[b]Max Jorge Hinderer:[/b] The »Mute« anthology »Proud to be Flesh« is about to be released. As you state in your introduction, rather than an editorial »best of« selection, the orientation of the book aims to be a »reflection of the magazine itself«. Could you explain your own magazine’s strapline »Culture and politics after the net«, especially regarding the founding of the magazine in 1994, as the first major internet platforms came about?

[b]Pauline van Mourik Broekman, Josephine Berry Slater:[/b] The strapline came about after much soul searching. When we started publishing as a magazine in 1997, »Mute« – which had been coming out as a digital arts newspaper since 1994 – used two straplines, one at the top of the page, and one at the bottom. »Proud to be Flesh«, which had featured from the beginning, was placed at the bottom. »Critical/Information/Services«, which replaced an earlier idea, sat next to the title logo. These two statements worked provocatively against one another – the first was a two-fingered salute to the fad for immateriality that accompanied the »cyber revolution«. The second used business jargon for critical purposes. So you want information? You’re going to get it. The pursuit of »critical information« however, led us to constantly revise our focus on digital technologies. In as much as »Mute’s« early life was propelled by an underlying enthusiasm for networked computing and its possibilities, there was always a critique of technocracy and the »dialectic of enlightenment«, of which net culture is a part. Later, when we, together with the culture we were covering, became swept up in the anti-capitalist movement, we needed to acknowledge that the net was now part of our world – for better or for worse. The new strapline, which we adopted in late 2002 (on the occasion of yet another format change) registered a modicum of enthusiasm for the net, but also a commitment to viewing contemporary reality as forever changed by it.

[b]Hinderer:[/b] Web 2.0?
[b]Broekman, Slater:[/b] »Mute’s« attitude to Web 2.0 can be encapsulated in the title of an article by Dmytri Kleiner which we published on the same subject – »Info Enclosures 2.0«. The first wave of enclosures of the net focus on the corporatisation of its infrastructure: all those »mom and pop« ISPs, the small-time enthusiasts who were gobbled up by telecoms companies. The second round of enclosures associated with Web 2.0 relates to the brilliant realisation by big media companies that they didn’t need to waste all that money creating commercial content – they could get the rest of us to do it for them. However, the enclosure of what Kleiner calls the »means of sharing«, or peer-to-peer networks, goes further than that – it relates to the wider capitalist phase of being totally subsumed, in which the whole of our social lives are assimilated into the production of value. Much can be summed up by the adulteration of the verb »to befriend« into »to friend«.

[b]Hinderer:[/b] Does the title of the new anthology, »Proud to be Flesh«, allude to a specific relation of materiality and immateriality in contemporary culture production?

[b]Broekman, Slater:[/b] Perhaps »Proud to be Flesh« is our way of playfully expressing our Marxist materialism – to address not just freakish ideas like »extropianism« (the desire to upload oneself into the net, to become encrypted as data) but also the autonomist left’s idea of »immaterial production« and the belief in its potential for communism within capitalism.
At the high point of that particular fad, we wanted to concentrate on who and what sustains the immaterial realm, the symbol-pushing of a global elite. »Flesh« relates to the poor on whose backs the net is built, and reminds us that we, as bodies, are vulnerable like our biosphere and cannot live on »thin air« like New Labour think-tank favourites such as Charles Leadbeater would have us believe.

[b]Hinderer:[/b] After its 15th birthday, what can we expect to see next from »Mute«, which could, unfortunately, be seen by some as an indirect child of Thatcherism?

[b]Broekman, Slater:[/b] In terms of the upcoming anniversary, »Proud to be Flesh« may seek unashamedly to make »Mute’s« output of the last fifteen years more accessible. But the next fifteen years’ output should be considered more directly in light of the open publishing model we adopted circa 2005/6. Although this has been slow to gain momentum, and the opening up of an editorial process to »the wisdom of crowds« by no means guarantees decentralisation of authority (or any other state of editorial utopia!), it has been fascinating to develop our agenda more consciously in tandem with readers’ opinions and material, the quality and relevance of which continually amazes us. A few years into the process, the stream of self-published content we now host (ranging from articles to images to books) makes it impossible to envisage a scenario for our future in which the active reader doesn’t loom very large. The consequences for our commodified form will as ever have to be considered as we go along.
It would be delusional for »Mute« to regard its »heritage« as unproblematically radical or oppositional. Like so many other publishing projects of its day, it is a bastard child of many contradictory social, political and economic tendencies – one of which is indeed the notional »entrepreneurialism« of Thatcher’s Britain. Viewed from a certain perspective, the project could even function as an advertisement for the kind of »mixed-economy« enterprise New Labour went on to lionise, and which it tried so hard to engineer. (After all, not only is »Mute« a product in the marketplace, but it is a cultural initiative supported with state funds, which in the UK often means become increasingly entangled with government agendas.) However, we would of course also challenge any simplistic denigration based on our »complicity« by pointing to our efforts to develop the magazine as a critical dialectic between our subject matter and its audience.

[b]Hinderer:[/b] Mute has always relied on non-European contributions, yet is still assumed to be a London-based project. How does the format of a web-based project such as yours restructure the relationship between the local and the global?

[b]Broekman, Slater:[/b] It’s true that the internet restructures the local/global, but time and again during the editorial process, we see how hard it is to escape the tendrils of a variety of materially rooted networks – be they institutional, social, or economic. As far as we can see, in this situation the only viable methodology is to be alert and totally engaged with the contradictions of our position/ing, never presuming an organisational innocence, and to use as many avenues as possible to access our material. However, any notion of unmediated editorial contact with a sort of virgin non-local »voice« must continue to be regarded as another (colonialist?) phantasm... (The figure of the lone »Third World« or »conflict zone« blogger – a firm favourite of the UK press – comes to mind here.)

[b]Hinderer:[/b] What potential do you see in reviewing publicity strategies of the 1990’s for today’s political agency?

[b]Broekman, Slater:[/b] It’s complicated. With Facebook etc. being held up as the panacea in the context of any kind of communicational/organisational challenge, even though these platforms are obviously so utterly compromised, then returning to the period prior to their arrival – when a sort of isomorphism between politics and its infrastructures seemed possible – might seem just the ticket. But returning to the non-corporate web and all that... as many »Mute« writers have been at pains to discuss, this image of a free internet taken over by big, bad business was a gross distortion to start off with, and so should be handled with extreme caution. As mentioned earlier, the story is more one of corporate consolidation and value extraction from »free« and »collective« activity (itself entirely symptomatic of global power imbalances), not the capitalist takeover of an erstwhile egalitarian space. Similarly, as we ourselves have perhaps demonstrated, an intense engagement with the relationship between »content« and »carrier« can flip over into a sort of format-fetishism, where the carrier is tasked with the full load of signification, and content is demoted to a sort of incidental secondary position. In this context, the mass availability of free, effective tools for organising and publishing can only be a good thing. With »Mute«, I think it’s fair to say that, as time has passed – and notwithstanding our continuing experimentation – we have been happy to follow a less stringent formal/technological agenda, while making increasing demands of our content. We see ourselves as a battleground for »critical information services« rather than focusing on the content management system you use, or the type of paper you use for the magazine.

http://www.metamute.org/

Proud to Be Flesh: A Mute Magazine Anthology of Cultural Politics After the Net
Eds. Pauline van Mourik Broekman & Josephine Berry Slater together with Michael Corris, Anthony Iles, Benedict Seymour and Simon Worthington.
Mute Publishing in association with Autonomedia
624 pages, 48 pages of illustrations.
http://www.metamute.org/en/proud_to_be_flesh

Mute Magazine Graphic Design
Eds. Pauline van Mourik Broekman, Simon Worthington and Damian Jaques with an introduction by Adrian Shaughnessy. Eight Books Ltd. 144 pages, 250 colour illustrations.
http://www.8books.co.uk/mutegraphics.html

 

 

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