... of Culture Machine 

Culture Machine [HTL to 'Information - Opening Act'] is an umbrella term for a series of new experiments in culture  and theory designed to generate research that is engaged in the constitution of new areas of inquiry and the opening of new frontiers of cultural and theoretical activity. In the first instance, Culture Machine will take the form of an international, inter-active, electronic journal , a number of research groups [HTL to 'Re-Search Engine' part of 'Information'], and a series of symposia [HTL to 'Test-Site' part of 'Information']. As the first product of Culture Machine, this is its 'test run', its 'test drive'. As such, this is a test of Culture Machine's its themes, agendas, projects and programmes , its scholarship , its 'theory' , its 'politics', its 'politico-institutional practices', its legitimacy , its responsibility, etc. 

... of the Culture Machine Journal  

One way in which Culture Machine will attempt to seek out and promote the most provocative of new work, and analysis of that work, in culture  and theory  is by producing an international, inter-active electronic journal. As the first edition of the Culture Machine journal, which is itself the first product of Culture Machine this is a test of its means of publication , its technology , its instructions (HTL to instructions), its maps (HTL to site map), its design, its peer-reviewing procedures , its assessibility , its interactivity , etc. 

... of 'This is a test' 
 The 'first' text (if a strictly linear approach is taken) of the first edition of the Culture Machine journal , which is itself the first 'product' of Culture Machine, this text has a somewhat ambiguous position (highlighted by its hyper-textual  form). Strictly speaking, it is neither part of the journal, nor external to it. Rather, this text is both inside and outside at once, constituting a framing account of Culture Machine  and the Culture Machine journal  that is included within the frame of the journal itself. 

Providing an account of the Culture Machine journal , and, indeed, Culture Machine  itself, is one aspect of the test we have set ourselves here. 
 

... of Aims 
 
 As the 'first' text of the Culture Machine journal, this text might have been expected to provide a set of opening aims for Culture Machine ] To the extent that such a set of aims can be provided, we have already done so. As we state in our 'Opening Act' [HTL to 'Information - Opening Act'], Culture Machine aims to: 

• seek out and promote the most provocative of new work, and analyses of that work, in culture and theory  from British and international authors 
• promote research which is engaged in the constitution of new areas of inquiry and the opening of new frontiers of cultural and theoretical activity 
• generate possibilities for new scholarship and research .

But providing a set of aims for Culture Machine is difficult, if not impossible, given that, as we also state in our 'Opening Act' [HTL to 'Information - Opening Act']: 

• these founding aims are themselves, along with the very concepts of 'founding' and of  'aims', possible themes to be analysed by Culture Machine  
• Culture Machine has no specific agenda , no project or programme (cultural, theoretical , political, social or ethical) it intends to see worked out in its various manifestations 
• Culture Machine is instead to be to cultural studies  what 'fundamental research' is to the natural sciences: open ended, non-goal orientated, exploratory and experimental in approach. 

And, indeed, to provide a definitive set of opening aims would constitute an attempt on our part to avoid taking risks with the future of Culture Machine. It would be to imply that Culture Machine's future can be known in advance, and that it belongs to the realm of that which is already understood. In order to discover Culture Machine's aims we must try not to know them already. Instead, we must leave ourselves open to the chance of the unpredictable. To take this risk is to acknowledge that we cannot know the aims of Culture Machine in advance. Nevertheless, it seems to us that unless we take this risk, and face the possibility of failure inherent in it, Culture Machine can have no culture , no politics , no legitimacy ,  and no responsibility . 

Aware that this problematization of aims may itself, along with the rest of this text, constitute a set of aims, we will acknowledge simply that taking the risk of providing such an 'opening' is another aspect of the 'test' we have set ourselves here. 
 
 

... of Scholarship 
 Publishing electronically provides Culture Machine  with an opportunity to test some of the effects, consequences, limits and possibilities of contemporary technology - E-mail, WWW, the Internet, HTML, Java, Javascript, Janet, CD-ROM, DVD, PCs, Word Processors, etc. - for research into culture  and theory  This should not be taken as implying that the only possibilities created by new technology are new and radical ones. (The majority of academic electronic journals, for instance, are simply books that are read  using a keyboard and a monitor. Indeed, many are merely electronic versions of texts that already exist in printed form.) Nor is it to imply that the established modes of academic scholarship are no longer of interest. Instead, Culture Machine will be concerned to subject  both 'new' and 'traditional' forms of study and research to critical examination. 
 
 

... of Publishing 
 How will electronic publishing affect ideas of editing, peer-reviewing, authorisation , legitimacy, copyright, etc.? Certainly, as Bill Readings notes, publishing electronically offers 'value for money': 

the costs and delays of production and distribution are massively reduced: there are minimal staffing costs, no printing or distribution costs, and no limitations of space. The electronic journal offers better value in terms of the quantity of information produced, the speed of its production, and the geographical range of its distribution.  
(Readings, Bill (1994) 'Caught in the Net: Notes from the Electronic Underground', Surfaces, vol.4, no. 104; http://tornade.ere.umontreal.ca/guedon/Surfaces/vol4/ 
readings.html) 

Yet new technology also seems to take publishing outside this economy, since what gets published is no longer dependent on what a publisher can successfully market or sell. As the editors of another electronic journal point out, electronic publishing does not offer merely a 'way of extending or improving existing practices'. Rather, it: 

... means rethinking what we mean by both 'publishing' and 'journal'. The technology is constantly changing (new versions of net browser appear that change dramatically what we can do with text, audio, video, and graphics). But most importantly, we have to experiment with ways to write and present writing that do not just transfer print onto the Web (though there is a lot of this - kind of a anthropological approach, where there seems to be a mad rush to archive everything online before it disappears).  
(Seulemonde Online Journal, Tampa/Florida, 1994; www.cas.usf.edu/journal/ 
bennington/gbennington.html)

One of Culture Machine's preliminary projects  involves examining some of the possibilities that are created by contemporary technology for publishing ; and, in particular, for publishing a scholarly  academic journal  which is not merely an electronic transcription of traditional publishing forms. 

Neither a paper document, nor a digitalisation of a paper document, then, the Culture Machine journal   has, in parts, been designed toward what some might call the 'top-end' of the spectrum. This means that, depending on your equipment, screen size, its resolution, etc., not all of the Culture Machine journal  may be available or accessible to you at any one time. 

       _______________________ 
Our relations with machines are strongly informed by a desiring economy of dominance and control. We demand them to be efficient and reliable, they should work smoothly and quietly - just like any good slave. Even where we use them for the new, telematic experiences we want them to enhance our lives and experiences in a controllable and meaningful way...  
(Broeckmann, Andreas (1998) 'Techno-Parasites: Bringing the Mechanic Unconscious to Life', Magazyn Sztuki/Art Magazine, no.17, 1/98: 372)        _________________________ 

But since 'technology' is also one of Culture Machine's  initial themes , these  (and other) limits posed by the journal's electronic form are not seen merely pragmatically as boundaries to be worked within, but rather as limits inherent to the electronic form itself; limits that can be neither ignored nor unproblematically accepted. 
 

... of Hyper-text 
In order to examine some of the possibilities that are created for scholarly research  by contemporary technology, the Culture Machine  journal  will test a number of commonplace ideas concerning reading, writing and new technology. These include: 

• the idea that computer writing problematizes the distinction between author and reader ; 
• the idea that reading   'hyper-text' is not a passive process; 
• the idea that 'hyper-text's' non-linear format gives power back to the reader; 
• the idea that 'hyper-text' requires the reader to become actively  involved in the writing process, creatively co-authoring the text in the process of reading  it.
• 
         ____________________ 
  Non-linearity, we are told, re-distributes narrative power to readers. It undermines the tyranny of the Author. ... Indeed, advocates believe that with nonlinear text, or hypertext, literature can at last give full expression to the kinds of unconventional discursive impulses folks like Joyce and Barthes were forced to convey via the grotesquely obsolete linear format. For that matter, nonlinearity provides a kind of running critique of the linear format, laying open the myth that 'stories' can be told only in one way, in only one direction, and towards only one conclusion; towards 'closure'. With nonlinearity, as with thought itself, there is no closure, only additional links.  
  (Roberts, Paul, 'The Future of Writing', Independent on Sunday (29.09.96): 12)  
   _______________________ 

As a test of these commonplace ideas concerning hyper-text and its supposed ability to exploit those parts of textuality traditional texts cannot reach, this text has been written in a way that is not simply linear. Using multi-media CD-ROM programmes as a model, blocks of text have been joined together by means of 'hypertext' links to form a kind of textual web. Each small section of text (long texts tend to slow down the 'hyper-textual' process) - and, theoretically, each word in each section of text - is thus an opening  to any amount of other digital locations both 'inside' and 'outside' this text (to the extent these terms still apply); additional hyper-text links also being available to a number of the other texts in this edition of the Culture Machine journal. Simply click on the highlighted word - or 'hot' text - you want to know more about. 

There is thus no strict linear narrative to this text. Its hyper-textual format means that it cannot be read  in any predetermined way or order. Rather, readers have to find their own way round and through this text.  As a result, it is just one among many texts, possible ones, real ones, imagined ones, future ones. If you were to read 'This is a test' at another time, or in another place, it would be very different, and would give rise to quite another text. 
 

...of Reading and Writing 
The 'hyper-textual'  form of this text should not be taken as implying that we regard 'hyper-text' as simply non-linear; nor that 'hyper-textual' possibilities cannot be found in more 'traditional' forms of reading and writing. The extent to which the kind of destabilisation and decentering of both the reading and writing subject increasingly associated with electronic writing is also true of other forms of writing is in fact one of themes s'] Culture Machine  is initially interested in investigating. Are so-called 'traditional', 'linear' texts not to a certain extent always already 'nonlinear', intertextual, inter-active, open, interruptive, etc.? Do they themselves, like computer writing, not allow 'at least in principle, almost instantaneous access to any page or word or mark from another', and thus an opportunity of exploring 'the possibilities of folding a text back on itself, of discontinuous jumps establishing quasi-instantaneous links between sentences, words, or marks....' (Bennington, Geoffrey (1993) 'Derridabase', in G. Bennington and J. Derrida, Jacques Derrida. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press: 314).  

As well as hyper-text, this text thus also uses more conventional forms of academic writing, including quotation and referencing, to lead the reader 'outside' the text, and in this way mix it with entirely 'separate' sources - although notions of inside and outside, joining and separation are rendered problematic by the way in which, as J. Hillis Miller puts it, in the ('non-spaced space or spaced-out space of the internet, everything is in a sense everywhere at all times... and everything is juxtaposed to everything else'Miller, J. Hillis (1995) 'The Ethics of Hypertext', diacritics, (fall), 1995: 31).  
 

...of Inter-activity 
How interactive are the forms of writing  and communication proposed by new technology ? Is interactivity allowed only within the limits of some pre-determined process, a series of pre-determined givens? To what extent is the level of interactivity on offer in such circumstances limited merely to some crude form of textual exchange? 

___________________________ 
To make a traditional story truly interactive, a game designer would have to make a branching plot that forks any time the main character has to make a decision... The mathematics of this quickly become nightmarish for the designer, who now has the delightful job of writing 256 versions of the same novel. Even if someone tried to do it..., he'd end up with a narrative sandcastle whose towers and turrets were continually toppling over. Some choices make better stories than others, and constructing a compelling narrative is not a particularly carefree enterprise. It involves a lot of ditchdigging and bridge building and sign posting. And most people don't want to work that hard. That's why they pay authors.  

So ultimately, 'interactive storytelling' becomes a matter of providing that authorship while giving a player the illusion of choice.  
(Herz,  J.C. (1997) Joystick Nation. London: Abacus: 149-150)  
__________________________ 
 

As part of Culture Machine's  experimentation with interactivity, this text - together with the Culture Machine journal [HTL to 'Responses/Feedback' section of journal] - enables You to respond to it (in the form of articles, reviews, comments, suggestions, criticisms, advice, etc.,.). 

But it also has the further facility whereby You can participate in its authorship by adding your own ideas to 'This is a test'. Simply post your text/test to Culture Machine in the usual way [...] and (subject to peer-review ) these will be incorporated into 'This is a test' [HTL to appropriate section for responding]. 
 

... of Assessment 
What problems are presented for authorship by new forms of electronic technology : both by the new forms of culture   and theory they generate; and by the possibilities they present for multi-authored, interactively created, and even computer-generated, texts? 
      ___________________ 
In multi-media... text simply happens. It appears on-screen without any evidence of being the work of a single, living individual.  
(Roberts, Paul, 'The Future of Writing', Independent on Sunday (29.09.96): 12)  
___________________ 

And how are such texts to be assessed? On what basis? 'Culture'? 'Politics'?  'Excellence'? 'Legitimacy?'  'Performativity'? If , like 'This is a test...', they have no readily identifiable author(s), who will receive the research points? 
       ______________________ 
What it means for scholarly production is that new modes in the evaluation of reception (and the consequent gaining of scholarly legitimacy) will arise. Electronic technology makes it possible to calculate with far greater accuracy and speed the number of times a given article is consulted. The spectre arises of the intellectual star of the 21st Century with a box in the corner of her or his computer screen counting the number of times their articles have been accessed today.... Symbolic capital has never been so easy to calculate. Worried conversations will arise in the corridors of the MLA convention as older academics watch their reputations diminishing; more technically minded research assistants could be deputed to write software that would repeatedly access given articles in order to ensure that end of year bonus. 
(Readings, Bill (1994) 'Caught in the Net: Notes from the Electronic Underground', Surfaces, vol.4, no.104; http://tornade.ere.umontreal.ca/guedon/Surfaces/vol4/ 
readings.html) 
       _____________________ 

In order to test the applicability of the current criteria of academic evaluation and accreditation to co-, multi-authored, and interactive material, Culture Machine will consider anyone who has read this text to be its co-author. Readers of this text are hereby authorised to include it on their c.v.'s (as a text co-written by them), and (presuming some, at least, are academics) to include it in their research assessment submissions. 
 

... of Culture 
As we state in our 'Opening Act' [HTL to 'Opening Act'], Culture Machine  aims to seek out and promote the most provocative of new work, and analyses of that work, in culture  and theory  from British and international authors. And one of the themes  initially proposed for investigation by Culture Machine is the consequences of such new work for those aspects of culture that are already established as legitimate areas of scholarly concern. The 'Call for Papers' for the 1998 'Crossroads of Cultural Studies' conference in Tampere, Finland [HTL to Fornas and Grossberg pieces], provides a convenient, if far from comprehensive, list: 

Gender, ethnicity, identity, body, otherness, age, media, power and knowledge, traditions today, nation-states, globalization, culture and economy, centre and periphery, new information technology. 

However, the study of culture cannot be restricted solely to areas of 'legitimate' academic concern, for the simple reason that the last thing that would be studied in such a case would be 'culture'. Any decision as to what 'culture' is would be made in advance. The decision as to what constitutes 'culture' would be made before that 'culture' was actually studied. Which means it would never be studied at all, since the question of what culture is, where it is to be found, what its limits are, would never in fact be raised. 

Consequently, Culture Machine is interested neither simply in studying 'culture', nor in 'cultural studies' . 
 

... of Disciplinarity 
Despite having many of the hallmarks of the sort of multi- , inter-, trans- or post-disciplinary project that have become such a commonplace feature of cultural study in recent years, Culture Machine  - somewhat surprisingly perhaps, given the number of academic departments, journals and conferences currently describing themselves in these terms - is concerned to distinguish itself from such approaches. 

This is not to deny such perspectives have all at times been, in their different ways, very necessary and extremely useful to the challenge cultural theory , and cultural studies  especially, have offered to certain critical, cultural, institutional and academic orthodoxies. Nevertheless, and as we have made clear elsewhere, while cultural and theoretical diversity is positively sanctioned and actively promoted by such perspectives: 

it is simultaneously restricted and restrained. In particular, a transparent norm is produced, one which says that the negotiation and translation between disciplines is welcome, so long as it stays within certain limits; limits which cultural criticism is able to locate without having to bring its own identity radically into question. 
(Hall, Gary and Wortham, Simon (1996) 'Interdisciplinarity and Its Discontents', Angelaki, 2:2: 6)  

Therefore, as well as drawing on the work of a number of different thinkers (including Derrida, Lyotard, Habermas, Benjamin, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Debord, Haraway, Gibson, Virillio, Hall, Bourdieu, Grossberg and Giroux) from a range of different disciplines (literary criticism, sociology, philosophy, media studies, etc.), all regarded as 'legitimate'  in their own right, in order to address specific problems which require a multi- , inter-, trans- or  post-disciplinarity competence (i.e. the institution of the institution, the future of culture and theory), Culture Machine will at the same time insist on questioning some of the fundamental concepts and ideas that underpin the field of cultural study - concepts such as 'culture' , 'politics' , 'legitimacy' , 'responsibility' , etc. 

Included in this investigation will be the idea that we already know the identity and relationship of the different disciplines that go to make up the repertoire of contemporary cultural scholarship  and research. For by simply repudiating, rather than investigating thoroughly, the notion of a discipline, cultural study's 'multi- ', 'inter-', 'trans- 'and 'post-disciplinary' projects have too often failed to distinguish themselves from the prior concepts to which they therefore remain terminally and terminologically rooted. 

... of Cultural Studies 
In questioning some of the fundamental concepts and assumptions underpinning the study of culture , Culture Machine's  intention is not to reject or denounce cultural study as it has taken place up till now. It is instead to appeal to another tradition or aspect of the study of culture . It is a tradition that can be found at the very origins of cultural studies itself (which in part explains why Culture Machine is so interested in cultural studies as a discipline or 'anti-discipline'). 

That cultural studies is a vital and distinctive academic discipline is in small part due to the way in which it has actually placed in question what it is to study culture  . Rather than some history, tradition or method of analysis that is fixed and safe and decided upon 'in advance', it is this tradition of questioning what it is to 'do cultural studies', which, as Lawrence Grossberg points out, 'is never finished or guaranteed, but always risky and... fraught with inescapable tensions' (Grossberg, L. (1992) We Gotta Get Out of this Place: Popular Conservativism and Postmodern Culture. London and New York: Routledge), that gives 'cultural studies' its truly radical edge. And it is within this tradition of 'cultural studies' - of 'deciding what cultural studies is, of making cultural studies over again and again' (ibid.) - that Culture Machine   will operate. 

Culture Machine's questioning of some of the fundamental concepts and assumptions that underpin the field of cultural study  does not therefore mean that it is no longer interested in 'doing' cultural studies. On the contrary, this is the most cultural studies thing to do of all. This questioning of cultural studies is precisely what it is to 'do' cultural studies. 
 

... of Politics 
One of the things that makes cultural studies  so interesting is its self-consciously politically committed nature. Indeed, it is the tension between this political aspect and its theoretical  self-questioning of what it is to 'do' cultural studies, that marks the very specificity of cultural studies. 
      ___________________ 
[C]ultural studies has drawn attenton to itself, not just because of its sometimes dazzling internal theoretical development, but because it holds theoretical and political questions in an ever unresolvable but permanent tension. It constantly allows one to irritate, bother, and disturb the other, without insisting on some final theoretical closure.  
(Hall, Stuart (1992) 'Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies', in C. Nelson, et al (eds), Cultural Studies. London: Routledge: 284)  
___________________  

However, a lot of the work that has been done in cultural studies over the last few years has been accused of not being 'political' enough. Cultural studies has become too 'theoretical' and 'anti-political', it seems, too focused on the 'textual'. What cultural studies apparently needs now is a good dose of economic, social and political analysis. 

And yet a lot seems to be taken for granted by the argument that cultural studies is not as political as it used to be, and that it needs to get back to its political roots to set it right. In particular, there is noticeably little or no examination of what 'politics' or 'the political' might actually be. 

Consequently, Culture Machine  has no interest in simply re-politicising cultural studies. Nor does Culture Machine have as one of its preliminary projects or programmes a concern to develop forms of knowledge and analysis that would be political - if the political is to be understood in the usual way. This is not to say Culture Machine has no interest in politics; or that it is interested in 'theory'  to the exclusion of politics. Rather that Culture Machine will be concerned to ask: What is politics in general? And what is politics for cultural studies? How does the concept of politics operate within cultural studies? Is politics something that can simply be returned to? And what are the consequences of any possible rethinking of 'politics' for cultural studies' own perceptions of itself as a 'political' project? 
 
 

... of Theory 
Culture Machine's   interrogation of some of the fundamental concepts and assumptions underpinning the field of contemporary cultural scholarship  does not mean that it is interested in theory as opposed to politics . A whole host of commentators have tried to map the study of culture in this way: in terms of a series of oppositions between 'cultural studies'  and 'political economy', textuality and politics, theory and practice, etc. However, just as Culture Machine will seek to examine some of the constituting concepts of cultural study - including both 'culture' and 'politics' - so, too, will it investigate that of 'theory'. 

In particular, Culture Machine is interested in placing the examination of 'culture' and 'politics' alongside a challenging of the politico-institutional practices  and procedures in which such questioning takes place - the university , publishing , etc. And initially at least, this challenging of politico-institutional practices will focus on the institutional shifts in scholarly  research and publishing  that are being brought about by new communications technology . For it seems to us that these new technologies threaten to undermine, or at the very least, restructure, our understanding of the nature of academic research. 
 

... of Legitimacy 
Providing a place or space in which to test some of the effects of new digital technology  on those aspects of culture  that are already established as legitimate areas of academic concern is certainly one of the regulating ideas behind Culture Machine . What is so interesting about new technology, however, is not just the extensions and improvements it offers to existing practices of scholarly research  and publication; nor the way it expands the field of academic knowledge, so that Digital Communications, Electronic Publishing, Multi-media, Animation, Visualisation, Virtual Reality, Cyberspace, The Internet, etc. can now all take their place in the university alongside the other areas of 'legitimate'  teaching and research; but rather the challenge this technology presents to the academy's very modes of legitimation. As Jacques Derrida insists in Archive Fever, new technologies not only change the process of analysing, communicating, exchanging, classifying, stocking and conserving academic knowledge, they change the very nature of that knowledge. 'This means that, in the past, psychoanalysis would not have been what it was, if E-mail, for example, had existed' (Derrida, Jacques (1996) Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press:16/17). 

It follows that the effects, consequences, limits and possibilities posed by new technology for scholarly research into cultural and theoretical  questions cannot be explored using the 'recognised', 'legitimate' forms of academic knowledge - psychoanalysis, literature, history, politics , philosophy, etc. For new technology changes the very nature of these knowledges rendering them, as Derrida puts it, 'unrecognisable'. Instead, in order to understand the kinds of research new technology makes possible, it is necessary for academic knowledge to adopt new forms, forms which academic knowledge can perhaps understand only by rethinking its identity. 
 

...of the University 
The effects of new technologies on the legitimacy of academic knowledge means that issues associated with new technologies  cannot be located solely in the world that operates 'beyond' the academic institution. It is not merely a question of studying this technology in relation to, say, new political economies and markets (nation-states, globalization, culture and economy, centre and periphery, etc.). One cannot study new technology without also studying the university. Indeed, the study of new technology is in many ways the study of the university. 
       ___________________ 
... information technology which, while appearing nowadays to escape the control of the university... is its product and its most faithful representative. This is only apparently paradoxical, and it is in facing the law of this apparent paradox that an ultimate responsibility would be, if such a thing were possible, there for the taking today'.  
(Derrida, Jacques (1992) 'Mochlos; or, The Conflict of the Faculties' in R. Rand (ed.) Logomachia: The Conflict of the Faculties. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press: 18-19) 
___________________ 
 

All contributions to the Culture Machine journal  (including responses to both particular articles and to 'This is a test' itself) will be refereed anonymously by a network of suitably qualified 'peers' made up of the members of the journal's editorial boards [HTL to 'Editorial Boards'] and various others. Peer-reviewers will thus be involved in making judgements with respect to the 'quality' of a particular contribution, and its appropriateness to the context(s) in which it is likely to appear. At the same time, Culture Machine will attempt to put the legitimacy of the various conventions or regimes of judgement at risk by aiming to promote research which is engaged in the constitution of new areas of enquiry and the opening of new frontiers of cultural  and theoretical activity. Some contributions may of course do this more than others. But whether it is a noble risk or folly to skate on thin ice is only ever a 'serious' question, and a matter of genuine significance in a community of skaters!