Tags and Burners, Cycles and Networks: Folklore in the Telectronic Age

Author(s): John Dorst

Reviewed work(s):
Source: Journal of Folklore Research, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Sep. - Dec., 1990), pp. 179-190
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3814251 .
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John Dorst

Tags and Burners, Cycles and Networks:

Folklore in the Telectronic Age

For most of the students who take it, the American folklore course I
teach serves as a general introduction to the field. So naturally we spend
a good deal of time on basic concepts and on identifying common
misconceptions about folklore. To these ends we focus in the first half of
the semester on forms of folklore that will be familiar to the students
from their own experience- what have come to seem to me as the old
standbys: personal experience narratives,jokes (particularly topical joke
cycles), contemporary belief tales, and photocopy lore, which is always
available in abundant quantities in the bureaucratized context of the
university.
But having used these sorts of materials for a few years, I have begun
to feel dissatisfied. I don't just mean that they grow stale or that they
don't work pretty well for the intended illustrative purposes. It has more
to do with a growing sense that in the very process of "correcting" my
students' perceptions I am reproducing and enforcing my own blind
spots. Although one's teaching always reflects plenty of biases that pro-
ceed from unique personal and historical circumstances, other predis-
positions, the sort I am concerned with here, are functions of professional
enculturation. They are the rhetorical conventions, the waysof thinking,
even the elements of world view, shared among folklorists by virtue of
common training and participation in a professional culture. Like any
field of inquiry, folklore has its own discourse/practices which deter-
mine the objects deemed worthy of attention, legitimate critical and
interpretive approaches, and police the standards according to which
professional judgments are made.
Journal of FolkloreResearch,Vol. 27, No. 3, 1990
Copyright ? 1990 by the Folklore Institute, Indiana University
180 JohnDorst

What concerns me is that certain elements of the discourse/practice I

operate with as a folklorist have become unfortunate limitations, con-
ventional ways of thinking that seem to fall beneath the threshold of
critical reflection and that impede our ability to capture the emergent
conditions of folklore in an advanced consumer culture. And it is in my
pedagogical approach to the sort of folklore forms I mention above,
what we might call mainstream contemporary genres, that some of these
disciplinary limitations are most evident. At least it is where I have
become most sensitive to them. So my purpose in what follows is to
identify and expurgate a couple of these disciplinary biases-biases that
both allow me to use contemporary folklore genres to disabuse my
students of their misconceptions and simultaneously restrict my own
ability to reassess and think critically about these very genres. I will begin
with a personal narrative of my own, a pedagogical conversion experience
of sorts that crystallized and made concrete for me the vague discomfort
I had been feeling about how I was deploying my folklore training in my
teaching and how that training was deploying (and still deploys) me.
I have had occasion over the past year to use with some regularity the
international electronic mail system BITNET, a computer network
through which one can communicate virtually overnight with anyone
who has an address on this system anywhere in the world. Early in the
spring of 1989 I found in my BITNET "mailbox" an invitation to sign
onto the new interactive e-mail COMPUTER NETWORK FOR FOLK-
LORISTS. Such networks, referred to as bulletin boards, or in this case
as a "discussion group," are well established in other academic fields-
the HUMANIST network, for example. In fact, computer networks have
been around for two decades, though they have proliferated greatly in
recent years (New York Times, 13 May 1990:1,16). Today there are "thou-
sands of specialized networks [which] now cater to a htlge variety of
interests, including those of comedians, cooks, travelers, recovering
alcoholics, sports fans, homosexuals, wine lovers, retirees and Go play-
ers" (ibid.:16).
Once one accesses such a network, long distance exchanges with
other members becomes rapid, easy and openly available to anyone with
the means to get connected. Not surprisingly, the popular rhetoric
applied to this technology invokes distinctly vernacular associations.' To
some, McLuhan's global village seems on the verge of realization. The
computer networks appear to make possible communities that, though
physically dispersed, display attributes of the direct, uncon-strained,
unofficial exchanges folklorists typically concern themselves with. These
popular discourses about the vernacular qualities of advanced telectronic
communications bear looking into as themselves expressions of folk
 IN THETELECTRONIC
FOLKLORE AGE 181

desires to domesticate increasingly remote technologies. But more to

the point here is the relationship of folklorists in their own practices to
these technologies and to the relations of production they support.
The attraction of the folklorists' network as stated in the BITNET
invitation is that this new tool will revolutionize communication among
scholars. Not only can it serve as an electronic newsletter, but it will
make it possible for folklorists to "keep track of new upgrowths of such
contemporary folklore asjoke cycles, customs, legends, and so on." The
implication is that such lore is carried on "out there" somewhere in the
familiar and stable space/time of folk processes. The electronic tracking
and exchange among scholars of such lore is perceived in purely neutral
terms, as having no implications for the lore itself. The seductive instru-
mentality of these technologies makes it easy to miss some of their
deeper implications.
The limitation of this way of thinking is most evident perhaps in
regard to topical joke cycles-that genre of lore in which whole crops of
jokes spring up seemingly overnight around some sensational event in
the news: Chernobyl, the Challenger disaster, Richard Pryor's drug
accident, Gary Hart's political debacle, and so on. Such cycles flourish
briefly and then disappear, as the mass media move on to fresh maimings
and new collective tragedies. It is misleading to suggest that the com-
puter networks merely provide folklorists with the tools we need to track
evanescent developments in topical folklore. In fact, advanced informa-
tion technologies and the social relations they entail constitute the very
conditions of possibility for such lore in the first place.
I'm not suggesting, of course, that such lore only exists through these
technologies of electronic reproduction. Topical jokes, for example,
certainly are exchanged in face-to-face situations. But even in these
contexts there is a sense in which the lore enacts the means and relations
of (re)production characteristic of a mass mediated, telectronic society.
These social circumstances and technologies are not extraneous to the
lore, merely providing new conduits for its circulation. They inform and
inhabit the lore from within, structurally and ideologically. And it seems
to me that the disciplinary practice of folklore studies operates system-
atically to block our full recognition of these historical conditions. I will
return to this point and identify what seems the most obvious way in
which our discourse as folklorists limits our ability to deal effectively with
current cultural conditions. But first, I want to offer another example
from the world of computer communications to convey some of the
complexity of the issue I'm trying to identify.
Also in the spring of 1989 an interesting news item came across my
computer screen, again through the electronic mail lines. There ap-
182 JohnDorst

peared on the widely circulated HUMANIST bulletin board a commen-

tary on a news story from the SanJose MercuryNews, including the full
text, or rather the nearly full text, of the news item itself. And it is worth
noting that the newspaper story might well have been entered onto the
bulletin board using a scanner, which automatically reproduces hard
copy as electronic inscription.
The story ran originally under the headline, "COMPUTERUSERS
WORRY THAT STANFORD SET PRECEDENT, They say decision to
block bulletin board impedes free access to public information" (San
Jose MercuryNews, 20 February 1989). The gist of the account is that the
Stanford administration blocked access on its campus to a computer list
of jokes that were deemed to serve, in the words of university officials,
"no university educational purpose." Apparently this is the first instance
where a university has blocked free access by its users to part of the
international bulletin network called USENET, which reaches 250,000
users worldwide. Not surprisingly, the debate over this issue is couched
in the familiar terms of first amendment rights and academic freedom.
The editor of the HUMANIST bulletin board (note that these inter-
national networks are often closely managed and by no means the open
forums they might at first seem) takes the opportunity of his commentary
on the news item to congratulate HUMANIST users for their enlightened
policy of self-regulation, "the only kind worthy of human beings." He
then proceeds to demonstrate this self-regulatory practice by editing out
of the original news story the one example it had contained of the sort
of offensive joke that prompted Stanford watchdogs to block the joke
list in the first place. The editor's remarks, unintentionally ironic, are
worth quoting: "Recent events remind us of how valuable our liberal
traditions really are, how much our study of the humanities depend on
them, indeed how much the very idea of electronic networks stems from
them. At the same time, conditions may require that a line be drawn, as
I found I had to do with the text below [that is, the text of the news
article], which repeated a joke that caused offense, ostensibly as an
example of what gets people upset. I didn't think an example was
required!" (Joe Giampapa, HUMANIST, 27 Feb. 1989).
According to the report, it appears that Stanford's decision to block
the texts was prompted by the jokes' racist and sexist content, as well as
the fact that the jokes are simply listed, anonymously and without com-
mentary that would address the social issues raised by the offensive
humor. Other bulletin boards that contain similar jokes, but that also
include commentary, are not blocked. The unadorned texts are unac-
ceptable. Texts placed in context-not context in the folklorist's sense,
but the context of the relevant social issues as defined by some appara-
tus of authority-are okay.
 IN THE TELECTRONIC
FOLKLORE AGE 183

The convoluted circumstances of this case can be summarized as

follows: a racist or sexist joke is edited out of the text of a newspaper
story which has been entered (perhaps automatically scanned) onto an
electronic bulletin board by one of its editors. This news story-now
minus the example of the type of joke that precipitated the newsworthy
event in the first place-is about Stanford's blocking-or, in effect,
"editing out"-a joke list that appeared on another bulletin board to
which the university is a subscriber. The rationale for this "censorship"
by Stanford's officials was that the jokes were not of educational merit,
which seems to be a code for the fact that they were potentially inflam-
matory in an environment where cultural, particularly racial, tensions
seem to be increasing. The editor of the bulletin board that recorded
the news story uses the Stanford incident as a parable about enlightened
self-regulation, connecting this in some vague way to the idea that
computer networking is consistent with humanistic values.
I go into such detail with this example because it seems to me the
absent joke, the ghost joke that haunts these telectronic labyrinths, can
be viewed as a paradigm for what I'm trying to identify here, namely the
boundary-less, dematerialized space in which such lore operates. It is a
space in which it is not at all a simple thing to draw lines between devices
intended for the recording and study of lore by folklore scholars and the
environments which allow for the inscription and exchange of lore by
the computer-literate and plugged-in folk. My example of the demateri-
alized joke demonstrates that this is an extremely active folkloric space,
in which social and cultural forces operate and register. But unless we
adjust our assumptions about what we study, for example our received
notions about what constitutes traditions active in performance, we will
miss a great deal of what is going on. It seems to me quite legitimate, for
example, to consider the disappearing act of the computer joke as a
kind of folkloric performance, though to do so means that we need to
abandon the idea of stable subjectivities-that is, of clearly identifiable
performers and audiences. It is a performance that occurs within the
immensely complex networks and apparatuses of a relatively new social
order. Such activities are not readily susceptible to the conventional
methods of performance analysis and ethnography of speaking.
I should make it clear at this point that I am not just talking about
folklore and computers. Rather the electronic inscription and repro-
duction of folklore forms merely epitomizes and makes especially visible
the wholesale transformation of social and material relations that char-
acterizes our historical moment. We might return to the case of topical
joke cycles. It seems to me that my training as a folklorist has predis-
posed me to view this relatively recent phenomenon as a species of the
genre JOKE, that is, as a series of separate items that can be catalogued
184 JohnDorst

and analyzed for recurring themes. This is basically how I treat them in
my class. But another way to approach this phenomenon is to consider
the apposite genre not JOKE but CYCLE. From this perspective the
diagnostic feature of the genre is seriality itself, the potentially infinite
process of sequential displacement of one unit by its equivalent. And
this is a property not only operative within a given cycle but between
cycles as well, since topical cycles seem to replace one another in con-
cert with the serial substitution of news stories in the mass media.
Viewed in this way, the joke cycle evades analysis in the terms most
familiar to us. For example, if the genre is the cycle rather than the unit
joke, what constitutes the context of its performance? How can we
localize its performers and audiences? Although carried on through
vernacular (face-to-face, etc.) channels, the phenomenon of the topical
cycle is of the same species as the joke bulletin board I have just
described, which only exists through the agencies of electronic tech-
nologies. For folklorists to register joke cycles on their own e-mail
bulletin board is not to pull them out of their context for the purposes
of cataloging and analysis, but rather to realize more fully their "natural"
conditions of existence. Performance, recording, categorizing and ana-
lyzing all come to seem like versions of the same telectronic gesture.
Advanced mass communications technologies do not just serve more
efficiently to capture evanescent items of contemporary lore. They
epitomize the forces and relations of production through which such
lore is constituted. That joke cycles should move quite freely between
computer bulletin boards and face-to-face exchanges is quite to be
expected, and we have no basis on which to assign one setting priority or
legitimacy. They are inseparable aspects of the same apparatus, as is the
computerized "discussion group" through which folklorists facilitate
their research.
There is one bias which seems to me the most significant impediment
to folklorists getting beyond the received conventions of the discipline
to a vantage from which we might perceive more clearly how current
conditions of production inform contemporary lore. The major block to
such recognition is, I think, the interpretive tradition that inclines us to
approach this lore primarilyin terms of its covert thematics. The standard
method entails the comparative analysis of motifs to reveal recurring
thematic preoccupations in a given body of lore, which in turn yields
interpretations of how the lore expresses broad attitudes shared by
those who exchange it. Now I don't mean to suggest that this approach
cannot yield very interesting results. But without considering as well the
mode of production and exchange of the lore, such interpretations can
 IN THETELECTRONIC
FOLKLORE AGE 185

miss crucial contradictions indispensable to critically effective readings.

Let me offer an example. The Challenger disasterjoke cycle, perhaps
because of its especially grotesque elements, has come in for interesting
commentary by folklorists, notably, companion essays by Willie Smyth
(1986) and Elizabeth Radin Simons (1986) in an issue of Western Folklore.
Although emphasizing different aspects of the jokes, both authors read
this cycle as in some way a folk critique of hegemonic apparatuses.
Smyth, for example, sees in the jokes an expression of folk resistance to
the apparatus of televisual media-news programs, mass advertising,
etc. The perceptive and convincing argument follows the line that the
outrageous juxtaposition of allusions to all sorts of everyday commercial
products-Head and Shoulders, Tang, Bud Lite-with the most hor-
rible aspects of physical mutilation is a collective commentary on the
medium that presented the Challenger accident to the public. The
network news, and by extension the whole televisual apparatus, trades
daily in just these sorts of contradictions and macabre juxtapositions.
Through the jokes the folk registered their awareness of and resistance
to the hypocrisy behind the pious media voice that was presuming to tell
them how they ought to feel about the tragedy. In the end, then, these
jokes can be read as appropriations of mass media imagery and dis-
course to produce counter-hegemonic rejections of the media construc-
tion of the world.
Such an interpretation seems quite fine to me and it is exactly the sort
of thing that I try to get my students to think about, if only because it has
not occurred to many of them that folklore "means"anything at all. But
that feeling of having completed the interpretive task in showing how a
body of lore expresses collective attitudes, especially attitudes that do
not square with those purveyed by the dominant order, leaves
unexamined the ways in which the lore may connect to, and perhaps
even support, the prevailing structures of authority and control. It seems
to me that one could make the case that what operates as critique at the
level of thematics in the joke cycle is recuperated by the hegemonic
order in a more fundamental operation, namely, that the cycle as genre
reproduces or mimics the distinctive operations of the reigning hege-
mony. If in the individual Challengerjokes the commodities of advanced
consumer culture are resisted, in the Challenger cyclethe seriality (re-
placement of a unit by an infinite series of equivalents) that is the
hallmark of the current commodity structure is staged or modelled. The
life of such cycles is the very enactment of the mass mediated commod-
ity apparatus that, according to Smyth, the jokes criticize through their
motifs and themes. That this joke cycle began to circulate nationally
186 JohnDorst

almost overnight through the agency of mass communications tech-

nologies (Smyth 1986:247, n. 12) is not extraneous or merely instrumen-
tal to, but a constitutive feature of the genre.
These circumstances have implications not only for verbal genres
such as joke cycles, but for contemporary material culture forms as well.
Photocopy lore as a type of artifact, for example, parallels in many
respects the qualities of serial reproduction characteristic of the joke
cycles. Even closer parallels can be seen in subway graffiti writing of the
sort documented in Henry Chalfant and Tony Silver's superb film Style
Warsand described most fully in Craig Castleman's GettingUp: Subway
Graffiti in New York(1982).
Folklorists of course view such graffiti as a form of folk art, with its
social base in urban adolescent subcultures. Although there are numer-
ous categories of subwaygraffiti writing (Castleman 1982:26-46), formal
properties distinguish two basic types. "Tags"are the cursive, rapidly
produced, monochromatic "monograms"which the writers attempt to
"get up" as frequently and disperse as widely as possible. They might
appear anywhere, but they are especially concentrated on the interior
walls of subway cars. "Pieces" (meaning "masterpieces"), or various ex-
tensions of them, are the large, flamboyantly colored and visually elabo-
rate works that usually appear on the outsides of the subway cars,
sometimes covering the entire exterior surface, or even extending to
more than one car. These pieces are of course the graffiti form easiest to
view as artistic expression-as paintings. They are like the tags, though,
in that the writer's name, which is not the personal given name but a
kind of individual logo, is usually at the core of the design. In fact, one
could argue that the tags are the truly paradigmatic form, since the
"prime directive in graffiti [is] 'getting up"' (Castleman 1982:19). The
goal above all is to reproduce one's name as much and as widely as
possible, to which end the tags are especially suited. A single piece,
however impressive and original in style, will not bring the same prestige
as wide distribution.
Like the joke cycles, the imagery of graffiti draws heavily on the me-
dia-cartoons, mass advertising, movie posters, billboards, and so on.
The styles developed in many of the pieces mimic or caricature me-
chanically or electronically produced scripts, such as computer generated
lettering. But it is less in the elements of style or the iconography than in
the mode of production and dissemination that this graffiti most sig-
nificantly parallels the joke cycles. It "spreads"with remarkable speed,
approaching the simultaneity of mass media dissemination. The writing
of tags, intended as they are for rapid deployment and maximum distri-
bution, takes on qualities of mechanically automatic reproduction.
FOLKLORE
IN THETELECTRONIC
AGE 187

And subway graffiti is highly evanescent, with constant replacement a

hallmark characteristic. The term "burner"refers to an especially good
piece, usually the work of a master writer. The metaphorical implication
is that such a piece "burns"or destroys and replaces all predecessors.
And of course a literal process of erasure and replacement goes on
constantly as the inscribed surfaces are cleaned or painted over, making
them available for fresh inscriptions. In all of these qualities then, urban
graffiti, like the joke cycles, stages the material relations of the commodity
in our mass mediated, advanced consumer culture.
In one of the most sophisticated discussions of this graffiti to date,
Susan Stewart (1987) examines it as an expression of its particular
historical moment. She argues cogently that it reproduces consumer
culture's "styleof simultaneous distribution, erasure of authenticity, and
insistent superficiality" (175). As a form of expression that is "both
outlawed and venerated" (162), both crime and art, graffiti points up
with special vividness the paradoxes and crises of advanced consumer
culture, especially with regard to the work of art as a commodity.
Having identified the complex mechanisms through which urban
graffiti reveals the protocols of advanced consumer culture, Stewart
moves her argument in a direction very like the one Smyth takes in his
analysis of the joke cycles. She too identifies a vernacular critique. In this
case it is not merely a thematic commentary on mass mediated culture.
Rather, graffiti entails a utopian and disruptive gesture through graffiti
writers' vernacular appropriation of the commodity mode. By localizing
the consumer rhetoric within the vernacular community, graffiti writers
resist their own absorption by that very consumer system. Graffitiwriting,
she says, "forms a critique of the status of all artistic artifacts, indeed a
critique of all privatized consumption, and it carries out that threat in
full view.... [It] attempts a utopian and limited dissolution of the
boundaries of property" (175).
The argument mounted here, as is Smyth's reading of the Challenger
jokes, is compelling. In its abstract outlines, this type of critical analysis
has become quite familiar, both in the work of folklorists and else-
where.2 A folk or vernacular community appropriates the style, the
means of production, the structures and rhetoric of the dominant culture
and, reframing them through vernacular modes of production, turns
these appropriated elements back upon the dominant order, sometimes
overtly, thereby evoking repressive responses or mechanisms of incor-
poration, sometimes covertly or esoterically, in unself-conscious sym-
bolic forms. Urban graffiti, as a decidedly public expression, suffers
from both the repressive response of law enforcement and the incorpo-
rating response of the art establishment, which would assimilate it to the
188 John Dorst

bourgeois categories of fine art (Stewart 1987:171-74). The joke cycles,

exchanged in more private and limited contexts and expressing collective
dissatisfactions more obliquely, are less threatening to the dominant
order and generally do not incur repressive responses. The parable of
the suppressed e-mail bulletin board jokes at Stanford reminds us,
though, that under the right circumstances such a response is alwaysat
the ready.
There is no question that this general line of argument, with its focus
on the dynamics of incorporation and excorporation, effectively captures
many real circumstances in the ongoing struggle between hegemonic
forces and anti-hegemonic impulses. But, as productive and compelling
as this critical strategy usually is, its rhetoric preserves a utopian concep-
tion of the vernacular (or folk) sphere that can blind us to important
aspects of the relatively new conditions of cultural production. In terms
of the case at hand, for example, we need at least to consider the
possibility that the graffiti writers' vernacular appropriation of the style,
the rhetoric, the imagery, and above all the characteristic modes of
(re)production of advanced consumer culture are in fact that culture's
ultimate penetration of the vernacular-ultimate in the sense that it
leaves the vernacular mode of production intact while thoroughly in-
habiting it. It may well be that graffiti writing outrages the bourgeois
verities of ownership, public versus private space, the decorous separation
of interior and exterior, and so on. But perhaps it does so in a way quite
consistent with the newly dominant modes of cultural production, which
are made possible in part by the electronic technologies of infinite
image and text reproduction, and instantaneous mass distribution. Per-
haps forms like joke cycles and urban graffiti, and we might add urban
belief tales and photocopy folklore as well, are symptoms of the coloni-
zation of vernacular production by the subtle agencies of advanced
consumer culture, which depend increasingly on the fragmentation of
the market into ever more diversified and localized segments. The
consumer system as currently constituted thrives on the proliferation of
localized cultures rather than on the consolidation of such cultures into
one homogeneous mass.
I am not proposing here, then, merely a revival of the old Frankfurt
School notion that mass culture in the late twentieth century threatens
to overwhelm a legitimate elite culture on the one hand and a set of
equally legitimate folk cultures on the other (see Lim6n 1983). Rather, I
am raising the possibility that in the sort of expressive forms I've been
FOLKLORE AGE
IN THETELECTRONIC 189

discussing, we begin to see emergent symptoms of a kind of ecstatic (and

disturbing) apotheosis of the vernacular sphere. The dilemma I find
myself with as a folklorist is the possibility that we are in the historical
moment that marks, not the end of folk culture or the vernacular mode
of production, but the end of that discursive practice which sustains the
distinction between the vernacular, the folk, the marginal, and so on, on
the one hand, and the dominant, the mainstream, the official, the mass,
on the other. The dominant order, embodied most concretely in its
technologies of reproduction and dissemination, threatens to dissolve
the stable boundaries that are necessary to the sort of critical stance, so
commonly taken by folklorists, that finds in residual and emergent
cultural forms expressions of non- or even anti-hegemonic sentiments.
It has been my primary point that our own discursive practices as folk-
lorists do not equip us very well to deal with these unprecedented and
complex conditions of cultural production.
Universityof Wyoming
Laramie

NOTES

An earlierversionof this essaywas deliveredin a plenarysessionat theAmerican

FolkloreSocietyannual conferencein Philadelphia,October1989.

1. For example, the New YorkTimesarticle quoted above begins with

an anecdote about a courtship conducted over the e-mail lines. This is
followed by the example of the city of Santa Monica, California, using a
computer network to allow an open forum for city council meetings, in
the journalist's words, the "electronic equivalent of an eighteenth-century
town meeting."
2. In his fine book TelevisionCulture,John Fiske (1987) mounts an
extended argument that televisual experience provides volumes of raw
material for local vernacular appropriation. Far from turning us all into
passive zombies, he finds that television is received and used in a great
variety of ways, including many forms of active resistance to the overt
blandishments of the mass consumer order. His book is of considerable
relevance to folklorists interested in the politics of culture.
190 JohnDorst

REFERENCESCITED

Castleman, Craig. 1986. GettingUp: SubwayGraffitiin New York. Cam-

bridge, Mass.:The MIT Press.
Lim6n, Jose E. 1983. "Western Marxism and Folklore: A Critical Intro-
duction."Journal of AmericanFolklore96:34-42.
Simons, Elizabeth Radin. 1986. "The NASAJoke Cycle: The Astronauts
and the Teacher." WesternFolklore45:261-77.
Smyth, Willie. 1986. "Challenger Jokes and the Humor of Disaster."
WesternFolklore45:243-60.
Stewart, Susan. 1987. "CeciTueraCela:Graffiti as Crime and Art."In Life
after Postmodernism:Essays on Value and Culture,edited by John
Fekete, 161-80. New York:St. Martin's Press.