November 2005 Archives

Almost three years ago, one of my first posts on this blog was about Steven Soderberg’s version of Solaris, and how it acted like a “mutant womb” or “prototyping space” for our concepts of sociality, and resonated with the discourse of artificial intelligence. The narrative functions like a huge Turing Test, in which interpretive choices are an essential part of a strange, displacing dialogue with what one would commonsensically see as the usual “task” of AI: “creating a sentient Other”. (Of course, AI’s reductionist instrumentalism is completely displaced by Solaris, and instead rendered as an enigma, or “natural phenomenon”, or an arrival of an Other.)

More recently, I mentioned this in relation to how Battlestar Galactica approaches the figure of the Cylon woman in such a loaded and yet interesting way. Again: artificial intelligence and the prototypical, with the figure of the womb-matrix (and the sex/gender system) made even more literal.

Today I went back to Alan Turing’s original essay about his eponymous Test for sentience, and noticed that he based the Turing Test on an “imitation game”, in which an interrogator must differentiate between a man and a woman via only a typewritten conversation with them both. Moreover, the man must pretend to be a woman, while the woman should tell “the truth” about her gender. Whoa! In Turing’s test, the computer takes the place of the man. Double-whoa!

There’s a final resonance here: not long after writing this paper, Turing was arrested for sodomy. (Get this — his boyfriend robbed his house, and when asked about the nature of their relationship when Turing reported this to the authorities, Turing told the cops that he was, uh, fucking the guy.) Unrepentant about this sexuality, Turing was sentenced to forced “organotherapy”— female hormone injections — in order to reduce his libido. And not long after this, he committed suicide.

I have no idea what to make of this, except to note how compellingly these fragments of association flag the way in which systems of sex/gender/sexuality always lie crucially within fundamental questions of technology, the social and the human, and our capacity to conceive of them (which is what the question of artificial intelligence is actually all about). And for me, this reminder is much more useful than any liberal handwringing about “where are the women bloggers?”, or overaestheticised, fetishistic visions of cyberfeminism.

[ tags: alan-turing, artificial-intelligence, battlestar-galactica, gender, homophobia, solaris, steven-soderberg, turing-test ]

Wow. I actually shed a tear watching the teaser trailer for Superman Returns. The old elements from Richard Donner’s original film — Marlon Brando’s godlike voiceover, the John Williams score — are so elegantly integrated. Interestingly, these things stand not just for the franchise’s past, but for “the past” in general: words and music from Krypton, to contrast with a re-visioning of its only son’s life on Earth. “The Planet Krypton” (available as an MP3 here), an elegy for a dying civilization, is one of my favourite John Williams pieces, and it becomes all the more moving when a montage of Smallville farmboy-isms is set to it. It’s totally a by-the-numbers approach to “epic” — repeat a melodic figure over a slowly mutating chord progression — but It Works. Of course, it’s all christofascist bunk, but I can’t resist it…

EDITED — Oh, okay, here’s the antidote, courtesy of Superdickery:

[ tags: bryan-singer, film, marlon-brando, music, pop-culture, racism, richard-donner, superman, superman-returns ]

It’s November 2005, and I still love the Sugababes — I think it’s something fundamental about the way I’m wired. (Their debut LP remains, for me, one of the greatest albums of this new century.) Lately, the closest I’ve come to physical violence was when someone in London dissmissively described the ’Babes as “rough as guts”, and “something the cat dragged in”. I’ve conferred with Camelia about this before, but What The Fuck is going on with the public articulation of class privilege in the UK at the moment? When this same person started sniggering about my fondness for Burberry because the latter has become a “chav” thing, and thus obviously verboten, I began having that wonderful subjunctive vision of Jack Black suddenly beating the fuck out of Tim Robbins in Stephen Frears’ otherwise dodgy High Fidelity.

Far be it for me to fuel any reactionary fantasy that Australian culture is somehow more egalitarian, but this obsession with “chavs” has a troubling uniqueness to it — it seems like a far more virulent racialisation of class than “Westie” or “bogan” is in Sydney or Melbourne. (And believe me, working for a youth advertising firm based in East Sydney will give you a bellyful of the latter.) The currency of the “chav” label in Britain makes me angry and nostalgic for that country’s postwar history of reappropriative working class style — as if these “gains” have all been turned back by a new offensive. But the current landscape also vaguely suggests that hegemony mightn’t be a particularly useful way of approaching these questions, if it ever was. The terrain on which counter-hegemony was to have been achieved seems less and less desirable as a surface for politics.

I’m not sure where this situation leaves those of us with an investment in projects that involve communities and cultural politics. (Speaking of which, I invite everyone to the Suburban Sista Soundz gig on 30 November at the Metro in Sydney, which will feature my favourites, Krystal and Karma. Girls who are “rough as guts”? These “chav-istas” will rip you to fucking shreds, you fucking fucker.) I suppose it’s about reconceiving community cultural development in terms of generating capacities and new spaces for circulation.

In any case, the next time someone helpfully advises me that my taste is “too chavvy”, I swear, there will be blood.

[ tags: chavs, class, hegemony, politics, pop, pop-culture, sugababes ]

Was briefly in New York this last week, and managed to see Salman Rushdie, Don DeLillo and others at PEN’s State of Emergency event at Cooper Union, at which the literati provided “Readings Against Torture, Arbitrary Detention & Extraordinary Rendition”. Funnily enough, the highlight of the evening was Rick Moody’s appearance. (Yes, Joe. Rick Moody.) He read from La Pelle, Curzio Malaparte’s misanthropic account of the American post-war occupation of Italy, and I was unsure whether Moody was simply being a sarcastic dickhead, or smuggling in a critique of the abject disavowal of Atrocity by liberals, whose panic over human rights is driven by occasional recognitions of Like — signs that are most constitutive of its inadequacy than mere hypocrisy. (Malaparte, an erstwhile fascist, wrote La Pelle in that weird political netherzone prior to his swerve towards Maoism in the ’50s, so I guess anything’s, uh, possible.) Listen to it here and judge for yourself.

[ tags: curzio-malaparte, don-delillo, pen, rick-moody, salman-rushdie, torture ]

So we go and visit John Keats’ house in Hampstead. In one of the bedrooms upstairs, I find a book of poetry. In this book, I find these verses:

I stand firm for our soil
Lick a rock on foil
So they juice me, seduce me,
Dress me up in Stussy.
Hell is ’round the corner where I shelter.
Isms and schisms, we’re living helter skelter
If you believe or deceive common sense says you shouldn’t receive
Let me take you down the corridors of my life.

Yes, it’s Tricky’s “Hell is Round the Corner”! Good to see that the Keatsologists are keeping it unreal.

+  +  +

Brunette girls in Belfast have their own ganguro girl thing going on: dead straight hair, ridiculously deep salon tans, eyeliner, short skirts.

An articulated insect from the Belfast Festival opening parade:

(Click it for the whole Northern Ireland photoset.) The kids went crazy!

+  +  +

Oh, and apologies to the Eurochildren I failed to catch up with. Perhaps next time…

[ tags: belfast, belfast-festival, ganguro, hampstead, ireland, keats, london, poetry, tricky ]

In Highgate, a visit to a certain grave:

(Click for the photoset. Note the people buried around him — including a prominent Cliffite…)

[ tags: grave, highgate, marx, cemetery ]