I wanted to store these quotes from Susan Stewart’s
Crimes of Writing (1994) somewhere, though I am not sure what their implications might be yet. They seem to harmonize with (1) the interest in the financialization of subjectivity, (2) the adoption of a ”speculative” approach to identity and community, and (3) how algorithmic recommendation conjures identity and audiences based in probabilities and speculation.
In this passage, Stewart is writing about George Psalmanazar, an early 18th century impostor who pretended to be from Formosa (a.k.a.Taiwan) but was really from France. He wrote a book about Formosan customs and language that was entirely made up.
This kind of imposture was made possible — or was even made inevitable — by the “speculative” relation between books and the audience. I take “speculation” here to refer to both the publishers (who were in the process of discovering what sorts of publishing and what sorts of print objects would be profitable) and audiences (who were in the process of discovering what kinds of stories were possible, plausible, engaging, distracting, etc. and what sorts of new pleasures were enjoined by print).
“During this period, the ‘responsibilities’ of authorship were undergoing a great upheaval: conventions of originality, genius, authenticity, documentation, and even genre itself remained subjects of speculation and interest rather than of either natural ‘rights’ or formulated law.” Stewart writes. In other words, profit opportunity was going to partly dictate what would eventually be ideologically naturalized or legally enshrined with respect to what authors and publishers could do and what they could write about and how.
If those speculations were made possible by the transition to print culture, similar forms of speculation are being engendered by the move to “post-print culture” or internet culture or network culture, or however you want to describe our current condition. The new forms of speculation, however, are paradoxically driven by a surfeit of data, by new forms of measurement and outcome assessment that prompt new moments for gambling and for determining winners and losers and so on. Authors speculate on audiences not in terms of who they are or what they want, but in terms of how well they will allow themselves to be defined, to be packaged as a particular audience commodity or engage in forms of productive “interactivity” that can be exploited.
And of course the “conventions of authenticity” are continually being renegotiated by the new forms of mediation available — new “social” apps drive new standards of authentic practice, also inflected by opportunity for profit for users and platforms and various third parties.
I guess what strikes me about this is how much speculative opportunity drives the development of new forms of mediation and representation: These necessarily appear as “destabilizing reality” — enacting a “creative destruction” or liquifaction of “all that is solid.” The speculative opportunities aren’t grafted on later; they are intrinsic to the development of new media forms.
