Page 15 - Cyberculture and New Media

6 ‘Until Something Else’ – A Theoretical Introduction
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Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is
vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes
according to style, but remains always the same. Kitsch is
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the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times.

Nor did this inversion erupt all at once. The intervening four
decades between Greenberg’s homily on form and Baudrillard’s landmark
inauguration of postmodern critique, Simulation and Simulacra, would seem
to trace a line directly from ideas about the purity of medium to that of
complete and vacant derivation, based on the traffic and interchange of signs,
a substitution whose performance begins as sensory artifice and culminates as
a set of codes proxying for reality itself, as we shall see.
But too easily positing Greenberg as the modernist weathervane in a
postmodern cataclysm misses the more complex problems of the art-medium,
indeed message-medium, agglomeration of cyberculture in general, outside
any disciplinary context. For however inexactly his thinking was termed
“formalist”, which is to say, assuming the existence of something like pure
universals, and however we might admit of the indissoluble union of medium
and production, there is nonetheless, suggestively below the superficial, one
major distinction that has emerged, even as others have dissolved. It turns on
the problem of individual identity, forged in relation to time and labour as a
function of the basic product to be realised. However executed, and whether
so for art, manufacture, or information, personal effort interfaces with a long
chain of technological supports that shape the gradual output in relation to the
complexity of the interaction, the unit of analysis for technology’s formulaic
conditions of engagement. Technology’s manifestations, therefore, however
extruded, printed, or structured, conform to a perpetual level of exactitude,
similitude, and standardisation that is increasingly precise, and decreasingly
personal. The archetypal creation of cyberculture, like a collage, is explicitly
synthetic, assembled, yet increasingly uniform. This last adjective suggests
how post-industrial process points toward thoroughly formalist results. As
product or content are historically immediate and of their time whereas form,
formalism, and uniformity are abstract and timeless, which is to say,
unrealised, we locate ontological tensions underlying the production of
cyberculture. For the term cyberculture itself evokes the union of something
abstract and timeless – the sense of culture – with something embedded,
time-based, and historically contextualised – the cyber-stratum, the present
moment of technology’s interleaving within societal function, and with a
clear preference for being encoded, the worlds of Gemeinschaft and
Gesellschaft encapsulated as a single word, a summary formulation. That
cybercultural thinking is in essence formal is evident in the arresting
immediacy with which pervasive encounters with technology in social,
professional, personal, and artistic acts impose logical structure, instrumental