I Confess.

I am a spoiler whore, and I have the ‘lovemarks’ to prove it. My closest friends hate my fondness for spoilers; they don’t want the coherence and integrity of the narrative ruined by the secret. Now I can tell them that I am a creature of the technoculture and they are as antiquated as Betamax™.

I found that it was useful to think about Dean when reading the second chapter. Namely, I found that the distinction Jenkins draws between Walsh’s ‘expert paradigm’ and Lévy’s ‘collective intelligence’ to align to the shift Dean identifies from the Benthamite split between the public-supposed-to-believe and the public-supposed-to-know [afforded by the existence of the secret] and the decline of symbolic authority and the collapse of the public-supposed-to-believe.

Jenkins begins by explaining that we Americans do not participate in public debates because of the expert paradigm: “to play the game, you have to become a policy wonk, or, more accurately, you have to let a policy wonk do your thinking for you” (29). There is an expert – a public-supposed-to-know – and we let them do the thinking for us – the public-supposed-to-believe.

Later on, Jenkins explains how the expert paradigm is breaking down (52-53): “Our traditional assumptions about expertise are breaking down or at least being transformed by the more open-ended processes of communication in cyberspace…The expert paradigm creates an exterior and interior; there are some people who know things and others who don’t. A collective intelligence, on the other hand, assumes that each person has something to contribute… is disorderly, undisciplined, and unruly.”

Dean says that “secrecy generates the very sense of a public that it presupposes...It presupposes a subject that desires, discovers, and knows, a subject from whom nothing should be withheld. The public as that subject with a right to know is thus an effect of the injunction to reveal” (10-11). Similarly, for Jenkins, the knowledge community is held together by “the social process of acquiring knowledge – which is dynamic and participatory, continually testing and reaffirming the group’s social ties” (55).

This may not make a lot of sense given that I haven’t fully wrapped my head around Dean and ideology but I’ll give it a go. When I continued thinking about the spoiler and Jodi Dean [and the shift from symptomatic to fetishistic ideology], I realized that I am very fetishistic when I enjoy my spoilers: I know the spoiler, nevertheless I watch the television program; my actions betray a belief in the coherence of the narrative and its structures. Then I began to wonder, are my prudish friends happy campers as the public-supposed-to-believe? Am I a creature of drive, getting off on knowing that the narrative is constructed, and are they stuck desiring an impossible unitary narrative? Suckers.

Some other thoughts.

Jenkins speaks about the military-industrial-entertainment complex in a very different way from Stahl: “America’s Army, thus, may be more effective at providing a space for civilians and service folk to discuss the serious experience of real-life war than as a vehicle for propaganda” (79). I think this really highlights the differences between Stahl’s notions of participation (democratic/reflective participant, to (inter)active ‘gametime’ participant) and what Jenkins calls, “participatory culture.” Although Jenkins makes the distinction between the passive spectator culture of mass media and the active consumer (3), it seems that the public sphere and its construction are both thought of in different ways, although perhaps betraying the same belief of the public which Dean problematizes.

I'll spoil some more...I can’t help but think of the Virno notion of the General Intellect when reading aobut Lévy’s ‘collective intelligence.’ “Mass intellectuality is the composite group of Post-Fordist living labor, not merely of some particularly qualified third sector: it is the depository of cognitive competences that cannot be objectified in machinery. Mass intellectuality is the prominent form in which the general intellect is manifest today. The models of social knowledge ... are not units of measure; they constitute the immeasurable presupposition of heterogeneous effective possibilities. Social relations are ordered by abstract knowledge rather than the exchange of equivalents” (Virno “General Intellect”)

I also admit that the idea of world-making (21) reminded me of emergence and biopolitics, “Game designers acknowledge that their craft has less to do with pre-structured stories than with creating the preconditions for spontaneous community activities” (159). This in turn reminded me of the multitude’s virtuosity: “Theirs is an activity which finds its own fulfillment in itself, without objectifying itself into an end product, without settling into a finished product, or into an object which would survive the performance.” This question of the productivity of the relations in themselves really seems to be something we could map onto the emergent properties of a self-organizing system (the multitude perhaps?).

I also must confess that Jenkins’ story of the new American arts is really reminiscent of De Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life. “The story of American arts in the twenty-first century might be told in terms of the public reemergence of grassroots creativity as everyday people take advantage of new technologies that enable them to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content” (136).

I'm glad I got ALL that off my chest.