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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Henry Adam Svec American Folk Music as Tactical Media Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018, pp. 197
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Reviews / Comptes rendus
2018-10-01
2021-09-03
2018-10-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Simone Dotto
2018/10/01
Università degli Studi di Udine
2036-461X
31
en
Henry Adam Svec American Folk Music as Tactical Media Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018, pp. 197
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16221/16942
19
Henry Adam Svec
American Folk Music as Tactical Media
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018, pp. 197




   In a Futurama episode entitled ‘Forty percent Leadbelly’ (S07, E14, 2013)
Bender the robot, one of the main charachters of Matt Groening’s animated
series, runs into Sylicon Red, a guitar-playing alien and a universal legend of
folk music. Seeing the opportunity to become a renowned folk singer himself,
he duplicates Sylicon’s instrument with a 3d printer and starts performing under
the stagename of Ramblin’ Rodriguez. However, the audiences reject his songs
for their lack of sincerity, and Sylicon Red warns him not to come back ‘’til you
have lived a life worth singing about’ — advice that Bender follows literally,
producing a duplicate of himself to experience real-life adventures for him that
he can easily turn into successful hits.
   The episode can be easily interpreted as a science-fictional satire of an
‘authenticity’ issue that underlyies the whole folk discourse: Bender managing to
counterfeit ‘artistic integrity’ suggests that ‘being (and sounding) authentic’ is not
an inner quality for personal self-expression but a set of socially and culturally
constructed conventions. As an alternative to this ‘culturalist’ view, one can take
advantage of the lesson given by Henry Adam Svec’s American Folk Music as
Tactical Media to offer a different reading. After all, the reason Bender ends
up artificially reproducing (and ultimately ‘faking’) authenticity is because he
is trying to handle an ancient oral heritage in the only way artificial intelligence
can: transcoding it in an amount of data and producing an original output that
recombines that data. In this sense he does not act all that differently from any
(human) ethnographer or folk revivalists: in fact, when the robot character wants
to achieve a formula to write the perfect folk song he performs a computational
analysis of ‘all folk songs in the world’ that strikingly resembles Alan Lomax’s
Cantometrics project, an interactive and dynamic database whose aim was
precisely to dissect, measure and taxonomically classify singular performative
motifs and musical elements from a world-wide ethnographic repertoire recorded
on punch cards. The technological experiments undertaken by Lomax in the
sixties are extensively studied in the first chapter of the book, strictly associated
to cybernetics. Like Norbert Wiener before him, the ethnomusicologist resorted

                                                  Cinéma & Cie, vol. XIX, no. 31, Fall 2018
                               Reviews / Comptes-rendus


to computational machines to decode a system of networked relationships (folk
music) and map repeated patterns of action (singing and dancing performances);
like Bender the robot after him, he firmly believed that ‘the truth of the folk was
to be found alongside the (now digital) machine’ (p. 44).
   That ‘folk and machine were often one and the same’ (p. 108) is the provocative
argument grounding the whole analysis of American Folk as Tactical Media. As
the author admits in the introduction, his aim to search for ‘resonances’ between
folk (revival) and media theory may at first seem counter-intuitive, since the
former is usually presented as a pre-modern object ‘in constitutive opposition’ to
technological innovation (p. 14). Svec’s understanding of media, however, is not
limited to means of mass communication, nor even to the presence of technical
objects as such: coherently with the general aims of Amsterdam University Press’
Recursions book-series (of which his volume is a part), he is interested in the
study of cultural techniques, and how ‘diagrams and dreams, models and maps’
(p. 15) articulate the real that folk revivalists physically inhabit, and claim to sing
about. The author’s concern for the pragmatics of mediation becomes clearer
when he gradually moves his attention from John and Alan Lomax’s use of
analogue and digital machines to other outstanding folk personalities. Indeed,
the second chapter stems from Harold Innis’ notion of time-biased media to
explain how Pete Seeger used to disseminate the seeds of folk culture by using
‘any channel necessary’, as though a sort of a counter-broadcasting scattered
all over the communicational eco system. The third chapter then argues against
authorialist views on Bob Dylan’s work and revisits his rock songs in a kittlerian/
derridian fashion. According to the author, by taking the (in)famous ‘electric
turn’, the songwriter did not simply trade his role as a spokesperson for a
community with a more individualistically romantic idea of self-expression, but
he became an inscription surface for the discourse networks of his time; the ‘voice
of a generation’ that he had supposedly channelled through his earlier works was
replaced with the non-human noises coming from material and infrastructural
agencies. Throughout an admittedly rhapsodic and unsystematic overview of the
folk revival, the reader learns that not only our historical awareness of musical
heritage, but the way songs themselves were written and performed was always
already ‘plugged in’, always already mediated.
   This media-related perspective proves useful to offer fresh insights on often-
debated topics (Dylan’s song-writing being one example). However, this does
not prevent Svec from addressing the troubled trope of authenticity: the whole
second part of the book, and particularly the chapter entitled ‘Another Authentic
Folk Is Possible’, draws on Marx’s writings and radical critical theory in search
of a non-essentialist formulation. While advocating for a critical and relational
understanding of the concept, the author makes two crucial points: first, that
authenticity is not a state of being but a process (meaning that ‘true folkness’
is not to be found in any naturally given volk but only in those people actively
struggling to become one); second, no such a thing as the ‘self’ is conceivable
outside intersubjective relationships and, consequently, no self-expression can

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                    H.A. Svec, American Folk Music as Tactical Media


possibly be valuable as ‘innerly authentic’ if taken in isolation from its social
context. Such an overtly political reframing of authenticity paves the ground for
further resonances between media theory and the folk revival. For instance, the
notion of tactical media (originally formulated to describe digital activists’ hit-and-
run attacks) serves as a key for a ‘folk-archaeological’ approach to the old rituals
of the Hootenanny, a series of open-mic musical parties organized by Woody
Guthrie and the Almanac Singers in mid-40s America, whereby singers, activists,
storytellers and listeners joined forces for a collective, democratically-minded
performance. The reason for likening them to the politics of digital resistance
is not only since they too create ‘ephemeral communicational assemblages’ for
a ‘multipoint-to-multipoint interaction’ (p. 120), but also because ‘there are
weapons to be assembled out of the long American folk revival’s tactical media
toolbox’ (p. 115) which could still be of some today’s networked mediascape.
   An already theoretically dense book, American Folk as Tactical Media makes its
most compelling argument when it points its finger at the present. In Svec’s line
of reasoning, Steve Jobs’ fetishization of Bob Dylan as a source of inspiration goes
hand in hand with the cyber-optimistic view of digital produsage as a ‘renewed
vernacular culture’: both, he argues, exemplify the strategical rebranding of ‘the
folk’ displayed by digital corporations as a rhetorical surface for the exploitation
of user data and free labour. Significantly, these discursive strategies tend to
shift attention away from the media-channels themselves and emphasize instead
the users’ (authentic) individuality and the immediacy of their interactions. A
new folk revival in the digital era could help us to dismantle these cognitive
capitalistic rhetorics, so long as we grasp its inherently pragmatic and medial
nature. To paraphrase Svec’s conclusions, an authentic folk spirit is not to be
preserved outside, but it must be practiced from within the mediascape in order
to create communal outlets in already established networks. A task for ‘machine-
benders’ indeed.

                                  [Simone Dotto, Università degli Studi di Udine]




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