INTRODUCTION

Radio as a contemporary public medium tends to be considered primarily in terms of its industrial and cultural arrangements. We may identify five broad types of radio broadcasting: public service broadcasting, commercial radio, state radio, community (or micro) radio, and pirate radio. The first of these, perhaps best known in the West through long-established services such as the BBC, is predicated on providing services that, whilst funded largely by government, are independent of direct state control and are ideally free from commercial imperatives. The ideal of public service broadcasting, in the classic Reithian formulation, is to educate, inform and entertain, aims which are legally enshrined. By contrast, the commercial sector is under no such legal and social obligations; instead its aim is the maximisation of profit through the maximisation of audiences and the generation of advertising revenues. Radio under the direct control of the state is largely unknown in the West and tends to be associated with dirigiste regimes (whether secular or religious) which seek to standardise and limit content and formats to produce programmes that function as essentialised, arguably propagandist, attempts at national social control through the delimiting of debate and discussion. By contrast, community or micro radio operates at a hyper-local level, often as a result of the low power of transmitters, broadcasting (or better, ‘narrowcasting’) to specific, local geographic communities (whether cultural or social), determined by location or the interests of communities or both.

INTRODUCTION

In an insightful essay that argues for the necessity of a cultural studies approach to the Internet, Sterne has pointed to the prevalence within academic studies of considering the Internet as a ‘millennial cultural force’ (1999: 258, original emphasis). He finds that the most common approach in these studies is to treat the Internet in terms of binary oppositions, most typically those of revolution/alienation and technophilia/technophobia. These approaches, he argues, assume the technology is autonomous from other forces (social, political, cultural) and suggest a highly deterministic place for the Internet. Lacking these contexts, such studies fail in their attempts to understand the Internet in two key ways. First, following Bourdieu, Sterne argues that it is the careful construction of the research object that these studies fail to undertake. What, precisely, in other words, does it mean to study the Internet? Is it, for instance, to study a communication tool, an information resource, an electronic network, a mass medium, or even a set of industrial practices? Without clarity on what is being studied we can learn nothing. Too often, it seems, the academic is essaying an investigation that is founded on rhetorical claims (‘the information superhighway’, for example), rather than critically examining the nature and provenance of such claims and their location within culture. Second, and proceeding from that, there appears a tendency to treat the Internet as a largely autonomous site, for study negates contexts, whether historical, economic, political, social or cultural.

INTRODUCTION

The primary aim of this chapter is to present an overview of the main features that characterise the critical, ‘public’ journalism that has emerged on the Internet, largely through the media of new social movements and radical political organisations and institutions. It will examine the dialogical and popular methods that inform many of the radical journalism projects on the Internet through a case study of the Indymedia network, described by one commentator as ‘to date the pinnacle model of citizen participation in the media’ (Giordano 2002). A key feature is the egalitarian mode of address, where intellectuals share media platforms with activists and where it is hoped that elitism is eroded. Here we find the new media used both by grassroots activists and by dissenting academics and other intellectuals participating in a counter public sphere.

This is not to suggest that radical journalism on the Internet has evolved ahistorically and without reference to mainstream journalism practices. As emerging research suggests (Atton 2002b), there are fascinating interrelations between the two types of news cultures (for example, the radical use of tabloid style by alternative journalists, the erosion of expert hierarchy in radical news). Finally, the chapter will critically examine some of the theoretical claims that have been made for this type of online journalism and in particular ask whether it represents as radical a shift in notions of doing journalism as some of its celebrants believe.

INTRODUCTION

In Chapter 4 we explored how the Internet has been employed by musicians and fans to shift the emphasis of musical production away from corporate control towards more libertarian and collectivist ways of production and circulation. The use of open source licensing is one such attempt to encourage radical ways of making music. The discussion of Internet radio in Chapter 5 developed these issues further, demonstrating the ways in which the application of new technology to a traditional medium might prompt audiences to create their own forms of creative communication. The present chapter focuses on these audiences as fans and examines how the online fanzine has developed as a means of building and maintaining taste communities across geographic boundaries. It will develop some of the arguments made in the previous chapter through its continued emphasis on avant-garde and experimental forms of contemporary popular music. Its aim is to identify particular fanzine projects that have emerged on the Internet and to examine them in terms of their historical connections with the printed fanzine, and to assess the extent to which the online fanzine is presenting new opportunities for fan production. It will also explore the creative potential of such publications and the opportunities they offer for fans to become creative artists themselves. The shifts in attitudes towards creativity we identified at the close of Chapter 4 are not only played out in the creativity of artists and the gift economies of fans.

INTRODUCTION

As we saw in Chapter 1, the progress of digital technology in recent years has hastened legislators and commentators alike to suggest methods by which the electronic transmission of information and ideas might be monitored, some would say policed. We have already met arguments based on national security, morality and economics. This chapter explores the last two of these in relation to intellectual property rights on the Internet, and does so through an examination of the implications of the exercise of those rights for creative practices and in particular the legal and commercial threats to ‘social authorship’ (Toynbee 2001). Finally, it examines peer-to-peer file-sharing networks (such as Napster and Gnutella) from this perspective. It considers such practices as aspects of social creativity, not simply as intellectual property theft. Yet such practices have not emerged from nowhere. They are the outcome of at least three major intersections of cultural practice: the recent history of illicit reproduction of artists' performances by audiences (home taping and bootlegging) and the social networks that grew alongside these practices (tape swapping constitutes peer-to-peer (P2P) networks before the fact, as it were); the various movements (such as shareware, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, interventions such as open copyright and open publishing) that have developed on the Internet, but which also have pre-digital antecedents; and the history of creative appropriation across numerous artistic movements, including high art and the demotic (visual and aural collage, folk song, the many syntheses of popular music styles into ‘new’ genres).

INTRODUCTION

The 1990s saw a dramatic movement of the European far right towards the centre of national politics, through a series of attempts to establish ‘respectable’ electoral parties. Right-wing parties with policies based primarily on nationalism and immigration (such as Joerg Haider's Austrian Freedom Party and Jean-Marie Le Pen's Front National in France) resonated with publics increasingly disillusioned with what they saw as centralist policies of the European Union, of a liberalism that to them appeared to favour the rights of ‘aliens’ above native-born citizens, and a globalisation that seemed to ignore domestic issues such as law and order, housing and employment. Such parties sought, with some success, to normalise a racial nationalism based on ‘whiteness as an essentialised social identity which they say is under threat’ (Back 2002b), a strategy also followed by the British National Party.

We might think of these developments in mainstream political culture as the penetration into a dominant, Habermasian public sphere of debate and opinion-formation (assisted in no small way by the mass media's coverage of these popular right-wing parties) of hitherto marginalised political groups. Parallel to this normalisation of right-wing discourse in the public sphere we find an increasing use of the Internet by fractions of the far right which essay more extremist versions of the populist rhetoric of such as Haider and Le Pen, which resonated so deeply with significant sections of their respective countries' electorates.

Speaking on television on the anniversary of September 11th, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani described New York City, the night after the attack on the World Trade Center, as ‘Hell, what Dante must have meant when he described Hell’. In such a context, this familiar allusion is striking in spite of, or perhaps because of, its very conventionality. A Catholic invokes ‘Hell’ and ‘Dante’ in the same breath, incidentally omitting reference to any sacred text. Like many present-day Catholics including the current Pope, Giuliani doesn't claim to believe in a theological Hell, an actual place of eternal torment to which sinners are sent in the afterlife. But the invocation of the name of ‘Hell’, together with the appropriation of Dante, constitute something more than a literary allusion. The double invocation aims to seal off the event from others, to claim for it a unique status, to transform it from a historical occurrence into a mythic absolute. In this book I argue that, like Giuliani, many secular Westerners retain a vestigial or quasi-religious belief in Hell: Hell as the absolutely horrific experience from which no one emerges unchanged. In the Western imaginative tradition, even more important than the notion of Hell as a sacred space is our belief in the journey through Hell, the idea of the transformative passage, the destruction and rebirth of the self through an encounter with the absolute Other. The arc of such a journey only becomes visible retrospectively, when remembered and narrated.

This book has explored the idea that modern, Western secular cultures have retained a belief in the concept of Hell as an event or experience of endless, unjust or unspeakable suffering which occurs in actual, human lives, and which has, in particular, been realised or made immanent in twentieth-century history. Within this historic context, the descent to Hell has emerged as one of the important narratives by which late twentieth-century Westerners come to know themselves as coherent selves. While perception of the different ways in which we are already in Hell is a characteristically late twentieth-century insight, the decision to embark on the journey of descent is one mode of actively responding to the prevalence of the infernal. As Notley's heroine says, ‘“Down” “is now the only way” “to rise”’ (The Descent of Alette, p. 26). From the nineteenth century to the present day, Marx's writings on the capitalist economy, reinforced by psychoanalytic accounts of subjectivity, have contributed to the valence of the idea that a descent into Hell can be the means of recovering – or discovering – selfhood. But these more recent frameworks have combined with earlier literary and religious models of katabatic narrative to produce the notion of a self made ethical by its encounter with the underworld.

By way of conclusion, I wish to discuss a recent, historical example of an infernal encounter being refashioned into the narrative of a journey of descent and return.

Is Hell a fable?

After he has sold his soul to Lucifer, Marlowe's Dr Faustus says to Mephistophilis, ‘I think Hell's a fable’. And Mephistophilis dryly responds, ‘Ay, Faustus, think so still, till experience change thy mind’ (Doctor Faustus, II, 1, 130–1). The dramatic irony of this exchange rests on the assumption that Faustus is wrong and the audience knows it. Faustus himself seems more ready to defy Hell than disbelieve in it; after all, he is conversing with a demon he has just summoned from the underworld. The medieval premise of this Renaissance play, that a region of eternal torment exists, might seem completely alien to a modern audience. But is there a sense in which Mephistophilis' reply remains true for us? Does experience teach us that Hell exists?

On the face of it, this idea seems implausible in the context of a modern, secular culture. Even religious communities in the West have modified their views on the subject of a punitive afterlife. According to the current Pope, Hell as a literal place to which sinners are sent after death is no longer part of official Catholic doctrine. Piero Camporesi begins his study of Hell in visual art by firmly separating pre-modern from modern views on the subject: ‘We can now affirm with some justification that hell is finished, that the great theatre of torments is closed for an indeterminate period, and that after almost 2,000 years of horrifying performances the play will not be repeated’ (The Fear of Hell, p. vi).

As we saw in Chapter 1, the twentieth century has frequently been characterised as an infernal one, both by writers who lived through its worst horrors and – since it is by no means clear that we have emerged from it – those who are currently reflecting on it retrospectively. Against that background, I have tried to show that descent narratives can function either as the means of constructing an escape route from, or alternatively discovering a radical shift of perspective on, this historically infernal condition. However, in the traditional katabatic narrative, such descent journeys are not equally available to all. Female characters, by definition, are usually excluded from descent because they are already in the underworld; indeed, the underworld is symbolically what they are. Narratives of the Orpheus myth, for example, usually dispatch Eurydice to the underworld in the opening lines or paragraphs, if she is not discovered there already from the outset; in a sense, she has always already died. Or, as Cavarero wryly observes, ‘Orpheus inaugurates the stubborn tradition [of love poetry], which wants the loved woman to be a dead woman’ (Relating Narratives, p. 94). While certain non-Western myths (such as the descent of Inanna to wrest power from the underworld goddess Erishkigal) ascribe the heroic role to a female character, it is only quite recently that mythic descent heroines have begun to gain currency in Western literature and culture.

A week before the start of hostilities in Iraq in March 2003, a BBC reporter interviewed American soldiers about their mental preparations for war. Among the images filmed by the camera crew, and televised on BBC News on 10 March, was that of an American soldier sitting in the desert, reading Dante's Inferno in an English translation. One can only speculate as to why that particular US soldier was reading the Inferno at that moment in Iraq. What seems more certain is that by televising the image of the soldier reading Dante, the BBC was inviting us to think about the invasion of Iraq in terms of a Dantean descent to Hell. Moreover, given the widespread public protests in Britain against the war and the BBC's willingness to challenge the government on its decision to invade, one might also conclude that this figure of the descending military hero – the new crusading pilgrim with his Dante in hand as a guide through Hell – was intended to be viewed as an ambivalent figure. For whom would this Western descent narrative prove to be Hell: for Saddam's regime, for the Iraqi people or for the Western invaders themselves? Despite the differences in historical contexts, comparisons with Vietnam were ubiquitous in the US and UK media. Beside the American soldier and Dante, then, many viewers may have sensed the ghostly presence of another descent hero, Captain Willard, played by Martin Sheen in Francis Ford Coppola's anti-Vietnam war film, Apocalypse Now (1979).

In Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (1998), Marya Hornbacher writes, ‘I went through the looking glass, stepped into the netherworld, where up is down and food is greed … Itis ever so easy to go. Harder to find your way back’ (p. 10). This amalgam of allusions to Virgil, Dante and Lewis Carroll is a common feature of contemporary autopathographies, or memoirs of mental illness. Such narratives represent Hell as a condition of actual, contemporary Western existence, and not only a concept of the afterlife imagined by theologians, mytho-graphers or writers of fiction. Unlike the second-generation Holocaust narratives that were discussed in the preceding chapter, these personal memoirs describe infernal states of which the writers have, or claim to have, first-hand knowledge and experience. Nevertheless, it is striking how frequently these autobiographical accounts of mental disorder, addiction, neurosis and psychotic breakdown are structured and narrated as journeys of descent into the underworld and return.

Contemporary Western culture has not only been characterised as traumatic, as noted in the previous chapter; it has also been described as generally psychotic. Whereas the early twentieth-century subject was alienated, the postmodern subject is typically schizophrenic, according to such theorists as Fredric Jameson, David Harvey, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. As Deleuze and Guattari claim, ‘the schizophrenic deliberately seeks out the very limit of capitalism; he is its inherent tendency brought to fulfilment, its surplus product, its proletariat, and its exterminating angel’ (Anti-Oedipus, p. 35).

In Alasdair Gray's Lanark, the ceiling of artist Duncan Thaw's studio is scrawled with quotations, two of which read:

Gray yokes together Virgil and Marx (along with Freud, Dante, Blake and many other katabatic luminaries) in order to underline the ways in which postmodern capitalism may be understood as a contemporary, secular form of Hell. In the other narrative strand of this mammoth, passionately socialist, sardonically self-questioning novel, the hero Lanark lives in a dystopian city without sunlight or love. The task he sets himself is to understand how the city came to be like this, and how it, or he, can be returned to the ordinary paradise he sometimes remembers from an earlier life. Lanark's Unthank is a fantastical, futuristic version of Thaw's 1950s Glasgow, which Gray represents as similarly lacking in human affection, freedom and creativity. As his name suggests, Thaw's task is to release the frozen core of humanity in himself and his environment. He proves to be a spectacular failure in this, and his alter ego, or perhaps post-ego, Lanark fares little better. And yet the novel as a whole is richly affirmative of ordinary virtues and pleasures: individual autonomy, breathable air, the affection between a father and son, light and architectural grace.