’t mean that we need to stop kind of triggering caring.
Andrew Dubber
Right, right. Right. So your background is very firmly in the horror genre. Yeah, just kind of interesting take on it, particularly when you start thinking about the relationship between human beings and technology. You want to sort of talk a little bit about that?
Jon Greenaway
Yes, yeah. So I did my PhD at a place called Manchester Centre for Gothic studies. And I write quite a lot quite a lot in the way that I think about politics gets infected with horror. And I think horror is really
Andrew Dubber
an appropriate response to the political situation.
Jon Greenaway
Yeah, precisely, precisely, this is exactly what I think, which is that there’s a great quote from Theodore adorno, who says that if you could write an ontology of the contemporary age, it would be an ontology of horror, right? We exist in a world that is profoundly strange and deeply kind of catastrophic in some ways. So we can either say that horror is this kind of trash cultural form that is there to kind of give us the cheap thrill of somebody in a clown mask jumping out at you all, which I think is much more interesting answer is to say that horror is actually a diagnosis, it is a cultural response to a political and existential condition, which frequently is mediated through technology, especially, probably, like, from the 80s onwards, you start to see much more explicitly digital technology interacting with, with human bodies, you know, changing us physically, is what technology is able to do. I mean, you know, lots of existentialists have written about what technology can do and phenomenologists. But their that their conception of technology is something like a hammer. But now when you have technology, which has got capabilities far beyond one person one use, you can see that technology can change us in in much more kind of frightening and profound ways.
Andrew Dubber
Which gets you into a very Black Mirror kind of situation. What do you make of that, incidentally?
Jon Greenaway
So I saw a swing, I saw a swing between two points of view, which is that I think it’s a I think it’s really interesting and responding to a lot of very kind of contemporary concerns. But there’s also the thing of like, a black mirror is its critique is what if phones but too much? What if, what if phones, but what if they were bad, right? And so I think it’s a good first step, but I think there are more interesting questions you can ask about the relationship between seek human body particularly and horror, horror and technology and I think maybe maybe a kind of better starting place in this video. I’m as like the work of David Cronenberg and the body horror of late 80s, where it’s done explicitly from a kind of awareness of stuff written by Marshall McLuhan. And the way that technology is going to fundamentally not just change how we communicate, but it’s actually going to change Korea who we are. Yeah. And, and the point is that, I think that’s interesting about black mirror is that the technology all works perfectly. The problem is not technology, the problem is that this technology is turned back on ourselves. There is a kind of brokenness about the humans in Black Mirror kind of on an ontological level, you know, it isn’t that they’ve made bad choices is just that, after a certain point, if you push it far enough, human nature sort of snaps. And so I think there’s something there, too. So those are two really interesting strands of the way that horror and technology intersect.
Andrew Dubber
Is there anything that you can look at in the world and go well, I’m really optimistic about that. Are you as an as a Marxist allowed to be optimistic?
Jon Greenaway
Well, this is that’s really difficult. That’s a really difficult question, because there will be some Marxist who would say you have to be you can’t admit the possibility of defeat, right. And there would be some who would say Actually, no, everything’s, everything’s awful. That’s already happened. Yeah. Yeah. And which both both, I think are kind of perfectly arguable, positions. But there’s a great, there’s a great book called hope without optimism by Terry Eagleton. So I’m not an optimist. optimism is is in his kind of formulation very banal. And kind of platitudinous Everything will be fine. I mean, it might not be. But I am hopeful. You know, there there is like the the the idea that the struggle for liberation is ended, is I think, profoundly narcissistic. And it’s it’s very subjective. It’s all about, you know, what, I don’t feel great about this, how things have worked out for me, I think I think it’s much better to be hopeful than it is to be optimistic, because hope admits the possibility that things may not work out, that things might not get better. And, you know, to go back to Gramsci, the famous kind of formulation is pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will, I think it’s incredibly important to have a very clear eyed and realistic view of just how bad certain things can be, but never to obscure the fact that not only is radical change, possible, often emerges completely unexpectedly. You know, Gramsci went from in the space of about 18 months, being on the brink of kind of leading a socialist revolution in Italy, to being kind of fighting a rearguard action against the fascist government that had taken over the state in the space of about, yeah, 18 to 24 months. That’s how quickly, like huge, colossal events can change. So I don’t know, I think being an optimist is a little bit naive. But I think being hopeful, actually is, is very difficult, but very important.
Andrew Dubber
Okay, so then the question is, what are you hopeful about?
Jon Greenaway
Well, what I’m hopeful about is the idea that, Well, one thing that I’m very hopeful about is there’s a new book coming out by Wendy Liu, called Silicon Valley must be destroyed, how to save technology from capitalism. And because I think this idea of if there is a way forward beyond the kind of decaying neoliberal order, which has been in crisis since 2008, and is arguably about to enter another one, and that way out is obviously technological. It’s but Silicon Valley has moved from the 90s, slightly cyberpunk utopian idea of like, we’re going to save the world to how do I get venture capitalist but 100 and $50 million into this app, which is going to fold within 18 months, whilst I clear a check for 23 million quid and then retire to a commune somewhere. So I think if we can rethink our relationship to technology, I’d really kind of foundational level that moves us away from the just essentially, that there’s, you know, the meme that floats around on line is that like, every six months, some startup company wants to disrupt public transportation and invents the bus. But there’s but that obscures the fact that there’s serious money and serious effort is put into these attempts. But what’s missing is a political vision that sees beyond the cheap returns of capitalist logic. So if there is a kind of potential a utopian future for the world, which, you know, Oscar Wilde said that any any map without utopia or on is not worth looking at, then it is going to be one that’s the genie can’t go back in the bottle. Technology is a necessary tool and instrument for whatever kind of future building might be done. But whether that can be done with the political understanding of technology that we have now, I think is quite unlikely,
Andrew Dubber
right? Assuming capitalism assuming the technology that we have, but recognising problems in the world and coming up with, you know, tools to help address those issues. To address grand challenges, is there a way in which that can be done? Well, that can be done ethically that can be done productively that, that actually makes things mess produces them, puts them out into the world in a way that actually makes the world a better place. is that happening? Are there examples of them? I mean,
Jon Greenaway
I hope so. I hope so how do you get away from production that doesn’t depend upon extraction, you know, and often that’s extraction of rare earth, minerals in the global south, that’s, you know, plastic and toxic wastes that are dumped in China or the developing economies of of India or other other nations. So I think, is it possible to create something, and I think that’s why that’s why I think education is really interesting, because what is what is education? Because to me, it isn’t just the impartation of knowledge from one person to another, but it is a co constitutive act, like learning is how you create something new, but learning is never something that is just done to you. It’s something that you and, you know, one other as many others as possible can do together. So I think that that is maybe the creation of knowledge, I think, is something that can potentially not rest upon these extractive violent logics of, of production,
Andrew Dubber
should we make things better? Or should we just stop making things? Or?
Jon Greenaway
I don’t necessarily know if the choice is one or the other? Can we make better things that would mean that we need to make less, quite arguably, is I that’s the the question of degrowth is how it’s referred to this idea of, can we do with less? And I think it has to be thought about? I don’t know if I have a really good answer to that. I think probably yes. But can we can we do that with technology that isn’t designed to be obsolete in 24 months? Can we do that with technology that doesn’t run out of tech support within five years forcing you into making another purchase? Potentially? Could we have a have technology that was completely ethically perfect? Almost certainly not? Because that’s not the world is always entangled with itself, you know, you can’t, there is no unproblematic action, but there are definitely things that can be done, that would be better, I think, making better things and making fewer things probably have to go together.
Andrew Dubber
If I, let’s say, from a completely different discipline or field from a computer programmer scientist or something like that, how can your knowledge be useful to me in what I do? I think
Jon Greenaway
one of the good things about any any kind of critical theory or what Marxist would call historical materialism, is that it gives you a much bigger picture of how everything has developed to this point. You know, Marxist Marxist, historically have always been incredibly interested in science. You know, one of the one of the, you know, Friedrich Engels wrote about anthropology wrote about a great book called dialectics of nature, which is about the natural world. So I think people worry that oh, this is politicising science or this politis. But it’s like this is already political. And if anything, one of the great values of it is to allow you to see the connections between what we take to be impartial knowledge, and the political effects that that impartial knowledge can often have. I mean, anthropology was created by pseudo scientists in the 19th century, who needed a way to form a racist hierarchy of for their colonial project that was seen as science that was seen as completely what we can’t argue with that that’s just the way that the world works. But this isn’t, that is not how the world works. And I think it’s much more valuable to be able to see the ways in which knowledge is constructed, and often instrumentalized to ends that scientists and engineers and mathematicians would probably be personally repelled by than it is to worry, oh, well, we can’t talk about, you know, history. We can’t talk about the social applications of this, because that’s dangerously close to doing politics. Because if we don’t talk about politics, or we don’t kind of are not aware of that, then I promise you, there are many people with much more reactionary and conservative views, who very much are aware of that. You know, this is why there are so many, often student movements who are deeply opposed to technologies of facial identification being used on university campuses. Why? Because it’s going to be very easy and efficient way of criminalising dissent of turning universities into into observational panopticon ‘s even more than they already are, and a way of policing and restricting young people. Now is that what the technology is supposed to do? No, of course not. That’s not what technology is supposed to be for. But if that is what it will be used for. And I think especially around issues of facial identification and around that’s that’s an area where I think technologists have to be blindingly aware of the fact that this is a kind of tool for any sort of repression of social movements, for example,
Andrew Dubber
is this just about thinking about ethics before you get started? Or is there sort of a bigger picture to it than that?
Jon Greenaway
I mean, yeah, you could, you could say that it’s just Well, you know, we already we take the ethics class, we’ve solved the problem. But this, this is this is not a static process. This is like cultural criticism, we’re never going to be done with examining the ramifications of discursive processes. You know, I think Marx generally gets sort of stereotypes of very static thinker, yo, well, Marx is all think x, or, you know, there’s the Marxist formulation, which is x. But if you read capital, what you actually see, this is what David Harvey talks about. It’s the Marx’s, maybe the great thinker of systems and systems, which are never still, you know, the dialectic doesn’t stop. The the system of capitalism is not a is not a diagram. It’s something that is constantly in motion. So he’s he is the great theatre theoretician of flow of processes of production, which is not something that never stops. So I think if you go, Well, we thought we had an ethics meeting. And now we’re done. And that in itself is a problem. Because we go well, our ethics is going to be completely non problematic for the entire life of this product, or this, this thing that we’re developing. But I think having a self reflective and dialectical attitude towards the relationship between production application and ethical or moral or aesthetic considerations is what any kind of critical, critical approach will give you
Andrew Dubber
from a policy perspective. And politically speaking, it feels like Europe is doing a kind of at least putting more effort in, in this regard, things like GDPR, and those sorts of things will help.
Jon Greenaway
I mean, I hope so if only if only from the point of view of the threats that GDPR regulations carry within them. Because I mean, if anything is a policy instrument goes, it’s relatively crude, I think, but what what any large organisation will be nervous about will be the be the threat to the bottom line. And I think you have to understand how to make any sort of corporate entity behaving the way that you want it to is, you you, this idea of, it happens quite a lot with video games, you know, Video game, fans will say, oh, why why won’t developers be be be brave and stop making their programmers work? 80 hour crunch weeks, so you want them to be brave? Well, you already pre ordered you, you’re asking them to act ethically, when they already have your money. So you know, and I think the GDPR regulations are really interesting. I really good idea, actually. And I think the interesting one of the right to be forgotten is is one that I’m sort of fascinated with, because we have this, you know, we’re told that everything lasts forever on the internet. You know, everything’s permanent now. I actually think there’s something slightly horrifying about that. There’s something slightly unnerving about this idea that you will always be the very worst thing that you’ve ever done. You will always be there’s a joke that floats around Twitter, which is like, every day Twitter has main character. And the aim of going on Twitter is always to make sure that that’s not you. You know what I mean? Right? But like, but the kind of awful nightmare of forever being that one moment stretch, it’s like being in Hell
Andrew Dubber
yeah. This right to be forgotten thing is really interesting when looked at from the point of view of somebody who’s interested in heritage and archives, because what people tend to find, particularly with, for instance, with archaeology, you tend to dig out the stuff that people throw away, you don’t dig out the people that the things that people prized, and, and so if things that are important to you, that are so important to you, that you delete them that get forgotten what, you know, sort of future archaeologists of culture will only find, you know, basically the stuff that we thought was trash.
Jon Greenaway
I mean, yeah, but the I mean, I think the internet is incredibly haunted place. Right? We You know, this idea that there are so many, like half finished blogs, there are so many websites which no longer work, there are so many like, places that used to be really interesting forums or sites of discussion or cultural exchange or weird experimental arts, that are now kind of ghost towns and are haunted by these kind of floating avatars. And this idea that what we will be left with is kind of the cultural detritus of a of an age that was like, exponentially Exactly. Writing. But that’s that’s something that I think is really interesting. There’s this idea which I’ve been fascinated with of kind of a kind of Gothic Marxism, which is that the in what we throw away in our cultural detritus in our low culture, there is something that’s tells us a great deal about not only what we value, but about what we were hoping for, for our future. What did we want the What did we want the future to look like? Right? And in the kind of ghost town of the internet, maybe you can see, it’s, it’s sort of like digital archaeology in many ways, right? You see the layers building up on top of one another of what we thought the internet was where we would create the future. And we you get to see what certain each generation and this is maybe a generation that changes in space a year, right? The web of 2020 years is a slightly different beast from the web of 2016. In many ways, worse place. But you get to see what did these What did each generation think about what the future was going to be?
Andrew Dubber
And yet at the same time, we’ve lost yesterday’s we’ve lost Myspace, and there’s absolute repository. Yeah. of the culture at the time is just, well, there’s no point paying for the hosting. Let’s Shut it. Shut it all down. Yeah. So So in that respect, you know, there’s sort of the the right to be forgotten as the curse of being forgotten. Yes.
Jon Greenaway
Yeah. But but also a necessary one, right? And what what what defines us as as kind of subjects, is the is our contingency. This is why we’re drawn to horror, because we need to be reminded of our contingency, but it’s also why we’re scared. It’s why we’re frightened. Because to be confronted with finitude is to be confronted by a limit. And the limit experience, you know, it’s it’s what back in like the 15th century, would you consider a religious experience almost, you know, you take into the limits of yourself and reminded of your own finiteness, right. But we promised a kind of immortality, the singularity. Yeah, you know that. But at the end of the day, just what you said that, you know, if the costs get too great, and you can’t monetize the user base, effectively, turn off the servers, everybody dies. You know, there’s something slightly you know, if you lose everything, what would that make you? If you exist solely online, if you have a particular kind of persona or output, if you lose that there, there is something kind of terrifying about it. But also, it’s something that is true of life itself, right? We you know, we live towards our own end. And Simon Critchley has this great point where he says that, like a basic ontological condition is his indebtedness. We need one another, from a very kind of foundational level. But we don’t like to be reminded of our own limitations, we don’t like to be reminded of our own kind of fragility of finitude of our inability to do this by ourselves. So but it’s the only way we’re going to make it through it’s doing it
Andrew Dubber
together, not wanting to sort of push on the big questions, but what’s the role of art and, and cultural creativity and all this?
Jon Greenaway
Well, I think to explore those kinds of questions, right, is it just, I think one of the one of the kind of really sad things about a lot of contemporary culture is that it gets talked about solely as product. And people go, Oh, well, you just don’t like it when films are successful. It’s like, yes, but if the only one of the markets, you know, Marx writes about this in the Communist Manifesto, where he says that capitalism has dissolved, everything, everything is dissolved, any kind of religious belief gone any kind of moral or aesthetic standard, gone, everything, all it’s come down to, the only way that we can judge value is through the value of the marketplace, the value of exchange. So if the only way that we can understand art is through its box office returns, that explains how we get things like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where we go, Well, these must be good movies. Why? Well, because they made an awful lot of money.
Andrew Dubber
No, because they’re the new mythology.
Jon Greenaway
Yeah, even more chillingly. This kind of, but is it possible? Is it I think it’s, I think it’s necessary actually to defend the idea of talking about culture as a realm that is maybe no longer independent, but is in some way resistant to being only talked about only understandable within the terms of how much money does this make? Because, you know, there are so there are there are millions of people who will make and create not for any expectation of reward reward, I’m sure would be really nice. Because it would probably allow them to create more. But the the the urge to create itself is is not something that fits neatly within use value and exchange value.
Andrew Dubber
Right? Right. The need to express yourself could just be as easily carried out through screaming in an empty room. Yeah, but, but you won’t you can’t feed your children with that.
Jon Greenaway
Yeah, precisely. You know, we’re we’re drawn into like any anything Cultural act, you know, there the argument is about what do we what do we value. And eventually if if the logic of the market is the only logic, if it’s if that truly is the only way in which, you know, we will have the only that’d be the only metric of quality will be, will this sell, then what you’ll see is you’ll anything is starting to see it is a colossal narrowing of cultural space. And this idea of culture as a place that, you know, doesn’t require requires no risk must be easily distributable, must be easily comprehensible, must be easily marketable. If that seal, what that will exclude is vast swathes of literature and philosophy of art of cinema, of all of these cultural forms, they will just become irrelevant. Why because they won’t sell. Right. And this is great Mark Fisher quote, where he’s talking about this in the context of philosophy. And he says that he was teaching in a further education school, and they were talking about nature. And one of them will niches, niches, difficult. niches hard. It’s like, yes. But he said, you know, you want nature in the same way as you want a hamburger. But the very end adjustability of nature is the point. The point is that there are certain kind of cultural forms that don’t need that are hard, that are difficult, that are weird, and, and maybe not marketable. But that is not a problem with the cultural form in and of itself, it’s a problem with how we understand value. And if we only if we only admit for the value of the sale, then there will be so much culture that is completely indigestible to us, right?
Andrew Dubber
I’m gonna try out something and hopefully, you’re gonna be able to carry this over the finishing line for me so that I can actually kind of put this debate a little bit I the way that I think about Music Tech Fest and a lot we do a lot of things that are about experimentation and putting different people from different disciplines together, trying things out. And there’s the story that I kind of tell myself is start with Northrop Frye is a Canadian literary critic, he had this idea of the, I guess what you call the hierarchy of literary forms, start with myth, Gods monsters, go to the romantic You know, there’s sort of swords and sorcery and dragons and so forth. It goes down to high mimetic meaning like life, but for rich people, to low mimetic, you get all the twists, and, and those sorts of things. And then you get down to the world of Kafka and satire and irony, and those sorts of things. And he says, what happens when you come out the bottom of that you go through the history of literary forms, you fall at the bottom, and you’re in freefall. And he said, what he thinks is that you come back up at the top, you’re in myth again, but from the point of view, and the way that William Blake Did you know, Songs Of Innocence experience, you go through that journey as an innocent, then you come back out, and you can start to tell the stories, again, from the beginning, from the point of view of somebody who’s seen cavco, who understands, and that whole journey now, jump over to Marshall McLuhan. And you’ve got these ages of media, you’ve got the oral age, where we sit around campfires tell each other stories, you’ve got the scribal, we’re starting to write things down in paper, print, electric, now into digital. And the question again, is what happens when you come out at the bottom of that? What’s after digital? And and my theory is, you end up outside of that, being able to look at all of it and going, what can I use? what’s useful from all of those different ways and all those different mediums of expressing yourself? You put that in a room and go, we’ve got all of these forms? And all of these ways of thinking to play with what can we now make? And what’s important to make? And I guess kind of the question I’m asking you is, what do you do with that? Once you’ve kind of thought about it in that way? Where do you take it? How do you apply it?
Jon Greenaway
Yeah, I think, I think what it means is that we end up being kind of technologically and culturally, you know, ravens we’re drawn to, we’re drawn to the new we’re drawn to kind of what’s shiny.
Andrew Dubber
This is illiterate,
Jon Greenaway
you know? Well, in many ways. No, I think, like capitalism itself is profoundly illiterate. Capitalism doesn’t need you to read capitalism just needs you to be good at understanding pictures and doing what you’re told. This is something Deleuze and Guattari wrote about in something called Postscript on the Societies of Control, like you don’t, it’s in a way it’s post electronic, you know, you don’t need the written word. What you need is you need the screen. Of course, that is in itself kind of text, right? But it’s a text that is both in some senses, both more sophisticated and less sophisticated than the written word. But what I think what I think you get the opportunity to do by going through all of those stages is you get the chance to kind of forge a new literacy, right, that draws from multiple modes of storytelling that draws from, you know, I think, new myths, yes, but you’ll also be tend to old ones. It’s why you see online, especially a kind of resurgence of hyper traditional Catholicism. Why? Because it gives you a method by which you understand everything. It’s why you have a kind of, but also you have things like you say, you know, what’s the contemporary mythology? It’s, it’s, it’s a superhero. In a way, I think the superhero is increasingly exhausted. So if anything, you can’t we’re kind of in need of a new one. And there are moments in, you know, I think social movements are probably, where do you find a new kind of collective? Where do you kind of find a new mythic grounding is going to have to be in in a V people, but then I would say that, you know, so I think what you end up with is you end up with an incredibly hybridised, there won’t be any kind of pure cultural form anymore. You know, this is certainly true for me, you know, I I do podcasts I do. Writing I do talks, I do teaching. So there is no, there is no kind of one traditional intellectual role. There won’t be one traditional media role. And they certainly won’t be one traditional way of storytelling. I think, if anything, in the wake of kind of the post, postmodern age of the 60s up to the present, really, there was this, you have the period of high modernism of abstract and difficult language, the high mysticism, then you have the low mysticism of Caprica, arguably Lovecraft as well. And then you have the kind of postmodern free play. In a literary sense, we’ve kind of returned to a kind of rewarmed 19th century literary realism, which was never real realism is not realistic. But in I think cinema is offer is often doing some of the most interesting things. And this is why I’m drawn drawn to horror film, because I think horror is a very apt description. It’s not realistic, but it is real. And I think that’s an important thing to kind of point out. So you end up with a, a, and this is why horror works so well, in the contemporary condition, right? Horror is the ultimate hybrid. It will get into everything you will get into the way that you think about technology. It will get into the podcasts you listen to, it will be on your Netflix screen, it’s in your phone, it’s on the cinema screen. It’s in the books that you might read, their horror is everywhere. Because we exist in a horrifying world horror is about hybridity. It’s about multiplicity. It’s about the polymorphous nature of fear and desire. And so I think, yeah, maybe maybe there’s some real truth to Adonis point that contemporary ontology is determined by horror.
Andrew Dubber
That sounds like a really dark place to leave it, but it seems like the right is there any light that you can shine on this dark place?
Jon Greenaway
Well, I think horror horror is something that we all go through, but it’s something that is horror films of survivors, you know, for something said to be a horror film. We, the reason that a lot of people who’ve been through very traumatic incidents in their own life, find horror, kind of a rewarding thing to watch is because it reminds you that monsters can be beaten, you know, maybe not all of us make it you know, maybe not all of us survive the, the the mass man with a chainsaw, but monsters can be beaten, vampires can be thrown back into their coffins, we should know that they’re going to come back. But we should also know that we’ve dealt with them before. So I think horror is a horror is not necessarily just a dark place, but it requires a sort of cold eyed willingness to look at the world as it truly is. And yeah, when you do that, you get to see just how terrible things have been. But you also get to see that that kind of struggle against the monstrous has been happening for centuries for as for the entire length of human history. And to me that is both kind of frightening and or inspiring, but also deeply kind of positive and affirming that the, you know, the fight goes on.
Andrew Dubber
I’m one of these people who needs to know that it’s going to be alright, in the end. Can you assure that?
Jon Greenaway
No, no, no, because because the the the the but the point is, it could be? It could be I’ll take it. Will it be ultimately, I don’t know. That’s up in the air to be to be determined. But
Andrew Dubber
it could well be and especially if more people try and make it that way, I guess. Absolutely. Fantastic. Jon, thanks so much for your time. Thank you so much. That’s TheLitCritGuy, aka Jon Greenaway. And that’s the MTF podcast. You can find more of Jon’s thinking on twitter at TheLitCritGuy, you can dive deeper at his Patreon page for as little as $1 a month that’s patreon.com slash TheLitCritGuy, or, and I’m sure Jon would endorse this. You could go to your local library, choose a few actual books and start on your own critical journey. He’s always there when you need some signposts along the way. I’m Andrew Dubber. You can find me at Dubber on Twitter. And Music Tech Fest, of course has Music Tech Fest on absolutely everything Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, you name it. I hope you enjoyed today’s intellectual diversion. If you find yourself for some time on your hands during your homestay, feel free to go back and check out some of the back catalogue. This is Episode 70 of the podcast. There’s bound to be something else in there that’s of interest. Of course in the meantime, subscribe, share, rate review, and wash your hands afterwards. Make sure you stay safe. Have a great week, and we’ll talk soon Cheers.
