_note_on_notes.txt
Dear Reader
_note_on_notes.txt
This is just to explain that these notes are very rough and full of errors. They function as source material for my other writing when hopefully mistakes and typos are somewhat corrected. Use at your peril.
action-arendt.txt
Hannah Arendt (2000 [1964]), 'Labor, Work, Action', _The Portable Hannah Arendt_, New York: Penguin, pp. 167-181.
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Hannah Arendt (1998 [1958]) _The Human Condition_, Chicago: University of Chicago Press
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In making the distinction between work 'vita contemplativa' and 'vita activa' - contemplation and action - it is clear to Hannah Arendt that active life simply cannot be avoided (2000: 167). Rather than simply think that all action ends in contemplation or that contemplation leads to action, it is not possible to go through life without acting in it, whereas contemplation is unfortunately optional. In describing the human condition, the centrality of labour, work and action seems indisputable to Arendt. The problem for Arendt is that in the history of philosophy, labour is always placed at the bottom of the hierarchy, and action - that which involves the political sphere - is under-acknowledged. In the work of Marx, she maintains labour is tied too firmly to work at the expense of action. She points out that in the pre-philosophical hierarchy, action took the highest position.
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Broadly describing the same activity, the distinction between work and labour is hard to fathom: she quotes Locke 'the labor of our body and the work of our hands' (1998: 80); _homo faber_ who makes and works upon, or fabricates, as distinguished from _animal laborans_ which labours and mixes with (1998: 136), and produces 'labour power' and surplus when more than that which is required for its own 'reproduction' (labour produces life itself). Arendt points out that most European languages make similar distinctions: 'arbeiten' and 'werken' in German; 'laborare' and 'fabricari' in Latin; 'ponein' and 'ergazesthai' in Greek. It seems that the human body is given over to labour, the reproductive process, the biological and the link to the human organism (even the pains of birth are associated of course). Thus labouring is tied closely to the cycles of life itself, and consumption not least, it 'corresponds to the condition of life itself' and lasting happiness and contentment lies in 'painful exhaustion and pleasurable regeneration' (2000: 172). To Arendt, the labour of bodies produces consumer objects whereas the work of hands produces use-objects, a more discrete activity associated with the making of objects and things.
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The fabricated thing (as a result of work) is an end product as a result of a production process entirely separate from its possible uses - what Arendt calls 'determined by the category of means and end' (2000: 175). This is different from labour where production and consumption are part of the same process (as both production and consumption are labour activities), like life itself. Repetition is necessary for work only in as far as the worker needs to earn a living - or to put it differently in as much as labour is embedded in work. Hence, the work involved in making software necessarily involves a labouring component both in terms of making a living through making an object, and as an object that labours in itself - it is both made and makes (this is a complex argument that relates to the relationship of worker and machine, or living and dead labour). Revolution in Marx's terms, is not simply the emancipation of the labouring/working classes but the emancipation of labour from the labourers or work from the workers - something that technology might indeed enable. This is especially possible when the worker is not merely a 'tool-maker' but a labourer wherein the tools become part of the labouring process in itself, in tune with the body or replicating the body's movements and rhythms (Arendt's example is the deployment of labour-saving gadgets in the kitchen, 2000: 175). Replacing the labour of the body can be seen to be potentially emancipatory in this sense. However, Arendt thinks that the brain power and logical processes of giant computers are as 'worldless as the compulsory processes of life, labor, and consumption' (1998 172); in other words they stop short of thought.
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In Arendt's thinking, the work of art does not fit into the 'means-end' chain. The work of art is both the most enduring and useless fabricated object human hands can produce; the same hands that build the useful but less durable objects: 'the proper intercourse with a work of art is certainly not "using" it; on the contrary, it must be removed carefully from the whole context of ordinary use objects to attain its proper place in the world' (1998: 167). Although present in all forms, the performative arts (her examples are music and poetry) are particularly resistant to reification as the least 'materialistic' of the arts (1998: 169). For instance, the durability and permanence of poetry is enhanced by its rhythms, its ability to be transformed into memory an its closeness to thought. Whereas cognition pursues an aim and once achieved cognition comes to an end, thought has neither an end nor an aim outside itself. According to Arendt, it is entirely useless: 'as useless, indeed, as the works of art it inspires' (1998: 170). Thought inspires the highest human productivity, and if thought can be said to have a beginning and end it stands for the human life process itself. Activities close to thought, such as speech and action, are necessary to demonstrate separation from the 'utilitarian instrumentalism of fabrication and usage' and 'the driving necessity of biological life' (1998: 174).
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Human plurality, for Arendt, is evident in speech and action in that it both represents the capacity for equality and distinctiveness: 'human plurality is the paradoxical plurality of unique beings [...] with word and deed we insert ourselves into the human world' (1998: 176). neither is necessitated by labour nor work, but is an impulse to begin something new on one's own impulse (1998: 177). Arendt reminds the reader that to 'act' means to 'begin', then to 'lead' (_archein_ in Greek), to set something in motion (the Latin _agere_). To Arendt, this capability of action is bound with the expectation of the unexpected that results from the sameness and uniqueness of human plurality. Each unique individual is revealed through word and deed. Action relates to speech in this primordial sense to Arendt, disclosing who someone is at a fundamental level. The agent is disclosed in the act without which action loses it specific character (1998: 180).
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The political realm arises out of acting together, as a plurality of unique individuals, in 'the sharing of words and deeds' (1998: 198). In this way, power is actualised, for, 'Power is what keeps the public realm, the potential space of appearance between acting and speaking men, in existence.' (1998: 200). Power is a collective activity, and like action, holds no bounds.
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Arendt's understanding of action is a critique of the Platonic separation of knowing and doing, as far as she is concerned that which lies at the root of domination and the 'will to power'. Knowledge is identified with command, and action with execution. These ideas are evident in fabrication: 'first perceiving the image or shape (_eidos_) of the produce-to-be, and then organizing the means and starting the execution' (1998: 225). To Arendt, this makes the mistake of substituting making for acting (praxis in this Platonic sense as the outcome of action - is that right?). Ideas are simply executed. The mistake of substituting making for action is persistent in philosophy and political theory, according to Arendt, and this leads to a line of thought where any means appear justifiable to pursue a recognised end; the logic of 'you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs' as she puts it (1998: 229). We are overpowered by persuasive analogies and ethics are suspended. Whereas human action, lies in the realm of uncertainty, as something that cannot be fully known but that is crucially bound up with regeneration and the principle of freedom. Action is the ability to begin something new and as such the highest human achievement.
action-virno.txt
Paulo Virno (2004) _A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life_, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, Andrea Casson, New York: Semiotext(e).
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general statement:
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Virno defines the concept of the multitude in some detail, drawing particularly on the contrasting views of Hobbes and Spinoza. His understanding is partly derived from the idea of 'public intellect' that in Marx, is called general or mass intellect, and probably owes something to the 'nous poietikos' (productive, poietic intellect) from Aristotle (2004: 38). Virno's thesis in extremely concise form is: 'if the publicness of the intellect does not yield to the realm of the public sphere, of a political space in which the many can tend to common affairs, then it produces terrifying effects. _A publicness without a public sphere_: here is the negative side - the evil if you wish - of the experience of the multitude.' (2004: 40)
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He is arguing that post-Fordist labour is shared, collective, communicative. As such, it both erodes the traditional division of labour and can also foster dependence. However, the publicness of the 'intellect' is not a positive public force unless it is at the same time political.
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labour and action (cf. arendt) and performance:
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The once unquestionable separation of labour (or poiesis), action (or praxis) and intellect has dissolved. The production of free software might illustrate the point: to make public, as a result of mass intellect and labour. This, again, is a positive force, if if it as the same time a result of political work, action, thinking. Virno is extending the work of Hannah Arendt in this respect (in _The Human Condition_ [1958], see 2000). She argues that politics has imitates labour, whereas Virno thinks the opposite that labour imitates politics - or indeed, that poeisis has taken on the appearance of praxis (2004: 50-1). That labour increasingly takes on the forms of political action or indeed depoliticised action explains the current' crisis of politics, the sense of scorn surrounding political praxis today, the disrepute into which action has fallen' (2004: 51).'
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The purpose of the activity is found in the activity itself. Quoting Aristotle, Virno further explains the point:
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'For while making has an end other than itself, action cannot; for good action [understood both as ethical conduct and as political action, Virno adds] itself is its end.' (2004: 52)
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Virno's example of this is in his discussion of 'virtuosity' to indicate the special capabilities of a performing artist. He is drawing upon Arendt's observation that the performing arts have a strong affinity to politics. A performance is characterised by its lack of an end product, or at least a product that is indistinguishable from the performance itself (2004: 52). Furthermore, it operates in real-time and has its own sense of purpose or fulfillment. In this context, it would appear that many of these attributes could be assigned to the virtuosity of programmers and programs.
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That an audience is required for the virtuoso performance emphasises the dependence on others and the link to politics, and the lack of an end product. Both politics and the performance require a 'publicly organized space' as does labour under post-Fordism (Virno 2004: 55). Virno also links this sense of vituousity to speech as a phenomena that has purpose in itself, and does not produce an end product independent of the act of speech itself, and operates in a publicly organised space. He continues:
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'It is enough to say, for now, that contemporary production becomes "virtuosic" (and thus political) precisely because it includes within itself linguistic experience as such.' (2004: 56)
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The question for Virno is: ' what is the _score_ which the virtuosos-workers perform? What is the script of their linguistic-communicative _performances_?' (2004: 63). The score is 'general intellect' as the 'know-how on which social productivity relies', as a 'attribute of living labour' (2004: 64-5). General intellect in this virtuosic sense requires political action as it results from human living labour involving communication. The script is by no means determined and does not have an end product in sight, it is contrast: 'virtuosity without a script, or rather, based on the premise of a script that coincides with pure and simple _dynamis_, with pure and simple potential' (2004: 66).
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For Virno, this potential of utilising general intellect for political action is something necessary and he proposes two strategies of civil disobedience and 'exit' or defection in opposition to servility. Perhaps one should simply conclude that the script, score, code is indeterminate and thereby full of radical potential. Potential is that which is not yet present, and this is as important to capitalism as it is for alternatives to capitalism. Virno claims that 'Post-Fordism is the "communism of capital"' (2004: 110) as it incorporated aspects of socialism and general intellect in paradoxical form. If under capitalism potential is commodified, then positive potential must remain without end product, remain in the public realm, and remain performative.
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Idle talk represents this potential. In contrast to Heidegger's position of idle talk as a poor experience, Virno insists that idle talk is performative (in the sense that John Austin describes in _How to Do Things with Words_, 1962). In idle talk (the non-referential aspects of language), words determine actions and events, and there is something fundamentally performative in this. For example: 'In the assertion "I speak," I _do_ something by _saying_ these words; moreover, I declare what it is that I do while I do it.' (2004: 90) Work is now bound to speaking and the use of communications technologies.
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[note: Virno argues that it is not the parole but the langue which is mobilised (2004: 91).]
aesthetics-jayadornobenj.txt
More Frankfurt school stuff - Jay
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Aesthetic theory
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Marxist aesthetic theory can be broadly split into the Leninist call for partisan political work (in its extreme the more Stalinist socialist realism), and the approach following Engels, to measure works not by political intention but by social significance (according to Jay, in turn summarising George Steiner, 1996: 173). This would allow for works to generate social significance beyond the intentions of the particular artist or writer. Jay cites the classic example of Luk‡cs in History and Class Consciousness, who in developing Engels distinction between realism and naturalism, managed to combine both positions, celebrating the work of Balzac over Zola, despite their politics and then rejecting the whole thesis because of its rejection by the Leninist party hierarchy. Class conflict was the main focus rather than also paying attention to the pressing effects of technical innovation. Despite this, the essay in important in introducing the concept of 'reification' (define).
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By far the most well-known discussion of aesthetics in relation to the Frankfurt School is through the work of Benjamin and Adorno. Both shared a concern for the language and style employed for their writing - for instance, in Benjamin, there is the example to produce a work with subjective elements removed by writing an essay entirely made up from quotes from other sources. Thus form and content are seen to be both equally important and not to be falsely separated. Adorno similarly insists that 'defiance of society includes defiance of its language' (quoted in Jay, 1996: 176). Readers of Benjamin often find his text dense and contradictory. This is partly explained by his use of the dialectical method, but also his conviction that multiple layers of meaning are possible in every part of the essay, and that every part needs to be considered in relation to the whole. Fundamental to both approaches and that of the Frankfurt School as a whole is the conviction that culture must be seen in a social context, and that myths of individual artistic creativity were untenable. For my purpose, this trajectory is neatly summarised in thinking of the interpretation of art 'as a kind of code language for processes taking place within society, which must be deciphered by means of critical analysis' (Jay, 1996: 177). The inherent over-simplification (although reductive) serves the purpose of taking culture, as an index for and in relation to, lived social and material relations. Adorno describes the artwork as not autonomous but as a 'force-field between subject and object'; between subjective processes and objective processes which necessarily included 'material filtered through the existing social matrix'. Taste and processes of reception were similarly mediated in the social realm and 'cultural criticism must become social physiognomy' as Adorno puts it (Jay, 1996: 177-8). The institut saw art as the last preserve of a yearning for utopia, in its reconciliation of form and content, subjective and objective elements. A successful work of art, therefore, is one that expresses reconciliation negatively, by revealing its contradictions. Adorno says:
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'A successful work of art, according to immanent criticism, is one that resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure' (Adorno, in Prisms, 1967: 32, also quoted in Jay, 1996: 179).
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(note: leaving aside the religious connotations 'immanent criticism' is that which is inherent - it exists, operates, remains within)
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The problem lay in the fact that contradictions were seen to be resolved. This reductionist tendency might be opposed by the dialectical method. Adorno approach to the study of music is an obvious example. Music contained social contradictions but was neither simply reflective of society nor autonomous. His work is often mistakenly read as opposing 'popular' and 'serious' musics - however, the issue was really around its status as a commodity and whether it was market-lead or not. Therefore, although some music might appear obscure, it did not make it reactionary in itself. Popular music for Adorno, took on an ideological role because of its mass appeal and reach. Music was an example of commodity fetishism, evident in its popularity and emphasis on styles, fashions and the star-system, evoking 'standardisation and pseudo-individuality' (Jay, 1996: 192). Adorno's argument for a new asceticism, therefore, was in some contrast to Benjamin's interpretation of the revolutionary potential of popular cultural forms (like film).
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Allegedly, it was Benjamin's association with Brecht that encouraged the view that technical innovation and art might contain revolutionary potential. Benjamin remained somewhat distant from critical theory, far more concerned with analogy and a more general approach to dialectics. In Benjamin's work, myth is taken to indicate repetitiveness and sameness, of the type produced by capitalism in contrast to 'origin is our goal' (quoting Kraus in 'Theses on the Philosopy of history') in which the 'ur-form' both indicates origin and newness (from the German 'Ursprung'). Hence, the interest in the destruction of 'aura' emerges in Benjamin's artwork essay:
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'The instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice - politics' (?).
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For Adorno, this was no surprise as art necessarily had a political function and all art demanded close attention. Adorno and Benjamin famously disagreed on the consequences of this destruction of aura. Whilst Benjamin expressed the positive aspects of this shift, Adorno expressed the negative one that standardisation and pseudo-individuality would ensue. The essay 'Kulturindustrie' (The Culture Industry) expressed this tendency in more detail reflecting the Institut's study of American mass culture during the post-war (ww2) period. However, and importantly, this was no defence of high culture as such, nor a conservative attack of popular culture but a recognition of the breakdown of the distinction and a way to reveal material conditions and social contradictions. The term itself, a contradiction in terms, indicates Adorno and Horkheimer's disdain for populism. The problem with mass culture was simply that it was not democratic in other words, and technology served these ends.
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Production-consumption:
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It was Marcuse who described the separation of production and consumption as indicative of an unfree society.
alife-berger.txt
Why Look at Artificial Animals?
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Notes towards the construction of http://www.vivaria.net
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[The title is a reference to John Berger's 'Why Look at Animals? published in About Looking, 1980.]
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'Animals are not machines...Actually only machines are machines. Nothing else is made by human beings from parts and for purposes entirely supplied by themselves. Nothing else therefore can be understood simply by reading off those parts and purposes from the specifications.'
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(Midgley, 1979: xvi)
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'But basically machines were not self-moving, self-designing, autonomous... Now we are not so sure... Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert' (Haraway, 1991: 194).
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Animals are both like and unlike humans. If this was partly reinforced by human isolation from the wider world of nature under the culture of capitalism, under late techno-capitalism, animals can be said to be increasingly both like and unlike machines - or to put it another way, machines are increasingly being classified according to the model of the animal. The inter-relationships are enduring ones, reactivated by changes in social and technological production, making the former distinction further complicated by the addition of artificial life-forms and biotechnologies (the merging of biological and computational forms). The task of classifying and differentiating between animals, humans and machines is one performed with increasing amounts of difficulty, born out of complexity, to use an operative term.
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In his essay 'Why Look at Animals?' (1980), John Berger states: 'They belonged there and here. Likewise they were mortal and immortal... They were subjected and worshipped, bred and sacrificed' (1980: 5). Pointing to the use of the connective 'and', when 'but' might be more easily anticipated, he reveals the inherent dualism in our historical relationship with them. Furthermore, rather than language traditionally reinforcing a 'natural' superiority over animals, it both reinforces a hierarchy based on literacy levels as well as impeding communication with animals who clearly articulate differently. Furthermore, language is treated quite literally as code on a computer - evidently not natural but constructed and evolving through social interactions. The contradictory image of talking animals springs to mind - from Johnny Morris's 'Animal Magic' where he speaks on behalf on animals to Walt Disney's anthropomorphic cartoons where animals talk via technological apparatuses - through 'animation', or animated motion [for more on this, Esther Leslie's essay 'Wallace and Gromit: an animating love', 1997; she also employs Berger's essay, by the way]. Humans remain both like and unlike animals, and the distinction is a social one reinforced by the role of language and representation expressing symbolic thinking, something that animals allegedly do not do. In the broadest sense, the origins of language are there to be uncovered in endless myths that employ animals analogously - Charles Darwin's Origins of the Species comes to mind, as does Kafka's Metamorphosis:
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'As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect'.
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For behaviourists and Lacanian psychoanalysts alike, human socialisation is necessarily likened to an entry into language and the symbolic order. Berger makes the crucial distinction that humans have developed a language of symbols that expresses something other than itself, even though the first symbols were undoubtedly animal in origin (eg. early cave paintings depicted animals and probably used animal blood as raw material). Hence the distinction expresses a contradictory (even dialectical) impulse bound up with human evolution - from lowly four-legged beasts used as metaphor to two-legged ones with the ability to use metaphor:
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'If the first metaphor was animal, it was because the essential relationship between man and animal was metaphoric. Within that relation what the two terms - man and animal - shared in common revealed what differentiated them. And vice versa.' (1980: 5)
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Our symbolic language has presently become so advanced that we have adopted animal metaphors for machines.
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Part of the enduring fascination of looking at animals is to attempt to be at one with nature, and to reinforce the power to transcend our animal heritage (Smith & Schaffner's film The Planet of the Apes simply makes this a quirk of fate, in a parallel world where the human animal power relations are reversed). Marx similarly makes a crude distinction between animal and human labour, the latter distinguished by the use and construction of instruments of labour but also through intent. Although 'a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construction of its honeycomb cells', he continues 'But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax. At the end of every labour process, a result emerges that has already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, hence already existed ideally. Man not only effects a change of form in the materials of nature; he also realises his own purpose in those materials' (1992: 284). This serves to regulate and mediate the 'metabolism' between humans and nature. But how is this labour to be conceived of in the shift from animals becoming instruments of labour to instruments of labour under techno-science being likened to animals (such as in the case of bees, even)?
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To reinforce this sense of human superiority, animals have been seen to be machines without soul (at least to carnivores), bound up in dualistic thinking that separated the soul from the body-machine, extended to the master-slave dialectic. (Descartes, who is partly responsible for this kind of thinking, allegedly nailed his wife's dog to a wall by its paws and dissected it alive to prove his hypothesis. He thus also contributed to the precedent for animal experiments in the name of science. The dispassionate manner in which this was performed was like taking apart any working mechanism. Quoted in Leslie, 1997: 150). In this way, animals were classified according to the model of the machine, and employed as machines - increasingly replaced by the internal combustion engine under mechanisation ('horse-power', etc.). Under the conditions of consumer capitalism, animals have come to be treated as raw materials, processed in gigantic factory farms without the 'freedom to roam' (or even freedom to act like a machine) and deprived of their symbolic function other than as a readymade meal. Ronald McDonald would no doubt disagree with Karl Marx and attempt to throw emphasis on agency through consumption rather than a critique of functionalist production. If the metaphor appears indigestible, it simply lends itself to other kinds of parallel human suffrage on behaviourist principles. Under capitalism, first animals and then humans have been reduced to the role of machine, far from their 'natural' habitat or condition.
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According to Berger's thesis, animals begin to 'disappear' during the process of urban industrialisation in the nineteenth century. In parallel, domestic pets multiplied, and adhered to the truism of resembling their masters in that they were separated from their natural way of life, and made to lead artificial lives alongside pot plants in domestic interiors. These pet 'artificial animals' reflect the alienated conditions of late capitalism, expressing sentimental attachment and preferred property relations - but not the parallel autonomy of previous times. The pet and owner both lack agency (the power to act independently), as one pulls the other by its lead or responds to stimulus like Pavlov's dog. As part of the bourgeois home, the symbolic virtual animal also follows this sad trajectory reduced to appearances in the 'spectacle', encapsulated in the over-production of anthropomorphic materials designed for family viewing and cuddly consumption (there are far too many examples to mention, of endless books, films, games and toys. Berger cites the work of Beatrix Potter and quotes Disney's Donald Duck). Children are the key players here of course, as they are both seen to not only like animals, but also to be like animals, and hence required to engage with them as part of a process of socialisation through reflexive play (feed them, train them, take them to bed, bury them, and so on). This phenomenon is ever-developing, ranging from the adoption of real and toy animals to the more recent realistic animal toy robots - the Sony Cyberdog AIBO and Tamogotchi come to mind. Slavoj Zizek's essay 'Is It Possible to Traverse the Fantasy in Cyberspace?' describes these virtual pets as instruments of interpassivity). Clearly ideology is at work in the ways we observe animals and choose to characterise our relation to them in the home and in more public arenas.
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The public zoo (shorthand for zoological garden, like the botanical garden) came into existence when animals disappeared from daily life in the nineteenth century (London zoo was established in 1823). Rather like the museum or the heritage industry, there exists a central paradox at work in the destruction of the natural world with its simultaneous preservation. In the case of zoos, Berger is saying that freedom as well as visibility is made artificial. We observe living objects as if they were dead. The animal inhabits an artificial natural world, a simulated or virtual world of rocks and trees as fake as theatrical props. The animals are isolated and do not interact with other species, and they become as dependent as pets on their keepers for food and social arrangements and interactions, including the supply of mates for reproduction (Zizek's use of the term 'interpassivity' sums up the state of this). In other words, zoos are mausoleums to life and survival and monuments to historic loss.
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Berger says: 'The zoo to which people go to meet animals, to observe them, to see them, is, in fact, a monument to the impossibility of such encounters' (1980: 19). At the same time, it was thought possible to study the natural life of animals in artificial conditions, and accordingly make assumptions about human behaviours. This is dubious to say the least; Donna Haraway describes how you can trace the 'scientific' study of primates against the backdrop of anxieties around the bourgeois family. (For more on this, see her aptly named work, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: the reinvention of nature). However unreliable the motives or scientific method, wild and out of control behaviours can be made captive, observable, and thought understandable (Foucault might add detail on this 'panoptic' desire to taxonomise and order through the use of technologies of vision and the construction of truth). This flawed logic is rooted in scientific positivism, of isolating and caging the subject for study. In the zoo, captive animals perform a symbolic but passive function to endorse scientific, economic and colonial power. Performance artists Coco Fusco's work with Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Two Undiscovered Amerindians, (1992-94), played with these ideas, spending days in a labelled cage placed in an urban public space, watching television and working on a laptop. It was commonplace during the Victorian period to offer all kinds of exotica for public consumption.
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In much the same way, Berger draws the comparison with art:
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'In principle, each cage is a frame round the animal inside it. Visitors visit the zoo to look at animals. They proceed from cage to cage, not unlike visitors in an art gallery who stop in front of one painting, and then move on to the next or the one after next. Yet in the zoo the view is always wrong.' (1980: 21)
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Furthermore, the Victorian Zoo, according to Bill Nichols (in 'The Work of Art in the Age of Cybernetic Systems'), exhibits the logic of a self-regulating system and simulated animal-nature and 'natural' environment (1988: 34) - much like the idea of virtual worlds presumes the (real) world as we perceive it to be 'real'. Nichols captures the debate about artificial life through Benjamin's artwork essay on reproduction:
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'Casting the issue in terms of whether existence within the limits of an artificial life-support system should be considered 'life' obscures the issue in the same way that asking whether film and photography are 'art' does. In each case a presumption is made about a fixed, or ontologically given nature to life or art, rather than recognising how that very presumption has been radically overturned. And from preserving life artificially it is a small step to creating life by the same means.' (1988: 37).
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This line of thinking serves to suggest that we now look at animals wrongly in new ways.
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Drawing upon some of these ideas, it has become commonplace for artists to use biological metaphors and examine creativity in the light of scientific investigations in artificial life, simulating the characteristic processes of living things (the work of Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau are prime examples, for instance in their work A-volve). [Note: Artificial life according to Marvin Minsky is the practice of building organisms and systems that would be considered alive if found in nature, Turkle, 1997: 151]. Turkle cites a number of key examples of artificial organisms: Richard Dawkin's 'The Blind Watchmaker' in which the user can evolve 'biomorph' organisms; Thomas Ray's 'Tierra' in which digital 'chromosomes' mate, mutate, and evolve; and SimLife's 'genetic playground' where users are asked to evolve creatures. It is now obvious that animal and machine (or organic and technical) processes are analogous and similarly contain self-organising functions (for instance, see Kevin Kelly's Out of Control). Self-organising systems have become complex and are irreversibly arranged in multiple networks - take for instance, the application of biological logic to auto-generative systems, the development of neural networks and genetic algorithms. Evolution can be seen to happen at speeds that would otherwise make research untenable, leading in turn to findings at odds with biological orthodoxies. The implications go beyond the idea of an online virtual zoo where observation of the behaviours might allow visitors to better understand life, but to create life and possibly to make better life.
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Yet, Berger says: 'Everywhere animals disappear. In zoos they constitute the living monument to their own disappearance.' (1980:24). Can the same be simply said of artificial life?
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Undoubtedly former firm distinctions between animals, machines and humans are now unreliable - though of course the idea of the zoo was partly to reinforce the distinction in the light of Darwinism. On the contrary, life can now be generated by 'unnatural selection' (Turkle, 1997: 149) which seems even more unsettling than the former dictum. But rather than undermine established relationships, does this reinforce the distinction too? Moreover, what would an artificial zoo look like for designed for artificial species?
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The moral, social and political significance of beginning to think about the rights of 'a living process to exist whatever the medium in which it occurs' is clear (Turkle quoting Langton, 1997:151). How would one begin to establish whether life is demonstrated or produce some kind of taxonomy?
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In 1987, at the Los Alamos conference on A-life, it was agreed that artificial organisms needed to demonstrate four qualities to qualify as life: (1) they must exhibit evolution by natural selection, the Darwinian aspect; (2) they must possess a genetic programme, the rules for their operation and reproduction, the DNA factor; (3) they must demonstrate complexity; with emergent and unpredictable outcomes; (4) the complex organism must self-organise (Turkle, 1997: 152). You can trace the lineage here from artificial intelligence, as well as the influence of chaos theory in believing that mathematical structure lay beneath apparent randomness, and that randomness could generate mathematical structures. However, unlike traditional A.I. thinking, A-life relies on its fundamental equivalence to real life. Hence it is deeply controversial. However, when looking at artificial life, it appears tamed by the computer screen in much the same way as watching wild animals in a zoo, you are separated by the cage bars or glass. Furthermore, if once watching animals allowed humans to imagine being at one with nature, how does the human respond to the discovery that nature itself is programmable? In the culture of simulation, there is nothing natural about the way we look at these animals, artificial or not - we look at them artificially in new ways. Is the distinction between humans, animals and machines undermined or reinforced? It is brought closer on the one hand, but how would Berger view such developments?
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In her essay 'Artificial life as the New Frontier', Sherry Turkle (1997) cites a classic example from the late 1960's is John Conway's 'The Game of Life'. In this, a simple rule-based structure generates complex patterns, and so what might be seen as whole colonies emerge, reproduce and die. These are 'emergent objects' that act as if alive, in an unpredictable manner quite unlike machine-like automation. Turkle cites another essay by Douglas Hofstadter 'A Coffee House Conversation on the Turing Test' (1985) which challenges outmoded notions of thinking what a machine is. Machines are clearly behaving more and more like animals, and humans of course. There is positive allegorical potential here, in that bottom-up change is made evident in biological, technological and economic systems - leading to a recognition that both people and machines might be seen to throw off their chains (a sentiment from the industrial epoch based on the master-slave dialectic). However, there is a contradiction inherent in these political processes much like decentralisation is a ruse for more centralised control - as bottom-up evolution is conditional on top-down centralised control in autonomous systems. Even Turkle appears to conceive of this dialectically: 'we are making boundaries and relaxing them in a complex double movement' (1997: 170).
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Rather than the proliferation of animal representations being compensatory to historic loss, they have added to the disappearance according to Berger, rendered almost entirely distant by close inspection at a zoo or laboratory (evoking Benjamin's dialectical relation of closeness and distance: that things might remain distant however close they may be). If animals become 'ever more exotic and remote' (1980: 24), what about the potential attraction of artificial life? What are the implications of the obvious proposal to include artificial life as part of the collection of a zoo (or museum for that matter)? Furthermore, this might be more in keeping with the agendas of contemporary zoos, that in general now tend towards 'conservation' rather than 'observation'; and what in the context of techno-capitalism, might be better called the generative possibilities reflected in self-regulating systems. Pierre Bourdieu's concept of 'cultural reproduction', to describe how the dominant culture manages to reproduce itself, is enlivened quite literally by the biological metaphor. Now, those in power really can self-replicate in their own image, like DNA. Berger thought the dualism between animals and humans has been lost, and goes further to suggest this as a link to totalitarianism. He continues bleakly 'This historic loss, to which zoos are a monument, is now irredeemable for the culture of capitalism' (1980:26). Is this even more pronounced under present technological and cultural conditions? In looking, the imperative must be to shift from a politics of representation (the critical orthodoxy at the time of Berger's essay) to a politics that takes account of generative processes. In answer to the question, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
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'He thought about his need for a real animal; within him an actual hatred once more manifested itself toward his electric sheep, which he had to tend, had to care about, as if it lived. The tyranny of an object, he thought. It doesn't know I exist. Like the androids, it had no ability to appreciate the existence of another. He had never thought of this before, the similarity between an electric animal and an android. The electric animal, he pondered, could be considered a sub-form of the other, a kind of vastly inferior robot. Or, conversely, the android could be regarded as a highly developed evolved version of the ersatz animal. Both viewpoints repelled him.' (Dick, 1968: pp.36-7)
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One things for sure, under the conditions of techno-capitalism, humans are both like and unlike artificial animals.
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References:
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STAR's project can be found at http://www.vivaria.net/
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Steve Baker, The Postmodern Animal, London: Reaktion Books, 2000.
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John Berger, 'Why Look at Animals?' in About Looking, London: Writers & Readers 1980.
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Phillip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), London: Harper Collins, 1993.
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Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: the reinvention of nature, London: Free Association, 1991.
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Douglas Hofstadter 'A Coffee House Conversation on the Turing Test', in Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern, New York: Basic Books, 1985, pp. 492-525.
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Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis, Die Verwendlung (1916), London: Penguin, 1975.
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Esther Leslie, 'Wallace and Gromit: an animating love', in Soundings, issue 5, Spring 1997, pp.149-156.
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Mary Midgley, Beast & Man, The Roots of Human Nature, London: Methuen, 1979.
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Bill Nichols, 'The Work of Culture in the Age of Cybernetic Systems', in Screen vol.29, no.2 Winter, 1988, pp. 22-46.
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Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, London: Phoenix 1997.
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Slavoj Zizek, 'Is It Possible to Traverse the Fantasy in Cyberspace?', in Elizabeth Wright & Edmond Wright, The Zizek Reader, Oxford: Blackwell 1999, pp. 102-124.
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Web references:
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A-life, http://www.a-life.com
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Virtual zoo, http://artforum.tv/zoo/index.html
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Alan Dorin, 'Animaland: Aesthetics, Algorithms & Artificial Life', http://www.cs.monash.edu.au/~aland
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Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Pena, http://www.artswire.org/cocofusco/yearofthewhitebear.html
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Conway's 'Game of Life', http://www.reed.edu/~jwalton/gameoflife.html
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Steve Grand, 'Cyberlife Research', http://www.cyberlife-research.com
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Luigi Pagliarini, 'Alive Art' http://www.artificialia.com/luigi
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Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, A-Volve, http://www.mic.atr.co.jp/~christa/WORKS/A-VolveLinks.html
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Capitalism and Anti-Capitalism: re-reading Capital
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'Believe me, dear citizen' (Marx, 'Preface to the French Edition', 1990: 104)
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'Think Doomed' (Billboard Liberation Front jams an Apple Macintosh campaign [cf. 'Think different')
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Introduction:
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Ernest Mandel begins his lengthy introduction to Capital (Das Kapital), Volume One (1990) with the claim that contemporary society reflects the model of Capital in a 'purer form' than when it was first composed in 1867. He is writing this in 1976, and points to various examples of late-capitalism's crises at that time (for example, from the student and workers' riots in Paris of 1968, to ecological concerns as a result of nuclear power). If this was contentious then, it certainly is not anymore (in 2001). Wealth and power on a global scale is ever more and grotesquely concentrated in a small number of giant industrial and financial corporations. That the distinction between rich and poor has been widening is a moral and political outrage, is it not?
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In the light of these general tendencies, Capital attempts to explain the fundamental contradictions that lie in the system in which impetuous growth is combined with the seeds of its own destruction (to paraphrase Marx). More recently, these contradictory aspects have been even more sharply demonstrated in the collapse of 'hyper-industrial' Communist regimes in Eastern Europe (after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989) expressing their inability to incorporate the information revolution and the recent anti-capitalism protest movement, demonstrating a renewed interest in political economy and a critique of current neo-liberal capitalism (bizarrely, what Americans call 'libertarianism'). Capitalism has undergone dramatic transformations, characterised by flexibility, decentralisation and networking. But these developments are in process and have uneven consequences: 'Indeed, we observe the parallel unleashing of formidable productive forces of the information revolution, and the consolidation of black holes of human misery in the global economy...' (Castells, 1996: 2).
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According to Capital, the decline of capitalism's mode of production is inevitable, as it is simply a product of history that also produced it in the first place. Contradictions manifest themselves in all aspects of capitalism's workings, however latent they may appear. These contradictory tendencies unfold in every detail of the system, 'every one of its basic "cells", the commodities' (Mandel, 1990: 13). Neoliberalism's dominant ideology of expanding markets and less governmental interference extends the logic of Capital (note: the process of circulation is covered more scientifically in Capital: Volume Two, 1992). Dialectical contradiction similarly extends to the circulation of commodities in the market-place.
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The purpose of Capital was to 'lay bare' the laws of motion that govern the capitalist mode of production. This is unashamedly historical in scope in order to situate this specific mode of production in the context of others, each of which demonstrate their own economic logic and laws of motion - and Capital has its own intricate history. Mandel explains that Capital is based on 'an understanding of the relativity, social determination and historical limitation of all economic laws' (1990: 13). Clearly once understood, alternative laws and social forms might replace existing ones, but only if there are previous analyses of basic concepts (materiality, commodities, labour, value, etc). This is also an argument for the continuing relevance of the text, of course. Simply to dismiss Capital as out of touch with contemporary modes of production would fall into this ahistorical and mystical trap. Castells describes the restructuring of capitalism underway in the mid 1990s as 'a more decisive effort at deregulation, privatisation, and the dismantling of the social contract between capital and labour that underlay the previous growth model', using technology to effect. Thus, to paraphrase Castells, reform sought to deepen the capitalist logic of profit-seeking; enhance productivity; globalise production, circulation, and markets; ensuring profit-making; establishing state support for these policies often to the detriment of social and public interests (1996: 19). Industry passes through periodic cycles of economic expansion and stagnation (exemplified by Mandel's work elsewhere, The Long Waves of Capitalist Development, and adapted by Jameson, and in turn Foster, to chart cultural trends) and correspondingly the laws of motion point to future developments of commodity production too. Such tendencies have been verified in the expansion of surplus-value to its extreme, and current expressions of slave labour in various parts of the world. The general tendencies and laws of motion, predicted by Capital, have been confirmed by the test of history, and accelerated by technological innovation.
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Capitalist society structured by antagonism of two dominant classes - the bourgeoisie (owns and controls the means of production) and the proletariat (owns and provides labour only). It appears on surface to be a fair exchange of commodities - labour for money through the market mechanism. But Marx points out to the underlying exploitation of proletariat by class of capitalist producers - as the price of the labour set on the free market is less than the value of labour's product. Therefore the class of capitalist producers appropriate surplus value which arises from such exchange.
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Method:
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Marx famously applied the materialist dialectical method in his analysis of the mode of production. He says in the 'Postface to the Second Edition' of 1873:
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'My dialectical method is, in its foundations, not only different from the Hegelian, but exactly the opposite to it. For Hegel, the process of thinking, which he even transforms into an independent subject, under the name of 'the Idea', is the creator of the real world, and the real world is only the external appearance of the idea. With me the reverse is true: the ideal is nothing but the material world reflected I the mind of man, and translated into forms of thought.' (Marx, 1990: 102)
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However this is certainly not to dismiss the Hegelian dialectic out of hand, as: 'The mystification which the dialectic suffers in Hegel's hands by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general forms of motion in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be inverted, in order to discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.' (Marx, 1990: 103) Ironically the same criticism has been levelled at Marx for his mystification of the dialectical method - amongst others, by Karl Popper, in The Open Society and its Enemies (first published in 1945), who accuses Capital of being unscientific and of overstressing economism. Popper accuses historical materialism of economic historicism: 'the doctrine that economic motives and especially class interest are the driving forces of history' (2003: 110). To be fair, Popper's work on historicism in Hegel and Marx is a complex work and attempts to appreciate and criticise its contribution to an understanding of the meaning of history. Popper says: ' What I wish to show is that Marx's "materialist interpretation of history', valuable as it may be, must not be taken too seriously; that we must regard it as nothing more than a most valuable suggestion to us to consider things in their relation to their economic background.' (2003: 120)
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Against the criticism of the unscientific nature of the method, on the contrary, it is crucially verified through practice (more accurately praxis). The method rises from the concrete materiality (of bourgeois society) to the theoretical abstractions that underpin it, in order to move back to the concrete totality of the theoretical analysis (see Sekula? quoting Marx's Grundrisse). Most criticism simply confirms the motives for the method in the first place: 'In its rational form it is a scandal and an abomination to the bourgeoisie and its doctrinaire spokesmen, because it includes in its positive understanding of what exists a simultaneous recognition of its negation, its inevitable destruction; because it regards every historically developed form as being in a fluid state, in motion, and therefore grasps its transient aspect as well; and because it does not let itself be impressed by anything, being in its very essence critical and revolutionary' (Marx, 1990: 103)
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The method is therefore crucial presupposing the view that all elements are dialectically interconnected and part of an integrated totality of the mode of production. The laws of motion relate to its inception and to it eventual destruction, and are 'discovered to be nothing but the unfolding of the inner contradictions of that structure, which define its nature. The given economic structure is seen to be characterised at one and the same time by the unity of these contradictions and by their struggle, both of which determine the constant changes which it undergoes.' (Mandel, 1990: 18) Dialectics suggests that nothing is finished or resolved but in a continual state of flux. Furthermore, these laws are possessed in a materialist sense, in existing social and historical frameworks, that even reflect the production of the analysis itself - with reference to a history of ideas and the mode of production in which it was itself produced.
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Capital is a detailed account and packed with 'scientific' data (of course, the specific detail is mostly outmoded). In terms of method, it is only with this material that the dialectical method might throw light on the material, its inner connections and totality. The Hegelian distinction of appearance and essence is important here too, in describing the dialectical method of peeling back successive layers to discover the deep-seated laws of motion (like code). These, in turn, might 'explain why these phenomena evolve in a certain direction and in certain ways (Mandel, 1990: 19).' There are parallels here with the idea of an integrated form and content, and the critical power of dialectical analyses are emphasised in the rejection of mere surface appearances, designed to hide critical depth (described by Debord as The Society of the Spectacle). It is the integration of appearance/essence and form/content that reveals the inner workings and contradictory forces built into the system. Marketing and advertising aim to distance the products from the factories and workers that produce them. Yet, recently even these images have become fashionable in some circles - we are shown a nostalgic form that less describes the conditions in which goods are actually produced these days.
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Value/Labour:
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'The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an "immense collection of commodities"' (Marx, 1990: 125). The commodity, as external object reflecting human needs (and implying wants or desires), expresses the inner contradiction and essential component of capitalism through the opposition of use-value and value expressed externally by the opposition of use-value and exchange-value (what Marx calls 'congealed labour-time', 1990: 130). 'Every useful thing... may be looked at in two points of view of quality and quantity' (Marx, 1990: 125) and the commodity expresses this two-fold aspect of labour, and in turn, is embedded in contradiction. Marx explains this through Hegelian logic: 'at a certain point merely quantitative differences pass over by a dialectical inversion into qualitative distinctions' proving the 'correctness of the law' (1990: 423). In far too brief summary to do it justice, Marx discovers that the capitalist mode of production (as distinct from a pre-capitalist one) simultaneously produces value, surplus-value, capital, as well as the production and reproduction of the antagonistic social relations between labour and capital - based on the need for workers to sell their labour and the corresponding desire for capital to 'extort' value from the workers; the conflict works more neatly in the German language: 'Arbeitgeber' (labour-giver) and 'Arbeitnehmer' (labour-taker).
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This 'surplus-value' (excess) is thus the result of the use-value of labour producing value greater than its exchange-value (and this has nothing to do with its usefulness in the sense of social progress, only in terms of its status as commodity). Marx summarises the commodity-form: 'If commodities could speak, they would say this: our use-value may interest men, but it does not belong to us as objects. What does belong to us as objects, however, is our value. Our own intercourse as commodities proves it. We relate to each other merely as exchange-values' (1990: 177). A commodity is made mystical through exchange-value, and in this way made into a 'fetish' (describing its condition as commodity rather than simply a utility). Marx explains this process of mediation through an analogy with something rather like religious substantiation: 'There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men's hands' (1991: 165). The metamorphosis takes place through its circulation and exchange, through buying and selling in the market-place (and use of money as a change of form of the commodity). It is through the circulation of commodities developed into world trade (by the sixteenth century) that the system of capitalism arises. Circulation aptly describes this process that renews itself, wherein capital and surplus-value are produced and reproduced in incessant and limitless transformation.
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Aprs moi le dŽluge! is the watchword for every capitalist says Marx (1990: 381; and later to become a Situationist slogan), caring little for the damage caused in the obsessive drive for profit (operating like a vampire in search for every last drop of blood, according to Engels, or like Shylock's bond of flesh; both in Marx, 1990: 416 & 400). The aim of the capitalist is to exploit this surplus as far as possible as this is its 'variable capital' and wherein capitalist wealth is accumulated or diminished accordingly. Marx makes the distinction between 'constant capital' and 'variable capital': the former indicating the capitalist's fixed material private property stopping the workers from working for themselves; and the latter, describing labour-power that partly produces surplus-value. For the most part, new technologies produce enormous increases in constant capital (the total value of the means of production employed) set against a corresponding reduction in variable capital (expressed in labour power). The equation simply alters the internal proportions of the total capital, expressing the basic character of the distinction, and the site for potential exploitation - in the relationship between necessary and surplus labour for instance. Take for example, the usual practice of work being advanced to the capitalist, of workers allowing credit to the capitalist - only paid for later (most of us are paid in this way, even in a fairly benevolent working contexts). The worker is coerced into producing surplus labour-time for the capitalist, beyond the necessary levels or needs of the worker (and outside the structures of 'over-time' as such).
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The capitalist must find 'free' workers willing enough to sell their labour on the market, and with no other option of course, due to historical circumstances. In such an un-democratic scenario, Marx describes the 'dramatis personae' of capitalist and worker: 'The one smirks self-importantly and is intent on business; the other is timid and holds back, like someone who has brought his own hide to market and now has nothing else to expect but - a tanning' (1990: 280). These violent conditions are in themselves a product of history and inherited social formations - all part of the process of buying and selling labour-power. Marx reminds us that the 'owner of labour-power is mortal', evoking the extreme rationalism of the labour (death) camps (the irony of 'Arbeit Macht Frei'), and that 'the labour-power withdrawn from the market by wear and tear, and by death, must be continually replaced...' by the family as factory (Marx, 1990: 275). Thus a Marxist critique of (biological and cultural) reproduction, sexual politics, education and training emerges. In the broadest sense, education can be simply thought of as a means of providing the appropriate labour-power, and in turn fresh labour-power to produce capital. Capital through its disguised commodity forms, literally and metaphorically 'brings forth living offspring' (1990: 255). (note: ref. Bourdieu's concept of 'cultural reproduction', and Sekula's 'School is a Factory', etc). For Marx, the relations are the same between worker and product whether in a teaching factory or sausage factory (1990: 644). In this way, apologists might begin to describe the whole of society as running like a gigantic sausage factory producing surplus-value.
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Capital is inextricably tied to the private ownership of the means of production, private appropriation of produced commodities, of surplus-value and the private accumulation of capital. Private property is the antithesis of collective, social, public property. Marx operates dialectical thinking to explain the preferred chain of events ('the expropiators are expropriated'):
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'The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labour of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation. It does not re-establish private property, but it does indeed establish individual property on the basis of the achievements of the capitalist era: namely co-operation and the possession in common of the land and the means of production produced by labour itself.' (1990: 929)
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Thus, rather than dispersed private property (of workers) being accumulated not by singular individual monopolies, it becomes the common, socialised property of public (state) ownership. Presently, the state is selling off its public sector stock to private interest with abandon, verified by nation state and EU policies (in the case of the UK), and to the ultimate benefit of private interests. These rights of private property have been and are still protected by bourgeois legislature and policy-making, and the corporate sector. The privatised 'branded world', as Naomi Klein calls it, in No Logo (2001) increasingly resembles a theme park. She is not evoking Baudrillard's Simulations as one might expect (in which he describes Disneyland as more like America than America itself), but the latest developments in marketing where actual towns are becoming branded (a situation in which it appears that cultural theorists, like Baudrillard, have been used as copy editors). As a further development, she describes the Disney town of Celebration, Florida, in which residents can live, work, shop, and consume entertainment in one place without fear of influence from other brands.
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Klein explains:
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'For the families that live there year-round, Disney has achieved the ultimate goal of lifestyle branding: for the brand to become life itself.
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Except the life on offer is perhaps not the one we might expect from the Mouse. When Disney first conceived of a branded city, it was meant to be an artificiality bonanza, a temple to the mid-fifties futuristic gods of technology and automation... Although wired with every modern convenience, Celebration is less futurism than homage, an idealised re-creation of the liveable America that existed before malls, big-box sprawl, freeways, amusement parks and mass commercialisation. Oddly enough, Celebration is not even a sales vehicle for Mickey Mouse licensed products; it is, in contemporary terms, an almost Disney-free town - no doubt the only one left in America.' (2001: 155)
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The example aptly demonstrates the achievement of the complete privatisation of public space. There are no factories or unsightly spaces here - as they have been displaced to other parts of the world. Private space has become entirely commodified - and become a 'privatised public utopia' (Klein, 2001: 158).
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These capitalist conditions lay bare '... the unceasing movement of profit-making. This boundless drive for enrichment, this passionate chase after value, is common to the capitalist and the miser; but while the miser is merely the capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser. The ceaseless augmentation of value, which the miser seeks to attain by saving his money from circulation, is achieved by the more acute capitalist by means of throwing his money again and again into circulation' (Marx, 1990: 254-5). In this way, money makes money; capital circulates and re-circulates, preserves and expands itself and demonstrates its automatic, self-valorising processes: like 'an animated monster which begins to "work", "as if its body were by love possessed"' (Marx prone to quoting from literature, quoting Goethe's Faust, 1990: 302). With this in mind, the capitalist imagination unleashed the 'house of terror' in the shape of a gigantic workhouse for the industrial worker (Marx 1990: 389) - commonly known as the factory. Such social organisation on a grand scale, has been proven to stimulate the 'animal spirits' into higher productivity - evoking the factory farm. Herein lies an important principle of co-operation:
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'Not only do we have here an increase in the productive power of the individual, by means of co-operation, but the creation of a new productive power, which is intrinsically a collective one' (Marx, 1990: 443).
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This is both the unifying principle of the Fordist production line (named after Henry Ford's organisational form of the production line) and also of Trade Union action; the whole is more than a sum of its parts in both cases. Thus, the careful organisation, and regulation of this mass remains fundamental to its successful operation in terms of the interested party. 'In form it is purely despotic', claims Marx (1990: 450) as for the most part, the unification of the diverse elements is strategically organised into hierarchical divisions, stratified to enable the greatest levels of exploitation. Remember: 'What is true of the division of labour within the workshop under the system of manufacture is also true of the division of labour within society' (Marx, 1990: 615). In contemporary neo-liberal democracies, the so-called flat management system is just the latest fashionable technique for the systematic division of labour. This is usually justified by some oblique reference to complexity theory but that stops short of an understanding of the dynamic of disorder and order within such a model (see my later explanation of this linkage between chaos theory and the marxist dialectic). If, in general, it could be said that production is now organised in more flexible, and dispersed forms, in the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism (if you like), new organisational logic leaves the relations of oppression and authority in place all the same. These lines of domination are merely inscribed with a different organisational logic. The flexible production system is perhaps best exemplified by 'Toyotism' (as opposed to Fordism), employing co-operative team work, decentralised methods, performance rewards, and flat management, and cultivating close relationships to suppliers (more on this in Castells, 1996: 157-172) - all contributing to an adaptive control over production and the work force. It is not despite capitalism's contradictions, that it remains active, but more that these contradictions are part of the very working dynamism that allow it to adapt to change so effectively.
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Further flexibility might be characterised by the network (web-like) model where the horizontal axis (more so than vertical axis, a scenario in which lumpen corporations are left vertically-challenged) is preferred corporate expansion and mutability:
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'Information technologies allows simultaneously for the decentalised retrieval of such information and for its integration into a flexible system of strategy-making. This cross-border structure[...] forming networks that are able to innovate and adapt relentlessly. Thus, the actual operating unit becomes the business project, enacted by a network...' (Castells, 1996: 165). He calls this new organisational form: 'network enterprise', that 'makes material the culture of the informational/global economy; it transforms signals into commodities by processing knowledge' (1996: 172).
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Here, I am merely quoting the general tendency, as the forms vary according to cultural specifities (that I haven't time to go into in detail). For instance in East Asia, Castells catorgises three distinct types with examples from Japan, Korea and China - all with their particular nuances. However, the examples also point to the inadequacy of the Western ethnocentric business view. There is something anti-corporate about these formations in themselves (something missed by much anti-corporate protest that uses this misleading phrase), and they are better described in terms outside of corporate centred-ness. Clearly, these new enterprises are multinational, corporations are transnational, and the networks are international in scope - summarised in terms of economic globalisation (that itself requires better definition of course).
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Clearly, there is a distinction to be made about the capitalist character of this co-operation and collective operations within different epochs and within cultural traditions. Tracing these developments historically, a very similar division of labour applies but in an exaggerated form (examples later). History has proved that on a large scale, co-operation has too often relied on the forces of domination and enslavement as its defining feature. For Marx, this enters a new era with the capitalist process of production wherein: 'a worker who performs the same simple operation for the whole of his life converts his body into the automatic, one-sided implement of that operation', increasingly efficient through repetition, and coming to embody 'the living mechanism of manufacture' (1990: 458). According to Adam Smith, the worker 'generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become' and 'in every improved and civilised society, this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall' (quoted in Marx, 1990: 483). In other words, the worker becomes increasingly dull in mind and body, and is conditioned by the nature of the tasks undertaken. (To be fair, Smith suggests education is necessary for these reasons, but all the same the necessary link between the division of labour and the education system is made explicit).
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Perhaps more positively, the example of watch manufacture (clock-work) is suggested as a way of imagining the partial operations that are must come together in precise ways. To achieve this, a number of specialised workers are employed in collective effort to produce a complex single product; a total mechanism (and one is left to question the analogy in terms of the digital watch). Collective labour must be forced to function as a working organism, but one in which inherent human sociability is forced to turn against itself. Herein lies the technical foundations of the industrial revolution. The collective working mechanism takes on new forms under digitisation, but still one in which the working principles are maintained to integrate the worker into its overall system of operation.
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The all important surplus-value is derived from the strategic organisation in the production process taken as a whole. The private industrial factory is filled with useful machines and labour, and in turn organised to increase productivity. The aim is to enhance surplus-value above all else on a grand scale (the recent anti-capitalist slogan proposing an alternative to the guiding capitalist principle of profit over people comes to mind; as well as the slogan of Globalise Resistance: 'Our World is not for Sale'). Examples like this evoke the grim descriptions of the working day in Capital (especially the chapter 'The Working Day', 1990: 343-416), quoting Montagu Valpy in 1860: 'the system... is one of unmitigated slavery, socially, morally, and spiritually... Is their black market their lash, and their barter of human flesh more detestable than this slow sacrifice of humanity... for the benefit of capitalists' (Marx, 1990: 353-4); wherein industry is organised without legal limits to exploitation, but now on a global scale. Opposition is possible of course, and this has been the historical function of Trade Unions, to shift the balance to the democratic rights of workers. Yet, under what Mandel calls 'senile capitalism' (one might be more specific and call it 'senile-dementia'), if coercion fails, strikes and Trade Unions are simply banned. This is common in free-trade zones, belying their title.
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In this way, an 'efficient' capitalist factory system, subordinates labour in favour of the machine: 'Alienation of labour is no longer only alienation of the products of labour but alienation of the forms and contents of the work itself' (Mandel, 1990: 34). Without a shadow of doubt, this still holds:
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'IBM claims that its technology spans the globe, and so it does, but often its international presence takes the form of cheap Third World labour producing the microchips and power sources that drive our machines. On the outskirts of Manilla, for instance, I met a seventeen-year-old girl who assembles CD-Rom drives for IBM. I told her I was impressed that someone so young could do such high-tech work. "We make computers," she told me, "but we don't know how to operate computers".' (Klein: 2001: xvii)
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The process of production, like the wider infrastructure of society and communication, still rests entirely on living labour, despite the suggestion otherwise. Even a so-called autonomous computer system cannot produce value in itself. This labour-power might be enhanced?? by technology but is still reduced to a commodity under capitalism. The role of machines and technology are important here, as they enable the capitalist to subordinate labour, increase surplus-value and accumulate ever more capital - simply enhancing the sum total of capitalist wealth as a calculation involving what workers receive set against what they produce in terms of value. The question of where this surplus should be distributed is at issue.
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It might be easy to assume that Marx was technophobic, but this is far from the case, and undialectical in principle {note: Marx was no Luddite; the movement that terrorised industrialisation in 1811, opposing labour-saving technologies at the time). On the contrary, the revolutionary potential of new technology might just as easily be put to emancipatory ends. It would be plainly ridiculous to deny the possibility of technology, and of collective effort, increasing the social productivity of labour, and contributing to social progress. Marx denies the charge of 'stupidity', and is clearly 'against the capitalist application of machinery, [not] against machinery itself' (1990: 569). He further explains that murder cannot be blamed on a knife; the knife can be employed by the murderer and the surgeon (echoing the positive image of the surgeon in Benjamin, penetrating reality - ref?). The function of machines is not to replace labour as such, but to assist in the accumulation of capital.
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Unsurprisingly, it is the analogy to levels of co-operation by the division of labour that are at issue, and what distinguishes the fully developed factory from previous modes. Machines replace human labour but also require labour in themselves, and might increase labour in other fields. Despite this, in overall terms, there is an undeniable trend to replace living labour with the 'dead' labour of machines. The value of the machine can be measured against the human labour that it replaces. This is further complicated by having to account for the amount of labour invested in making the machine. However, these are fairly fixed costs compared the variable labour costs that the machine replaces. Accordingly, it is perhaps easier to enslave humans than machines and to reward their efforts in more miserly amounts (and there are countless examples of the slave-labour of women and children in Capital; these stories are shockingly much the same as those in No Logo, some time later). Large-scale industry thus makes the calculation not in human terms, but crudely lumps humans and machines together in terms of extending the productivity of labour.
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Marx recommends:
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' A machine which is not active in the labour process is useless... Living labour must seize upon these things, awaken them from the dead, change them from merely possible into real and effective use-values. Bathed in the fire of labour, appropriated as part of its organism, and infused with vital energy for the performance of the functions appropriate to their concept and to their vocation in the process...' (1990: 289).
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(Aside: this is a crude opposition perhaps for those that remain deluded by the idea of an autonomous computer operation as analogous to life).
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The analogy of human/machine labour goes further. Just as human labour can express signs of wear and tear, so too the machine. It suffers material wear and tear, but more significantly depreciation of exchange-value as newer and improved machines come onto the production line. Again, its value is contingent on the labour-time invested in the reproduction of the improved version. With the human worker, its an increasingly easy replacement especially with the predominance of temporary contracts in the workplace. With machines, the machine might be more efficient but also the very production method involved in producing the machine. Reproduction spins faster and faster in an endlessly reciprocal loop (elsewhere Marx calls this the 'metamorphosis of capital' to describe the discontinuous stages: successive, and at the same time, co-existent process of rotation, in Mandel's introduction to Volume 2, 1992: 18).
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Currently, employment patterns have evolved to general rules of profit accumulation and general shared characteristics but also have crucial and diverse differences even if these work interdependently under globalisation. The danger of over-simplifying these factors belies the contradictory nature of capitalism itself perhaps. For instance, there is no global labour force as such within the global economy - it is subject to borders, institutions, racism as usual. Whilst capital flows freely, labour is still constrained despite the rhetoric of the free market economy and globalisation. There may be a tendency towards change and global labour networks, but it is only a tendency. Surplus value must be protected at all costs and requires significant capital outlay on machinery. Labour-power is thus extended and intensified for effect.
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Machines:
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Earlier forms of the mode of production were essentially conservative, but the technical basis of industry at this point in time is distinctly revolutionary (there is a note here, 1990:617, to 'all that is solid melts into air', in, The Communist Manifesto). According to Castells, the conditions were similarly conservative in Silicon Valley in the 1960s but combined with a certain libertarian (hippy) spirit (1996: 5-6). Seen in this way, the social consequences were unintended - merely a bi-product of the speed, diversity and scope of technological change. 'Profitability and competitiveness are the actual determinants of technological innovation and productivity growth. It is in their concrete, historical dynamics that we may find the clues for understanding productivity's vagaries.' (Castells, 1996: 81)
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The chapter 'Machinery and Large-Scale Industry' (in Marx's Capital: Volume One, 1990: 492-639) is an extremely important one in pointing to broad and general principles of automation, and of course the starting-point of the industrial revolution itself. It begins with the common distinction between tool and machine (and one often stupidly repeated in terms of the computer): 'the tool is a simple machine and the machine as a complex tool'; the tool requires human motive power, whist the machine operates independent of it (1990: 492-3). Marx insists that all machines are a combination of these factors, no matter how much they are disguised. He claims machines consist of three parts: the motor mechanism (acting as the generating force but either working independently or by external impulse, eg. horse-power); the transmitting mechanism (that regulates the motion and distributes it, eg. the use of gears); and lastly the tool or working machine (that takes the working machine and 'seizes on the object of labour and modifies it as desired') (1990: 494).
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In this way, in general terms, 'the machine, therefore, is a mechanism that, after being set in motion, performs with its tools the same operation as the worker' (1990: 495). The difference is that the worker might now be more of an operator, and that the machine might perform the functions of multiple workers. In this way, the machine became emancipated from the limits of human effort, and part of a wider scheme of machines working together collectively as part of an extending industrial apparatus. This is where he makes a further distinction of a complex system of machinery from the co-operation of a number of similar machines by identifying where the multiplicity takes place; as either a number of tools forming the organs of the machine or a number of machines of one kind constituting the organs of the motive mechanism.
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Continuity marks the regulating principle of the fully developed factory and not the isolated practices of the division of labour under manufacturing previously described. Marx further explains:
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'The collective working machine, which is now an articulated system composed of various kinds of single machine, and groups of single machines, becomes all the more perfect the more the process as a whole becomes a continuous one' (1990: 502)
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The resulting system 'constitutes in itself as a vast automaton as soon as it is driven by a self-acting prime mover' - an auto-generative system in embryonic form. Marx continues wildly:
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'An organised system of machines to which motion is communicated by the transmitting mechanism from an automatic centre is the most developed form of production by machinery. Here we have, in place of the isolated machine, a mechanical monster whose body fills whole factories, and whose demonic power, at first hidden by the slow and measured motions of its gigantic members, finally bursts forth in the fast and feverish whirl of its countless working organs.' (1990: 503) This image of workers becoming 'second-order robots' is commonplace but more positively one can point to autonomous educated workers programming their sequences of work (Castells, 1996: 241). As an aside, the term 'robot' was allegedly first used by Karel Capek in his play 'Rossum's Universal Robots' (Prague, 1921) drawing upon the Czech term 'robota' which literally means 'forced work or labour' from the Latin 'robor' meaning power or force (Floridi, 1999: 207; the play typically describes a scenario in which a factory that builds artificial agents is eventually taken over by them and the whole of humanity destroyed). Networkers are the necessary agents of the network enterprise made possible by information technology, as Castells puts it (1996: 242).
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With information technology, automation comes of age, and labour is transformed by the need for the required knowledge to operate it, offering new relational patterns in the performing of tasks. In fact, he goes further and makes the distinction between the networkers, who set up connections on their initiative, and the networked, who are online but without any control over decisions; and another category of the switched-off who are tied to tasks and operate through non-interactive, one-way instructions. In terms of decision-making, he presents three characterisations: the deciders (who make the decisions in the last resort), the participants (who are involved in decision-making), and the executants (who merely implement decisions) (Castells, 1996: 244). One can readily apply these formulations to interactive systems and the generative media and identify the subsequent relations of power.
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The automatic factory is described as an integrated system: 'a vast automaton, composed of various mechanical and intellectual organs, acting in an uninterrupted concert for the production of a common object, all of them being subordinate to a self-regulating moving force' (Ure 'Philosophy of Manufactures', quoted in Marx, 1990: 544). In this scenario, the automaton itself is the subject; not as convention would have it, the worker simply controlling the machine-object. Rather, the worker starts to become the appendage of the machine. In the modern industrial factory of 1867 (at the time of writing), the machine works in tandem with human in a collective and conscious effort (note: at this time, machines weren't thought of as capable of consciousness apart from in popular fictions). Together they function as a living mechanism (with the worker transformed into a state of the living dead). Marx points out the significance of this overall and specialised machine as not only the function of an automaton but an autocrat. It expresses the autocrat's will to power and ruling ideology.
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This is perhaps even more the case with informational production, wherein constant networked interaction is required between workers, management and machines. Systems must be networked and integrated in order to process information efficiently in much the same way; through a thoroughly integrated network of computers that link to each other and to mainframes - both arranged in decentralised and centralised working relations. However, any polarisation of labour that has resulted (specified by race, gender and class - as always, there are winners and losers) is not determined by technology itself. Changes are socially-determined and ideologically arranged. For the most part, in practice, 'the combined productivity of scientists and technologists, workers by hand and brain, inventors of machinery and flexers of muscle, increase the profit of the owners of machinery' (Mandel, 1990: 53).
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The empty promises of more and more jobs (for geeks) in the high-tech industry illustrates the point well. Moreover, Castells points to the observation that even in the most competitive of economies like Germany and Japan, it does not follow that most jobs will be in information processing despite information being a crucial aspect of the success of those economies (1996: 211). As a general trend, Castells maintains that 'there is no sytematic structural relationship between the diffusion of informational technologies and the evolution of employment levels in the economy as a whole' (1996: 263). But without doubt, traditional forms of work are being thoroughly eroded (and you can detect this in terms of creative production too of course). The relationship between capital and labour has changed making it suitably more flexible and adaptable like the networked technologies that support these changes.
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Castells follows: 'A new spectre haunts Europe (not so much America and Japan): the emergence of a jobless society under the impact of information technologies.... Yet, as is usually the case with spectres in the electronic age, in a close-up it appears to be more a matter of special effects than a terrifying reality' (1996: 265). This is perhaps a temporary lapse, but new patterns are emerging that owe more to institutional determinants that the influence of technology per se. This is clearly the lesson of history too. Microsoft, the symbolic target of most attention in this field, provides opportunities for 'contingency workers' (or 'flextimers' as they are sometimes called), not employment as such. In the new media industry, the use of temporary workers is rampant, following the lead of the likes of Microsoft in 'engineering the perfect employee-less corporation'. Klein claims Microsoft 'wrote the operating manual' for banishing employees to the margins, extensive use of independent contractors, 'outsourced divisions, contract factories, and freelance employees' (2001: 249) (elsewhere referred to as 'temp slaves' or descriptively as a 'disposable labour force').
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This is a familiar story to anyone involved in the new media industry. At the centre of operations are the privileged few ('microserfs') - those on permanent, full-time contacts, benefits, stock options - earning an average $220,000 a year (Klein, 2001: 250). At the hub, Bill Gates has amassed a fortune of $55 billion (Klein, 2001: xvii). Even hackers are employed as part of the overall operative mechanism - which incorporates apparent opposition to effect. Labour is still crucial, but disaggregated in the network society - for 'on the surface, societies were/are becoming dualised, with a substantial top and a substantial bottom growing at both ends of the occupational structure, so shrinking the middle, at a pace and in a proportion that depend on each country's position in the international division of labour and on its political climate' (Castels 1996: 279; who provides statistical analyses to substantiate these claims).
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The dialectical approach to this reveals (and to repeat) 'the contradiction between use-value and exchange value, inherent in every commodity, [that] fully unfolds itself in this contradictory nature of capitalist machinery' (Mandel 1990: 37). Technology might just as well be used for progressive, humane purposes as repressive, destructive ones (perhaps suitably exemplified by the dialectical example of nuclear fusion). There are environmental consequences: 'The more a country proceeds from large-scale industry as a background of its development, as in the case of the United States, the more rapid is this process of destruction' (Marx, 1990: 638).
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To labour the point, technology's deployment is evidently a matter of politics and choice, hence its misuse for the most part. 'It is not the machine that, nor any technological compulsion, which inevitably transforms workers and men and women in general into appendices and slaves of monstrous equipment. It is the capitalist principle of profit maximisation...' (Mandel: 1990: 65). Castells suggests that the social dimension of the Information Technology Revolution might be best understood in terms of social agency, by quoting Kranzberg: 'Technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral' (1996: 65). Thus the application of machinery can be seen to express the contradictions of capitalism itself: it both shortens and lengthens labour-time; it creates new employment and new unemployment as a necessary corollary; it both liberates and enslaves. With the accumulation of wealth comes the accumulation of poverty. This is clearly evident on a global scale now.
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Global Capital:
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Enhanced by networked information technologies, that form the material base for the global economy, all activities of production, consumption and circulation operate through global networks of interaction. With an economic crisis in the 1970s, Castells describes the conditions for the change in the evolution of capitalism into the Information Technology revolution. Capital required increased flexibility and mobility, and was crucially assisted by the new information technologies in close conjunction with deregulated markets and the integration of financial markets. This is what Castells calls 'the recapitalisation of capitalism' (1996: 85). Capital's reproduction cycle necessarily follows a spiral-like pattern of transformation: 'This, then, is the process of accumulation of capital: the transformation of surplus-value into additional capital, which can produce new increments of surplus-value, leading to new increments of capital' (Mandel, 1990: 61). So it goes, capital accumulates with uncanny efficiency reproducing itself on a progressively increasing scale. Marx says 'The conditions of production are at the same time the conditions of reproduction' (1990: 711). Capitalism has become ever more dynamic, mobile and expansive reflecting the technology that it serves and that serves it. (the Jameson quote would fit in well here - describing the network)
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Klein, demonstrates the incorporative/recuperative power of capital in appropriating revolutionary signs as consumer goods: in 1999, Mao and Lenin appeared on 'Red or Dead" handbags; Pizza Hut deliver pizzas to a picket line in a commercial; Apple computers appropriated Gandhi or their 'think different' campaign; and Che Guevara became a logo for 'Revolution' soda (2001: 85). That these contradictory processes operate on a world scale is nothing new, but perhaps the extortion of capital from the so-called under-developed world to the developed one is more overt under present conditions of 'globalisation', sharpening capital's imperialist ambitions (add Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire, Harvard University Press, in this connection. It has been described as the 'new communist manifesto'). Capital seeks surplus-value through identifying the cheapest labour costs in 'free-trade zones' where companies are granted special privileges to guarantee surplus-value.
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In the chapter 'The Modern Theory of Colonisation', Marx traces early forms of globalisation and the need to create dependence 'by artificial means' (1990: 937), to retain control of the fragmentation of the means of production. The Old World imposes its values on the New World. In the chapter 'The Discarded Factory', Klein describes the Cavite Export Processing Zone, located near Manilla, in gory detail (one of 52 in the Phillipines, but like zones elsewhere - in Indonesia, Mexico, Vietnam, for instance) (2001: 202 -229). According to the International Labour Organisation Special Action Programme on Export Processing Zones, the largest zone economy is in China, where it is estimated that 18 million people work in 124 export zones. There are 27 million workers world-wide, and the World Trade Organisation estimates that $200-250 billion worth of trade flows through these zones (Klein, 2001: 205). As one arbitrary example of many, Cavite is simply grotesque in scale and ambition, as 682 acres of walled-in industrial area, housing 207 factories, with 50,000 workers, producing goods only for export (for Nike, Gap, IBM, and other notorious multinationals). However, these factories do not publicise what they make or who they make it for, and certainly not the conditions in which things are made - this is a clandestine activity as there is much to hide. The zones are tax-free economies, entirely separate from any democratic control over work conditions (Klein calls this a miniature military state). There is nothing new here of course, except it exists in a purer state, as Mandel suggested earlier. In these zones, there are no import or export duties, no Income or property taxes, and as a result gross exploitation is rife.
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At the risk of generalisation, the vast majority of the workers are young women, migrants, subject to very long working day and unconditional overtime, on temporary short-term contracts (if on a contract at all) with no rights (such as to strike or claim sick benefit), where the wages often remain below subsistence level (and the minimum wage is only $6 a day anyway), and all these conditions are enforced through abusive military-style management (echoed in Marx's descriptions of labour conditions in 1867, see 1990: 802-870). Klein characterises these working conditions in terms of fast food (or what Julie Burchill elsewhere calls 'vile slop'): a 'McJob'. Work remains at the centre of the social structure and remains a suitable site of struggle. It has been transformed of course, but general principles of exploitation remain. Castells characterises the changed forms of 'networkers' and 'flextimers' in terms of the increased individualisation of work and the fragmentation of society in general (in the chapter 'The Transformation of Work and Employment', 1996: 201). New employment patterns correspond to the modes of development outlined elsewhere - broadly, in relation to the agricultural, industrial (what could be described as post-agricultural) and informational (or post-industrial) forms.
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Often, the workers have little choice often denied the rights to strike, form unions, and work in factories that do not follow labour rights of the country they are situated in, or the companies that subcontract the work (as corporations negotiate waivers if possible). This is what Pierre Bourdieu calls the 'utopia (becoming a reality) of unlimited exploitation' in an essay an 'neo-liberalism' as a political programme of 'pure and perfect order.' ( 2001: 94) The zone factories occupy a never-never-land of global capital, the dystopian flip side of the Disney town, 'Celebration'.
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Workers clearly have little to celebrate. Compared with the Philippines, wages in China are lower again - as low as 13 cents an hour according to one survey. It's a harsh irony that The People's Republic of China has become a favourite site or these free-trade zones. 'Zero-risk globalisation' serves the needs of capital accumulation over those that do its dirty work. The counter-argument is that these operations have longer-term, positive, sustainable effects on the host economy. Much of the evidence suggests otherwise. Capital reproduces itself through its own brand mechanisms - the World Bank, G8, GATT, WTO, APEC, EU, NATO, and so on. For instance, it was on the 1st January 1995, that the general agreement was struck on tariffs and trade (GATT) became the world trade organisation with extraordinary legislative, executive and judicial powers (Katherine Ainger, New Internationist, issue 338, September 2001). Taken together diverse factors combine to form part of a hugely successful self-perpetuating mechanism for the accumulation of surplus-value and capital.
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It would be easy to draw limes of continuity here with capitalism operating on a world scale since the sixteenth century, seeking sought to overcome the limits of time and space. What distinguishes the global economy is that 'it is an economy with the capacity to work as a unit in real time on a planetary scale' (Castells, 1996: 92). [add Doreen Massey stuff on the specific character of globalisation] Castells sees this global economy as 'characterised by the combination of an enduring architecture and a variable geometry' (1996: 145) expressing dynamic processes of competition and change.
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Importantly, it should be noted that global resistance is exactly that, as global as capital (not simply the 'global resistance' of the Socialist Workers Party). The Zapatistas, of Mexico, declared in 1996: 'We will make a collective network of all our particular struggles and resistances. An intercontinental network of resistance will against neoliberalism, an intercontinental network of resistance for humanity' (New Internationalist, 2001: 15). Western media tend to report the protest on its own doorstep, at the risk of overlooking examples like the Zapatistas in Mexico, cry of 'Ya Basta' (enough) to neoliberal policies (1994); 130,000 Filipino workers protesting against free trade (1996); international day of action in 21 countries, in support of the Liverpool dockers fighting casualisation (1997); to more widely publicised examples like the first global street party at the time of the G8 summit (1998); activists disrupting the WTO meeting in Seattle (1999); to what has been characterised as Europe's summer of resistance in Gothenburg and Genoa for the G8 summit. There are simply too many instances to mention.
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The anti-capitalist movement is much publicised for its appearance around the world at key events, but local resistance is crucial too. There are a number of contentions here of how best, or most effectively, to proceed. The original composition of the protests involved 'anti-statist elements... espousing anti-hierarchical, decentralised models' (Seymour, 2001: 2), and yet a growing recognition that the movements diverse elements need some kind of consolidation and alliance with longer established labour movements like trade unions. Both those positive and critical of globalisation forget the still powerful influence of the nation-state and the role of governments in influencing the economy (Castells 1996: 97).
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However there are also some serious inconsistencies to resolve. These all appear as symptoms of the 'third way' neoliberal ideology (allegedly beyond the old oppositions of left and right wings of thought) of increased privatisation, free-trade agreements and the dismantling of the welfare state (certainly not left in other words). The opposition can be effectively characterised as that of between the imperialism of multinational corporations against the more local efforts of the traditional nation state. Global anti-capitalism is opposed to global capitalism through 'trans-local' networks of resistance - both echoed in the Coca-Cola catchphrase of 'think global, act local'. Whether the nation-state remains an effective framework for resistance to these forces of globalisation is contentious (such as the traditional model of 'statism'). But surely there is the equal danger of multicultural politics playing into the hands of multinationals - itself modelled on the same non-hierarchical, decentralised principles of individualism. The failure of identity politics (recognised by diverse commentators from Slavoj Zizek to Naomi Klein) has evolved into a renewed engagement with the political economy - correspondingly shifting issues around representation to those of institutional politics, and from issues of exclusion to those of exploitation.
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The recent popular protests have articulated capitalism's contradictions and a refusal to cooperate, but a recognised and broadly agreeable alternative would be significantly more difficult to identify. A new model would be welcome but what model, and what's wrong the old model anyway as a means of understanding the limits of the thing under question. The anti-capitalist movement is perhaps too diverse - even in its description of whether it is 'anti-capitalist', 'anti-corporate' or 'anti-globalisation-ist'. It may well be all these things but the choice of title suggests complementary and competing agendas. Its decentralised framework is both one of the reasons for its success and perhaps one reason why it will not succeed in bringing about any better alternative. A synthesis of old and new forms of resistance is required.
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This is why Capital remains a pertinent text, in helping define the laws of motion of the capitalist machine itself. Castells reiterates that 'while the informational/global economy is distinct from the industrial economy, it does not oppose its logic' (1996: 91). It remains the case: 'that wage-labour and capital are still the two antagonistic classes of society; that accumulation of capital is more than ever the basic motive force of that society; and that the extortion and realisation of private profit governs the basic drive of separate firms'. In Mandel's view, 'These basic laws of motion thus continue to remain valid' (1990: 82), and have been widened in a 'gigantic leap forward in the reach and scope of the circulation sphere' (1996: 92). Not least, the anti-capitalist movement points to the currency of these observations. Herein lies the most recent hope of a revolutionary consciousness - through a recognition of the fundamental contradictions of the system in which impetuous growth is combined with the seeds of its own destruction.
Binary file appropriation-various.txt matches
.txt
artisan-barbrook.txt
Richard Barbrook & Pit Schultz (1997), ÔThe Digital Artisans ManifestoÕ,
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The resistance to market forces and labour patterns is characterised by Ricard Barbrook and Pit Schultz in their 'Digital Artisans Manifesto' (1997). They reject the idea that the Internet is the final stage of alienating effects of machines, and instead, and alluding to autonomous Marxism, emphasise the centrality of autonomous and creative labour in this process as the force of historical change: 'We will transform the machines of domination into the technologies of liberation'. It is argued that this transformation can come about by rejecting neo-liberal work patterns of the free market, the 'californian ideology' and formation of a 'virtual class'. Instead they propose the digital artisan in which autonomous work is made possible in the manner of past craft workers':
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'The revival of artisanship is not a return to a low-tech and impoverished past. Skilled workers are best able to assert their autonomy precisely within the most technologically advanced industries. The new artisans are better educated and can earn much more money. In earlier stages of modernity, factory labourers symbolised of the promise of industrialism. Today, as digital artisans, we now express the emancipatory potential of the information age. We are the promise of history.'
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This is written in polemical style as manifestos are, so accordingly perhaps lacks analytical depth. It seems to reinforce a 'virtual class' based on 'immaterial labour' but without the capacity to understand the ways in which relations of production are recast. Surely there is little point in following the invitation for 'Digital Artisans of Europe Unite!' without attaching this to other material antagonisms. There is more to autonomous Marxism than these ebullient declarations. This is perhaps unfair, it is written playfully and I have a poor sense of humour in this regard.
authority-foucaultberger.txt
Michel Foucault (1983) This is Not a Pipe, trans. James Harkness, Berkeley: University of California Press.
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The character and structures of any environment convey controlling messages to those who work or participate in it. In other words, "The Medium is the Message" claimed McLuhan, drawing attention to the ways in which the structure or process of the (medium) environment manipulate the (message) perceptions, senses and attitudes. The question might become: how are these spaces (the lecture theatre, gallery, the essay, the project) organised and to what effect? For instance, in terms of lesson plans and structures, the activity of the teaching room is conventionally broken down into content and method. It is often imagined that content is disseminated through the lesson itself and that the method carries no content; why else separate them in such a way. This is a particularly subtle and effective form of control. As the contents of lessons are rarely remembered, what is being learnt but the structure of the learning. This is the message.
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The overriding educational experience, and experiencing a work of art tends to be one of listening to a single voice of authority. This listening may not be passive necessarily (as clearly the reading and viewing subject has its own interpretative agenda too) but still might give the appearance of passivity all the same. The overall structure and organisation of space is one that is designed to authenticate the single god-like speaker at the front of the teaching room, standing whilst everyone else remains seated, and so on, required to believe in the speakers authenticity and accept their authority by means of a particular set of spatial relations.
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The teacher and student, artist and audience, author and reader relationship is not fixed and need not reflect authoritarian politics (this relationship between authenticity and authority is a central concern of Walter Benjamin's Artwork essay). Similarly, this text uses a set of pseudo-academic conventions aiming to legitimate what is being said. Representations follow much the same logic. Take Magritte's 'Ceci n'est pas une pipe' (of 1926) for example. The image is simple, like one found in school text book; a thing and the words that name it. Foucault describes this in his book This is not a pipe:
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'But why have we introduced the teacher's voice? Because scarcely has he stated, "This is a pipe," before he must correct himself and stutter, "This is not a pipe, but a drawing of a pipe," "This is not a pipe but a sentence saying that this is not a pipe," "the sentence, 'this is not a pipe' is not a pipe," "In the sentence "this is not a pipe," this is not a pipe: the painting, written sentence, drawing of a pipe - all this is not a pipe."' (1983: 30)
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Similarly, the form of John Berger's Ways of Seeing in which the argument takes shape is part of the work itself, abolishing the distinction between form and content. Berger said, reminding the viewer of the specifics of his technical reproduction:
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'But remember that I am controlling and using for my own purposes the means of reproduction needed for these programmes... with this programme as with all programmes, you receive images and meanings which are arranged. I hope you will consider what I arrange but please remain skeptical of it.' (1972)
authority-jayadorno.txt
more Frankfurt school stuff - Jay
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Authority
authority-jayadorno.txt
Although I am not employing psychoanalytic methods as such, it needs acknowledgement as a major influence on the critical theory of the Frankfurt School.
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'In psychoanalysis nothing is true apart from the exaggerations' (Adorno, from Minima Moralia, quoted in Jay, 1996: 105)
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The Frankfurt school sought to align Marx and Freud (mainly through the work of Erich Fromm); in so doing characterising a dynamic approach to history: 'For Marx, the past is pregnant with the future.... For Freud, the future is pregnant with the past.... Revolution could only repeat the prototypal rebellion against the father, and in every case, like it, be doomed to failure' Jay, 1996: 86-7, quoting Rieff). Hence, Marx and Freud make strange bedfellows in one sense, but represent a useful dynamic approach on the other. Oedipal resistance to the father lent itself to the study of authority and by extension the relationship of the individual to society that resulted from shared interests in the connected and linked symbolic structure of unconscious processes. Furthermore, the disenchantment with the possibility of revolution seems to lie in these interconnections (here the idea of progress is set against the death instinct in Freud). Perhaps the obstacles to social change lay in the unconscious.
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It is also in the work of Fromm that the connection between capitalism and anality is drawn. According to this logic, rationalism, possessiveness and puritanism are related to anal repression and orderliness (Jay: 1996: 94). [good quote for ordure] In other words, and at the risk of oversimplifying things, the capitalist is anally retentive. Using Freud's libido theory as a point of departure, Fromm also sought to investigate 'irrational authority' through a study of sado-masochism that de-emphasised the erotic elements. In response to alienation, he developed the idea that love depends on given socio-economic conditions; that for freedom to exist, there must be love in society. Freudian theory and its revisionist forms becomes repeatedly tied to society at large in the Frankfurt School approach (with its stress on the sociological in addition to the biological). For instance, Adorno stresses the anti-enlightenment character of Freud's work in debunking a sense of totality and the myth of the subject's unity as this is never realised in society. This is what Adorno calls 'an ideological cloak for the psychoanalytical status quo of each individual'. (Jay, 1996: 104, quoting Adorno's 'Social Science and Sociological Tendencies in Psychoanalysis') Adorno rejects Fromm's de-eroticisation as a means of 'social hygiene', and argues for the importance of the sexual elements of sadism so blatantly displayed through Nazism. He wrote: 'In the age of the concentration camp, castration is more characteristic of social reality than competitiveness' (Jay, 1996: 105).
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The focus on problems of authority and the rise of Nazism was of fundamental concern to critical theory (partly to explain the social and psychological conditions in which workers rejected their historical role within Marxism and to accept Nazism). They were not simply rejecting authority, but actually stressing its positive role - like an educators role in relation to students (what Max Weber called 'legitimate authority'. Fascism, for Weber, was characterised by 'rationalised means and irrational ends', Jay, 1996: 121). Fascism, on the other hand, was 'the reason in which reason reveals itself as irrational' (Jay, quoting Horkheimer, 1996: 121). It should be added that for Horkheimer and the like, fascism was intimately related to capitalism (it was 'middle-class extremism' according to Seymour Martin Lipset, quoted in Jay 1996: 124). In dialectical terms, totalitarianism is both a reaction to and a continuation of certain trends in liberalism. There is perhaps further confusion in the term 'national socialism' as the fascist tendency towards nationalisation is the opposite of socialisation - so this is decidedly not the Hegelian state as the reconciliation of opposites. Moreover, these were trends that were indicative of Western civilisation as a whole, not merely Nazi Germany. (note: also breaking from classical Marxism, Klaus Theweleit, in Male Fantasies describes fascism as the male's incapacity to deal with his own body).
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Horkheimer emphasised the disjunction between the anti-authoritarianism of bourgeois ideology and the submission of the individual to irrational authority of the socio-economic order. The family (always a favourite subject for the social scientist) effectively demonstrated these conflicts with society. Taking this relationship between the family and society to be dialectical allowed for both Hegel's and Marx's positions on the family to be considered - a optimistic and pessimistic view respectively. The question remained as to whether the crisis and breakup of the traditional family and lines of parental authority would engender or inhibit social change. The Institut's view became increasingly pessimistic on this issue. An analysis of social agents like the family, were in keeping with a general trend to recognise the patterns of the current stage of capitalist development. It was argued that under monolopy capitalism, social relations had been widened and now extended beyond the interactions of employer and worker, or producer and consumer. According to Friedrich Pollock, 'the profit motive' had been transformed into 'the power motive' in more (sado-masochistic) social relations of 'commander and commanded' (Jay, 1996: 153 - more accurately, the profit motive can be understood as part of the power motive).
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Drawing upon the Institut's studies of authority and the family, Nazi version of state capitalism (ironically called national socialism) was a new order of a 'command economy', a capitalism in its extreme wherein politics or ideology had been seen to have triumphed over the economy - and therefore needed to be best understood in terms of the political economy. The term 'state capitalism' is in itself a contradictory term as it simultaneously implies the state owns the means of production and therefore it could not be capitalist - in fact, it was a private capitalist economy but regulated by the state for the most part opposed to nationalising industry. Neumann, goes further in describing National Socialism was a 'non-state, a chaos, a rule of lawlessness and anarchy' (Jay, 1996: 165). The scarey implications were that the contradictions that were embedded within the economic system were unlikely to collapse as once believed because it was so carefully regulated. Forms of domination were more overt in the command economy perhaps (although it should be pointed out that these were also evident in Hegel's master-slave dialectical relationship) and this employed a technological rationality. Nazism could be understood in terms of a more widespread trend towards irrational domination. Adorno and Horkheimer assert:
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'A technological rationale is the rationale of domination itself' (in 'The Culture Industry' in Dialectic of Enlightenment). Therefore, social transformation could only ensue if this technological framework itself was overturned (expressed both in state capitalism and soviet state socialism). A reliance on change at the level of the means of production did not go far enough, thought Horkheimer, and change could only come about through a 'rupture in the continuum of history' (in the spirit of Benjamin's thesis on the philosophy of history).
authorship-barthesbenjamin.txt
The Death and Return of the creative subject
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authorship-barthesbenjamin.txt
Past its sell-by date or not? 'The death of the author' might be considered too literal, (too obvious and final, even morbid) a metaphor to offer a critique of the productive apparatus by which contemporary creative operations are organised and regulated - perhaps in particular, when using computers. In reverse historical turn, this examination of the apparatus makes reference to Russian Formalism and Structualism (pre- post-Structuralism) and the mere role of the author as a function of discourse. Both these movements sought to uncover the structural formations of language, and to establish a science of language that might be applicable to all cultural phenomena - in such a way that it would be possible to 'read' written, audio and visual 'texts' and discover how meanings are produced (within signifying systems in other words). Post-Structuralism follows this formalist trajectory but additionally considers the ways in which subjectivity is constituted (influenced by anthropology and psychoanalysis in particular; Barthes was heavily influenced by LŽvi-Strauss's structural anthropology and Lacan's work on the unconscious both applying linguistic structures to 'natural' phenomena - making it cultural of course). Therefore it may be useful to start with some competing definitions of 'subjectivity' that require some understanding before reading the supplied essays - the reading of which requires the recognition that all essays (and any cultural phenomena for that matter) are subject to the historical and cultural conditions of their production. The creative subject - author, artist, designer, programmer - is thus only ever part of the story. As Benjamin puts it (in 'The Author as Producer', in Understanding Brecht): 'Just as a murderer's bloody fingerprint on a page says more than the words printed on it.' (1973: 94)
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authorship-barthesbenjamin.txt
Commonsense understanding of the 'subject' is in opposition to object, alternatively cast as the self and other. However this viewpoint assumes a fixed, stable identity, a rational, centred, individual subject. The 'individualism' of this philosophical position fails to account for the role played by social relations and language in determining, regulating and producing the 'thinking subject'. Subjectivity is best understood through a collision of definitions: 1. From political theory, the citizen is a subject of the state; subjected to power and lack of freedom; 2. From idealist philosophy, the thinking subject as the site of consciousness; and 3. From grammar, the subject of a sentence, text, and discourse - that which the action is determined by. Clearly we are all subjects of various agencies (those of parents, legal apparatus, commerce, cultural characteristics) - a range of competing, multiple, decentred, unstable identities according to orthodox post-structuralist theory.
authorship-barthesbenjamin.txt
authorship-barthesbenjamin.txt
Examining subjectivity is therefore an effective way of conceptualising text/reader relations without taking either as fixed unitary definitions. It is also a way of recognising that cultural products employ strategies to try to fix subject positions (to persuade, to sell, to interpellate, etc). In some textual analysis this is taken to an extreme in suggesting that texts produce our subjectivity (as false consciousness, for instance in the work of Althusser) - as subjects in ideology. Similarly, the author-function is undoubtedly an ideological invention designed to grant the text more authenticity and authority. There are many examples of the creative use of deferred authorship and appropriation techniques; perhaps most notoriously the artist Sherrie Levine, who literally 'takes' (other people's) photographs, as an extreme version of the 'readymade' of language (and there is an obvious reference here back to Benjamin on reproduction as throwing associated concerns like authenticity into crisis). These kinds of examples assert that in the end, whatever the text is/has been about, the subject, like meaning, is always produced in the act of reading, viewing or hearing. Meanings are coded, but that does not mean they are simply encoded by the writer for the reader to decode - communication is far more complicated and unstable, and prone to miscommunication and misunderstanding.
authorship-barthesbenjamin.txt
authorship-barthesbenjamin.txt
Western epistemology has been proved to be full of dubious methods and ideas, invented to legitimate all kinds of dodgy practices. For instance, any notion of a superior or abstract order behind things has been laid to rest in the definitive metaphor - 'God is dead' proclaimed Nietzsche. In recognition of this, the decentred, fragmented, subject is left rather unstable with no longer an objective, rational or universal framework left intact to believe in, or seek to change; no longer confident of an assured progressive story or stance. Contemporary theory is a morbid affair, full of 'ends' and 'deaths' leaving subjectivity in a poor state of health. This is what the seminal essay 'The Death of the Author' seems to encapsulate - Barthes says: 'Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give the text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.' (1977: 147)
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authorship-barthesbenjamin.txt
At the risk of offering too obvious and too linear a prehistory of the 'Death of the Author' thesis, anti-authorial ideas are often evoked through MallarmŽ's view of compositional aesthetics. For instance:
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'The pure work implies the disappearance of the poet-speaker who yields the initiative to words animated by the inequality revealed in their collision with one another; they illuminate one another and pass like a trail of fire over precious stones, replacing the audible breathing of earlier lyrical verse or the exalted personality which directed the phrase.
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The structure of a book of verse must arise throughout from internal necessity - in this way both chance and the author will be excluded...' (MallarmŽ, quoted in Burke, 1992: 8-9)
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authorship-barthesbenjamin.txt
Through derived from a discourse more about inspiration, the passage neatly describes a situation where language itself has autonomy over the writer, where words are arranged in such a way that subjective intention does not figure. On the removal of the Author, and citing MallarmŽ as a precursor to this line of thinking, Barthes says: '(... the text is henceforth made and read in such a way that at all levels the Author is absent).... The Author, when believed in, is always conceived of as the past of his own book: book and author stand automatically on a single line divided into a before and after.' (Barthes, 1977: 145). This is further explained in response to Foucault's question 'Who is speaking?': 'MallarmŽ replies... the word itself... in a pure ceremony of the Book in which the discourse would compose itself.' (Foucault, quoted in Burke, 1992: 9) Language, conceived of in this way, is auto-generative. But where does authorship lie in all this, it has not simply disappeared but is recast surely in recognition of its own constructedness. To state the obvious, even MallarmŽ is the author of his own position on the author's disappearance.
authorship-barthesbenjamin.txt
authorship-barthesbenjamin.txt
Evidently, the author has not simply disappeared, and there is a pressing need to examine new demarcations, and the functions released by this alleged disappearance. Foucault, this time from the appropriately titled 'What is an Author? (in The Foucault Reader)' explains: 'It is not enough, however, to repeat the empty affirmation that the author has disappeared. For the same reason, it is not enough to keep repeating (after Nietzsche) that God and man have died a common death. Instead, we must locate the space left empty by the author's disappearance, follow the distribution of gaps and breaches, and watch for the openings this disappearance uncovers.' (1984: 105). Foucault, here, like Althusser too, are asking what humanism might be after the 'death of man' - Spinoza similarly contested that the laws of human nature could not be falsely separated from the laws of nature. Hardt and Negri further suggest that 'Donna Haraway carries on Spinoza's project in our day as she insists on breaking down barriers we pose among the human, the animal, and the machine. If we are to conceive man as seprate from nature, then man does not exist.' (2000: 91) In a history of ideas, this is the recognition of the idea of the death of man that Barthes is clearly responding to.
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authorship-barthesbenjamin.txt
Although the 'author-god' might be dead (according to Barthes's thesis), we are forced to accept this 'death' as a metaphoric gesture: 'the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author' (1977: 148) - as an over-stated expression of the author's inability to claim the privileged source of meaning or value of a work of art. This was simply meant strategically - to shift emphasis on to the words on the page, or the nature of the surrounding language and discourse - and away from associated myths of originality and genius. Thus, a certain rejection of certainty is enforced in relation to all kinds of 'hypostases' such as 'society, history, psyche, liberty... reason, science, law' (1977:147). From 'The Death of the Author', Barthes states:
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authorship-barthesbenjamin.txt
'We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.[...] the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His [sic] only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them. Did he wish to express himself, he ought at least to know that the inner 'thing' he thinks to 'translate' is itself only a ready-formed dictionary, its words only explainable through other words, and so on indefinitely...' (1977: 146)
authorship-barthesbenjamin.txt
authorship-barthesbenjamin.txt
So what about these words, how have they been arranged so persuasively, and from where do they derive? Sean Burke, in 'A prehistory of the Death of the Author' (1992) suggests that an existential reading of phenomenology is an important precursor to the question of subjectivity in Barthes (his focus is Barthes, Foucault and Derrida by the way). In particular, in the 1940s the work of Jean-Paul Sartre argued for the idea of free subjectivity, offering the figure of the politically committed author. This is to say, that the influence on 'the death of the author' is partly informed by an idea of consciousness rather than exclusively linguistic structures as is commonly supposed (Cognitive science might figure here too). Post-structuralist thinking would tend towards seeing consciousness and cognition as merely effects of language. The return of the author would appear regressive (and a little contradictory) but it serves to throw a different point of emphasis for effect (see Slavoj Zizek's The Ticklish Subject on the recentring of subjectivity for more on this argument). A leap of faith is required as it's more a question of whether the death or return of the author-figure is productive at this point in time. How productive is the metaphor? For my purposes this line of thought might be further traced back to Walter Benjamin in his essay 'The Author as Producer', first presented as a lecture in April 1934 at the Institute for the Study of Fascism in Paris (1973). Benjamin who claimed that:
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authorship-barthesbenjamin.txt
'An author who has carefully thought about the conditions of production today... will never be concerned with the products alone, but always, at the same time, with the means of production. In other words, his products must possess an organising function besides and before their character as finished works.' (1973: 98)
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authorship-barthesbenjamin.txt
Its significance lies in requiring the author to act as an active agent, to intervene in the production process, and property relations, to change 'technique' and transform the apparatus. This is the 'organising function' that Benjamin proposes demanding the author to reflect upon the production process - setting the laboratory in opposition to the finished work of art.
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authorship-barthesbenjamin.txt
Over the years, this thesis has been extensively reworked as the opposition of theory versus activism. Hal Foster reckons this has been more recently reinscribed as 'the artist as ethnographer' to take account of the institution; now working on behalf not exclusively of the proletariat but of the cultural or ethnic other (from exclusively economic relations to include cultural identity). For Foster evoking Benjamin once more, the difficulty is that these paradigms consistently inscribe otherness, with the danger of working as an 'ideological patron' on behalf of the oppressed without due attention to the production process; Benjamin, says this is 'an impossible place' to operate from (1973: 93). Foster calls for reflexivity advocating 'work that attempts to frame the framer as he or she frames the other' (Hal Foster, 'The Artist as Ethnographer', in, The Return of the Real, 1995: 203). In other words, subjectivity needs to be thoroughly inscribed into the very process of production.
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authorship-barthesbenjamin.txt
What sense of authorship does this evoke? - perhaps, one where subjectivity and technology are bound together in recognition of the organising function of computer apparatuses. It is somewhat ironic to note that both machines and humans are more or less programmed. This is a recognition that subjectivity is determined by other destabilising forces and that creative-subjectivity itself is socially-encoded. Echoing one definition of subjectivity that lays emphasis on discursive frameworks, the author is revealed to be a rhetorical invention operating in much the same way as a coded machine that follows a crude rule-based system, auto-generating what already exists (more on this in 'The Authorship of Generative Art' essay). It occurs to me that 'The Author as Producer' essay might be recoded to take account of these intricate procedures.
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authorship-barthesbenjamin.txt
authorship-barthesbenjamin.txt
More on 'The Author as Producer' essay:
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authorship-barthesbenjamin.txt
It is often overlooked that the essay was first delivered as a lecture address at the Institute for the Study of Fascism, Paris in 1934. It unsurprisingly expresses a committed politics (of aesthetics - remembering that Fascism seeks to aestheticise politics by 1936 in Benjamin's writings).
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authorship-barthesbenjamin.txt
The essay is centrally concerned with questions of autonomy - freedom of expression. A progressive writer acknowledges the choice of in whose service, or more particularly class interests, the writing operates. This, Benjamin explains, is usually called pursuing a tendency, or expressing 'commitment' and he takes this to be a key word (1973: 86) He explains that more often than not, commitment is seen in opposition to quality and suggests they might be synthesised to be one and the same - and sets out to prove it so using a dialectical method of argument. As a result, he argues that for a work to be 'politically correct', it must simultaneously be correct in the literary sense. The first principle he establishes is that the work is not autonomous in itself and must be inserted into the context of 'living social relations' themselves determined by production relations according to materialist criticism (1973: 87). Instead of making the usual opposition of whether a work is reactionary or revolutionary, he simply asks: what is its position within the production relations of its time - and this is a question of 'technique' for Benjamin.
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authorship-barthesbenjamin.txt
Technique has a particular sense in German derived from Technik (check Esther Leslie on translation again) but serves the purpose here to collapse the false separation of form (or method) and content. It also allows for the synthesis of commitment and quality that Benjamin proposes. He cites the Russian writer Tretyakov who as an 'operative' writer typifies suitable technique and lies outside the established canon of literary forms as a journalist. This is the part of the argument for Benjamin who thinks that the category of literature should evolve according to the energy of the time and include new forms and confusions (1973: 89). He calls this the 'melting-down process' of established forms - the temperature of which is determined by class struggle (1973: 96). In this way new forms can be cast (evoking 'all that is solid melts into air' perhaps). His example of this regenerative process is the newspaper, because it throws into question established separations - of academic and popular modes, of descriptive and creative writing, but particularly the separation between writer and reader:
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authorship-barthesbenjamin.txt
'For as literature gains in breadth what it loses in depth, so the distinction between author and public, which the bourgeois press maintains by artificial means, is beginning to disappear in the Soviet press. The reader is always prepared to become a writer, in the sense of being one who describes or prescribes. As an expert - not in any particular trade, perhaps, but anyway an expert on the subject of the job he happens to be in - he [sic] gains access to authorship. Work itself puts in a word. And writing about work makes up part of the skill necessary to perform it. Authority to write is no longer founded in a specialist training but in a polytechnical one, and so becomes common property.' (1973: 90)
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authorship-barthesbenjamin.txt
This exists in potential for Benjamin as he recognises that property is crucial here - and look what's happened since then in terms of media ownership. Along with this, he is keen to criticise the intelligentsia's attitude of mind as of little practical use: 'the important thing in politics is not private thinking but, as Brecht once put it, the art of thinking inside other people's heads' (1973:92). He further stresses the important distinction between theory and activism: that it is simply not enough to have political commitment however revolutionary it may seem, 'without at the same time being to think through in a really revolutionary way the question of their own work, its relationship to the means of production and its technique.' (1973: 91) This is what Benjamin defines as a producer (and definitely not consumer). 'Technical progress is, for the author as producer, the basis of his political progress' (1973: 95).
authorship-barthesbenjamin.txt
authorship-barthesbenjamin.txt
Merely to be at the side of the proletariat is no place to be: 'the place of a well-wisher, an ideological patron. An impossible place. (cf. Foster's artist as ethnographer). What is required is 'functional transformation', Brecht's phrase to describe the 'transformation of forms and instruments of production' (1973: 93) - not merely engaging with the apparatus or being satisfied with finished works but seeking to transform the apparatus - to propose technical innovation and revolutionary use-value over mere 'modishness' (by this he is thinking of photographers who depict poverty as spectacle - human misery as an object of consumption in his words, 1973: 96 - what in more contemporary terms, Zizek would describe as 'interpassivity'). The problem of course, even then, is that technical innovation happens all the time but without putting into serious question the ruling interests (this is what Benjamin sought to expose later in the artwork essay). Improvement of the production apparatus for Benjamin, necessarily means in terms of Socialism - the combination of commitment and quality in technique, so to speak. A further example of good technique is that of Dadaism, that sought to test art for its authenticity by ideas of the 'readymade' and photomontage. He describes this as follows: 'You put a frame round the whole thing. And in this way you said to the public: look, your picture frame destroys time; the smallest authentic fragment of everyday life says more than a painting. Just as a murderer's bloody fingerprint on a page says more than the words printed on it.' (1973: 94)
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authorship-barthesbenjamin.txt
Benjamin further suggests that cultural production requires a pedagogic function. It must have the function of a model (1973: 98) turning consumers and readers alike into collaborators. His example is Brecht again. He used the apparatus of epic theatre to reveal the 'functional relationship between stage and audience, text and production, producer and actor. Epic theatre, he declared, must not develop actions but trepresent conditions. A we shall see it obtains its 'conditions' by allowing the actions to be interrupted.' (1973:99) The infamous Brechtian 'alienation' technique (with the emphaisis on 'technnique' in this context) works against the illusion of theatre, allowing the audience to recognise real and present conditions. Thus the mediated (ideological) artifice is uncovered through a process of testing and observing through practice and dramatic actions the alienation of the audience - hopefully in a lasting manner. Brecht 'opposes the dramatic laboratory to the finished work of art' (1973: 10O).
authorship-barthesbenjamin.txt
authorship-barthesbenjamin.txt
The writer must reflect upon their position within the production process like a technician, demonstrating expertise alongside solidarity. This alliance is necessary to 'transform him, from a supplier of the production apparatus, into an engineer who sees his task in adapting that apparatus' (1973: 102) reconciling the means of intellectual production with technical quality and class conflict. Opinions matter but like commitment holds no relevance in itself. He reiterates:
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'An author who has carefully thought about the conditions of production today... will never be concerned with the products alone, but always, at the same time, with the means of production. In other words, his products must possess an organising function besides and before their character as finished works.' (1973: 98)
authorship-barthesbenjamin.txt
authorship-barthesbenjamin.txt
The importance here is that Benjamin stresses an identification with work - the work involved in producing art.
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authorship-barthesbenjamin.txt
authorship-barthesbenjamin.txt
authorship-brechtbelsey.txt
Catherine Belsey (1992), 'Towards a Productive Critical Practice', in Critical Practice, London: Routledge, pp. 125-146.
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Barthes wishes to make the reader no longer a consumer of the text but a producer. Here, Catherine Belsey points out that he is drawing upon Brecht in making the distinction between 'the passive consumer of the readable (lisable) classic realist text and the active producer of meaning who accepts the challenge of the writable (scriptable) text. Brecht distinguishes between the passive audience of dramatic theatre and the active spectators of his own 'epic theatre' aware of the contradictions involved (Belsey, 1992: 125). Despite both efforts, the consumer is still the dominant force in culture as a whole, the products of culture merely commodities for the most part. Texts are largely seen as the end product of a process, a reflection of the world or the output of the creative subject. Criticism too emphasises these aspects at the expenses of detail on the production process itself. Current buzzwords like creativity, innovation, enterprise merely emphasise the point. There is 'an illusion of complicity between the author and the reader' (Belsey, 1992: 127).
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Brecht's solution was to develop a new form of writing that foregrounds contradiction. Belsey proposes not only a new form of writing like Brecht but a new critical practice developed along similar lines to examine the process of production of the text, one that reveals the contradictions inherent in its form - and one might add the contradiction in the critical work itself. Brecht's argument (in his essay Mahoganny) is that each art form is an apparatus not controlled by the artist but by society. Artists might think they are using art forms to express their creativity, but they are in fact producers of artistic merchandise. Artists cannot create outside the apparatus. Therefore, you have to show the way things really work - to 'lay bare the device' (in the words of the Russian Formalists). Art should be considered a form of production, not a mystery; the stage should appear like a factory with the machinery fully exposed (we could think of a laboratory too). There is an excellent example of this in Jean Luc Godard's Tout va Bien in which the outside of the factory is peeled away like that of a doll's house. Benjamin, in 'A Small History of Photography' again quotes Brecht in this regard, who famously declared that:
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'... less than ever does the mere reflection of reality reveal anything about reality. A photograph of the Krupp works or the A.E.G. tells us next to nothing about these institutions. Actual reality has slipped into the functional. The reification of human relations - the factory, say - means that they are no longer explicit. So something must in fact be built up, something artificial, posed.' [1992: 255].
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Rather than simply use this familiar quote as a rejection of photography's usefulness as social description, as is often the case, or worse that the social is unknowable through representation; the point is that it is the surface that reveals nothing about these institutions and an alternative has to be 'posed'. Allan Sekula (in Fish Story: The Coffin Learns to Dance) suggests that if it is the underlying system of exploitation that remains hidden: 'Reified social relations are in a sense invisible to ordinary empiricism, and can only be understood through recourse to abstraction, or as Marx put it in the introduction to 'Grundrisse', through the movement upwards from the concrete to the abstract, and back down to the concrete'.
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Importantly, it is these elements of separation that lead to a political realisation. The idea is that separation produces a disunity that disturbing to the audience, and that this separation leads to learning (and the recognition that reality is similarly artificial). The technique reveal contradictions, induces active participation in the world rather than passive absorption - the naturalisation of ideology. The idea is to change society. Mere absorption is substituted by understanding. This is also called a 'return from alienation' by Brecht (alienation, in the Marxist sense) and the concept 'alienation-effect' (Verfremdungeffekt). The author thus takes on political responsibility for what he/she produces.
authorship-brechtbelsey.txt
Three types of separation explained:
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(Although these obviously interact) these are found in epic theatre that separates these elements rather than bringing them together (in the Gesamtkunstwerk). Brecht proposes these elements be separated.
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1. Interruption - the insertion of material that breaks up a smooth, logical chain of narrative causes and effects.
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2. Contradiction - the joining of stylistic techniques in a discontinuous manner, which breaks down classical norms.
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3. Refraction - the use of mediations between events depicted and the spectator's perception of those events.
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These separations do not merely work on a technical level (ie. between sound, image, etc.) but lead to a disunity and disturbance of the audience but induce an analysis of the elements. This is the argument. Viewers are not able to simply watch in an easy way - and are left with two options: to either dismiss it as 'arty' and obscure or seek to discover its workings, and in so doing rethink conventions.
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More precisely, criticism should offer knowledge of production and so in turn history:
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'The task of criticism, then, is to establish the unspoken in the text, to decentre it in order to produce a real knowledge of history.' (Belsey, 1992: 136)
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Like a good post-structuralist, Belsey would add the decentering of the human subject, and of language in which the raw material to be produced is text itself in the present.
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Gustav Metzger (1996) 'Auto-Destructive Art' in Damaged Nature, Auto-Destructive Art, London: Coracle, pp. 25-63.
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It is hard to dispute that:
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'The extension of concepts and language, the subtlety of the philosophical structure of science demands an extension of concepts and language in the field of art theory, history and criticism.' (Metzger, 1996: 53)
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Drawing upon the Dada movement and revolutionary politics of the early twentieth century, auto-destructive art was a response to changes in science and technology in the 1960s, for instance in the context of recent scientific theories such as quantum physics.
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The inherent violence in Dada, use of explosive and destructive tactics were directly applied to the work of art as a metaphor for change in the social realm brought about by radical actions. Dada was guided by the will to change social conditions and transform everyday reality. The manifestos (of which there are many) are full of longing for a changed world - to turn the impossible into the possible perhaps. Tristan Tzara said that 'Dada means nothing' - the absurd name itself referring to everything and nothing against established meaning in an upside-down world - full of nihilism (a belief in nothingness). It exists '...without aim or design without organisation' and that 'there is a great destructive, negative work to be done' in a political commitment to change (ref?).
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Auto-destructive art was similarly conceived as a way of transforming people's thoughts and feelings about art and, through art, society in general, through an 'aesthetics of revulsion,' using acid, ballistics, corrosion, radiation, and so on as artistic material (Metzger, 1996: 27). Like Dada, the artistic response is one that appears irrational but is intended to be a rational response to the irrationality of society - particularly evident in the emerging potential for destruction of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. Metzger calls this 'potential-probable destruction' and extends the threat to environmental concerns in general (1996: 28). In his view, artists should develop techniques that respond to the complex machinery and ideas, extending the forms of kinetic art at that time to new dynamic and adaptive systems. He quotes Moholy-Nagy's prophetic text of 1922 to stress his point:
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'Stated practically: instead of static material construction (material and form relations) dynamic construction (vital construction and force relations) must be evolved in which the material is employed only as the carrier of forces' [and] 'Carrying further the unit of construction, a dynamic constructive system of force is attained whereby man [sic], heretofore merely receptive in his observation of works of art, experiences a heightening of his own faculties, and becomes himself an active partner to the forces unfolding themselves.' (1996: 37-8; Metzger is quoting from Vision in Motion)
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There's nothing particularly new about stressing these issues, except that Metzger is suggesting that these techniques be used for auto-destruction drawing upon ideas of entropy. But growth is a further possibility in 'auto-creative art' (a term introduced in 1960), whereby works reproduce and transform in limitless iterations, drawing upon discoveries in biological sciences and bio-engineering at that time (1996: 55). However, the ideology is rather different in auto-destructive art that has a social agenda and thus needs to highlight the destructive tendencies of the social world and upend them. In which case, should I be arguing for a de-generative art (much of the work is of course)?
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Cut-up:
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For example, they attacked the mass media through the subversive rearrangement of words and images; cf. the newspaper had assumed a great importance (during the war).
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Tristan Tzara advised aspiring poets to cut a newspaper article into words and make a poem by shaking them out of a bag at random, revealing the hidden possibilities of language, and clearly undermining notions of creativity and genius by providing a way that anyone to work with words - echoing Benjamin's call for the is ready to become a writer.
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With scissors and glue, words could be made to appear as arbitrary patterns, rhythmical noise, mere chance arrangements of words and sounds - in brutist poetry and simultaneous poems - where texts in different languages were read at the same time to visual and aural effect introducing irrationality into literature, art and performance for a purpose - reflecting the confusion and emptiness of the world. Put another way, words are newly invented: 'in these phonetic poems we totally renounce the language that journalism has abused and corrupted'.
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In this, there is a consistent concern with everyday objects challenging the judgment of originality. Duchamp declared that these readymades became works of art as soon as he said they were. He proposed that nothing is owned or original - since tubes of paint are manufactured, even paintings are readymades according to this logic. Similar to cut-up poetry were other collage practices of photomontage, caricature and Duchamp's notion of the readymade - all disputing political and aesthetic realities.
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automatism:
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Experiments with automatic writing, painting, and everyday life were based on the premise that release from conscious control would open up new and previously forbidden zones of creativity - as the union of the imagined and the real. The automatic text reduced the significance of the poet making the text a transcription or discovery rather than a production or invention - making 'poem-objects' or 'found-objects' like the Dadaist 'ready-made'. Automatic techniques used to stimulate creative activity, to encourage spontaneity of utterance and image-making.
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Andre Breton (as key figure) defines surrealism as follows (from the First manifesto):
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"Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express - verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner - the actual functioning of thought... Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of the dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life..."
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Sadie Plant sees the surrealists as 'bluffing an anger which Dada had really felt'. However there were links to Trotsky, Spanish Civil war and Algerian and Moroccan independence. Breton declared: 'I believe it is impossible for us to avoid most urgently posing the question of the social regime under which we live, I mean of the acceptance and non-acceptance of this regime'.
autonomia-negri.txt
Negri, Marx after Marx
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The Italian group 'autonomia', founded in the 1970s, tries to open up new possibilities for the theory and practice of class struggle (not mere theory but praxis certainly, evident in Negri's militant position, aggressively reading the economy politically) - somewhat influenced on a conceptual level by post-structuralism (particularly Deleuze, drawing upon his philosophical position as well as co-writing Communists Like Us; also Marx after Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse results from a series of lectures at the UniversitŽ Paris in 1978 at the invitation of Louis Althusser). The complexity of the argument is somewhat exemplified by the book title Marx Beyond Marx - in that what lies beyond Marx is in itself a return to Marx. The idea of the book is to move beyond what has become the orthodoxy of an understanding of Marx - for Negri, this is expressed as Marx's Grundrisse (1981) beyond Marx's Capital (the conceptual subtlety of this is engendered by an understanding that the Grundrisse notebooks predate Capital and informs its arguments - for Negri, it restores Marx through its rawness and openness, exuding more revolutionary passion). A non-Marxist historiography would find this problematic but it is in entirely in keeping with a historical materialist process of overturning, reversal, supercession, inversion; as 'conversion' (as a 'simultaneous separation and coherence', according to Jim Fleming, in 'Editor's Preface', to, Negri, 1991: vii).
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Autonomia has a complex history bound up with the specific political context of Italy - the detail of which is not so relevant to this study but crucial to an understanding of Negri's position (and in the context of his lengthy imprisonment - note: Negri at once sees the world as a prison, that 'jail equals factory' and to 'to break with capital is to make a prison break', in 'Author's Preface(s)' where he writes in the form of a dialogue between a prisoner and free man, 1991: xvi). There are also a parallel set of political concepts that Autonomia responds to, such as 'hegemony' (from Gramsci, also imprisoned for his political views) that implies a passive working class determined by its relation to Capital, preferring to develop new organisational forms of resistance and collective agents of change (later developed in Empire as the 'multitude' rejecting many of the orthodoxies of worker's parties). Fundamental to this is the interrogation of the nature of work and the value of labour. In the introduction, Fleming (who incidentally set up the publishers Autonomedia - clearly alluding to Autonomia's project) explains the significance of this:
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'If work by the worker was the source of surplus value for the capitalist - working class autonomy indicated the present path of departure or separation for the anti-capitalist struggle, one based not on the "general social interest" of need subordinated to labor, but antagonistic to and against the social whole. This tendency, through refusal of work, was the overall orientation toward the strategy of immanent communism. In the absence of this strategy at this cycle of the struggle, communism would be indefinitely deferred' (1991: xi-xii; note: Negri uses the term Communism in preference to Marxism to emphasise revolutionary action over mere analysis).
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Whereas Capital seeks to valorise work (even unpaid work in homes, schooling, etc), and to re-establish the wage-work relation at all costs, Autonomia seeks to politicise 'work' and undermine spurious hierarchies related to qualifications and different wage levels (in this, it goes beyond Marx who concentrates on wage labour). Autonomia charts a shift from exploitation to domination - no longer through the model of exchange but through force (and hence force must be used to counter force - rational argument in the factory is no longer effective). Thus, a critique of capital suited to the times is posited, one that rejects the conventional pessimism towards revolutionary change evident in much critical theory. (note: although utopian conceptions of the end of capitalism are rejected in Negri, as in Marx - in not conceived of a teleological vision of an end goal but in a continued movement into the future without determinancy. This might be described as wandering, or drifting to use the Situationist term - turning away from orthodoxies on an irregular course, 'to wander is the activity of those who do not have a fixed destination and yet despise immobility'; in an 'uneasy balance between the stillness of a satisfied ontology and the teleology of those who move as if they possess the correct coordinates', in the words of Viano, in Negri 1991, xxxi).
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The term 'autonomy' is clearly important in this connection. This constitutes a departure from other leftist political positions in Italy at the time of writing that would advocate a 'Statist' (state-centred) approach (the discredited too-rigid model of Soviet Marxism for instance). The state simply had to be overthrown - no longer simply bargaining for better conditions in factories (through trade unions) but simply taking them over (with or without unions). One technique was to simply refuse work; paralleled by the artstrike calling on cultural workers to stop making or discussing their work from 1990 to 1993 - proclaimed under the ¾gis of 'Neoism' plagiarising Gustav Metzger's 1974 proposal for an Art Strike, says Stewart Home (1993), in 'Assessing the Artstrike 1990-1993', http://www.thing.de/projekte/7:9%23/y_Assessing_the_Art_Strike.html). The working principle here is that capitalism as an irrational system cannot be replaced by anything through better planning or anything that employs its same logic. The term 'autonomy' is to be seen in this light, as a description of the revolutionary subject that works to its 'own multilateral productive potential' (Ryan, in Negri, 1991: xxx). Any militancy needs to be tuned to these 'autonomous voices'.
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Grundrisse:
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Marx after Marx responds to the Grundrisse (1981) as it is in this that the law of value is articulated. What Marx calls 'real subsumption' that dislocates class exploitation to the wider (global) social realm somewhat masks class antagonism. To Negri, this doesn't mean that class antagonism has disappeared but is present in the social realm, in everyday life - thus undermining the classical Marxist formulation of the base and superstructure. For Negri, a communist critique for the post-modern world responds to an understanding of surplus value within this framework of real subsumption (explain subsumption?). In the Author's Preface, where he sets up a dialogue between his present and former selves, as prisoner and free man accordingly, the free man states: 'To be a communist today means to live as a communist'; to which the prisoner responds: 'This, I think, is possible even in prison, But not outside, until you free us all' (1991: xvii).
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Here the dialogue becomes dialectical evoking the master-slave relation in Hegelian style - in that it is only the slave who can become truly free. That is to say:
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'here, domination and reversal can only be accomplished by those who participate in an antagonistic relation' (Negri, 1991: 9). He adds: 'In practice only the freedom of necessary labor, the creativity of labor applied to itself, its force both creative and destructive, constitutes the real limit of capital and the manifold, recurrent cause of its crisis; up to the point of its reversibility...' (1991: 102).
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Rather than simply see the critique of capitalist hegemony embedded in its internal contradictions, Negri also points to another non-dialectical dimension. In addition to the imposed unity of dialectical relations between worker and capitalist, there is another logic of 'separation' from the forms of domination (note: if the negative trajectory of dialectics needs to be superseded, can this problem be accounted for by the negation of negation?). For Negri, dialectics is no metaphysical law but the temporary logic of capitalist times and part of its internal contradictions to be overthrown along with its domineering class in the 'transition' from socialism to communism. Transition here represents the shift between the crisis and the emergence of revolutionary subjectivity. For the autonomists, the binary informational logic of yes/no has been internalised to such an extent to seem natural and causal rather than complex and multidirectional - and is inadequate to describe subjectivity. He is partly emphasising that any interpretation of Marx must be adapted to the times: particularly to take account of the crisis of value, but more generally in keeping with the transformative power of praxis (in the sense that theoretical analysis leads to revolutionary practice). It is crisis that ruptures the dialectic for Negri, and indicates the autonomy of the proletariat (1991: 104).
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The concept of surplus value has aptly described capital, but Negri would contend that the law of value does not go far enough in describing the dynamic of capital. He adds: 'The only reality we know is that ruled by theft, capitalist alienation and the objectification of living labor, of its use value. Of its creativity. To make all that function according to the law of value, supposing it were possible, would modify nothing. Because there is no value without exploitation. [...] Communism is the destruction of exploitation and the emancipation of living labor. Of non-labor. That and it is enough. Simply.' (1991: 83)
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Surplus value in turn becomes profit when it is made social - to Marx, 'it is a distributive phenomenon and not a creative one' (in the Grundrisse, 1981: 668-9; and in, Negri 1991: 93). One might see how, applying this formulation, how the distribution of free software remains creative. It is through circulation that social capital exerts its power. Capital works socially and expansively, combining labour with everyday life. The antithesis of social capital is proletarian subjectivity for Negri (1991: 128)
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Value:
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In this formulation, value, in the form of money, is always kept in a contradictory state that cannot be resolved. To Negri this is all too clear:
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'Money has the advantage of presenting me immediately the lurid face of the social relation of value; it shows me value right away as exchange, commanded and organized for exploitation [for the generation of surplus value]. I do not need to plunge into Hegelianism in order to discover the double face of the commodity, of value: money has only one face, that of the boss.'(Negri, 1991: 23)
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This summarises the theoretical tendency in the Grundrisse, as Negri reads it, in shifting from a critique of value to a critique of power.
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This draws upon a particular description of the dialectic: 'that is not a Hegelian one of necessary mediation, that is not a Proudhonian one of the law of value, but is the logic of antagonism, of risk, of opening' (1991: 31).
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Interestingly, Negri defends the dialectics of the Grundrisse, as decidedly not 'methodological fetishism' but rather more open-ended:
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'We can see in it the passion for totality, but only in the form of a multiplicity of sequences and leaps, never in a monolithic sense; we can find it, above all, a dynamic which has the plurality and the same diversity of subjectivity, and is nowhere closed.' (1991: 13)
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Is this simply a question of a more open-ended definition of dialectics?
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Negri reiterates that in Marx's method, 'every new constitution of a new structure is the constitution of a new antagonism' (Negri, 1991: 56).
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This partly legitimates his own revisionist project of re-reading the Grundrisse, to rediscover the 'Marxist critique of all forms. It is there, finally, that we find the practical character of Marx's thought. The end of the dialectic? Yes, because the act of thinking here does not have the autonomy from the collective force, from the collective praxis which constitutes the subject as dynamism tending toward communism. The adversary must be destroyed.' (1991: 190)
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Labour:
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The problem in classical Marxism, for Negri, is in regarding the working class as the necessary antagonistic subject of capitalism. Perversely, he looks to Marx to overcome this problem and argues that Marx describes two logics: a dialectical and a non-dialectical one suited to the development of the working class from dominated labour power to a revolutionary class (note: I think this is to avoid themselves necessarily becoming a domineering force, in following the same logic. Anyway, 'working-class power is not the reversal of capitalist power, not even formally' 1991: 150). The revolutionary subject breaks the capitalist dialectic through the refusal to work through 'separation' leading to 'self-valorisation' (note: these terms are explained elsewhere). The idea was/is, put simply, to work for oneself as an individual and as a class. (Cornelia Sollfrank simply says: 'A smart artist makes the machine do the work' - quoted from her web page).
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It should be emphasised that for capitalism to produce surplus value, it has to construct an appropriate subjectivity to do so, and this subjectivity must be antagonistic even for the success of capitalism - without this would be no surplus, and for surplus capital to be generated, there must be exploitation of labour. There are two oppositions at work: 'exchange value against use value' and also 'objectified labor against subjective labor' (Negri, 1991: 68). In the former opposition, 'behind the appearance of exchange a theft takes place' (Negri, 1991: 79) and surplus value in general is 'value in excess of the equivalent' (Marx, 1981: 324); the conventional wisdom of classical Marxism is that surplus labour is stolen from the worker and turned into surplus value or capital. In this latter opposition, Negri drawing upon a passage from the Grundrisse in which labour is characterised in terms of subjectivity (in Marx, 1981: 271-2). Negri translates this as: 'The figures take the form of the opposition and of subjectivity: worker and capitalist, collective worker and collective capitalist' (1991: 77). Negri reads Marx in such a way as to develop a theory of proletarian subjectivity in opposition to capitalist subjectivity.
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Under capitalism, the passive subjectivity of the worker renders it incapable of changing its own lived labour conditions and ensures the success. The worker is denied autonomous subjectivity in other words. Capitalism evidently contains the seeds of its own destruction but knows it - aware of its immanent crisis in other words. To Negri, the 1960s and 1970s demonstrate autonomous needs of the workers and the refusal of capitalist work (through denying the logic of labour value - practically expressed through being absent or sabotage). The 1980s and 1990s seem to demonstrate a counter strategy to contain this refusal through wage controls and worsening labour conditions (such as temporary contracts, and free trade zones). The pointlessness of all the labouring (and the link of money to shit) is made evident in the following quote from the Grundrisse:
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'In fact, of course, this "productive" worker cares as much about this crappy shit he has to make as does the capitalist himself who employs him, and who also couldn't give a damn for the junk' (Marx, 1981: 273). What is being produced is the crappy shit of exploitation and surplus value of course.
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Negri explains that money figures at the centre of the process of domination: 'we find it each time that capital should restructure its command over the crisis - over the insurrection of the workers' use value' (1991: 61). The current global economy proves the point in spreading class antagonism far and wide across the globe, restructuring itself in the pursuit of surplus and constructing the necessary conditions to do so, and continually developing new schemes to avoid dissent ('regeneration' projects are a contemporary local example of the same principles). The mode of production itself is modified - the mode of production made informational is a case in point. Negri says 'every period of crisis is therefore followed by an extensive period of restructuration' (1991: 95) but crisis is merely deferred not altogether avoided. Negri explains the strategy: 'Capital's permanent revolution discloses the motor of its development. Every time we come to a global definition of it the picture undergoes a reversal. Separation, not contradiction, moves the process.' (1991: 116) - new obstacles are produced, not through contradiction but through separation (and it does this currently through 'the world market', what we now think of as globalisation. It is this picture that needs to be inverted, and contradiction needs to be reinstated.
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Machines (see other notes from Capital):
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Capitalism finds it harder to contain the pressure from below as it introduces more and more automation. In Marx's 'Fragment on Machines', Negri sees antagonism moving into subversion. To Marx, the introduction of automatic system of machinery subsumes living labour, and is,
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'set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages. [...] Not as with the instrument, which the worker animates and makes into his organ with his skill and strength, and whose handling therefore depends on his virtuosity. Rather, it is the machine which possesses skill and strength in place of the worker, is itself the virtuoso, with a soul of its own in the mechanical laws acting through it; and it consumes coal, oil etc, just as the worker consumes food, to keep up its perpetual motion.' (1981: 692-4)
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In this, living labour is appropriated by objectified labour in the form of capital's machinery. This is entirely in keeping with the negation of necessary labour, its use-value, and skill is stolen from the workers by the application of technology and science (a parallel might be struck here with Bowles's essay on hardware in which the Apple Mac is regarded as the perfect capitalist machine because of this aspect). For Negri: 'the capitalist appropriation of society is total. The subjectivity of capital has been violently activated. Machines and science have constituted and produced it.' (1991: 143)
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This is crucial as it described the production process as not dependent on labour, but in addition, technology. Dialectically, the proletariat's collective power becomes more pronounced as capital seeks to diminish it on an individual basis.
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Subjectivity:
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In Marx's method, 'antagonism is the motor of development of the system' (Negri, 1991: 54). The anti-capitalist movement thus performs its function as the antagonistic class with more or less success. The immanent crisis is connected to labour: 'the fundamental law of the crisis lies therefore in the contradictory relation between necessary labor and surplus labor, that is, in the functioning of the law of surplus value' which leads Negri to surmise that: 'The subjectivity of living labor opposes in such an antagonistic fashion the consolidation of dead labor into an exploiting power that it negates itself as a value, as an exploited essence, thus proposing itself as the negation of value and exploitation' (1991: 97-8). This is not enough for Negri, negation is simply the first stage of revolutionary consciousness. The point is to move beyond understanding of the conditions to changing them.
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The question remains, at this point in time, as to how organise this labouring opposition into an effective political force (this is where the more recent book Empire again figures - and the soon to be published sequel - that offers a more inclusive definition of the proletariat as the revolutionary subject - for instance that would include the 'marginalised proletariat' of students, the unemployed and unpaid house workers).
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It is the revolutionary subject that concerns Negri, how to conceive of new forms of refusal to produce surplus. Praxis in this way constitutes a reversal, and a transition from surplus value to the redeployment of surplus labour to human needs. Thus, Negri rejects socialism as this doesn't go far enough in transforming labour - seeing it as a repressed alternative to capitalism (and clearly looking towards the failed examples of the time when this was first written in 1985). Free from enforced work, work itself can be transformed according to Negri, through self-determination - what he calls 'self-valorisation' (1991: xxv; note: rather than capitalist valorisation - system of imposed values). He calls for a multiplicity of autonomously-determined needs and projects. He advocates a form of 'terrorism' (note: or what would be commonly described as this, now and then by his imprisoners; he is a militant exemplified in his views on the necessity of violence: 'Proletarian violence, insofar as it is a positive allusion to communism, is an essential element of the dynamic of communism. To suppress the violence of this process can only deliver it - tied hand and foot - to capital. 1991: 173) to achieve these ends in keeping with the conditions for the multinational worker.
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The revolutionary subject is 'self-constituting' building upon the relative 'successes' of feminism that somewhat rejected the preferred (centralised) organisational model (note: I wonder if this new models falls into the trap, like Marxism, of assuming the autonomy of the human subject??). Autonomia rejects a 'verticist' mentality and hierarchical lines of organisation, for a 'pointillist' multilateral militancy of a 'recomposed proletariat and the exaltation of the concept of difference' according to Maurizio Viano (in Negri, 1991: xxxiii). By these means: 'work is no longer work, it is work which is liberated from work' (Negri, 1991: 160).
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Brian Holmes (2003), 'Artistic Autonomy and the communication society', Nettime, Oct 26; conference paper for Diffusion: Collaborative Practice in Contemporary Art, Tate Modern, London.
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The idea of artistic autonomy appears as a strange paradox given the history of conceptual arts practice of the 1960s and 70s aiming to undermine autonomy, and perhaps in particular the formalist discourse of Greenberg and 'deconstructing the totality of the white male Kantian subject' (Holmes, 2003). Brian Holmes, although recognising that the issue is not a precondition for arts practice per se, does think that arts practice engaged with politics wrests on the ability to make free decisions. The issues are somewhat confirmed by examining the word itself. Drawing upon the work of Cornelius Castoriadis, Holmes points out that 'Autos' means self and 'nomos' means law: 'Autonomy means giving yourself your own law' (2003). Given individuals operate in a social context, any attempt to follow laws is a collective and complex problem. For Holmes, 'in this way, collective autonomy becomes a question both of individual or small-group artistic production, and of large-scale cultural policy. [... what the Bureau d'Etudes calls] "the deconstruction and reconstruction of complex machines." This is the way that artistic practices can affect reality.' (2003) he cites the work of Jack Lang with his slogan: 'La culture, c'est les poŽtes, plus l'ŽlectricitŽ (Culture is the poets, plus electricity)' in turn evoking Lenin, at the Congress of Soviets in 1920: 'Communism is Soviet power, plus the electrification of the entire country.'(2003) To Holmes, this is an indication of the power of creativity to turn energy into creative labour. In the context of the event at the Tate Modern (in which Holmes is speaking) the irony of its former use as a electric power plant proves the point:
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'It's a mausoleum, a tomb, which the party cadres of New Labour have turned into a tourist attraction, a kind of crystal palace of globalization. It can be illuminated, electrified in its turn: so the tomb of the working class is made into a glittering artwork. Poetry meets electricity.' (2003)
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Furthermore, the list of its corporate sponsors further proves the point (British Telecom, Bloomberg and British Petroleum not least) making the Tate thoroughly stitched into the financial core of 'transnational state capitalism'.
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The importance of all this for Holmes is to rethink the tactics of experimental and politicised artistic practice given the values of transnational state capitalism have thoroughly permeated the art world, 'not only through the commodity form, but also and even primarily, through the artists' adoption of management techniques and branded subjectivities' (2003). He is thinking of techno-collectives like etoy and their pseudo corporate organisation and marketing techniques - what Holmes calls 'neomanagement' and the opportunism of the 'flexible personality' (2003). Previous oppositional tactics expressing a critique of the institution of art have been incorporated. so what other spaces are there outside of arts traditional spaces? The internet to him is also an 'integrative system' acting as an ideological state apparatus: 'it hails you, it connects to you and gives you an IP number; it interpellates you into Imperial ideology.' (2003) In the light of this, new forms of class antagonism are required. He is thinking of new organizational forms, like the research network developed by Multiplicity, his own engagements with cross-border solidarity movements, like Kein Mensch ist illegal, and his collaborations with Bureau d'Žtudes. But he remains skeptical asking: 'What are the sources of this networked resistance? And what exactly is being resisted? Is revolution really the only option? Or are we not becoming what we believe we are resisting?' (this is from the paper 'The Revenge of the Concept: Artistic Exchanges and Networked Resistance', from the 'Geography - and the Politics of Mobility' symposium in Vienna).
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At this point in time artistic resistance is now entangled in
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the networks. Thus Eric Kluitenberg, in 'Transfiguration of the Avant-Garde/The Negative Dialectics of the Net' writes: 'In this paradoxical environment, dominant discourses of social, political and economic power can be challenged at the level of the representational systems they employ. The classical avant-gardes provide a repository of ideas, tactics and strategies that are now played out in a radically enlarged context; no longer the context of art itself, but that of the network society.' (2002)
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For Brian Holmes this offers hope for a resistance based on self-organisation and cultural production that lies outside the frameworks of the marketplace and 'the spheres of privilege which are insured by contemporary capitalism' (also from 'revenge of the concept').
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wake of modernity:
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'In Old Norse, "vaku" or "vak" meant a hole in the ice. Subsequently, in its transformation into wake, 'vaku' came to refer to the stretch of smooth water left behind a moving ship, a ship moving perhaps through icy waters, an ice-breaker perhaps. Already the metaphor of wake begins to awaken us to art's experience of practice within contemporary culture; for practice does indeed find itself in arctic conditions, condemned to occupy the icy hole, to be in the freezing wake left by the engine of modernity, preserved in ice by the culture itself. And maybe this hole, art's hole, also names your Museum as that which holds art at arm's length at the culture's frozen margins: there art might be represented as a brass monkey, up to its waist in the icy waters, impotent, but still chattering.' (Phillipson, 1989: 13)
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Kevin Kelly (2003) Out of Control, London: Fourth Estate.
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The increasing biological influence on technology is described by Kevin Kelly as 'the marriage of the born and the made' (2003). The machine is seen to work like an organism and vice versa but in a more convincing and complex fashion: 'human-made things are behaving more lifelike, and [...] life is becoming more engineered' (2003: 17). Kelly enthuses about the technological future but one that is informed by biology (if not biologically-determinist). The 'out of control' of the book's title refers to these systems as emergent and relatively autonomous. As opposed to mechanical systems or the factory assembly line modelled on the clock, other systems are ordered in parallel operations, with no obvious chain of command, as a network. Kelly says: 'What emerges from the collective is not a series of critical individual actions but a multitude of simultaneous actions whose collective pattern is far more important. This is the swarm model' sometimes referred to as complex adaptive systems (2003: 39). The enthusiastic reception of this logic goes out of control in itself, when applied to other fields of interest, to justify lack of control as somehow natural.
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This network logic 'revolutionizes' social practices under the conditions of what Kelly calls 'network economics'. He neglects to talk about surplus value when he describes companies 'combining well-educated human beings and networked computer intelligence into one seamless companywide network to ensure uncompromised quality' (2003: 236) - and profit of course. This is the vision of the networked and modular factory of the global marketplace as a self-perpetuating system (and ideology). It is a 'pure network' that exhibits distributed, decentralized, collaborative, and adaptive behaviours. Kelly's concerns around adaptive systems are not ideological but around understanding them, controlling them and optimising them.
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Under the conditions of network economics, companies take on the character of software with bugs in the system (Kelly, 2003: 244). The example is Microsoft's new operating system (at that time) with 4 million lines of code. Despite Bill Gates reassurances that bugs have been eliminated, users know better. It is probably inevitable in such complex systems and offers hope to those less convinced than Kelly about the motivations for operating these systems. It follows that companies invest heavily in developing the manufacturing process not the product. Perhaps this further proves the point about the motivating force of the economic system, and makes software, or more accurately object-orientated software, a suitable metaphor for these processes. It enables a more rational approach according to Kelly:
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'Object-oriented programs create a mild distributed intelligence in software. Like other distributed beings, it is resilient to errors, it heals faster (remove the object), and it grows by incrementally assembling working subunits.' (2003: 248)
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Analogous to a subunit, the worker becomes ever more immaterial in such a scenario.
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If the worker looks ever more unlikely to throw off their chains and their role as agents of change contested, it is perhaps also significant that the idea of revolution or discontinuity has become commonplace. Unlike the 'ordered change' of nature, revolutionary 'disordered change' is the realm of technology. Kelly claims that 'technology introduced the concept of revolution as an ordinary mode of change. [...] Science and commerce now seek to capture change - to instill it in a structured way so that it works steadily, producing a constant tide of microrevolutions instead of dramatic and disruptive macrorevolutions. How can we implant change into the artificial so that it is both ordered and autonomous?' (2003: 431) - depressing stuff! Some lies in his later assertion that 'Learning plus evolution is basically the recipe for culture.' (2003: 437) If his technological utopian could be transferred to the social realm, things aren't so bleak after all.
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FŽlix Guattari (1995), Chaosophy, ed. Sylvere Lotringer, New York: Semiotext[e].
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'When I was a child, I was, so to speak, in pieces; really a little schizo around the edges. I spent years trying to put myself back together again. My only thing was, I would pull myself along different pieces of realities in doing it.' (1995: 7)
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Guattari considers such a systematic disorganisation an important part of understanding subjectivity in an individual and collective sense (and is drawing together the disciplines of psychoanalysis and politics, later with more philosophy from Deleuze). For Guattari, subjectivity is manufactured, according to social and economic conditions - it is a thoroughly political issue (but this also goes beyond Althusser's ideological apparatuses). Here he is breaking with structuralism that would see language and communication forming subjectivities (and by extension also Lacan's psychoanalytic structuralism) as well as orthodox postmodernism that would see technological progress as encouraging a '"schiz" in relation to desire and creativity. On the contrary, I think that machines must be used - and all kinds of machines, whether concrete or abstract, technical, scientific or artistic. Machines do more than revolutionize the world, they completely recreate it.' (1995: 19).
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This is where new ways of understanding these processes involves disorganisation and chaos. [what we tried to do in the Sarai text] He contends:
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'It is obvious that the mechanics of semiotic and institutional management in the flux of production and circulation correspond less and less to the evolution of productive forces and collective investments. Even the most narrow-minded economists are stunned to discover a sort of craziness in these systems and feel the urgent need to find alternatives.' (1995: 22) In this 'flux' describes the action or process of flowing. Flow is shape plus change, motion plus form - and might be applied to changes in economics or history, and clearly Guattari has chaos in mind (drawing upon 'flow theory' perhaps).
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Alternatives to the unified subjectivity of the 'New World Order' (or what Guattari also calls 'World Integrated Capitalism') may be difficult to imagine under such conditions but important to imagine all the same. There is a collective aspiration from disorder to order - what Guattari calls 'singularisation' - and new ways need to be imagined that do not automatically reinforce hierarchies and oppressions but that utilise 'life itself and collective desire' (1995: 25) to good effect and clearly in addition to an understanding of the political economy and the Freudian unconscious. To Guattari, 'Capitalism mobilizes everything to halt the proliferation and the actualization of unconscious potentialities' (1995: 49). These psychic antagonisms are political - both individual at the level of desire and then collective and social. Rather like Zizek (but without Lacan or Lenin), he sees the reorganisation of better social relations as no more complex than other scientific or aesthetic endeavours - no more difficult to 'solve than questions of quantum physics or the manipulation of genes' (1995: 46). Central to this, is that change does not simply happen on a large scale socio-economic level or in ideology but increasingly from mutations at a micro scale molecular level. The possibilities for liberation lie in the combination of these effects in the 'machinic integration' of the processes of production, circulation and information. For instance, 'a mutation like that introduced by microprocessors changes the actual substratum of human existence and, in reality, opens up fabulous possibilities for liberation' (1995: 47-8; note: generally meant as a criticism of Marxism, although Lenin did talk of the little screw in the big machine as metaphor, according to Pierre Rose, in Guattari, 1995: 114). In other words, there is a dynamic between micro-politics and politics in general - integrating life and politics or art if you prefer. Guattari sees this as moving from 'dream to social reality, from poetry to science, from the most violent social reality to the most tender daily relations' (1995: 50).
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In forging new ways of conceptualising these issues that combine analytical and political action, Guattari calls himself an 'idea-thief', using second-hand concepts as well as inventing neologisms where necessary. Of particular interest is the concept 'concrete machine' that does not integrate different ideas from different domains but articulates 'singularities of the field under consideration to join absolutely heterogeneous components' (1995: 40). This is somewhat related in method to other concepts such as 'intradisciplinarity', not interdisciplinarity, the capacity to traverse different fields - most notably expressed in the bringing together of capitalism and schizophrenia. These concepts are tools not universal ideas, but ideas in flux that are complex (or more inclusive than that, 'arrangements') and 'rhizomic,' open to influence from other fields of interest. The idea is to suppress all possible duality. This happens necessarily in what he sees as 'rhizomic organisation' - akin to chaos - that avoids old dualistic formulations and hierarchies that are based on conditions of exclusion and domination.
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The capitalist machine is both rational and irrational, a rational framework under an irrational impulse. Guattari says that 'Everything is rational in capitalism, except capital or capitalism itself' (1995: 54). Capital is simply insane or demented to someone like Guattari with a psychiatric training - at a 'terminal stage'. In these terms, it is a repressive system that organises power to hide desire, that goes beyond an understanding of ideology as the predominant analytical mode (such as in Marxism). In fact, to Deleuze and Guattari, all ideologies mask desire, or repress it, and it is desire that requires liberation - and the point is that you cannot liberate desire by ideological imposition (of, for instance, a new alternative apparatus of State). But how then? Deleuze and Guattari advocate an oscillation between the spontaneity of anarchy and the hierarchical structure of party organisation to liberate desire - escaping the 'impasse of private fantasy' that the capitalist desiring machine has protected from social expression (1995: 62-3; an 'intradisciplinary' mix of Hakim Bey and Antonio Negri's ideas in connection to my notes perhaps). The failure of social revolutions is that they have failed to liberate desire sufficiently - merely a project of replacing one repression with another. (Surely, the negation of negation is designed with this in mind?)
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Orderly disorder
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----------------
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The contradictory phrase (after N. Katherine Hayles's 'Chaos as Orderly Disorder: Shifting Ground in Contemporary Literature and Science' New Literary History 20, 1989, pp.305-22) can be taken as a neat attempt to correlate chaos theory with dialectical thinking. Evidently, the relationship between order (that which can be classified and rationalised) and disorder (that cannot, because it is too chaotic and generalised) does not lie simply in opposition. The science of chaos (as a contradictory phrase, also sometimes called 'chaotics') characterises the apparent contradiction in the scientific study of chaotic phenomena. What has been discovered is that within the unpredictability of chaotic systems lie deep structures of order (Hayles, 1991: 1). However, the behaviour is so complex that conventional mathematical method cannot adequately account for these processes.
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Chaos theory
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A common understanding of Chaos theory describes how a relatively small input can have massive consequences (note: the term 'chaos' was popularised through James Gleick's book Chaos: Making a New Science, New York: Viking, 1987. Also this position is probably the complete opposite of Foucault who would tend to see the global impact upon the local only, in a closed system of discipline). Chaos theory has captured the popular imagination but also has serious analogical implications:
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'A small fluctuation may start an entirely new evolution that will drastically change the whole behaviour of the macroscopic system. The analogy with social phenomena, even with history is inescapable.
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[...and at the level of matter, that is] active, as matter leads to irreversible processes and irreversible processes organise matter.' (Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos, London: HarperCollins, 1985: 14 & xxix, quoted in Owens, 1996: 85. Owens is also drawing upon the work of Roy Bhasker such as Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation, London: Verso 1986). Brian Goodwin has outlined some of these issues in his essay 'Complexity, Creativity, and Society' (1997), casting new developments in science such as chaos theory as part of its dialectical relationship with broader social issues, and points to resultant ethical issues in assuming things to be simply accidental and contingent (1997: 121).
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The suggestion is that systems, even social systems, are not closed but also open to influence and change from external and internal factors. Furthermore, that scale is of crucial relevance measured in fractals rather than accepted and absolutist measurements and global scale - at both micro and macro levels. The much quoted example is given of the very scale of the ruler determining the measurement of the coastline of Britain (from Benoit Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature, New York, Freeman 1883) - emphasising the truism that the smaller the measurement the longer the length of the thing measured (even if measuring a ruler for instance). Against Newtonian mechanics and Euclidean geometry, scale is seen to be more complex and unpredictable. It would appear that old systems of measurement that assume that systems are linear, closed and fixed are no longer appropriate to a vision of a networked society and technology that emphasises non-linearity, openness and mutability.
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The term 'chaos' suggests a gaping disordered void, or abyss (from the greek verb-stem 'kha') and Hayles charts the general Western tendency to think of chaos in negative terms by its contrast to Taoist thinking (1991: 3). The argument that disorder is no mere opposite of order confounds this commonplace interpretation. Within self-organising systems, disorder may lead to order, and order is encoded into disorder at a fundamental level.
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Science becomes cast in terms of disorder rather than rational order, but this is a dialectical relationship in that simultaneously 'there is also, paradoxically, a sense in which it is about order'; and then quoting Hayles: 'complex systems nevertheless become chaotic in predictable ways'. Chaotic processes and systems express order and disorder in patterns that 'can be mapped and described in terms of period doubling and recursive symmetry' (Owens, 1996: 85 - I need to define these terms). In other words, they are not absolutely chaotic (or random) but express a complex structure of order and disorder. The science of complexity, in other words, 'refers to the potential for emergent order in complex and unpredictable phenomena' (Goodwin, 1997: 112). This complex patterning is evident in 'strange attractors'; sometimes known as the Lorentz attractor (Edward Lorentz in the 1970s, developing the earlier work of PoincarŽ on mapping planetary movements, represented these behaviour patterns using a computer). Along with a diverse range of mathematical equations, this is one example of the ways in which very small changes can be seen to have unpredictable consequences, even though they are linked in a deterministic manner (thus Lorenz accounted for the difficulty of predicting the weather). The system expresses unpredictability despite its deterministic character. When a change takes place in a predicted chain of events, the strange attractor causes the initial system and the disturbed system to move apart exponentially fast. I hope it is clear that I am not so much interested in a precise scientific mapping or explanation of this but its metaphoric potential: 'tiny disturbances can produce exponentially divergent behaviour' (Goodwin, 1997: 113. As mentioned, the principle is important to Goodwin as he points to the ethical dimension expressed through retaining some sense of order). Certainty is certainly thrown into question, but a further aspect is implied by my paradoxical way of expressing this.
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Another key term for complex systems is 'recursive symmetry' that Hayles describes as the kind of perspective required 'to see the predictability that lies hidden within their unpredicatable evolutions' (1991: 10). This explains the relationship between large and small scale wherein the form remains constant (a pattern within a pattern and so on). In other words, the concept explains how dynamic systems are very sensitive to small changes.
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Furthermore, Ilya Prigogine (predating Gleick's work of course) suggests that (new) order might be generated through disorder. In a description that sounds rather like the Internet, Prigogine and Stengers maintain that all systems contain sub-systems (1985). Furthermore, within these systems and sub-systems, positive feedback loops (from computer science) might generate the further development of a process, to the point of causing a fundamental and unforeseeable change of the existing system (by analogy, one could think of capitalism as one such system that contains the seeds of its own destruction). This is important as it emphasises the constructive positive role that disorder might play in creating order. According to this logic, at the 'bifurcation point', chance takes hold of determinism, and as a result either disorder or order may be generated. In science, this is the theory of self-organising matter that Owens has adopted to explain the possibilities of a social system - wherein order is both expressed in chaos and might be generated out of chaos (1996: 86). Living systems such as society itself is clearly unpredictable, determined by rules (strange attractors for instance), but emergent and unpredictable. The possibilities are large and complex, but not endless nor open-ended. Owens is partly concerned to distance herself from what she sees as the mistaken (postmodern) view of taking a theory like the one of chaos as proof of uncertainty, virtuality and scientific myth-making (she is particularly thinking of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1970 and Feyerabend's Against Method, 1975).
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Chaos and theory
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However, clearly such theories do contribute to the critique of order and established discourses such as science. Reflexivity is an established critical method in quantum mathematics as much as cultural studies or psychoanalysis, wherein scientific theory 'introduced the effect of the observer upon the observed at the microscopic level and the notion of relativity at the macroscopic' (Owens, 1996: 86). In fact she goes further and suggests an unconscious hypocrisy in denying progress and teleology on the one hand, and a belief in the progression from 'spurious order to playful disorder' in orthodox postmodernism on the other. At the same time, scientific method has always embraced a strategic sense of uncertainty not just the arts and humanities. There is a necessary politics to the representation of order here. For instance, the provisional and unstable aspects of science (such as in the work of Newton) were systematically ignored for the promotion of 'Newtonian' consistency and stability for ideological ends - the double meaning of 'order' is appropriate in this respect (for more detail, see Robert Markley, 'Representing Order: Natural Philosophy, Mathematics, and Theology in the Newtonian Revolution' in Hayles, ed. Chaos and Order, pp.125-148).
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The recognition of complexity, furthermore, suggests a shift from the individual to the collective, and from that of quantity to quality (Goodwin, 1997: 111; [unwittingly echoing Marx]). Brian Goodwin despite recognising the interrelationship of order and chaos, too easily equates this sense of uncertainty to a critique of modernity (1997: 114), assuming modernism to affirm determinism. This is rather too easy in equating chaos with the nonlinearity, fragmentation and discontinuity of post-structuralism (upgrading structuralism). He forgets plenty, when he describes the shift 'from the science of quantities that has characterised modernity, towards a science of qualities that is emerging in the post-modern era' (1997: 118; citing his book How the Leopard Changed Its Spots, 1994). Whereas my position (and I am not alone in this regard) is that modernity has always embraced uncertainty and its own critique, and should not necessarily to be seen as deterministic - dialectics is a case in point. Similarly, scientific method is both open and closed both embracing chance and determinism in a complex manner (according to Prigogine for instance). Owens explains this in dialectical terms - rather like reaching a point of synthesis that becomes a new thesis in endless reiteration.
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'At a bifurcation point, chance takes over, and it is impossible to predict what will happen; but in between times, determinism takes over again, until fluctuations force the new system into far from equilibrium conditions and a new bifurcation point is reached.' (1996: 88)
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Note: 'bifurcation' means splitting, the point where within a system, one path or another must be followed. Although the choice is limited to one of two, the decision is thoroughly unpredictable. With increased frequency, bifurcations can lead to chaotic systems of course. Hence, bifurcation theory is a common explanation for how ordered structures can arise form disorder. In other words, bifurcation apparently synthesises order and disorder -
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'... as in the labyrinth, chaos is uncomprehended order' (Weissert, 1991: 240).
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Prigogine's idea of the 'creative void' reinforces a culturalist thinking (even if many scientists remain sceptical of its philosophical trajectory) and 'validates the dialectic between order and disorder by finding analogous processes in physical systems. Moreover, it posits an optimistic turn to such processes by positing them as sources of renewal...' (Hayles, 1991: 14). The synthesis of order and disorder allows for the unpacking of deterministic or totalising theories and the possibility of conceiving positive change (for instance and arguably, something deconstruction does not do as it is not dialectical and deemphasises order in favour of randomness. According to Owens, deconstruction is 'trapped in the very dualism it seeks to circumvent' 1996: 91). Ironically, scientific theories such as the ones mentioned previously have been used to develop anti-totalising theories whilst at the same time without recognising their totalising aspects. Hayles simply says:
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'This interpretation of the new scientific paradigms ignores the fact that they have not renounced globalisation. [...] what makes it noteworthy is the discovery that despite the disorder, universal structures can still be discerned... the belief that the science of chaos opposes globalising theories is, then, a misapprehension about how these theories work.' (quoted in Owens, 1996: 90)
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Of course the same can be said of postmodernism itself - in that it became a totalising theory on the subject of anti-totalising theory. (Could the same criticism be levelled at the Network metaphor? I doubt it, as this is suitably complex and contradictory).
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Complex systems are dynamic, expressing change through the actions of variables, within a time-frame. However, it is also argued that the postmodern approach to the nature of time falls short in this respect. For instance, in the drive towards discrediting an upwards mode of Darwinian evolution, order privileged over disorder - survival of the fittest and all that). Put differently this has meant privileging the synchronic over the diachronic. Prigogine and Stengers provide a quite different model in which 'both entropy and evolution play a role: time is associated with randomness because only when a system behaves in a random way can past and future and irreversibility enter the picture; but irreversibility is also the source of order. While some systems run down, others evolve to a higher level of organisation.' (1996: 92) Time is cumulative and hierarchical - both synchronic and diachronic, scientific and discursive. If every attempt to provide an anti-totalising theory becomes a totalising theory in itself, the only solution is to accept mutability. One solution would be to see any antithetical mode is only effective as part of a chain of events of dialectical movement. Thus any anti-totalising theory would be a temporary state and only ever strategic.
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The simple logic of the whole is more than the sum of its parts is made manifestly evident. This is substantiated in terms of entropy as the measure of disorder, and 'concepts derived from the quantum mechanical definition of coherent states', in what Goodwin describes as a more holistic view (1997: 117). The metaphor is pervasive, and complexity theory has become commonplace as a means of understanding social and economic change, as well as evolution. Evolution follows this logic according to Laszlo (Ervin Laszlo, Evolution: the Grand Synthesis, Boston: Shambhala 1987):
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'This is how evolution seems to work: in 'chaotic' evolutionary theory, a bifurcation point produces a higher and more complex level of existence or unwelt which eventually destabilises itself from within by what amounts to redundant amplification of its founding premises until a new phase of chaotic fluctuation leads to its being superceded in its turn' (Owen, 1996: 93)
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The Darwinian perspective on evolution is inadequate in this regard. It does not sufficiently account for the ways in which different species adapt to their environments (Note: an orthodox view is that through competition between organisms, only the 'fittest' survive and produce offspring). Equally misleading and apolitical is the alternative view that: 'species go extinct not because of bad genes but because of bad luck' (David Raup in Extinction, quoted in Goodwin, 1997: 116). Furthermore, it makes an unacceptable political metaphor of course (of the inevitability and naturalness of free trade, open competition and market forces where the rich get richer and so on). Engels puts this neatly: 'Darwin did not know what a bitter satire he wrote on mankind, and especially on his countrymen, when he showed that free competition, the struggle for existence, which the economists celebrate as the highest historical achievement, is the normal state of the animal kingdom' (1980: 351). There is some danger is making too close a connection between scientific results and social programs (Hayles, 1991: 15) - too often cultural programmes are simply validated by spurious science. Chaos theory clearly cannot be simply limited to its technical aspects, and has been aggressively been applied as metaphor and analogy. But the correspondence between culture and science is not merely metaphorical or analogical - I am reminded of the truism by Dick Hebdige that even metaphors have real effects (ref?). What stands for what (in the enactment of metaphor) is only one of the further problems in the use of such an overused concept that aims to disrupt the ordered production of meaning? Does metaphor express order and disorder too? Chaos theory is being used to legitimate and illegitimate various ideas, as thus enters the cultural and generative matrix of ideology, in excess of metaphor.
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Political and creative processes in the most general sense contain unpredictable elements because they are complex by nature and open to outside influence. In such a way it is possible to rise above base instinctive behaviour. By extension (not extinction), the individual success or failure of creative types (artists, not least) is accounted for by luck and circumstance (not good breeding as such but class issues are clearly relevant). Contradiction between parts is required for the complex whole to adequately describe the ways in which these parts express both disorder and order (and is thus one of the essential functions of life itself). Thus fragmentation is rejected for an 'ordered complexity' that is neither ordered nor random. Along these lines of thinking and in general terms, orthodox postmodernism (deconstruction, post-structuralism et al) rest on 'bad science' and 'bad history' (Owens, 1996: 94); and bad politics. Take for example, the fractured human subject: on the one hand being a critique of bourgeois autonomy and yet entirely without agency. Surely, people and things are more complex, dynamic and self-organising. The reality we experience is decidedly more complex.
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chaos and marxist theory
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'Like chaos theory, the negation of negation is not just a metaphor, but a description of a pattern of change' (Owens, 1996: 103).
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In developing dialectical thinking from Hegel's idealism, Marx rejects the absolute subject ('the idea' - see quote where Marx argues that what he is doing is the exact opposite of Hegel) to embrace 'the causal relations within and between historically emergent, developing humanity and irreducibly real, but modifiable nature' (Owens, 1996: 99, quoting Bhasker's 'Reclaiming Reality'). In doing this, there are obvious parallels to chaos theory in the interconnectedness of things and the recognition of the importance of the influence of external conditions on any perspective. Crucially this interconnects the economy with the natural and social realm - and that these realms are governed by the same dialectical laws (incidentally it is whether these laws extend to the natural realm that chaos theory perhaps confirms). In other words, no part of the system can be falsely separated from its interconnection to the whole system (can I find a quote to confirm this?); the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Trotsky says 'We call our dialectic, materialist, since its roots are neither in heaven nor in the depths of our own 'free will', but in objective reality, in nature.' (quoted in Owens, 1996: 106)
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Engels in 'Introduction to Dialectics of Nature' (1980) outlines the defining characteristics of the dialectical laws of motion. Crucial to the legitimisation of this was the emancipation of natural science from theology; he charts the development of thinking to emphasise the point: '... the Arabs had left behind the decimal notation, the beginnings of algebra, the modern numerals, and alchemy; the Christian Middles Ages nothing at all' (1980: 340). He describes science locked into a theological logic of the 'absolute immutability of nature', planets circling, stars fixed, kept in place by 'universal gravitation' (1980: 341). For instance, Newton posited universal gravitation as an essential property of matter, its tangental force giving rise to the orbits of planets. How these things came into being in the first place were simply explained by divine creation. In contrast to this 'petrified outlook on nature' materialists attempted to 'explain the world from the world itself' (1980: 342-3).
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Kant's 'General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755) suggested that the solar system had 'become' in the course of time, in turn the earth had become, and as a result its history therefore must be 'not only of co-existence in space but also of succession in time' (1980: 343). Nature comes into being and come out of being. It transforms itself as part of the overall process of repeated acts of creation rather than one single original source of creation. Around the same time, similar attacks were veiled in the fields of botany and zoology proclaiming theories of descent of organisms (firstly Wolff in 1759 according to Engels, later and more notoriously through Darwin in 1859). Similarly in the study of Physics, Descartes' view that that laws of motion were fixed was replaced with a view that matter existed in motion in an eternal cycle. Echoing the sentiment of 'all that is solid melts into air' (The Communist Manifesto), Engels summarises these tendencies as,
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'all rigidity was dissolved, all fixity dissipated, all particularity that had been regarded as eternal became transient, the whole of nature shown as moving in eternal flux and cycles. [...]
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All nature [...] from protista [note: unicellular and cellularless protozoa] to man, has its existence in eternal coming into being and going out of being, in ceaseless flux, in unresting motion and change' (1980: 346)
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'It is an eternal cycle in which matter moves [...] nothing [even the concept of nothing] is eternal but eternally changing, eternally moving matter and the laws according to which it moves and changes.' (1980: 353)
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[Generally, engels's view of the dialectics of nature is regarded as rather crude]
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What had been once intuition, had been proved in clearer form, for Engels, through empirical proof (although remember, scientific evidence is not fixed either but in motion). Nature arises from differentiation, from the single cell through to complicated organisms, and does so historically. This is crucial to Engels, not only to explain the human distinction from apes, and the development of language, but more in terms of the defining characteristic of human labour - the essay 'The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man' written in 1876, provides more detail on this (1980: 354-364). He continues [writing in 1875-6]: 'Even the steam engine, so far his most powerful tool for the transformation of nature, depends, because it is a tool, in the last resort on the hand.' (1980: 349) And in turn, the hand is linked to the brain, and consciousness of the laws of motion themselves with which change can be influenced.
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It follows that dialectics is no simply dualistic notion but the idea that opposites interact in contradiction:
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'Old dualisms give way to new ideas of interaction and synthesis: either/or; order/chaos; change/stasis; mechanism/flux; determinism/existentialism; mind/matter; theory/practice; positive/negative; science/humanities; cause/effect; life/death. [...] Synthesis is not merging or the wiping of difference. Instead there is a fruitful tension between the two, a meaningful contradiction'. (Owens, 1996: 100-1).
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Herein lies the impetus for change, and in the case of Marxism between the contradictions between the means and relations of production. As a model of generative processes, it offers a counter-argument to causal relations, such as a straightforward linear movement between cause and effect. A minute change might have massive consequences - like making a mistake on the production line (John Latham's proposal for British Leyland comes to mind, where for each worker was required to make a mistake). Similarly 'chaotic systems have a kind of harmony, but it is neither static nor complete. For chaos theory it is disequilibrium which produces change' (Owens, 1996: 101). Both express the possibility of development and improvement in the system and embrace the concept of progress. Each new stage of development is an improved and synthesised version of the previous stage, in the continuing cycle of progress (although the possibilities for negative change are just as likely). All the same, a general rule applies: 'Complex adaptive systems function best when they combine order and chaos in appropriate measure' (Goodwin: 1997: 115).
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Owens quotes Prigogine (again from Order out of Chaos) in saying: ' being and becoming are not to be opposed one to the other: they express two related aspects of reality' (1996: 102). Similarly, she cites the many transformations of quantity into quality (evident not least in Capital) as indicative of the belief in the possibilities of positive change. Thus, she draws a parallel between the revolutionary moment and the bifurcation point as the point where dramatic change takes place. (note: Similarly, Goodwin cites the work of Parkard and Langton on the dynamic behaviour of cellular automata, in identifying 'the edge of chaos' (1997: 115). It is here that order and chaos are combined so that change can take place.) But this patterning does not stop there for it to operate dialectically, but needs continual improvement so as to not stagnate (thus Stalinism is accounted for its lack of open-endedness, as it wrongly assumed the dialectical process to have ended, and closed it down). On the contrary, every new synthesis should become a new thesis and so progress is not stopped short, and thus resists 'premature closure and false totalities' (Owens, 1996: 104).
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My contention is that dialectics continues to remain a useful conception and model of change to describe systems that appear to contain the same logic. Whether it is a law of nature seems debatable (how could this is proved either way?) but chaos theory at least appears to imply this productively drawing together thinking about the interconnections of nature, history, society, technology and politics. Furthermore, Marxism would suggest that human subjects are constituted through their relationship to society and institutions, and that society cannot be described simply as a collection of individual subjects but is a far more complex system that takes account of individual differences but also of collective actions. (link to the network society). Even for Bhasker, 'for emancipation to be possible. Knowable emergent laws must operate' (from Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation, quoted in Goodwin, 1997: 121). This approach provides the possibility of change through collective human agency - at the point of bifurcation or revolution.
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This is a forceful argument but clearly one not without its difficulties. Prigogine, for instance, thinks that dialectical materialism despite its undoubted similarities to the new science is too extreme in its rejection of determinism (in Order Out of Chaos, p.252-3). However, this is a misunderstanding of dialectics that does not see everything as fluid and in flux but simply more so than conventional deterministic systems (Owens, 1996: 105 - she says Newtonian systems). On the other hand, many critics of Marxism see it as simply too mechanistic, but this fails to take proper account of the dialectical method (for instance, Althusser operating in the euro-marxist tradition tried to distance the mature Marx from Engels and dialectics). There are a number of examples of the ways in which in practice, Marxism has sought to separate dialectics from materialism: remaining in impoverished form under Stalinism, or by focusing on contradiction through Maoism (Owens cites Mao's On Contradiction). Luk‡cs, on the other hand, in History and Class Consciousness, deemphasies the application of the dialectic to the natural realm, seeing it applicable only to the social and conceptual realms. Along with Gramsci, this is a popular point of emphasis in focusing the dialectic away form the contradiction inherent in nature and introducing the contradiction between reality and the will of the subject (the revolutionary perhaps). I think it is possible to draw from both positions but it is worth emphasising that dialectics challenges the pessimism of much contemporary critical theory (under the influence of post-modern thinking). By its inherent method, it offers the possibility of transformation coexisting with a tight structural framework - it is both a paradigm shift and an old discredited paradigm in itself: it encapsulates the idea of orderly disorder wherein positive change remains a possibility.
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Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers (1985), Order Out of Chaos: ManÕs New Dialogue With Nature, London: Fontana.
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On the problem of time, Prigogine and Stengers state: 'The world is far from homogeneous. Therefore the question can be put in different terms: What is the specific structure of dynamic systems that permits them to "distinguish" between past and future? What is the minimum complexity involved?' (1985: 16) Progress can be conceived in these terms. They cite Boltzman who investigated the correlation of probability and irreversibility: 'Only when a system behaves in a random way may the difference between past and future, and therefore irreversibility, enter into its description.' (1985: 16) In this way, the future and the past are both contained within the present (or that there can be no 'one time-directed evolution'. This examination of the laws of motion is far from a new endeavour. Since Galileo, scientists have been concerned with acceleration, and in particular in accounting for the change of state from rest to motion and motion to rest. Newton's work on gravity and the motion of bodies falling to earth is another obvious example. As an aside, Prigogine and Stengers claim that the Newtonian concept of change 'appears to be a synthesis of the science of ideal machines, where motion is transmitted without collision or friction between parts already in contact, and the science of celestial bodies interacting at a distance.' (1985: 63) - put another way, a synthesis of a mathematical view of motion and ideas from the occult. Prigogine and Stengers describe how the laws of change, of time's impact on nature, are expressed in terms of the characteristics of trajectories: lawfulness, determinism, and reversibility. (1985: 60) In dynamical systems, time and space work together to produce motion.
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In the manner of theses on the philosophy of history' or indeed Bergson - their argument tries to weave together scientific and cultural insights - to avoid what KoyrŽ calls 'Two worlds: This means two truths. Or no truth at all.' (in Prigogine & Stengers, 1985: 36) The two world need to be forced together, as 'a clash of doctrines is not a disaster, it is an opportunity' (Whitehead, quoted in Prigogine and Stengers, 1985: 213) The 'clash of doctrines' they are thinking of, is between being and becoming, and between probability and irreversibility. They propose a new synthesis.
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This skepticism over the idea of progress and the accumulation of knowledge leads Prigogine and Stengers to examine the limits of science by applying a history of ideas that approaches reality in a quite different manner. For instance, Bergson's opposition to scientific thinking was in the form of speculative knowledge and intuition. Hegel represents a more cosmic dimension: 'In his system increasing levels of complexity are specified, and nature's purpose is the eventual self-realization of its spiritual element.' (1985: 89) To Prigogine and Stengers, Hegelian thinking rests on the 'qualitative difference between the simple behavior described by mechanics and the behavior of more complex entities such as living beings.' (1985: 89) At each iteration of a level in the dialectical hierarchy, there is a corresponding increase in complexity in nature.
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In recognition of the limits of scientific and cultural knowledge, a science of complexity is posited. According to Prigogine's thinking, all systems contain subsystems that are continually fluctuating. It is possible that one or more fluctuation, as a result of feedback, may change the preexisting organisation of the system. This is a 'revolutionary' moment, or 'bifurcation point', where it is impossible to predict the direction change will take, and whether it will fall into a higher level of order or disintegrate into chaos. One of the properties of the evolution of a complex system is that multiple interacting elements in a system cannot be 'governed'. The collective behaviour cannot be predicted at a global level. For instance:
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'A society defined entirely in terms of a functional model would correspond to the Aristotelian idea of natural hierarchy and order. Each official would perform the duties for which he [sic] has been appointed. These duties would translate at each level the different aspects of the organization of the society as a whole. The king gives orders to the architect, the architect to the contractor, the contractor to the worker. On the contrary, termites and other social insects seem to approach the "statistical" model. As we have seen, there seems to be no mastermind behind the construction of the termites' nest, when interactions among individuals produce certain types of collective behaviour in some circumstances, but none of these interactions refer to any global task, being all purely local.' (1985: 205)
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And importantly, this model of 'order through fluctuations' suggest that in an unstable world or system, small changes can have large effects, but this is not arbitrary. The argument maintains that new order and organisation can arise spontaneously from disorder through self-organisation. In conclusion, they state that 'societies are immensely complex systems involving a potentially enormous number of bifurcations exemplified by the variety of cultures that have evolved in the relatively short span of human history. We know that such systems are highly sensitive to fluctuations. This leads both to hope and a threat: hope, since even small fluctuations may grow and change the overall structure. As a result, individual activity is not doomed to insignificance. On the other hand, this is also a threat, since in our universe the security of stable, permanent rules seems gone forever.' They cite Neher in characterising history as 'branded with the mark of radical uncertainty'. (1985: 312-3)
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praxis:
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Scientific thinking is predicated on theory and practice: the desire to shape the world and to understand it - activity as opposed to passive observation.
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James Gleick (1998) Chaos: The Amazing Science of the Unpredictable, London: Vintage.
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The book Chaos is very much an introduction to these issues.
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'Where chaos begins, classical science stops' (1998: 3) claims James Gleick, responding to the challenge of understanding disorder, irregularities and discontinuities in nature. The study of chaos managed to draw together previously separated scientific disciplines suggesting universal patterns of behaviours of complex phenomenon, leading to new insights. The analysis of 'dynamical systems' appeared to demonstrate a underlying structure of order. In addition to relativity (on an understanding of absolute space and time) and quantum theory (on an understanding of controlled measurement), the importance of chaos is a further assault on Newtonian Physics and its 'fantasy of deterministic predictability' (Gleick, 1998: 6). As a result Physics, in seeking to be a 'theory of everything,' became required to engage in the ways in which order appears to arise spontaneously from disorder. Whereas previously physicists would look for complex causes to account for complex effects, or to add randomness to an experiment to elicit random results, it became evident that very simple and small differences in input could have overwhelming consequences in terms of output - what became known as 'sensitive dependence on initial conditions' or the 'butterfly effect' in popular culture (describing changes in weather conditions: the movement of the wings of a butterfly in one part of the world stirs the air and thus might transform to storm conditions in another part of the world; from the 1979 essay 'Predicability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?').
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Plainly, the study of complex system builds upon systems theory itself. It was John Von Neumann, working in the 1950s, who realised that a complex dynamical systems contained points of stability. In turn, in the 1960s, and also influenced by the economist Benoit Mandelbrot, Edward Lorenz based on understanding the unpredictability of weather, claimed that predictability can lead to randomness (the butterfly effect if you like), but furthermore, understood randomness to contain a delicate geometrical structure (not to be random at all in fact). Such an understanding is crucial to the nature of things and the ways in which they change and might be changed within complex systems. Unstable systems, like the weather but also nature in general, almost repeat themselves but not quite. Lorenz saw this as a link between this 'aperiodicity' and unpredictability (contained in his 1963 paper 'Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow'; for my purposes, superficially like Benjamin's understanding of historical process in 'Theses on the Philosophy of History'). This was difficult to model on the computer at first - a rather determinist mechanism that could repeat accurately - but eventually algorithms were developed that could reproduce these processes (this is the kind of artificial intelligence commonly known as artificial life). In Lorenz's work, the complexities of unpredictability were modelled initially by the simple deterministic system of twelve equations and later by three 'nonlinear' equations (Gleick, 1998: 23; note: nonlinear is applied to the expression of relationships that are 'not strictly proportional'). This is also explained and visualised in the 'strange attractor,' that coincidentally looks like the wings of a butterfly, in which the fine structure can be seen within a disorderly stream of data. To show the changing relationships among three variables in a diagram of order and disorder:
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'At any instant in time, the three variables fix the location of a point in three-dimensional space; as the system changes, the motion of the point represents the continuously changing variables. Because the system never exactly repeats itself, the trajectory never intersects itself. Instead it loops around and around forever.' (Gleick, 1998: 29; in a note describing the first strange attractor: the 'Lorenz Attractor' of 1963).
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The loops and spirals never quite meet or intersect, and reveal a 'fractal structure' of stability. Rather like the 'Cantor Effect' in which lines are seen to contain errors and not be continuous, HŽnon's attractor reveals that what appears to be lines, on magnification, are pairs, and then pairs of pairs. However, whether any two successive points appear nearby or not is unpredictable. The attractor is like a Russian doll but more extreme in that it demonstrates infinite regress, an inexhaustible sequence of folding and stretching a line (Gleick, 1998: 150-1). Strange attractors held a fascination, held a strage attraction. In unwittingly Hegelian terms, the physicist David Ruelle commented that : 'A realm lies there of forms to explore, and harmonies to discover' (Gleick, 1998: 153).
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With increased computer processing power, complexity was seen to be evident in the simplest of bifurcation systems. The mathematician Frank Hoppensteadt fed a simple 'logistic nonlinear equation through his Control Data 6600 hundreds of millions of times,' taking images of the computer's display at each of a thousand different values of the parameter, a thousand different tunings'. The bifircations appeared, then chaos, 'and then, within the chaos, little spikes of order, ephemeral in their instability.' (Gleick, 1998: 77) Using bifurcation diagrams too in analysing population changes, and drawing together genetics, economics and fluid dynamics, Robert May saw these simple equations as metaphor, as they were only a representation of reality not reality itself (Gleick, 1998: 77-8). Here complex behaviour might be seen to be 'machinic' (in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari describe, in excess of organic and technical) suggesting new collective and complex subjectivities. The point, here, is that simple deterministic models could produce what looked like disorder, but in fact held a delicate structure of order. May went on to apply these ideas to biological systems and in particular to the study of disease - evoking the plague and sick body or 'desiring machine' in Artaud's work. In keeping with the alleged 'universality of chaos,' this indicates something of its potential for 'intra-disciplinary' work - using Guattari's term to avoid the accusation of universality. Even the most disorderly data reveals a kind of order.
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That there is 'order in chaos' is a clichŽ but what is the nature of this order and how universal (where different systems are seen to behave in the same way) or indeed how totalitarian (in which they are made to)? Unpredictability leads to universality according to Mitchell Feigenbaum's theory - universality at both a structural and metrical level, not just in patterns but numbers (Gleick, 1998: 180). In biology, Darwin established a teleological theory of causality (evolution), driven by 'natural selection' not God. But this was too reductionist in another direction. The naturalist D'Arcy Thompson draws upon an understanding of dynamical systems to describe life in more complex terms of motion and responding to rhythms - not just material forms but their dynamic structure (Gleick, 1998: 202; 'Evolution is chaos with feedback' according to Joseph Ford, in Gleick, 1998: 314) - in a description that sounds uncannily like dialectical materialism (at least to a dialectical materialist it does). To stretch the connection, it is said that antagonistic balance emerges from feedback (in SolŽ & Goodwin, 2000: 100). In chaos theory, a closed nonlinear system presents inner rhythms of order and disorder - universal elements of motion (cue Engels). Complex systems, such as the human body, are places of motion and oscillation (getting poetic, Gleick says that pattern is born amid formlessless; 'Life sucks order from a sea of disorder' 1998: 299). A living organism, according to Erwin Schršdinger, has the 'astonishing gift of concentrating a 'stream of order' on itself and thus escaping the decay into atomic chaos' (in Gleick, 1998: 299; evoking DNA as life's building block). Is it partly a question of recognising this not as deterministic but as a sense of inherent agency?
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Clearly nonlinear aspects are a key issue in the inner workings and unpredictability of complex systems involving human organisms. Despite the lack of determinism (no particular change in mind but change all the same), this has positive potential for human agency as metaphor and in terms of real effect even if the nature of the change was unpredictable - small stirrings might lead to stormy conditions that might eventually lead to a new calm (note: in the social field, this is at least in keeping with Negri's work as a not-deterministic model of revolution). If this sounds like a description of revolution, Gleick argues this is the case in terms of scientific method at least. He describes the work of Thomas Kuhn in disputing that science necessarily progresses by the teleological accretion of knowledge and as a rational enterprise of finding solutions to identified problems (1998: 36). Instead, he argues that 'revolutions' or 'paradigm shifts' occur when scientists question fundamental assumptions, when they question orthodoxies. This may be true, but there is a sense in which he is presenting an avant-garde of science here. Surely the point is that change emerges in unpredictable ways too and from small inputs - Gleick appears to contradict himself here in perpetuating a top-down model of expertise and maverick experimentation. In parallel, Ernst Mandel's model of economic change could be seen to be similarly deterministic ultimately (discussed elsewhere). However, Mandel's model does not reject the past as it is dialectical and based on the nonlinear principles of historical materialism. Can we think about scientific discoveries in a similar way?
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The importance for social theory and indeed socially-engaged arts practice, is that disorderly behaviour of simple systems act as a creative process:
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'It generated complexity: richly organized patterns, sometime stable and sometimes unstable, sometimes finite and sometimes infinite, but always with the fascination of living things.' (1998: 43)
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notes
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Bourbaki:
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Taking the name of a French General of Greek origin, a group of mathematicians used the pseudonym Nicolas Bourbaki to credit their work. The group stressed the primacy of mathematics insisting on a detachment from other disciplines. Rejecting the use of pictures too, they demanded that mathematics should be formal and pure - not subject to the ordure of other disciplines and the outside world (a parallel to Clement Greenberg perhaps). The computer somewhat reinforced the power of images to supply mathematical insight and led to demise of Bourbaki values (precepts, style and notation) that took such a hold on the French academy. Somewhat ironically, this remains an open source name in the mathematics world (alongside other open source names in new media such as Karen Eliot or Luther Blissett).
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Dust (add to notes on measurement and fractal geometry):
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___________________________
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_________ _________
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___ ___ ___ ___
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_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
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[and so on]
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'The Cantor Dust', named after the nineteenth-century mathematician Georg Cantor, describes a process:
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'Begin with a line; remove the middle third; then remove the middle third of the remaining segments; and so on. The Cantor set is the dust of points that remain. They are infinitely many, but their total length is 0. The paradoxical qualities of such constructions disturbed nineteenth-century mathematicians, but Mandelbrot saw the Cantor set as a model for the occurrence of errors in an electronic transmission line.' (Gleick, 1998: 92-3)
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The description was useful for scientists trying to understand the nature of errors and the cause of noise. At every level of scale, Mandelbrot discovered that the relationship of errors to clean transmissions remained constant.
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Following this line of thinking that encourages Mandelbrot to famously ask: 'How long is the coast of Britain?' The answer is infinitely long or that it depends on the length of your ruler. Mandelbrot surmises that as the length of the measurement becomes smaller, the coastline gets longer - to the point where it is being measured at an atomic scale, when it become infinite. In addition, the measurer affected the measurement. Euclidean geometry is thus seen to be full of errors, as are other measures perhaps - value for example. When measurement is attempted in three dimensions, traditional methods become even more nefarious and fractal dimensions are required (although at a fractal level, they are simple of course). To Scholz, this is the 'humpty-dumpty effect' of never being in position to fully join two broken pieces back together again (Gleick, 1998: 106). The parts will, forever, remain incomplete.
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Information:
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It was Claude Shannon who introduced the term 'information' in the 1940s to describe the units carried over communication lines and transmissions (Gleick, 1998: 255). This information was clearly not simply words or numbers, or ideas or concepts but something more generic and abstract. Information was stored in binary on-off switches that were known as bits, and information theory became the means to measure this and to assess its errors or noise. In Shannon's information theory, ordinary language consisted of 'redundancy' - noise that is 'redundant' in terms of conveying meaning, suggesting a shorthand version and predictive messaging (sms txt msgs cm 2 mnd), as well as economical ways of compressing data.
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Entropy:
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'Entropy' is derived from thermodynamics (and non-equilibrium thermodynamics is closely associated with complexity theory through the work of Ilya Prigogine) but also has relevance to information theory (through the work of Claude Shannon for instance). It is the term given to describe the inexorable tendency of the universe and other isolated systems to slide towards a state of increasing disorder. It is a measure of disorder in a physical system. Strange attractors, that conflate order and disorder, also increase entropy, and in a sense produce information. Information and chaos are linked: 'As a system becomes chaotic, however, strictly by virtue of its unpredictability, it generates a steady stream of information.' (Gleick, 1998: 260). Evidently, orderly disorder could be generated by simple processes, and demonstrate that chaos pulls the data into patterns (Gleick, 1998: 267) - somewhat disputing the idea of entropy and presenting an optimistic turn for praxis.
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Gerfried Stocker & Christine Schšpf (2003), eds., Code - The Language of Our Time, Ars Electronica, Linz: Hatje Cantz.
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Codes are essentially closed systems of semiotic elements - like all language codes. The texts which are formulated in these languages (or programs) are 'performative' strings of signifiers (summarising Leo Findeisen's statement in 'Some Code to Die for: on the birth of the Free Software Movement in 1887', in Stocker & Schšpf, 2003: 74). New codes are introduced and superseded all the time. Replacing the old code of English (if only), Findeisen points to two key historical examples: the new world alphabet 'VolapŸk' (1874), and in turn another 'universal language' introduced by Zamenhof (in 1887) as a predessor of 'Esperanto" (first congress in 1905). Zamenhof stated at the beginning of the manual of use:
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'An international language should be, as any national one is, be a common possession, which is why the author is here resigning for all time his personal rights over it.' (in Findeisen, 2003: 82)
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These examples all operate under the principle that language belongs to the public sphere.
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Note: If the same might be said of software, one might wish to make a distinction here between 'open source' and 'free software' - open source necessarily implying the free distribution of its source code whereas free software need not necessarily go this far. See http://www.opensource.org/ and then http://www.fsf.org/ for more detail (and for results that contradict this to some extent as both seem to say that free licensed distribution is necessary and access to source code).
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Florian Cramer (2003), "Exe.cut[up]able statements: the Insistence of Code', in Gerfried Stocker & Christine Schšpf, eds., Code - The Language of Our Time, Ars Electronica, Linz: Hatje Cantz, pp. 98-103.
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Cramer's title uses a phrase from mez, the Australian net artist (who writes in a hybrid of English language and pseudo-code), to make explicit his view that code can be taken as artistic material. It is both a filename for sourcecode that is executable (.exe) and a reference to cutup poetry such as in the work of William Burroughs (2003: 98), Cramer wishes to emphasise the point that code is not merely functional but can have expressive or poetic qualities too. Cramer provides many examples of poetic approaches to programming beyond the the merely functional approach: from perl poetry, code slang, 'viral scripting, in-code recursions and ironies (as, for example in the self-replicating source-code of "Quines", all of them being largely independent of particular transmission and storage media or output technology...' (2003 102).
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Code is clearly encoded and decoded - and some understanding of semiotics would suggest misunderstandings at the level of cultural difference. Cramer too wonders how code might be seen to be universal, and how language (as distinct from code) might be seen to be an international system.
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He draws upon Roland Barthes (in S/Z) in making the distinction between 'readerly' and writerly' texts and applying this to operating systems. Rather than the readerly properties of a GUI operating system that encourages consumption and hides the code, the command-line operating system of Unix is seen as writerly in terms of openness and encouraging the reader to become a producer of text or code. This is important for Cramer as it breaks down the false distinction between the writing and the tool with which the writing is produced, and in terms of the computer between code and data. It is almost as if GUI software disguises itself as hardware (Cramer, 2003: 101) using crude analogies like tools, desktops and trash cans - also see my notes on hardware for a very similar argument. On the other hand, the unix command line holds multiple possibilities for transformation and manipulation - combining instruction code and conventional written language for instance in poetic forms. Cramer cites the 1998 essay by Thomas Scoville 'The Elements of Style: UNIX as literature' in this connection (2003: 102) to insist on the writerly and literary aspects of programming. There has simply been too much emphasis on the visual and graphical aspects of creative computing in this regard. Good pedagogy here would require a backtrack on the fashion for visual literacy much against the grain of recent cultural policy-making (more essay-writing and hardcore programming, less traditional art and design perhaps).
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In keeping with post-structuralist thinking, for Cramer, computer language has become thoroughly entwined with subjectivity as we begin to think in these terms, using new codes (grammars and syntax).
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Erkki Huhtamo (2003), 'Web Stalker Seek Aaron: Reflections on Digital Arts, Codes and Coders' in Gerfried Stocker & Christine Schšpf, eds., Code - The Language of Our Time, Ars Electronica, Linz: Hatje Cantz, pp. 110-118.
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Erkki Huhtamo traces the artistic exploration of computer code to the early protagonists that had no alternative but to learn it, leading to an attention to the program itself rather than the output necessarily (2003: 111). Harold Cohen's Aaron is seen as a classic example of this tendency of someone developing a program over three decades to make art. Yet the code operates in a rather ambiguous relation to the overall artwork - it is decidedly part of Cohen's artistic output but more in terms of a representation of his skills and technique rather than an artwork as such. If anything, this is inconsistent with much conceptual art in the 1960s and the idea of the 'dematerialised art object (Lippard et al) that would emphasis process rather than end-product. Drawing upon Edward Shnaken's essay 'The House that Jack Built', Huhtamo cites Jack Burnham's 'Software' exhibition for the Jewish Museum in New York (1970) in this regard as part of a shift in the redefinition of what constitutes an arts practice in terms of both media and material, but also cites John Berger's Ways of Seeing (1972) as a way of connecting this to the acquisition of new forms of knowledge. For Burnham, the exhibition 'Software' encouraged an understanding of underlying structures in art and information systems in general. By drawing together practices in computer technology with conceptual art, 'Software' was to be seen as a linguistic metaphor for information exchange.
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Huhtamo is interested in what he calls 'software art purists' that emphasise the primacy of code as the main artistic material. To the media art historian, this is consistent with formalist experimentation with language and film to draw attention to the apparatus but also to the Greenbergian 'formalist' questions of a pure form outside of social context. He sees the software art movement as a continuation of this neo-modernist approach: 'emphasizing the centrality of the code and the algorithmic approach means positing a "hard core" often felt to be lost in the postmodern world'. In this connection we (Geoff Cox, Alex McLean, and Adrian Ward) are seen to 'fulfil many of the criteria for classical avant-garde movements' (2003: 117) - oh dear! - what Florian Cramer has elsewhere called 'software formalism'. Huhtamo simply paraphrases Cramer is making a false distinction between one 'group' (who aren't even a group) and another (mongrel) that emphasise the cultural and ideological underpinnings of computer programming that do not fit so easily in the 'modernist straitjacket' (2003: 117; note: he mentions postmodern techniques such as pastiche - one might like to point out the distinction that Jameson makes between pastiche and parody in this connection that would complicate the use of terms like postmodernism in the first place). Huhtamo gets lost here in the precise definition of 'formalist' concerns I think - what about a practice that is formalist in as much as it seeks to engage with the apparatus, and does so in order to engage with the mode of production and in turn the relations of production. Clearly this is not pure (nor simply free or open) but a decidedly dirty form of critical engagement appropriate to the task.
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[Note: Dirty code relates to this issue too, where a number of semiotic systems operate at the same time - for instance, in the work of nn or Jeff Instone - something not necessarily operable].
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Christiane Paul (2003), 'Public CulturalProduction Art(Software){' in Gerfried Stocker & Christine Schšpf, eds., Code - The Language of Our Time, Ars Electronica, Linz: Hatje Cantz, pp. 129-135.
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For Paul, code operates at a conceptual level of understanding and this is why it is analogous to conceptual art practices that use formal instructions (2003: 129). She cites 'The Aesthetics of Generative Code' essay firstly to emphasise that code cannot be separated from an understanding of the overall structure it is part of. Whether this is art or not perhaps misses the point, it is cultural production and should be understood in those terms as both formal instruction and with cultural significance - both formalism and culturalism in other words. Like Huhtamo, she draws heavily on Florian Cramer's essay 'Concepts, Notations, Software, Art' and adopts his (un-dialectical) polarisation of a concern for a culturally-coded construct or subjective aesthetic expression.
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[note: although clearly people write code in different ways, see Kevin Marks & Maf Vosburgh, 'Code and Personality', http://homepage.mac.com/kevinmarks/personality.html - this is not the issue]
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No wonder the distinction is seen as unhelpful as it is falsity from the start. Even Paul, says such a distinction is hard to make and states: 'If software in general is not neutral but culturally encoded, there always is an interplay between formal and cultural aspects, which obviously varies depending on the emphasis of a specific project' (2003: 132). She takes the recommendation that 'a separation of code from the resultant actions would result in a limitation of the aesthetic experience' (quote us, paraphrased 2003; 133). Although seeing the attention of the 'backend' as fringe, she takes the risk of including the source code alongside the exhibited work in CODeDOC at the Whitney Museum in 2003 (see Cramer's criticism of this in Read_Me Reader). This approach is perhaps best exemplified in artwork that is a data visualisation where the execution and process are evident but only in a meaningful way if the larger context or system is revealed. There is some danger of the aestheticisation of code - analogous to the concerns of Benjamin in calling for a politics of aesthetics rather than an aesthetics of politics (in his artwork essay; note: this distinction can similarly be applied to the undialectical separation of aesthetic concerns over cultural ones. Clearly and in unashamedly modernist terms, both/and are preferred over either/or as Marshall Berman would put it).
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Alan Sondheim (2004), 'Notes on Codework', nettime, February 11.
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In a similar way, 'Codework' gives a political dimension to a phrase like code-poetry to production (and labour). Sondheim states rather obliquely:
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'Every more or less traditional text is codework with invisible residue; every computer harbours the machinic, the ideology of capital in the construction of its components, the oppression of underdevelopment in its reliance on cheap labor.'
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[I think he means what Marx would call dead labour].
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And furthermore, as generative code, it has partly produced its own work.
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notes on slub and live coding:
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These issues of emphasising process over (recorded) end-product are evident in some experimental music that employs live coding (Collins et al, 2004). For instance, 'slub' (Alex McLean & Adrian Ward) use real-time scripting during live laptop performances in the spirit of improvisation. In this approach, third party graphical interfaces and programming languages are seen as too limited and prescriptive. Instead interpreted scripting languages (such as perl) are seen to hold more open-ended creative possibilities and perhaps more in keeping with the expressive qualities of the musician using an instrument. Live coding is perhaps more analogous to the scratching of contemporary Djs and holds some of the real-time, performative fascination as well as some formal similarities (such as two laptops instead of decks - without falling into literalism). With live coding of course the two laptops can process data collaboratively somewhat breaking the individualist trajectory of much conventional improvisation techniques (think of the jazz solo or dexterous DJ). Also, significantly, the desktops of both machines are usually projected allowing for some understanding of the process (according to programming literacy) and against the grain of the spectacle of VJ culture. In this, any improvisation relies on a predictive understanding of complex and generative systems. There is some risk involved 'in that many think they are trying to deprecate the creative role of the performer. On the contrary, slub is opening up the determinate processes of a computer in order to generate music' (Collins etal, 2003: 326), glitches and all. Sometimes it sound good too.
code-berry.txt
Josephine Berry (2002), 'Bare Code: Net Art and the Free Software Movement', http://netartcommons.walkerart.org/article.pl?sid=02/05/08/0615215&mode=thre
code-berry.txt
In examining open source code and arts practice, Josephine Berry sees the practice of hiding the source code as narrowing its creative potential, and enforcing a series of mythologies around creativity and property rights. On the other hand, there are more radical examples. She cites the award of a prize to the GNU/Linux operating system at the Ars Electronica festival in 1999, and sees this as not only the 'Duchampian gesture of nominating a tool of production as a work of art,' but also a classic example of the tendency to signal the analogy of avant-garde art and free software in challenging some of these myths around creative production (2002). These issues relate to the collective nature of free software production but also the breakdown of firm distinctions between producers and consumers. The individual artist, even software artist, might be 'compared to the capitalist who harnesses and thus alienates proletarian labor power into surplus value that can, as accumulated product.' (Berry, 2002) Significantly, for my thesis, she points to Walter Benjamin's 'The Author as Producer' that argues that the revolutionary author should necessarily engage with the technical apparatus of production. For Berry, this confirms the engagement with code and the relations of production that are expressed in the shared production of free software. This allows her to question that if: 'net artists use proprietary software to produce their work, to what extent can they be said to be transforming the apparatus of production?' Not very much at all of course. She concludes that:
code-berry.txt
'A radical realization of art, then, would be the deposition of the sovereign producer and a return of the shared wealth of creativity to its true owners: the multitude. For this reason, a reappropriation and transformation of the artistic means of production comes to the fore - an opening up of cultural source codes to an undetermined end.' (2002)
code-berry.txt
0100101110101101.ORG (2001), 'Data-Nudism', an interview with Matthew Fuller about life_sharing, nettime, April 14; First published by Gallery 9 / Walker Art Centre for life_sharing by
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0100101110101101.ORG http://www.walkerart.org/gallery9/lifesharing/
code-berry.txt
The phrase 'data-nudism' describes the laying bare of the apparatus in explicit terms:
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'With life_sharing, 0100101110101101.ORG reveals its mechanism. It sets
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its kernel free and all the functions that concern it, in the same way
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as a programmer who frees the source code of their software.' (2001)
code-berry.txt
They argue that data on a networked computer should be public property.
code-berry.txt
Friedrich Kittler (1999), 'On the Implementation of Knowledge - Toward a Theory of Hardware,' nettime
code-berry.txt
(http://www.nettime.org/nettime.w3archive/199902/msg00038.html).
code-berry.txt
In defining hardware, Friedrich Kittler defines software as a
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'logical abstraction' that exists in the negative space between people
code-berry.txt
and the hardware they use. Computer code is linguistic but is a very particular kind of language. Kittler points to a key difference in that words of natural languages do not generally do what they say: 'No description of a machine sets the machine into motion.' (1999). On the other hand, the artificial language of computer code generally does what it says - it executes and enacts its instructions or description. Computer code has both a legible state and an
code-berry.txt
executable state; both readable and writeable states at the level of language itself.
code-berry.txt
In another essay 'There is No Software,' Kittler explains the consequence:
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'Programming languages have eroded the monopoly of ordinary language and grown into a new hierarchy of their own. This postmodern tower of Babel reaches from simple operation codes whose linguistic extension is still a hardware configuration passing through an assembler whose extension is that very assembler. As a consequence, far reaching chains of self-similarities in the sense defined by fractal theory organize the software as well as the hardware of every writing. What remains a problem is only the realization of these layers which, just as modern media technologies in general, have been explicitly contrived in order to evade all perception. We simply do not know what our writing does.
code-berry.txt
For an illustration of this problem, a simple text program like the one that has produced my very paper will do. May the users of Windows or UNIX forgive when I, as a subject of Microsoft DOS, limit the discussion to this most stupid of operating systems. ' (----)
code-berry.txt
Along similar lines to Matthew Fuller's deconstruction of Microsoft Word, he explains that in word-processing a text the writer becomes part of the machine thoroughly embedded in the choice of computer and software program.
code-berry.txt
This is the triumph of software in hiding these other operations at the level of hardware. In this way, Kittler argues that hardware is obscured by software, and 'electronic signifiers [are obscured] by 'interfaces between formal and everyday languages'.(----) Similarly, 'graphic user interfaces, since they dispense with writing itself, hide a whole machine from its users' (----). This is policed as on the level of hardware itself, 'so-called protection software has been implemented in order to prevent "untrusted programs" or "untrusted users" from any access to the operating system's kernel and input/output channels.' (----; here he is referring to his own previous work, Friedrich Kittler, "Protected Mode", In Computer, Macht und Gegenwehr. InformatikerInnen fÙr eine andere Informatik, Ute Bernhardt and Ingo Ruhmann, ed. Bonn 1991, p. 34-44.) Kittler sees these tendencies as a rejection of the principles of the Turing machine in identifying hardware as an algorithm for computation. To Kittler, this is a commercial imperative occluding his belief that software does not exist as a machine-independent faculty. This simplification makes recent work in software art that does not require a computer all the more important, if not radical (I am thinking of the '.walk' algorithm of Social Fiction as an example). This would also threaten the legal logic that regards software as material property but not intellectual property. This again stresses the importance of hardware to Kittler, and the negation of software.
code-berry.txt
Perhaps more significantly Kittler's concept of Discourse Networks (1990) is relevant here in revealing that the user of technology is somewhat shaped by the technology they use. Kittler argues that the typewriter altered the nature of discourse and language (Seaman, 1999; citing Kittler, 1990).
code-berry.txt
Friedrich Kittler's observation is much quoted: that to understand today's culture requires a knowledge of a natural language and an artificial language.
code-block.txt
Friedrich W. Block (2004), 'From Code to Screening and Vice Versa: Orientation in Digital Poetics between Concept and Perception' lecture notes, from symposium 'From Software to Software Art,' transmediale festival, Berlin (in preparation for the P0es1s exhibition, Berlin).
code-block.txt
In attempting to understand the 'poetic' interface between language and the computer, Friedrich Block talks about 'productive irritation' (2004). One example is the Cramer's notion that the computer virus 'I Love You' might be considered as a form of digital poetry. This is an extreme example of poetry that simply cannot be realised in print. Block sees both print and screen-based forms as involving perceptual surfaces of projection. Work such as Cramer's perl love poem (sub merge{; my $enses;) and other 'code works' (such as Alan Sondheim) lie outside much interactive and multimedia practices in a more pure semiotic space of experiencing the work. Block sees this as largely ignoring the question of interface. For him, of more interest is the work of Jodi or the ASCII-Art-Ensemble investigating the differences between interface and code aesthetics. To him, it is in this intersection that digital poetics resides, without recourse to print or screen as such - an aesthetics of 'in-between', neither one nor the other. He is looking for media poetry that engages with the form of symbolic or medial differences. For him, the fundamental nature of binary code underpins the poetic idea of 'to be or not to be' making it clear that 'poetry, poesis, is the power to change from not being into being' (2004; quoting from Plato's Symposium).
code-ghoshkelty.txt
Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, ed. (2005) _Code: Collaborative Ownership and the Digital Economy_, Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press.
code-ghoshkelty.txt
The case for collaboration is made by Rishab Aiyer Ghosh in his introduction to _Code_ (2005), establishing how the dynamics operate both in terms of self-organisation and along ideological lines. The ideological dimension is exemplified by the free software movement protecting 'freedoms' but he emphasises that collaboration works more fundamentally than this as part of the human condition. Some of the anthropological work around open source and free software communities and networks help to substantiate this claim (for instance, James Leach's 'Modes of Creativity and the Register of Ownership', in Ghosh 2005, and more recently Christopher M. Kelty's _Two Bits: the Cultural Significance of Free Software_, 2008, that studies Free Software ethnographically rather than simply treating geeks as natives - see notes below). At the heart of this are a set of assumptions about creativity in terms of aesthetics, pleasure, cultural and economic value. As Leach, points out, the issue of collective production is often simplified to that of a 'tribal commons' when things are far more complex (2005: 31). The question for Leach is how technologies that establish collaboration as more and more central to economic production are effected by and effect 'ownership regimes'. When it comes to creativity, ideas are extracted from the commons and modified by creative and intellectual labour such that the issue of ownership and property arises as a problem in a (Western) culture that has stressed creativity as inextricably bound to individualism. In other parts of the world, especially historically, ownership related to creative work is far more multiple and distributed, connected to quite different spiritual and political principles. An example of this are 'spirit songs' in Papua New Guinea, where, although based on ancestral heritage, they are constantly changed and modified but with the underlying condition that 'spirits and people belong to one another' (Leach 2005: 33-34; These are called 'Tambaran' songs). They are generated by collective voices. The complexity lies in the fact that people and spirits are equivalents in a relational system. Ownership is bound to relations in such a model, and as multiple agents for future action.
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This is quite different from the conventions of copyright that remains based on capitalistic property relations:
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'People do own images, and ideational forms, but these are not owned in objects. In other words, they do not rely on the separation of mental/ ideational creativity from its instantiation in an object that can then be owned as property. The same goes for people themselves. They, too, have reproductive potential because of their constitution in the work of others. They can be owned and transacted, but not as property, rather as elements in other's projects.' (2005: 35)
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In such a model, process is privileged over product. Leach's argument is that comparisons can be drawn with the sense of multiple ownership expressed in free software development. The conditions for creativity, as he puts it, is not bound to individualised private property (2005: 38). His example is the development of the GNU/Linux operating system where each individual's work is valued in the context of the multiple efforts of all contributors, but importantly the relations are still expressed between people and things as opposed to relations between persons even as a consequence of copyleft (such as GNU GPL). Intellectual property rights enforce the relation with object, making ideas into an object, and indeed making social relations into an object undermining other forms of collaborative working that might attempt to take property and indeed the law out of objects. To Leach, this is also a critique of current ideas around innovation and value creation that disregards the value of heritage and a deeper understanding of creative processes (2005: 41), and thereby underplays the importance of relations and multiple agency.
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Perhaps this is where peer to peer production is a radical departure. This is broadly what Yochai Benkler refers to as 'commons-based peer production' as a distinct form of organisation of productive activity ('Coase's Penguin, or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm', in Ghosh, 2005: 169). Indeed, as one example, the production of peer-produced free software poses problems for traditional understandings of organisations as descriptions of the productive activities of employees in a firm or buyers as part of a market (the wage and price, accordingly - here, Benkler is drawing upon the economist Ronald Coase's essay 'The Nature of the Firm', of 1937), as does academic peer production in a more general understanding of the nature of information and networked informational exchange. What information technology has contributed is a more efficient and more pervasive mechanism for peer production to accelerate. Benkler's view is pragmatic: peer production works because it best matches human capital to projects; it is efficient if intellectual property is not restrictive as it relies on the wide availability of resources and open collaboration. Peer production suggests that the public realm is good for innovation outside of capitalistic relation of property.
code-ghoshkelty.txt
In 'Fencing Off Ideas: Enclosure and the Disappearance of the Public Domain', James Boyle refers to the period in history when common land was turned into private property (in Ghosh 2005). The essay begins with an anonymous poem from 1821, although the tendency can be traced to the fifteenth century:
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'The law locks up the man or woman; Who steals the goose from off the common; But leaves the greater villain loose; Who steals the common from off the goose. The law demands that we atone; When we take things we do not own; But leaves the lords and ladies fine; Who take things that are yours are mine. The poor and wretched don't escape; If they conspire the law to break; This must be so but they endure; Those who conspire to make the law. The law locks up the man or woman; Who steals the goose from off the common; And geese will still a common lack; Till they go and steal it back.' (2005: 235)
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The parallels to code are obvious, and often stated in the ways that intellectual property is being privatised and the way that code as an intangible object outside the marketplace is being forced into the property regime. Boyles's example of the 'second enclosure movement' is the human genome that surely belongs to the 'common heritage of humankind' rather than individuals or corporations (2005: 237). However, patents have been granted for gene sequences and stem cells in a clear violation of commonality and the common good. With reference to the poem, perversely what the law has largely protected are the data lords and ladies from anyone who attempts to steal back what is rightfully commonly owned.
code-ghoshkelty.txt
Christopher M. Kelty (2008) _Two Bits: the Cultural Significance of Free Software_, Durham: Duke University Press.
code-ghoshkelty.txt
Florian Cramer (2008) 'Interview with Christopher Kelty: the Culture of Free Software' (with Geert Lovink),
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The wider history and cultural significance of Free Software is developed in Christopher Kelty's _Two Bits: the Cultural Significance of Free Software_ (2008) as a set of cultural practices. In this sense, it is a manifestation of knowledge and power but presents a range of practices that are ripe with contradictions. This is evident in the ambiguities of key concepts such as 'openness', and in Kelty's book a chapter addresses this issue head on by shifting the discussion from how meanings are produced to the practical choices available - underpinned by Kelty's anthropological understanding of the term culture and networked culture. In response to this, Florian Cramer also addresses the concept of 'freedom' (making reference to Calum Selkirk) to explain how source code should not be 'welded shut':
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'The concept of "freedom" that serves as the lowest common denominator of FLOSS simply is consumer rights, nothing more, nothing less. [...] The "freedoms" that are defined, almost identically, in GNU's "Free Software Definition", Debian's "Social Contract" and OSI's "Open Source Definition" are nothing more than a educated common sense about computer software that doesn't fuck its users in the small print and doesn't turn them into proprietary upgrade dependents for the rest of their lives. The popular comparison of FLOSS with a car whose hood isn't welded shut therefore sums it all up. The only difference, which not even many FLOSS activists realized in the beginning, lies in the implication for culture: that welding the hood of _information_ technology shut reaches farther and is infinitely scarier than keeping transportation technology proprietary.' (2008)
code-ghoshkelty.txt
The two terms - free software and open source - correspond to two parallel narratives in the late 1990s: free software referring back to the 1980s when software freedom in resistance to proprietary software was promoted (associated with Richard Stallman); and open source emanating from the dotcom boom and free market thinking that free software offered economic benefit (associated with Eric Raymond). Releasing source code therefore represents a number of ambiguities relating to trust, cost, liberty, making free but making money on the stock market instead, a belief in open standards or a cynical business move to capitalise on free labour. There are competing ideologies here, and even the common denial of ideology within the open source community is a demonstration of ideology in itself (as Zizek has pointed out elsewhere); they share material practices but not ideologies. The distinction is perhaps best articulated in that free software describes a social movement whereas open source is a development methodology (Kelty 2008: 113; and they are both recursive publics to Kelty).
code-ghoshkelty.txt
Underpinning both at a more fundamental level is source code and the sharing of source code, itself rooted in the history of the UNIX operating system and its precarious position between the public domain and commercial enterprise (first written in 1969 by Ken Thompson and Dennis Richie at Bell Labs, in Kelty 2008: 125). If UNIX became the most widely used and portable operating system, caught between academic and corporate worlds, the key to its success was the distribution of source code as part of the system - allowing users to maintain it, support it, extend it and share it. Thus, beyond the obvious technical accomplishment and its pervasiveness, it served to establish a paradigm of sharing in three key areas of practice: porting, teaching and forking source code (Kelty 2008: 141).
code-ghoshkelty.txt
The intersecting terms 'open source' and 'free software' are often locked into a straightforward description of producing and releasing software rather than a wider discussion of organisation, sociality and the production of meaning. The cultural significance for Kelty is captured by the term 'recursive public' to account for the ways in which the public is: 'vitally concerned with the material and practical maintenance and modification of the technical, legal, practical, and conceptual means of its own existence as a public; it is a collective independent of other forms of constituted power and is capable of speaking to existing forms of power through the production of actually existing alternatives' (2008: 3).
code-ghoshkelty.txt
Somewhat related to the concept of the 'public sphere', a recursive public is capable of modifying itself through participation, relatively unmediated by higher authority. For Kelty, the collective technical experiment of the Free Software movement is an example of a recursive pubic that draws attention to its democratic and political significance and the limitations of our understanding of the 'public' in the light of the restructuring of power over networks. In a sense, the concept of the public sphere itself is taken as open to modification and reuse - it is made recursive in other words. As a consequence, a reconceptualisation of political action is required that combines traditional forms of expression such as free speech with coding practices and sharing associated with Free Software. Kelty's intervention is to extend a definition of a public grounded in discourse - through speech, writing and assembly - to other legal and technical layers that underpin the Internet in recognition of the ways in which power and control are structured - both discourses and infrastructures (2008: 50; Kelty's example is the case of Napster). In this way, recursive publics engage with and attempt to modify the infrastructures they inhabit as an extension of the public sphere. The publicness is constituted not simply by speaking, writing, arguing and protesting but also through modification of the domain or platform through which these practices are enacted. This is encapsulated by the phrase 'running code' to describe the relationship between 'argument-by-technology and argument-by-talk' (2008: 58; Kelty later refers to how the the free software recursive public turns from a 'class-in-itself to a class-for-itself' and therefore represents radical transformation, 2008: 116). Software is both expression as in speech or writing but also something that performs actions.
code-ghoshkelty.txt
In the chapter 'Conceiving Open Systems', Kelty examines the unruly term 'open', and asks whether it is more a means or a means to an end (2008: 143). He charts the development of the UNIX operating system and the TCP/IP protocol of the Internet as an open system (note: TCP/IP is Transmission Control Protocol/ Internet Protocol). Standardisation and openness underpin a quite different protocol of preferred order that exemplify the 'moral-technical imaginary of a recursive public' for Kelty (2008: 145). It was the need for interchangeability, interoperability, and networking that led to the adoption of an open systems method in the 1980s as hardware, software and systems diversified. It seems that rather than an end or goal being set, that openness was more a cultural paradigm, encapsulating the principles of liberal democracy and the free market as well as the open exchange of knowledge. But crucial to an understanding of the use of the term 'open' is that its opposite is not 'closed' but 'proprietary', and hence it takes on moral significance around monopoly control and ownership. What emerged from the various 'open-systems battles' since the 1980s was a 'partially articulated infrastructure of operating systems, networks, and markets' (Kelty 2008: 177), underpinned by moral divisions over intellectual property.
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What is important for Kelty's argument is that experimentation and developments in the culture of free software reflects an emergent and self-organizing public actions - the recursive public as he puts it. In this way he considers free software to operate as a critique that supplements the idea of the public sphere.
code-lessig.txt
Lawrence Lessig (2004), 'Open Code and Open Societies', in Lucy Kimbell, ed., New Media Art: Practice and Context in the UK 1994-2004, London: Arts Council of England with Cornerhouse.
code-lessig.txt
For Lawrence Lessig, open source and free software are fundamental to an open and free society. Generally in the West, ideological disputes over intellectual property and the dubious benefits of copyright law have arrived at a compromise under which after a period of time works fall into the public domain. There is a complex history to this and limited copyright broke the monopoly of publishers in the 1770s. After this, works in the public domain are common property open to use without permission of the author or publishers. It doesn't necessarily follow that this is free but it is open. Lessig's project is not to dispute property but to prove 'how creativity depends on a rich commons, how one feeds on the other' (in Kimbell, 2004: 182). Clearly there are distinctions between the public domain of real things and intellectual things. For Lessig, quoting Thomas Jefferson on the nature of ideas, it is a fundamental right for ideas to remain 'inexhaustible, uncontrollable and necessarily free' (in Kimbell, 2004: 183).
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There is an ideology to this and that's why ideas are often not free. In practice, the reverse is the case in contemporary practice as Lessig explains in a sinister example of corporate crime exerting its hegemony:
code-lessig.txt
'Content providers build code that gives them more control than the law of copyright does over their content. Any effect to disable that control is a crime. Copyright law gets privatised in code; the law backs this privatised code up, and the result is a radical increase in the control the content holder has over his [sic] content.' This historical irony is what he calls 'the story of how an open space gets closed. [...] An open society must resist this extreme.' (in Kimbell, 2004: 184) A free society requires this approach embedded in the principles of open source and free software. No doubt he would advocate the use of his own creative commons license agreements to protect these.
code-lessig.txt
Proprietary software might be an inherently flawed concept ideologically, but it is also a technical and pragmatic fact. The cooperative efforts of dedicated hackers in general make open source and free software arguably more reliable, stable and less bug-ridden through peer review. For instance, Linux was recognised by Bill Gates and Microsoft as being superior to its own Windows operating system in 2000, and since it has become the orthodoxy to develop certain software in this way.
code-lessig.txt
Crucially, open source software is not simply distributed for free, but free in the sense that it can be adapted and changed (under certain conditions of course). This is what Richard Stallman characterises as 'copyleft' protected by the GNU public license agreement for future free provision and distribution under the same conditions. However, it has become a victim of its own success and publicity, and there are increasing anomalies like the floatation of Red Hat (an open source supplier) on the Stock Market making millionaires of its founders (John Naughton, in Kimbell, 2004: 188). Perhaps the biggest weakness of initiatives like the Creative Commons open license agreements is that it does not challenge intellectual property law. Piracy, knowingly or not, is more radical in simply ignoring the law.
code-mackenzie.txt
Adrian Mackenzie (2005) 'The Performativity of Code: Software and Cultures of Circulation', http://www.lancs.ac.uk/staff/mackenza/papers.php; also in _Theory, Culture & Society_, vol. 22, no. 1, London: Sage, pp. 71-92.
code-mackenzie.txt
Adrian Mackenzie (2006) _Cutting Code: Software and Sociality_, New York: Peter Lang.
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Any sense of agency assigned to code relies on the relation of 'code's existence as both expression and process' (Mackenzie 2006: 141). Arguably, live-coding goes further as the act of coding becomes a prototype for its further action; what Adrian Mackenzie calls 'an entity that the code-index is held to represent' for software in general (his example is extreme programming). In this way, coding work - writing, compiling, and running code - comes to represent software as a whole. Code becomes privileged in a way that is simultaneously a simplification of the process and at the same time a challenge to the normative relations of software production and its further usage. Mackenzie clarifies the point:
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'Making code and coding into a prototype for software production seems very recursive, but in terms of the contestations of agency associated with software, the primacy of coding can be seen as asserting the identity of programmers as the originators of software.' (2006: 141)
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Software remains unfinished in socio-technical terms. To Mackenzie, the 'performativity of code' (2005) challenges the commercial imperative of software development and also the social relations associated with this. Like the work it does, the coding performance disrupts the false distinction between 'coding as form and code as force' (2006: 178).
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The performativity of the code object is characterised in this way by Mackenzie, with reference to the Linux operating system. The Linux kernal has a particularly unstable relation to commodified software and hardware as the most pervasive example of free/open source software development (taking the file and process of the Unix-like operating system), and through the enforcement of its GNU General Public License (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel). Mackenzie states that:
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'The way in which the Linux kernal is produced and continually changed cannot be separated from its structure as a coding project. The performance of Linux as a contemporary operating system cannot be detached from the circulation of Linux kernal code through code repositories and software distributions.' (2006: 178)
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Free and open source software development is enacted through an ongoing collective and collaborative labouring process. As a socio-technical description of performance, Mackenzie describes Linux as a performative 'speech act' that produces an uncertain relation between the code object (the Linux kernal) and the code subject (the programmers), and thus challenges its property relations and corporate relations of production (2005: 13).
code-mackenzie.txt
To Mackenzie, Radioqualia's _Free Radio Linux_ (2001) is a performance in this sense. The source code of the Linux kernal (the core component of the GNU/Linux operating system) was webcast over the Internet, using a speech synthesizer to convert the 4,141,432 lines of code into talk radio. It was broadcast like other speech materials and presented as displaying aesthetic value.
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Thus Linux somewhat demonstrates collective social action, or a positive implementation of general intellect in Virno's terms. It disrupts the false distinction between means and ends.
code-plant.txt
Code - 0s and 1s
code-plant.txt
[remeber to say that the arguments here are far too crude, populist and biologically determinist, and does feminism a disservice]
code-plant.txt
In Zeros + Ones (1997), Sadie Plant states the obvious in that: all computers translate information into the zeros and ones of machine code. She analogously thinks this reflects the 'orders of Western reality' (1997: 34) and lists an endless string of logical codes: including on and off, something and nothing, sense and nonsense, this and that, here and there, inside and outside, active and passive, true and false, yes and no. Her concern is to further relate this to sexual politics (remember the full title of her book is Zeros + Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture): male and female, penis and vagina, all make 'lovely couples' she states with irony (1997:35). Although 'it takes two to make a binary' (and set up the heterosexual paradigm), clearly inequalities are expressed in the tendency to privilege one side of the equation over the other - with positive and negative attributes accordingly. For the purposes of Plant's book, Ada Lovelace makes a glorious exception to the rule with her mathematical prowess (indeed, perhaps the University of Plymouth should be persuaded to rename the Charles Babbage building as the Ada Lovelace building?). In mathematics, ones and zeros are numbers of equivalent status.
code-plant.txt
The example of Alan Turing adds further interest (and breaks out of the potential heterosexist binary of the book up to this point) and challenges the tendency to privilege man over machine - following the dialectical logic of master and slave. She quotes Turing in saying: 'the intention in constructing these machines in the first instance is to treat them as slaves, giving them only jobs which have been thought out in detail, jobs such that the user of the machine fully understands in principle what is going on all the time' (1997:88). However, in dialectical style, the potential exists for the slave to turn the tables. It is the 'masters who are likely to be replaced' by the machines and thus for the most part a rearguard action is induced to stop machines taking control and enslave them. Common understandings of A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) have been governed by the conviction that the machine merely reflects the intelligence of the programmer and is slave to this principle - what might be better described as 'artificial stupidity' (1997: 89). So despite Turing's understanding that 'as soon as any technique becomes at all stereotyped it becomes possible to devise a system of instruction tables which will enable the electronic computer to do it for itself' (1997: 88), old models of thinking have been retained. This is thoroughly ideological. Based on models of cognition and centralised processing, computers have tended to be thought of as replacement brains rather than more organic systems (see Steve Grand's Cyberlife research for more on this) and as such remain as stupid as their programmers despite their potential to do otherwise - sounds like the ideological state apparatus at work. In contrast, the machine might learn quite independently. Furthermore, Turing's vision of an autonomous generative system has by now extended to account for systems that are thoroughly life-like in their own terms.
code-plant.txt
The famous Turing Test (1950) sought to measure whether a machine might pass for a human, and perhaps not surprisingly, it is relatively easily proved even with a fairly crude system. Another well-cited example is Eliza (1966) built by Joseph Weizenbaum, that acts in the manner of a psychotherapist and is surprisingly compelling despite simply working from a series of keyword responses (have a look at the online version, if you don't know it already). Plant cites Bladerunner (1984) as an illustration of an advanced test where the only indication of artificiality is a tiny flicker in the eye's iris with response to close questioning. In this story too, the worker-slaves have begun to ask questions themselves of their lot. The ability to imagine this differently, or creativity, is itself embedded in the 'wayward system' in its 'failures to carry out instructions and refusals to be bound by them' (1997: 95). As although 'it has always been said that "computing machines can only carry out the purposes that they are instructed to do. This is certainly true," writes Turing, "in the sense that if they do something other than what they were instructed then they have just made some mistake" [...] on the contrary, "the more it schizophrenizes, the better it works"' (1997: 95).
code-plant.txt
The intelligence of Turing figures here too. Humans do not necessarily follow the rules as prescribed and in the context of the war effort this was useful but under more peaceful conditions rather threatening in itself ('normal' reproduction was thrown into crisis in the war in many ways in fact). Plant cites Foucault, as she puts it, himself too both a byproduct and a renegade from the reproductive process. Foucault described a system of control where 'bio-power' is not centralized but dispersed: 'organized as a multiple, automatic, and anonymous power [...] this network 'holds' the whole together and traverses it in its entirety with effects of power [... it] is not possessed as a thing, or transferred as a property; it functions like a piece of machinery...' (1997: 98-9, in Discipline and Punish). Humans in this way, might be thought of part-machines, but one that (like a replicant) thoroughly believes in its own sense of autonomy and creativity. Thus Turing used his equipment in unconventional ways (excuse the laboured joke) and uncracked codes that others couldn't understand but that served to endorse the idea that he was also a cracked code in himself, eventually found guilt of 'gross indecency' in 1952. Here the historical facts collapse into bizarre allegory. First of all, he was proscribed oestrogen to reduce his sexual urge, under the dubious logic that to all intensive purposes he was female - this was a reversal of earlier judgements to give gay men testosterone to make them more male, yet ironically making them sex machines (presented here is another binary: not male-female but more accurately testosterone-oestrogen). (For what is probably a more accurate - and certainly more scholarly research version of events, see Andrew Hodges' Alan Turing: The Enigma. In this book, 'intelligence' is expanded to include human feeling, which results in Turing's suicide).
code-plant.txt
Plant concludes the Turing story: 'Two years later he was dead [...] "By the side of the table was an apple, out of which several bites had been taken." And this queer tale does not end here. There are rainbow logos with Turing's missing bytes on every Apple Macintosh machine.' (1997: 102)
code-plant.txt
NOTES
code-plant.txt
On cybernetics: (link to end of Castells)
code-plant.txt
Wiener's Cybernetics: Communication and Control in Animal and Machine (1948) was among the first to describe autonomous systems - more specifically, some device that allows the machine to govern or regulate itself. The key distinction (from clockwork machine for instance) is that the machine contains a sensing mechanism allowing external factors to be received and acted upon. What is essentially described is a feedback loop and this has a long history and is clearly present in some industrial processes. An even earlier reference is Ktesibios's 'regular' a water clock (C3rd B.C.) - arguably the 'first non-living object to self-regulate, self-govern, and self-control... the first self to be born outside of biology... a true auto thing - directed from within' (1997:157, Plant quoting Otto Mayr, The Origins of Feedback). With hindsight, it is now obvious that organic and technical (or animal and machine) processes are analogous and similarly contain self-organising functions (see Kevin Kelly's Out of Control, to name but one example). Now, self-organising systems have become much more complex and are arranged in multiple networks. The double helix of DNA was discovered in 1953, illuminating how artificial life, and genetic algorithms binding together biology and technology irreversibly. Plant explains: 'Any remaining distinctions between users and used, man and his tools, nature, culture and technology collapsed into the microprocessings of soft machines spiralling into increasing proximity: molecular lives downloading themselves into software systems, intermingling with the microprocessors and the bugs in the systems of machine code, finding new networks on which to transmit their instructions and codes...' (1997: 244-5) evoking the wet dream of Roy Ascott's 'moist media'.
code-plant.txt
The digital revolution has paralleled cybernetics, chaos theory, complexity and connectionism. Plant says that the implications of quantum mechanics is that molecules can be in two places at any one time, and yet computers are still being developed and being understood along old mechanical lines (1997:254). (this is my argument too of course! oops) Thus Turing's universal machine is thoroughly turned over by quantum computing. This fits her argument in that binaries are no longer appropriate and that particles are 'neither one nor two' (1997:255).
code-plant.txt
See sue owen text.
code-plant.txt
On solidity:
code-plant.txt
When a solid is heated its molecules vibrate with energy, beginning to obey fluid behaviours (Plant, 1997: 165-6).
code-plant.txt
On McLuhan:
code-plant.txt
Technological change induces a feeling that 'the future will be a larger or greatly improved version of the immediate past' says McLuhan revealing that the present is seen through a 'rear-view mirror' that conceals the extent of change (Plant quoting McLuhan from The Gutenberg Galaxy, 1997: 182). This describes the syndrome that Castells describes of change being recognised in general terms but old paradigms and institutions remaining in tact.
code-plant.txt
Add:
code-plant.txt
Quantum computing - conventionally a bit, the building block of a compuetr exists in one of two states - 0 or 1. Quantum computers change this rule and a quantum but can exist in three states - 0 or 1 or both.
code-plant.txt
(Simon Bone and Matias Castro, 'A Brief History of Quantum Computing', http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~nd/surprise_97/journal/vol4/spb3/)
codedoc-paul.txt
codedoc - christiane paul
codedoc-paul.txt
The procedural approach to making software art was somewhat taken to an extreme in the exhibition CODeDOC, first for the Whitney Museum of American Art's 'artport' web site (2002), and later at Ars Electronica (2003). The curator, Christiane Paul set the artist-programmers a task to 'connect and move three points in space' in a language of their choice (Java, C, Visual Basic, Lingo, Perl) and were asked to exchange the code with each other for comments. The viewers of the work are invited to first read the written code and then see the executed work. this raised a stir on mail lists as deliberately obfuscating or aestheticising code rather than demystifying the creative process in a long line of previous practices and experiments. What is perhaps interesting is that the curatorial approach is that the same pattern is evident in that she is unaware of what might be generated form the simple instructions. The curatorial statement contains a number of useful comments on the nature of the experiment:
codedoc-paul.txt
'In software art, the "materiality" of the written instructions mostly remains hidden. In addition, these instructions and notations can be instantaneously activated; they contain andÑfurther layers of processing asideÑ*are* the artwork itself. While one might claim that the same holds true for a work of conceptual art that consists of written instructions, this work would still have to be activated as a mental or physical event by the viewer and cannot instantaneously transform, transcend, and generate its own materiality.' (Paul, 2003)
codework-wark.txt
McKenzie Wark (2002), 'From Hypertext to Codework', HJS vol.3, issue1, http://www.geocities.com/hypermedia_joyce/wark.html
codework-wark.txt
There is a lot of work that deals with writing and code. McKenzie Wark cites the work of William Blake in this connection and sees him as a media artist in the sense of the scope of his production beyond simply text or images (2002). Perhaps this is also what Graham Harwood was thinking about in his recasting of Blake's poem London into perl. The point for Wark is to extend the debate around electronic writing from hypertext to what he calls 'codework'. In the tradition of post-structuralist thinking, hypertext exemplified the opening up of the space of text and the potentiality of the reader to complete the text. The emphasis here has tended to occlude the material production of the text.
codework-wark.txt
The term 'codework' attempts to address this technical and cultural issue. For instance, Wark points to the a range of alternative practices that are often antagonistic and work under collective pseudonyms like Antiorp or Integer with semi-legible postings to mail lists in which meaning and authorship are in question:
codework-wark.txt
'this - a l l this. = but 01 ch!!!!!!p. uneventful
codework-wark.txt
korporat fascist gullibloon zpektakle.'
codework-wark.txt
Texts such as this appear to be produced for their visual qualities and as noise, and fully integrating into a machinic production process combining natural and artifical languages and other spheres - from the Unix command line to Internet Relay Chat. Wark cites the work of Alan Sondheim using IRC to questions the status of writing in relation to the informal and collaborative nature of chat where other participants can enter the space of the text.
codework-wark.txt
Codework can thus be seen to cover the authoring or writing of text or coding software to write text opening up the possibilities of literature and creative production in general. Wark says that: 'Writing is not a matter of the text, but of the assemblage of the writer, reader, text, the text's material support, the laws of property and exchange within which all of the above circulate, and so on.' (2002)
codework-wark.txt
Sondheim's use of the term 'codework' makes the issue of material production more explicit...
computing-bolter.txt
Jay David Bolter (1984), Turing's Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
computing-bolter.txt
Luciano Floridi (1999) Philosophy and Computing: an introduction, London: Routledge.
computing-bolter.txt
In the development of the computer, theory preceded practice. J. David Bolter cites Alan Turing's paper 'On Computable Numbers' of 1936 in which he sets out the possibilities of logic machines - what became known as the Universal Turing machine - indeed long before they were built (1984: 12). Turing manages to describe the processing of information that any digital computer performs: 'to replace discrete symbols one at a time according to a finite set of rules' (Bolter, 1984: 47). More well known is Turing's paper of 1950 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence' in which he makes the claim that computers will be capable of imitating human intelligence, or more precisely the human capacity for rational thinking - what has become known as 'artificial intelligence'. Artificial intelligence is what Marvin Minsky has described as 'the science of making machine do things that would require intelligence if done by men (sic)' (from Semantic Information Processing, quoted in Bolter: 1984: 193). Interestingly, the definition not just through the analogy of humans and computers, or imitation, but through their differences.
computing-bolter.txt
If technology is broadly defined as the controlled application of power, ancient forms such as craft tools connect closely with human or animal muscle power. In Ancient Greece, such practical skills were combined with poetic insight. Craft skills were taken as analogous to other skills of planning and execution: 'The Platonic world of ideas was really a series of perfect patterns from which the imperfect objects of the material world were derived' articulating the compromise between the 'ideal' and the possible (Bolter, 1984: 22). Bolter charts the connection of ideas about the world and the development of technology. It is well established that the middle ages developed a dynamic but clockwork view of the world that underpinned philosophical and theological thinking at that time. In considering technologies, it is important to recognise this long history of mechanisms that relate to computation in the broadest sense.
computing-bolter.txt
A computer is above all a computational system. Computation defined simply is a logical or physical process of generation, turning inputs into outputs. Additionally, Luciano Floridi would add that these state transitions (from initial state to final state) are based upon a number of variable rules making the intuitive definition ultimately too simple (1999: 4). A more detailed understanding requires a longer history of mathematical and computational machines that necessarily link to the development of logical thinking: Pascal's adding machine of 1642; Leibniz's multiplication machine of 1671; Babbage's analytical machine of 1835, to name a few. It also requires an understanding of the potential for computing to extend beyond rational thinking, as a way of recreating or even generating new realities (Floridi, 1999: 8). The von Neumann machine basically adapted mechanical ideas from Charles Babbage of storage and processing to the electronic age - combining the program (the instructions) and the data into the same code. For Bolter, it is the ultimate assembly line manipulating parcels of information, and is an archetype for an industry that requires specialised collective labour and knowledge (1984: 34). The computer has thus become an analogy for contemporary thinking, and arguably is a 'thinking system' in itself.
computing-bolter.txt
Delving into this history, Bolter describes the innovation of the von Neumann computer was in considering the two principles of operations simultaneously: the rules of the operation and the data upon which this program operates. At this time, the data was put onto punch cards but the rules needed to be expressed in a way that was not simply the structure of the machine itself or its wiring. Von Neumann stored the rules and the data as strings of binary digits, all stored in the computer's memory and differentiated by the central processing unit. Within electronics, this thinking has encouraged the separation of engineers from programmers (until a recent merger, for instance in the University of Plymouth, the Schools of Communications and Electronic Engineering and the School of Computing) - more commonly expressed as an emphasis on hardware or software. The programmers put the pre-existing hardware to work (or life, according to Bolter, 1984: 52). One is hard and fixed, the other soft and mutable according to this logic. One is worked upon, and one performs the work.
computing-bolter.txt
On a more precise level, the computer works through binary arithmetic - both representing and manipulating numbers in base 2, a system that only uses the digits 0 and 1. Computers are binary simply because the flows that passed through the relays and switches operated in binary mode too - on or off, 1 or 0 accordingly. Even in mathematics, this is an issue of representation as the symbols are not given or fixed - just pervasive. Interestingly, in terms of numerical calculations, the computer is surprisingly prone to errors, and certain calculations simply cannot be performed by strings of binary digits ('pi' is a famous example). It was Ada Lovelace who envisaged Babbage's Analytical Engine, as not merely calculating numbers but arranging and combining letters and other symbolic systems - not as a calculator but as a logic machine. In turn, this informs von Neumann's approach to expressing different codes through the same binary representations or strings of bits - making 1 and 0 potentially yes or no, true or false, and so on. Bolter explains that this binary 'truth functions' is discrete, unambiguous, just computes as true or false. Furthermore, the logic extends using more complex formations such as 'or' - 'and' - 'not', as well as rules about contradiction, consistency and implication (1984: 69). Through these formal systems, mathematics and philosophy were combined under a symbolic logic.
computing-bolter.txt
The impact of this logic allows for ideas of artificial intelligence, in which machine can think and reason, bringing order to the world. Whereas, 'outside the computer, there is only chaos, dust, and various contaminants from which this fragile universe of order and logic must be guarded if it is to continue to function' (Bolter, 1984: 74). In the computer, all information is treated using this logic, coded into binary representation in order to be manipulated. Computers manipulate arbitrary symbols following conventions and rules - at the level of syntax rather than semantics if you like. It is at the level of representation that ambiguity, imagination and reality enter the frame. When computers are networked, the logic also gets leaky.
computing-bolter.txt
Logic, space and time are of central consideration in computation. Programmers arrange the data in space as a structure, and the program then acts upon this and returns a new data structure. In this sense, programmers express information architectures and work in spatial terms - parallel computing would be a good example. Bolter explains that programming languages provide structures in a data types called 'arrays', and more complex arrangements such as 'trees' (1984: 86). Programming languages can clearly be seen for their spatial qualities, their grammar and syntax but also their poetic arrangements in electronic space. Like poetry and electronic writing, a computer's operations are decidedly time-based as well as spatial; processing might be fast but nothing operates instantaneously on a computer. When instructions are to be repeated, this is called a 'loop', set to repeat until a terminating condition is met, unless an infinite loop is invoked. As Bolter points out: 'The time limits, which the computer and its programmer confront, are of both a theoretical and a practical nature. The ultimate limit comes from the nature of the computer itself' which is finite (1984: 112). On the other hand, infinite loops (that in theory might run infinitely) threaten the logical structure built into the machine.
computing-bolter.txt
In this connection, Bolter charts this reception of progress over the ages: in ancient time where there is little evidence of a belief in indefinite progress in contrast to Enlightenment thinking where unlimited human progress became dominant influenced by the operations of the clock (1984: 117-9). He contends that computers suggest a different view where 'time is finite and its progress is cyclic. Progress through repetition has in fact become a trademark of the whole industrial era' (1984: 120), but in this case not produced mass produced goods but units of information and ideas - immaterial production in other words. The loop characterises our contemporary view of progress through the analogy of recycling (Bolter wrongly characterises Capitalism and Marxism together in their faith in the direction of progress, 1984: 123 - their views of history are decidedly different).
computing-bolter.txt
On a practical level, computers use languages to represent the logical structure of the problems to be solved as code (Bolter, 1984: 124). An obvious distinction needs to be emphasises in that 'artificial' languages differ from 'natural' languages but clearly there is nothing natural about either language, they are both artificial. Although programming languages are not spoken as such, the analogies are more complex than simply saying natural languages evolved differently - from speech to written forms. However, natural languages clearly are not as fixed and evolve constantly through usage. (see my other notes on language and code) However, there are similarities too of course. Certainly some programming languages can be grouped and influence each other. Aesthetic concerns, issues of efficiency, accessibility and style are common to both. Importantly, a program is written for two very different readers: the computer that executes it and other programmers who may like to understand it and revise it (Bolter, 1984: 127). As a result of some of these factors, there are hierarchies of programming languages: from 'machine language' of 1s and 0s, to 'assembly languages' that translates the machine language with another program (an assembler), to 'higher level languages' that are more complex translation programs (called compilers) (Bolter, 1984: 128). Computer codes follow a hierarchy based on their relationship to machine instructions and binary logic but this is not a value judgement as such. 'High' and 'low' here relates to efficiency and complexity in an interdependent relationship.
computing-bolter.txt
Many programmers would deny the ambiguity of expression in their work - it either works or doesn't in logical terms - but clearly there are poetic and expressive elements in code. The logician also approaches natural languages in terms of its linguistic structure over semantic contents. Chomsky's Syntactic Structures (1957) is particularly influential here in proposing generative or transformational grammars. In this way, language was treated 'as an algebraic structure rather than as a lexicon of individual words' (Bolter, 1984: 147). A word is only of interest in as much as it is part of an overall rule-based structure that generates a sentence. It was Jerry Fodor, following Chomsky, who suggested that language is an internal code wired into the human brain - somewhat similar to machine code (Bolter, 1984: 150). Presumably natural languages work like translation programs at a higher level but still only translate the machine code.
computing-bolter.txt
Computer memory is also arranged hierarchically. At the top of the hierarchy are data-base systems for storage and retrieval large amounts of information. A data-base consists of any kind of discrete information put into 'machine-readable' form. Computer storage is exceedingly reliable, and organised in associative patterns making retrieval and searching efficient. In solving a given problem, the central processor takes symbols from memory, combines or compares them with other symbols and then restores them to memory following rules of logic. The computer is working with form rather than content.
computing-bolter.txt
The programmer is clearly a crucial part of the overall ecology of the computer machine. Creativity in this connection is a contentious issue: is this really expressive or merely a demonstration of skill - is it an art or a craft, or both? Programmers tend to work collaboratively (and yet simultaneously in isolation working on a terminal at the end of an internet connection) and express technical and intellectual skills - good technique in other words (in the sense that Benjamin describes elsewhere). The programmer puts logic to work, mediating between the problem to be solved and the logic of the computer - mediating or translating between content and form. The art of programming might be seen as the translation between content and form, between a problem expressed in human terms to one expressed in a way the computer can process, between ambiguous and complex expression and formal logic - between loose and strict thinking perhaps. At one extreme is the 'hacker', a compulsive programmer who is a caricature of a 'programming virtue, that of making one's program clean and coherent' (optimum performance) - Bolter calls this the 'twin qualities of programming, correspondence and internal coherence' (Bolter, 1984: 174). When programming is considered in terms of art of course, this does not hold. Creative work in translation offers other possibilities (in terms of language and meaning production), and ways of making comment upon the logic and system employed.
computing-bolter.txt
Bolter says that 'the programmer (and even the designer of computers) is farther removed from the materials than anyone before in the history of technology' (1984: 185). This is patently not true if code is material. In fact, Florian Cramer would maintain that there is a special closeness between material and tool (see notes on code elsewhere). He redeems himself, later, when in claims that 'the computer is in some ways a grand machine in the Western mechanical-dynamic tradition and in other ways a tool-in-hand from the ancient craft tradition' (1984: 232; Bolter, despite recognising both tendencies, would like to promote the computer as tool as he thinks this promotes more humane intentions). Here there is an emphasis on the less or more human control involved. The computer's functionality and its use is therefore paramount - more a semi-autonomous tool of intention (or something like that).
computing-bolter.txt
Quantum dialectics (add to digital dialectics):
computing-bolter.txt
A computer is a physical material thing, hardware constrained by the laws of physics. Adding a layer of complexity to this, 'quantum computing' attempts to step outside the physical constraints of standard computers by taking an external perspective to provide insights into possible directions that are non-deterministic and transformative and of course involve quantum states. In this way, new ways of codifying and processing data might be envisaged. If algorithms that follow the laws of quantum physics are implemented, the principles are made manifest in terms of physical information at least. The difference lies in that standard computing that follows Newtonian physics and only allows a bit to be any one determined state at a time - on or off. Whereas a quantum computer 'exploits the possibility of quantum states of atomic particles to store digital registers in a definable but still undetermined quantum superposition of two states at the same time' (Floridi, 1999: 189). Floridi explains this in more detail but it is the logic that is striking: a 'qubit' (quantum bit) is actually both states '1' or '0' simultaneously although probably not equal.
computing-bolter.txt
Floridi suggests that Hegelian dialectics might help explain this principle of quantum superposition whereby contradictory positions are reconciled in a higher unity by both being annulled and preserved in synthesis (1999: 190). Might we begin to imagine a concept of 'quantum dialectics'? The analogy to dialectics is further enhanced in describing quantum logic where Boolean operations generate new superpositions and eventually, or at least potentially the desired output (making it truly Hegelian - the example Floridi gives is the synthesis of the finite and infinite making the absolute, 1999: 190). Interestingly, Floridi explains that special logic gates have to be developed to control the interactions between qubits and to generate coherent change - so too, dialectics of course in which coherent change is the desired purpose. The potential is vast, especially when considered in terms of parallel computing but largely theoretical. In other words, the achievement of the absolute is only in potential.
concept-lippard.txt
Lucy Lippard, ed. (1997), Six Years: the dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972 [...], London: University of California Press.
concept-lippard.txt
The concept of the dematerialisation of the art object, first published in 1968 by Lucy Lippard and John Chandler, characterises art in two ways: 'art as idea and art as action' (Lippard, 1997: 43). Dematerialisation in this connection aims to deemphasise the material aspects of art, and especially of art as object, and its prevailing orthodoxies of 'uniqueness, permanence, and decorative attractiveness' into an 'anti-form' or 'process art' (Lippard, 1997: 5). Lucy Lippard quotes Sol Lewitt's statement that comes across as a slogan for generative art: 'The idea become a machine that makes the art' (1997: xiv).
concept-lippard.txt
Lewitt's 'Paragraphs on Conceptual Art' also define the terms in more detail (in Lippard, 1997: 28-9) and his 'Sentences on Conceptual Art' are presented as a series of aphorisms such as:
concept-lippard.txt
'10. Ideas alone can be works of art; they are a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas need not be physical.[...] 14. The words of one artist to another may induce an idea chain, if they share the same concept.[...] 29. The process is mechanical and should not be tampered with. It should run its course.[...] 35. These sentences comment on art, but are not art.' (1997: 75-6)
concept-lippard.txt
This approach departs from minimalist arts practice of preceding years and its apolitical, 'anti-intellectual, emotional intuitive processes of art-making' and replaced with 'an ultra-conceptual art that emphasizes the thinking process almost exclusively' (Lippard, 1997: 42) derived more from Dada, and Duchamp but also from Fluxus artists like Henry Flynt who allegedly coined the term 'concept art', from Alan Kaprow's 'happenings', as well as concrete poetry, mail art, performances, body and street works. Thus, conceptual art established an attack on the conventions of the art-world and the commodity status of the work of art. It also acted as a bridge between the visual and verbal forms of expression. Even criticism adopted similar tactics (departing from Clement Greenberg) for such as Lippard's example of her catalogue essay to accompany Duchamp's work at that time in which she simply selected readymades from a dictionary (1997: x). Appropriation became a standard strategy to undermine authorship and ownership, with artists, critics and curators engaged in this practice necessarily. Even pedagogy was considered an art form as it exemplified the issues of communication and distribution that conceptual art posed. Beuys coined the term 'social sculpture with this in mind:
concept-lippard.txt
'To be a teacher is my greatest work of art. The rest is waste product, a demonstration.... Objects aren't very important to me any more.... I am trying to reaffirm the concept of art and creativity in the face of Marxist doctrine.... For me the formation of the thought is already sculpture.' (in Lippard, 1997: xvii)
concept-lippard.txt
Much of this is exemplified by claims that information wants to be free; such as John Baldessari declaring 'that information could be interesting in its own right...'. Hans Haacke with a more overt political or even activist agenda claimed that: 'Information presented at the right time and in the right place can potentially be very powerful. It can affect the general social fabric.... The working premise is to think in terms of systems: the production of systems, the interference with and the exposure of existing systems....' (both in Lippard, 1997: xiii)
concept-lippard.txt
And yet, even overtly political art becomes incorporated. Benjamin's words about political art echo here: that it is simply not enough to make political art without at the same time attending to the technical apparatus. Lippard thinks the important legacy of conceptualism now, when it has become a commonplace activity, is that art can be found in social energies not yet recognised as art (1997: xxii). It is also worth adding that the term 'dematerialised' (like immateriality) is misleading as really my purpose (at least) is to recognise the materiality of ideas, instructions and actions, and in so doing to register these as social practices.
contradiction-mao.txt
Mao Tsetung (1977), Five Essays on Philosophy, Peking: Foreign Languages Press.
contradiction-mao.txt
On praxis:
contradiction-mao.txt
Activity in production is fundamental to Marxist thinking and the determinant of all other activities. Therefore knowledge too arises from the activity of material production (now cast as immaterial of course). Human knowledge thus is developed out of relations of production and other social practices, bound together and expressing social class distinctions in all political and cultural activities. Mao Tsetung verifies this centrality of practice bound to dialectical laws:
contradiction-mao.txt
'The dialectical-materialist theory of knowledge places practice in the primary position, holding that human knowledge can in no way be separated from practice and repudiating all the erroneous theories which deny the importance of practice or separate knowledge from practice. Thus Lenin said, "Practice is higher than (theoretical) knowledge, for it has not only the dignity of universality, but also of immediate actuality."' (1977: 4; quoting Lenin's notes on 'Subjective Logic or the Doctrine of the Notion')
contradiction-mao.txt
This is a description of praxis.
contradiction-mao.txt
Through this dialectical and materialist movement of cognition, perceptual knowledge is deepened to become logical or rational knowledge unified through practice: 'Our practice proves that what is perceived cannot be at once comprehended and that only what is comprehended can be more deeply conceived. Perception only solves the problem of phenomena; theory alone can solve the problem of essence.' (Mao, 1977: 6-7). To Mao, these ideas are verified through that fact that revolutionary theory arises from the practice of revolution itself - knowledge from direct experience. To imagine that rational knowledge can arise in itself without practice is 'idealism' or that the perceptual stage is reliable knowledge in itself is 'empiricism' and both are founded on false principles and un-dialectical (although note that Hegel's use of dialectics can be described as idealist, Marx updated this by relating this to practice). As dialectical thinking, deeper knowledge or a theoretical understanding is not enough in itself but is only useful in as much as it must be applied through action. Thus theory is continually developed and tested in the practice of production. It begins with practice and returns to practice.
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Importantly this dynamical process does not stop as the contradictions remain. Mao says: 'The movement of change in the world of objective reality is never-ending and so is man's [sic] cognition of truth through practice. [...] Our conclusion is the concrete, historical unity of the subjective and the objective, of theory and practice, of knowing and doing, and we are opposed to all erroneous ideologies, whether "Left" or Right, which depart from concrete history.' (1977: 19)
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This is the dialectical-materialist theory of knowing and doing (unwittingly echoed in the early stages of the national curriculum in art), wherein practice leads to theory which leads to practice and so on. With each cycle a deeper understanding of the objective and subjective world is achieved: 'Discover the truth through practice, and again through practice verify and develop the truth.' (Mao, 1977: 20)
contradiction-mao.txt
On contradiction:
contradiction-mao.txt
Materialist dialectics follows the law of contradiction in things, that lie at their very essence or the 'kernel' of the object according to Lenin (Mao, 1977: 23; citing Lenin's 'On the Question of Dialectics'). This view of the world stands in contrast to the metaphysical or evolutionist outlook that regards things, forms and species as isolated from one another and immutable. For instance capitalist exploitation can, in this way, be explained as something inherent to human nature, or social development simply explained by environmental factors. At the time of writing in 1937, Mao sees this as the tendency in Europe expressed as 'mechanical materialism' in pre-industrial times and as 'vulgar evolutionism' during the industrial age. The materialist-dialectical outlook, on the other hand, examines things both internally and in relation to other things: in other words, 'the development of things should be seen as their internal and necessary self-movement, while each thing in its movement is interrelated with and interacts on the things around it. The fundamental cause of the development of a thing is not external but internal; it lies in its contradictoriness within the thing.' (1977: 26).
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The internal contradictions provide the basis of change and the external factors the conditions for change. However, external causes become operative through internal causes (Mao, 1977: 28). In society, the internal contradictions are expressed between the productive forces and the relations of production, and provide the catalyst for the 'supersession' of the old by the new order. Importantly, as previously stressed, this new form also expresses new contradictions in infinite progress.
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Contradiction exerts universal rules, as it exists in the development of all things in mind, nature and society: 'Motion itself is contradiction' (1977: 31; Mao citing Engels from the essay 'Dialectics. Quantity and Quality'). For Engels and Mao alike, without contradiction nothing would exist at all, let alone be able to develop or change. It is present in all things however simple or complex they are, from beginning to end. As there is nothing but this determining contradiction of matter in motion, Mao explains that through this different forms can be identified. There is a certain 'particularity of contradiction' or essence that can be observed from one form of motion to another, enabling the observer to distinguish between things. Every thing has its own particular essence or contradiction. His examples of this include: 'positive and negative numbers in mathematics; action and reaction in mechanics; positive and negative electricity in physics; dissociation and combination in chemistry; forces of production and relations of production, classes and class struggle , in social science; offence and defence in military science; idealism and materialism, the metaphysical outlook and the dialectical outlook, in philosophy; and so on.' (1977: 36). Interestingly, the examples end recursively, with the principle itself proving itself as its own particular essence and contradiction.
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The earlier dialectical movement of knowledge from practice to theory back to practice is further explained through contradiction as the movement from the knowledge of the particular to the knowledge of things in general. Thus the essence of things is further understood through general understanding, and continues the dialectical cycle of better understanding (described elsewhere as the move from ignorance to knowledge, or scanty knowledge to substantial knowledge, from blindness to mastery of method, Mao, 1977: 58). It follows that general and abstract truths are only useful if they are applied again back in the world to concrete things. This is the tendency of much academic theoretical work of course - kept at the level of abstraction, without application to concrete conditions - that Mao would call dogmatism: 'our dogmatists are lazy-bones' (1977: 37) like many academics. If performed correctly by 'concrete analysis' (to paraphrase Lenin), each cycle makes knowledge more profound.
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In this way, contradictions are not resolved but perhaps temporarily or partially mitigated (1977: 43). Hence the process is marked by stages and there is no limit to further development: 'what is universal in one context becomes universal in another. Conversely, what is particular in one context becomes universal in another.' (1977: 48).
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Antagonism is an important form of contradiction, and the struggle of opposites for revolutionary theory. For instance, contradiction between classes must develop to the point of open antagonism for revolution to arise. By analogy, Mao explains that a bomb contains contradictions but: 'the explosion takes place only when a new condition, ignition, is present.' (1977: 69) Under capitalism or any exploitative condition, antagonism is thus a wishful temporary state whereas contradiction remains. In Mao's thinking, socialist societies do not contain antagonism but instead contradictions are temporarily resolved by the system itself in the process of continual development. Contradictions remain.
copyright-barron.txt
Anne Barron (2002), 'The Legal Properties of Art' conference paper, Marxism and the Visual Arts Now, University College London.
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Copyright makes distinctions of property in terms of 'work' - to copy it, to sell it, and so on, after the making act. Thus it severely limits the possibilities of a radical practice, such as tying its making to a particular author. The idea of the readymade, distributed or interactive work, despite being an orthodoxy in contemporary artistic production cannot be comprehended. Creativity in this sense is tied to a conservative and fixed paradigm that cannot account for dynamic processes. Anne Barron describes this idea of a stable and unified work as an affinity between copyright law and Modernism's idea of purity and autonomy bound up with the outmoded institutions that support art's commodification:
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'The concept of the work - the notion that the work is an objectification, in a bounded expressive form, of human creativity - is similarly crucial to the capacity of copyright law to accommodate contemporary visual art, for it excludes any art practice that resists its own reification: conceptual art, some of which liquidates the object entirely; and performance art, which yields an event unfolding in time rather than a spatially delimited artefact. Finally, the concept of the work also imposes constraints on the kinds of objects in which the work can appear: the object cannot be a human being as such; the object must arguably be reasonably permanent; and it cannot be liable to decay, disappearance or continuous change.' (2002)
criticism-adilkno.txt
Adilkno (1998), 'What is Data Criticism?' in Media Archive, New York: Autonomedia, pp. 57-59.
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Criticism in the work of the Frankfurt School serves the purpose of exposing the object value of traditional theory as being class-defined. Theory and criticism had to be combined as negation. There could no such thing as positive criticism and when contemporary criticism is considered, as with much of the criticism of recent decades, their views appear to hold: 'criticism thus succumbed to the ego trip of a better world that starts and end with oneself' (Adilkno, 1998: 57). Positive criticism leads to nothing as history seems to demonstrate, and has become a self-serving commodity - for instance in the case of the art review. The essay 'What is Data Criticism?' laments the age when critique threatened the very fabric of society. This seems untenable now when Marxism has been replaced by too many interconnections that make any one prime suspect difficult to identify - 'the quest for an opposable common denominator' (Adilkno, 1998: 58). The anonymous author proposes that:
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'Under the rule of unhistorical immaterialism, only absolute data criticism is a feasible option. [...] the only targets left for left for negation are the entire boot and root sectors of the media disk. Data criticism is the art of the absolute negation of information.' (1998: 59)
culture-adornohorkheimer.txt
Food metaphors:
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'The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises. The promissory note which, with its plots and staging, it draws on pleasure is endlessly prolonged; the promise, which is actually all the spectacle consists of, is illusory: all it actually confirms is that the real point will never be reached, that the diner must be satisfied with the menu. In front of the appetite stimulated by all those brilliant names and images there is finally set no more than a commendation of the depressing everyday world it sought to escape.'
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Adorno, Theodor W. and Max Horkheimer, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception," Cultural Studies Reader. Ed. Simon During. 38, p.40.
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The suggestion would be that the diner should not be satisfied and should engage with cooking itself - go into the kitchen rather than be interested in the dining room as such... to stretch the metaphor.
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Similarly again, one of Marx's caveats is that you cannot tell from the mere taste of wheat who grew it. In other words, that the product gives no indication of the system or the relations of production. (quoted in Deleuze and Guattari, 1990: 24).
culture-bourdieu.txt
Randall Johnson (1993) 'Editor's Introduction: Pierre Bourdieu on Art, Literature and Culture' in, Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, Cambridge: Polity, pp. 1-25.
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Pierre Bourdieu (1993) 'The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed' in Randall Johnson, ed., The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, London: Polity Press, pp. 29-73.
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Chris Jenks (1993) 'Introduction: The Analytic Bases of Cultural reproduction Theory' in Jenks, ed. Cultural Reproduction, London: Routledge.
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Pierre Bourdieu is an influential thinker in the cultural realm, and the role of culture in the reproduction of social structures. 'Cultural reproduction' is Bourdieu's term for this, that Chris Jenks (in a book using that term) seeks to revivify. To Jenks, the concept of cultural reproduction articulates a dynamic process between 'on the one hand, the stasis and determinacy of social structures and, on the other, the innovation and agency inherent in the practice of social action. Cultural reproduction allows us to contemplate the necessity and complementarity of continuity and change in social experience.' (1993: 1) To Bourdieu, social structures are embedded in the most ordinary aspects of everyday life and in 'higher' cultural practices such as art, music and literature (particularly in his book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, 1983). Much of this work comes from his analysis of the field of education, that appears to ensure the reproduce the power of the dominant class rather than undermine it. He broadly sees pedagogic practice as perpetuating a general social tendency towards repression - as 'symbolic violence' (Jenks, 1993: 11). Similarly, the symbolic power invested in art and cultural consumption is seen to be closely associated with economic and political power and authority. He sees this in terms of an economy of practices.
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The majority of commentators fail to recognise the positive generative aspects of Bourdieu's concepts. To Jenks, this is an over-concentration on the copying aspect of the reproduction metaphor at the expenses of regeneration or synthesis (1993: 2). Here the dynamical aspects of culture and of reproduction are overlooked. Culture is emergent, and is a social process built upon action, process and growth.
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Habitus:
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The concept of 'habitus' has some relevance here as Bourdieu's alternative to some of the problems associated with consciousness and subjectivity (associated with Marxism and Structuralism, such as false consciousness and a subjectivity constructed through discourse). He compares habitus to Chomsky's generative grammar to emphasise the creative and active capacities of human agents but without the associated difficulties in Chomsky of the universal mind. Habitus accounts for the ways in which agents can act in specific ways without simply being bound by or following rules. It is more a set of 'dispositions' that generate practices and perceptions through 'structured structures', almost as if by second nature (by 'sens practique', practical sense). Bourdieu says:
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'The habitus is not only a structuring structure, which organizes practices but also a structured structure: the principle of division into logical classes which organizes the perception of the social world is itself the product of internalization of the division into social classes.' (1984: 170)
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A good example might be language, and the ways in which certain forms of language bind people together in groups, or style in sub cultures (closely associated 'cultural unconscious', another of Bourdieu's concepts). Thus habitus is the 'principle that regulates the act,' typified as 'the system of modes of perception, of thinking, of appreciation and of action' (Bourdieu in Jenks, 1993: 14).
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The important point is that agents, knowingly or not, generate practices in this way, and they generate practices in a broader set of social relations that Bourdieu calls the 'field' (to describe a social formation). Each field is a dynamic concept, influenced by its agents but relatively autonomous from other fields. This owes something to systems theory in that each element (or agent) is linked to all other elements in the system (or field) and functions accordingly (produces meanings).
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Cultural Capital:
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Bourdieu defines 'cultural capital' as a form of knowledge, dispositions, an internalised code that equips the social agent with competency to appreciate or decipher a cultural artefact or relations. A work of art has meaning only in as much as it is a code that can be decoded. An artist invests cultural capital in the form of knowledge and skill in a project to reap maximum 'profit' from participation. Clearly cultural capital is accumulated through the agents activity in social formations and institutions, and distributed unevenly just like economic capital but separate to it. For instance, economic success does not predetermine cultural success and this is characterised in the phrase: 'the economic world reversed' to describe cultural production (Bourdieu, 1993: 29). The economic filed is one field amongst many for Bourdieu and so not determining in any sense.
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Fields (and Formalism):
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Fields follow a structural logic but are not the same - but importantly, the relationship is homologous across all fields (Bourdieu, 1993: 44 - but this is not to say that the structure of works are simply reflections of the social structure, or indeed that an artist might be expected to work on behalf of a specific class as in the case of Benjamin's 'The Author as Producer'). Through the concept of fields, some general analytical points can be drawn: to Bourdieu, the meaning of a work of art lies neither in its text nor in its social structure but in its field, the history and structure of the field, and the relationship of that field to power - all this at the same time. What constitutes art, and its aesthetic value, is bound up with these complex social and institutional frameworks. Thus, this is to be taken as a criticism of formalism, structuralism and deconstruction as simply not taking enough account of the fact that formal properties are themselves socially and historically bound. In this, the system of works is privileged over the system of systems according to Bourdieu, and avoiding to seek in the 'system itself the principle of its dynamics' (1993: 33). This is clearly an important criticism for the production of software art - that makes explicit its systemic nature at every level of its operation. Any work of art must be considered in terms of its production and consumption: the agent or producer produces in the field in which what the producer produces is granted value and legitimised as worthy of that field of practice (thus Benjamin, whilst drawing upon Russian Formalism avoid this problem in 'The Author as Producer'). In a sense, this is simply placing the work of art in the social relations and conditions that sustains it as art in the first place. Critics, academics, historians, publishers of art all serve this mediating role and sustain the system of collective belief. Accordingly, any inquiry must extend to all those who contribute to this result: those agents who conceive the idea, those who execute it, those who provide the equipment, and materials, and those who make up the audience for the work (Bourdieu, 1993: 35).
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Therefore, any analysis (like this one) must not be too external (eg. Marxist) or internal (eg. Formalist), subjective or objective, but both (both-and rather than either-or). [note: this relates to the ideas of Lefebvre and dialectics] To stress the point: works of art must be analysed both in relation to other works, in relation to the structure and history of the field, and to the specific agents involved.
culture-hebdige.txt
Software culture - need to investigate the idea of 'culture' in this regard.
culture-hebdige.txt
Cultural Capital v Economic Capital
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The theory of Cultural Capital emphasises that everyone has a "cultural history", accumulated through the primary and secondary socialisation process, which includes anything that gives you an advantage or disadvantage in certain situations.
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For example, something as simple as your biological sex or skin colour can, under certain circumstances, be advantageous or disadvantages for your life chances. Cultural Capital, therefore, can be considered to be anything in your personal / social background that helps or hinders you during your life. It can, for example, be things like family background and status (Prince Charles, for example, because of his membership of the Royal Family, has greater cultural capital than you or I), income, wealth, educational qualifications or whatever.
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The theory was originally developed by Bourdieu and Passeron (in 'Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction', 1973). Bourdieu in particular developed the idea of situational constraints by using the concept of cultural capital to demonstrate how the working classes are systematically blamed for their relative failure within the education system and to understand the theory a little more we need to understand the concept of cultural reproduction.
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Culture is a notoriously ambiguous concept (notes from Dick Hebdige (1993) 'From Culture to Hegemony', in, Simon During, ed., _The Cultural Studies Reader_, London: Routledge, pp. 358-367.)
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Even as a scientific term, 'culture' refers both to a process (artificial development of microscopic organisms) and a product (organisms so produced).
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Excerpts from Raymond Williams, Keywords:
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Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language. This is so partly because of its intricate historical development, in several European languages, but mainly because it has now come to be used for important concepts in several distinct intellectual disciplines and in several distinct and incompatible systems of thought.
culture-hebdige.txt
The fw is cultura, L, from rw colere, L. Colere had a range of meanings: inhabit, cultivate, protect, honor with worship. Some of these meanings eventually separated, though still with occasional overlapping, in the derived nouns. Thus 'inhabit developed through colonus, L to colony. 'Honor with worship developed through cultus, L to cult. Cultura took on the main meaning of cultivation or tending, including, as in Cicero, cultura animi, though with subsidiary medieval meanings of honor and worship (cf. in English culture as 'worship in Caxton (1483)). The French forms of cultura were couture, OF, which has since developed its own specialized meaning, and later culture, which by eC15 had passed into English. The primary meaning was then in husbandry, the tending of natural growth.
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Culture in all its early uses was a noun of process: the tending of something, basically crops or animals. The subsidiary coulter -- ploughshare, had travelled by a different linguistic route, from culter, L -- ploughshare, culter, OE, to the variant English spellings culter, colter, coulter and as late as eCl7 culture (Webster, Duchess of Malfi, III, ii: 'hot burning cultures). This provided a further basis for the important next stage of meaning, by metaphor. From eCl6 the tending of natural growth was extended to process of human development, and this, alongside the original meaning in husbandry, was the main sense until lC18 and eC19. Thus More: 'to the culture and profit of their minds; Bacon: 'the culture and manurance of minds (1605); Hobbes: 'a culture of their minds (1651); Johnson: 'she neglected the culture of her understanding (1759). At various points in this development two crucial changes occurred: first, a degree of habituation to the metaphor, which made the sense of human tending direct; second, an extension of particular processes to a general process, which the word could abstractly carry. It is of course from the latter development that the independent noun culture began its complicated modern history, but the process of change is so intricate, and the latencies of meaning are at times so close, that it is not possible to give any definite date. Culture as an independent noun, an abstract process or the product of such a process, is not important before 1C18 and is not common before mCl9. But the early stages of this development were not sudden. There is an interesting use in Milton, in the second (revised) edition of The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660): 'spread much more Knowledg and Civility, yea, Religion, through all parts of the Land, by communicating the natural heat of Government and Culture more distributively to all extreme parts, which now lie num and neglected. Here the metaphorical sense ('natural heat) still appears to be present, and civility (cf. CIVILIZATION)is still written where in C19 we would normally expect culture. Yet we can also read 'government and culture in a quite modern sense. Milton, from the tenor of his whole argument, is writing about a general social process, and this is a definite stage of development. In C15 England this general process acquired definite class associations though cultivation and cultivated were more commonly used for this. But there is a letter of 1730 (Bishop of Killala, to Mrs Clayton; cit. Plumb, England in the Eighteenth Century)which has this clear sense: 'it has not been customary for persons of either birth or culture to breed up their children to the Church. Akenside (Pleasures of Imagination, 1744) wrote: '... nor purple state nor culture can bestow. Wordsworth wrote 'where grace of culture hath been utterly unknown (1805), and Jane Austen (Emma, 1816) 'every advantage of discipline and culture.
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It is thus clear that culture was developing in English towards some of its modern senses before the decisive effects of a new social and intellectual movement. But to follow the development through this movement, in lC18 and eC19, we have to look also at developments in other languages and especially in German.
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In French, until C18, culture was always accompanied by a grammatical form indicating the matter being cultivated, as in the English usage already noted. Its occasional use as an independent noun dates from mC18, rather later than similar occasional uses in English. The independent noun civilization also emerged in mC18; its relationship to culture has since been very complicated (cf. CIVILIZATION and discussion below). There was at this point an important development in German: the word was borrowed from French, spelled first (lC18) Cultur and from C19 Kultur. Its main use was still as a synonym for civilization: first in the abstract sense of a general process of becoming 'civilized or 'cultivated; second, in the sense which had already been established for civilization by the historians of the Enlightenment, in the popular C18 form of the universal histories, as a description of the secular process of human development. There was then a decisive change of use in Herder. In his unfinished Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784--9 1) he wrote of Cultur: 'nothing is more indeterminate than this word, and nothing more deceptive than its application to all nations and periods. He attacked the assumption of the universal histories that 'civilization or culture -- the historical self-development of humanity -- was what we would now call a unilinear process, leading to the high and dominant point of C18 European culture. Indeed he attacked what be called European subjugation and domination of the four quarters of the globe, and wrote:
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Men of all the quarters of the globe, who have perished over the ages, you have not lived solely to manure the earth with your ashes, so that at the end of time your posterity should be made happy by European culture. The very thought of a superior European culture is a blatant insult to the majesty of Nature.
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It is then necessary, he argued, in a decisive innovation, to speak of 'cultures in the plural: the specific and variable cultures of different nations and periods, but also the specific and variable cultures of social and economic groups within a nation. This sense was widely developed, in the Romantic movement, as an alternative to the orthodox and dominant 'civilization. It was first used to emphasize national and traditional cultures, including the new concept of folk-culture (cf. FOLK). It was later used to attack what was seen as the MECHANICAL (q.v.) character of the new civilization then emerging: both for its abstract rationalism and for the 'inhumanity of current Industrial development. It was used to distinguish between 'human and 'material development. Politically, as so often in this period, it veered between radicalism and reaction and very often, in the confusion of major social change, fused elements of both. (It should also be noted, though it adds to the real complication, that the same kind of distinction, especially between 'material and 'spiritual development, was made by von Humboldt and others, until as late as 1900, with a reversal of the terms, culture being material and civilization spiritual. In general, however, the opposite distinction was dominant.)
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On the other hand, from the 1840s in Germany, Kultur was being used in very much the sense in which civilization had been used in C18 universal histories. The decisive innovation is G. F. Klemms Allgemeine Kulturgeschichte der Menschheit -- 'General Cultural History of Mankind (1843-52)-- which traced human development from savagery through domestication to freedom. Although the American anthropologist Morgan, tracing comparable stages, used 'Ancient Society, with a culmination in Civilization, Klemms sense was sustained, and was directly followed in English by Tylor in Primitive Culture (1870). It is along this line of reference that the dominant sense in modern social sciences has to be traced.
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The complexity of the modern development of the word, and of its modern usage, can then be appreciated. We can easily distinguish the sense which depends on a literal continuity of physical process as now in 'sugar-beet culture or, in the specialized physical application in bacteriology since the 1880s, 'germ culture. But once we go beyond the physical reference, we have to recognize three broad active categories of usage. The sources of two of these we have already discussed: (i) the independent and abstract noun which describes a general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development, from C18; (ii) the independent noun, whether used generally or specifically, which indicates a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period, a group, or humanity in general, from Herder and Klemm. But we have also to recognize (iii) the independent and abstract noun which describes the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity. This seems often now the most widespread use: culture is music, literature, painting and sculpture, theater and film. A Ministry of Culture refers to these specific activities, sometimes with the addition of philosophy, scholarship, history. This use, (iii), is in fact relatively late. It is difficult to date precisely because it is in origin an applied form of sense (i): the idea of a general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development was applied and effectively transferred to the works and practices which represent and sustain it. But it also developed from the earlier sense of process; cf. 'progressive culture of fine arts, Millar, Historical View of the English Government, IV, 314 (1812). In English (i) and (iii) are still close; at times, for internal reasons, they are indistinguishable as in Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1867); while sense (ii) was decisively introduced into English by Tylor, Primitive Culture (1870), following Klemm. The decisive development of sense (iii) in English was in lC19 and eC2O.
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Faced by this complex and still active history of the word, it is easy to react by selecting one 'true or 'proper or 'scientific sense and dismissing other senses as loose or confused. There is evidence of this reaction even in the excellent study by Kroeber and Kluckhohn, Culture: a Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions, where usage in North American anthropology is in effect taken as a norm. It is clear that, within a discipline, conceptual usage has to be clarified. But in general it is the range and overlap of meanings that is significant. The complex of senses indicates a complex argument about the relations between general human development and a particular way of life, and between both and the works and practices of art and intelligence. It is especially interesting that in archaeology and in cultural anthropology the reference to culture or a culture isprimarily to material production, while in history and cultural studies the reference is primarily to signifying or symbolic systems. This often confuses but even more often conceals the central question of the relations between 'material and 'symbolic production, which in some recent argument -- cf. my own Culture -- have always to be related rather than contrasted. Within this complex argument there are fundamentally opposed as well as effectively overlapping positions; there are also, understandably, many unresolved questions and confused answers. But these arguments and questions cannot be resolved by reducing the complexity of actual usage. This point is relevant also to uses of forms of the word in languages other than English, where there is considerable variation. The anthropological use is common in the German, Scandinavian and Slavonic language groups, but it is distinctly subordinate to the senses of art and learning, or of a general process of human development, in Italian and French. Between languages as within a language, the range and complexity of sense and reference indicate both difference of intellectual position and some blurring or overlapping. These variations, of whatever kind, necessarily involve alternative views of the activities, relationships and processes which this complex word indicates. The complexity, that is to say, is not finally in the word but in the problems which its variations of use significantly indicate.
culture-hebdige.txt
It is necessary to look also at some associated and derived words. Cultivation and cultivated went through the same metaphorical extension from a physical to a social or educational sense in C17, and were especially significant words in C18. Coleridge, making a classical eC19 distinction between civilization and culture, wrote (1830): 'the permanent distinction, and occasional contrast, between cultivation and civilization. The noun in this sense has effectively disappeared but the adjective is still quite common, especially in relation to manners and tastes. The important adjective cultural appears to date from the 1870s; it became common by the 1890s. The word is only available, in its modern sense, when the independent noun, in the artistic and intellectual or anthropological senses, has become familiar. Hostility to the word culture in English appears to date from the controversy around Arnolds views. It gathered force in lC19 and eC20, in association with a comparable hostility to aesthete and AESTHETIC (q.v.). Its association with class distinction produced the mime-word culchah. There was also an area of hostility associated with anti-German feeling, during and after the 1914-18 War, in relation to propaganda about Kultur. The central area of hostility has lasted, and one element of it has been emphasized by the recent American phrase culture-vulture. It is significant that virtually all the hostility (with the sole exception of the temporary anti-German association) has been connected with uses involving claims to superior knowledge (cf. the noun INTELLECTUAL),refinement (culchah) and distinctions between 'high art (culture) and popular art and entertainment. It thus records a real social history and a very difficult and confused phase of social and cultural development. It is interesting that the steadily extending social and anthropological use of culture and cultural and such formations as sub-culture (the culture of a distinguishable smaller group) has, except in certain areas (notably popular entertainment), either bypassed or effectively diminished the hostility and its associated unease and embarrassment. The recent use of culturalism, to indicate a methodological contrast with structuralism in social analysis, retains many of the earlier difficulties, and does not always bypass the hostility.
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Raymond Williams in 'Culture and Society' (1961) points to two main definitions:
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1. that emphasises the dream of an 'organic society' - integrated into a whole, a notion of past community, harmonious perfection.
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2. future socialist utopia where the distinction between labour and leisure is undermined.
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1. rather conservative, representing culture in terms of a standard of aesthetic excellence. (opera, ballet, literature, art) - the best that has been expressed.
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2. rooted in anthropology, referring to a particular way of life expressing certain meanings and values, not only in the arts but in other institutions and ordinary behaviour.
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Documentary tradition and real life, everyday life
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Grierson and general post office GPO film unit
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Humphrey Jennings' spare time (1939) and Mass observation movement (marketing techniques) - combining marxism and surrealism
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Thus culture takes on a wider interpretation, according to T.S. Eliot:
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'all the characteristic activities and interests of a people', and in turn described by Raymond Williams as the 'study of relationships between elements in a whole way of life' (1958). Here the emphasis is on the (theoretical) analysis of particular meanings and values.
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Raymond Williams developed an approach which he named 'cultural materialism' in a series of influential books - Culture and Society (1958), the Long Revolution (1961), Marxism and Literature (1977). Cultural materialism was always, for Williams, a Marxist theory - an elaboration of historical materialism.
culture-hebdige.txt
'Latent within historical materialism is ... a way of understanding the diverse social and material production ... of works to which the connected but also changing categories of art have been historically applied. I call this position cultural materialism.'
culture-hebdige.txt
Cultural production is itself material, as much as any other sector of human activity; culture must be understood both in its own terms and as part of its society. Williams' conception of cultural materialism went further, however. The key question was how the relationship between society and culture was understood. In his 1958 essay 'Culture is Ordinary' Williams cited the Marxist tenet that 'a culture must finally be interpreted in relation to its underlying system of production' and glossed it as follows: 'a culture is a whole way of life, and the arts are part of a social organisation which economic change clearly radically affects.' The second part of this statement indicates Williams' resistance to the classical Marxist idea of culture as a 'superstructure' which echoes an economic 'base'. The first part suggests how he would bridge the gap: culture was "a whole way of life". This Williams counterposed to 'high culture' - "this extraordinary decision to call certain things culture and then separate them, as with a park wall, from ordinary people and ordinary work".
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Hence, culture is always political. This is not to say that the crimes of the ruling class can be read off from a film or an advertisement, any more than they can from a party political broadcast. Still less does it imply that work which aims for that level of explicitness is the best or most important. Rather, culture is political because the social process addressed by political analysis is always embedded in culture. Williams reversed the terms of the usual analysis. Rather than being a specialised area in which we see reflections of the political processes governing society, culture is the "whole way of life" which makes up human society; political analysis is a specialised framework which can be used to understand it.
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Mass media was tentatively endorsed but a moral and aesthetic overtones - in distinguishing 'good' and 'trash' cultural forms. Williams called jazz 'a real musical form' and football 'a wonderful game' (in contrast to Adorno's views).
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Mass or Pop culture
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High or elite culture
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The 'culture wars' (Dylan v Keats)
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Digital culture?
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Both Williams and Hoggart portray the working class 'culture' sympathetically and with a strong bias to literature and literacy (again expanding the categories of literacy in particular - in Hoggart's 'The Uses of Literacy' 1966?). In this way, it was thought possible to 'read' society.
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Roland Barthes in Mythologies (1972) sets out to examine the hidden rules, codes and conventions that are particular to specific groups are rendered universal for the whole of society. Not concerned with value judgement but how all signs are converted to 'myth'. Barthes combined a literary or linguistic perspective with a Marxist perspective - and in particular 'ideology' that lies behind surface appearances, beneath consciousness. For Marx, it is the basis of the economic structure (surplus vale) that lies hidden from the consciousness of the agents of production - often referred to as 'false consciousness' (although Althusser confirms that ideology works at an unconscious level).
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Ideology saturates everyday discourse in the form of common-sense.
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'The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.' (Marx and Engels)
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Hegemony refers to the ways in which 'total social authority' is exerted not simply by coercion or direct imposition but by winning and shaping consent in such a way that power seems legitimate and natural.
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'Hegemony' -- the willing acceptance of one social group's dominance and control by another and the dominating group's main vehicle of control -- can be seen in terms of the more complex view of social structure, elaborated for the analysis of popular culture, developed in recent years within the Gramscian tradition and articulated by theorists such as Stuart Hall.
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However, an understanding of the more fundamental use of the term is also important. While it is difficult to find an adequate definition for hegemony, Todd Gitlin gives a sense of how the concept works:
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'[H]egemony is a ruling class's (or alliance's) domination of subordinate classes and groups through the elaboration and penetration of ideology (ideas and assumptions) into their common sense and everyday practice; it is the systematic (but not necessarily or even usually deliberate) engineering of mass consent to the established order. No hard and fast line can be drawn between the mechanisms of hegemony and the mechanisms of coercion. . . . In any given society, hegemony and coercion are interwoven.' See Todd Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching, 253.
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Ideology is thus seen to be permanent, natural and outside history. Hegemony according to Gramsci is a '"moving equilibrium" containing relations of forces favourable or unfavourable to this or that tendency' (Stuart Hall, 1976) . In other words, even opposition is part of the way that dominance is exerted. This is important but is neither fixed nor guaranteed.
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Stuart Hall has also developed reception theory -- an approach to textual analysis which allows for a measure of "negotiated" or "oppositional" readings of the text by the audience (see 'Encoding-Decoding'). This means that audiences/readers don't simply take in a TV show, newspaper, etc., dumbly, accepting the textual meaning intended by the producer or editor. Instead, they negotiate meaning in the media text, that is, they take in some of the meaning supposedly embedded in the text, but they also infer some of their own meaning into the text. Depending on their cultural backgrounds, some people might accept most of the media text's message, while others reject it almost entirely, preferring an oppositional reading of the text.
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Commodities can be symbolically 'repossessed' in everyday life, and endowed with implicitly oppositional meanings, by the very groups who originally produced them... The consensus can be fractured, challenged, overruled, and resistance to the groups in dominance cannot be lightly dismissed or automatically incorporated. It is these objections and contradictions that find expression in subculture (Lefebvre in 'The Practices of Everyday Life'). For Hebdige, style in subculture is hugely significant - as its transformations go against 'nature', interrupting the process of 'normalisation'. Moreover, political struggle itself takes cultural forms.
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Does this hold?
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Adorno (On Popular Music) meets Textz.com (on Napster)
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[1] Popular music, which produces the stimuli we are here investigating, is usually characterized by its difference from serious music. This difference is generally taken for granted and is looked upon as a difference of levels considered so well defined that most people regard the values within them as totally independent of one another. We deem it necessary, however, first of all to translate these so-called levels into more precise terms, musical as well as social, which not only delimit them unequivocally but throw light upon the whole setting of the two musical spheres as well.
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[2] One possible method of achieving this clarification would be a historical analysis of the division as it occurred in music production and of the roots of the two main spheres. Since, however, the present study is concerned with the actual function of popular music in its present status, it is more advisable to follow the line of characterization of the phenomenon itself as it is given today than to trace it back to its origins. This is the more justified as the division into the two spheres of music took place in Europe long before American popular music arose. American music from its inception accepted the division as something pre-given, and therefore the historical background of the division applies to it only indirectly. Hence we seek, first of all, an insight into the fundamental characteristics of popular music in the broadest sense.
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[3] A clear judgment concerning the relation of serious music to popular music can be arrived at only by strict attention to the fundamental characteristic of popular music: standardization. The whole structure of popular music is standardized, even where the attempt is made to circumvent standardization. Standardization extends from the most general features to the most specific ones. Best known is the rule that the chorus consists of thirty two bars and that the range is limited to one octave and one note. The general types of hits are also standardized: not only the dance types, the rigidity of whose pattern is understood, but also the "characters" such as mother songs, home songs, nonsense or "novelty" songs, pseudo-nursery rhymes, laments for a lost girl. Most important of all, the harmonic cornerstones of each hit--the beginning and the end of each part--must beat out the standard scheme. This scheme emphasizes the most primitive harmonic facts no matter what has harmonically intervened. Complications have no consequences. This inexorable device guarantees that regardless of what aberrations occur, the hit will lead back to the same familiar experience, and nothing fundamentally novel will be introduced.
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[28] In order to understand why this whole type of music (i.e., popular music in general) maintains its hold on the masses, some considerations of a general kind may be appropriate.
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[29] The frame of mind to which popular music originally appealed, on which it feeds, and which it perpetually reinforces, is simultaneously one of distraction and inattention. Listeners are distracted from the demands of reality by entertainment which does not demand attention either.
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[40] Yet, if one looks at the serious compositions which correspond to this category of mass listening, one finds one very characteristic feature: that of disillusion. All these composers, among them Stravinsky and Hindemith, have expressed an "anti romantic" feeling. They aimed at musical adaptation to reality--a reality understood by them in terms of the "machine age." The renunciation of dreaming by these composers is an index that listeners are ready to replace dreaming by adjustment to raw reality, that they reap new pleasure from their acceptance of the unpleasant. They are disillusioned about any possibility of realizing their own dreams in the world in which they live, and consequently adapt themselves to this world. They take what is called a realistic attitude and attempt to harvest consolation by identifying themselves with the external social forces which they think constitute the "machine age." Yet the very disillusion upon which their coordination is based is there to mar their pleasure. The cult of the machine which is represented by unabating jazz beats involves a self-renunciation that cannot but take root in the form of a fluctuating uneasiness somewhere in the personality of the obedient. For the machine is an end in itself only under given social conditions--where men are appendages of the machines on which they work. The adaptation to machine music necessarily implies a renunciation of one's own human feelings and at the same time a fetishism of the machine such that its instrumental character becomes obscured thereby.
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In contrast:
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Textz.com concept:
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a spectre is haunting the corporate world--the spectre of organized world-wide file-sharing. mp3, to name the most common synonym for the becoming-distributor of millions of former customers, has clearly shown that the flows of digital data are much more driven by people and popular protocols than they are determined by legislation, ownership or the new global rules of the corporate-political. napster has reverse-engineered the ideology of a whole industry, and it has finally proven its total, complete and absolute obsolescence. today more than ever, the nets are zones of excess, immune against the business model of electronic scarcity. the transnational companies that are trying to break up the file-sharing networks have declared a war they will never be able to stop. there are going to be thousands of napsters. textz.com is not even zero-point-five of them.
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we are not the dot in dot-com, neither are we the minus in e-book. the future of online publishing sits right next to your computer: it's a $50 scanner and a $50 printer, both connected to the internet. we are the & in copy & paste, and plain ascii is still the format of our choice. it shouldn't require a plug-in to read a book on the net, nor should it require a credit card. the text industry is a paper tiger. along with the mass erosion of their proprietary rights goes the vanishing of their digital watermarks. packed today, cracked tomorrow. whatever electronic gadgets they will come up with--they are all going to be dead media on their very release day. forget about your brand new kafka dvd. i already got it via sms. one shouldn't expect the 50 million former users of napster to be digitally illiterate: they won't judge an e-book by its cover.
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this is not project gutenberg. it is neither about constituting a canonical body of historical texts (by authors so classical that they've all been watching the grass from below for almost a century of posthumous copyright), nor is it about htmlifying freely available books into unreadable sub-chapterized hyper-chunks. texts relate to texts by other means than a href. just go to your local bookstore and find out yourself. the net is not a rhizome, and a digital library should not be an interactive nirvana. the conceptual poverty of today's post-academic, post-corporate public online services--and we haven't seen dot-museum yet--is not and has never been a desirable alternative to the dystopic vision of a future controlled by the super-pervasive data-streams of the emerging military-entertainment complex. there are still other options. nostalgia is slavery. stay home, read a book.
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information does not want to be free. in fact it is absolutely free of will, a constant flow of signs of lives which are permanently being turned into commodities and transformed into commercial content. textz.com is not part of the information business. they say there was a time when content was king, but we have seen his head rolling. our week beats their year. ever since we have been moving from content to discontent, collecting scripts and viruses, writing programs and bots, dealing with textz as warez, as executables--something that is able to change your life. this is not promotional material. facing the unified principles of information--the combined horror of global communication and so-called guerilla marketing--there is no more need for media theory or cultural studies. the resistance against corporate culture can itself no longer remain in the cultural domain. you make a mistake if you see what we do as merely apolitical.
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we are studying the coils of the serpent, watching the walk of the penguin, mapping the moves of our wired enemies. intellectual, digital and biological property--cornerstones of the new regimes of control--are the direct result of organized corporate piracy. they are not only replacing such dubious and obsolete notions as freedom, democracy, human rights and technological progress. all these new forms of ownership are, in the first place, attempts to expropriate people's work, data and bodies--just as the they begin to acquire, for the first time in history, the technical means to organize them in a radically different way. today's global media and communication conglomerates are mafias, and we shouldn't count on what's left of the national governments when it comes to fighting back. "humanity won't be happy until the last copyright holder is hung by the guts of the last patent lawyer." napster was only the beginning. the nineties of the net are over. let's move on.
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justification of approach to examine net art in this seemingly 'out-moded' manner
I agree with Richard Barbrook that Birmingham-style
cultural studies lost something in its move away from
'economism'. Mind you, there has already been a partial
reaction to this in the form of cultural policy studies,
which does address institutional issues. But on the whole,
cultural studies has not been well equipped to deal with
the rise of new media technologies and the issue of
class and property that flow from the commodification
of digital information.
cybernetics-nichols.txt
The essay 'The Work of Culture in the Age of Cybernetic Systems' clearly requires an understanding of Benjamin's 'Artwork' essay. Interestingly as an update so-to-speak, this essay is not simply recast in the age of digital technology or computers but cybernetics. It is within this context that Bill Nichols wishes to test the artwork thesis and its claims for cultural transformation in the present moment as it was then (in 1988).
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This essay begins with a useful description of such cybernetic systems: as 'an array of machines and apparatuses that exhibit computational power' and even 'some quotient of intelligence' but all 'exhibit the capacity to process information and execute actions' (1988: 22). He thus places the computer within a broader definition of cybernetic systems to draw out the particularities and limits of systems that are self-regulating within precise and predetermined or coded parameters. He situates the computer as not merely a part of these processes but also a metaphor for them, and as such the contemporary exemplar of the dialectical relation of what he calls 'the negative dominant tendency towards control and positive latent potential towards collectivity' (1988: 23) - even in the artwork essay, democratic potential is only ever evoked as potential in contrast to rising fascist tendencies. The language of cybernetics, through the regulation of systems and actions, thus dramatically evokes this ideological tension 'between the liberating potential of the cybernetic imagination and the ideological tendency to preserve the existing form of social relations' (1988: 23).
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Rather reflecting the times (1980s) when the phrase 'cultural production' had a currency, he significantly focuses on the 'work of culture' rather than 'artwork' as a broader category that would include art of course but also other cultural practices and actions emanating from the mode of production, and the relations of production it supports. In this way, there is a emphasis more on processes, operations and procedures that run in parallel to the cybernetic system.
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In the time of Benjamin's essay, industrial processes and mass reproduction suggested fundamental shifts in the nature of art production, perception and relations of production - where the concept of aura, and the linked (alliterative) traditions attached to authenticity, authorship and authority were challenged. In other words, through reproduction, art is radically transformed in both form and function, and reality becomes something that can be re-presented, re-made - as it is revealed to be artificial in the first place. The significance for Benjamin is clear: 'The instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice - politics.'
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New technologies necessarily hold the potential for revolutionary change but this is why the reverse is often the case, as this dangerous potential is recognised by the overall system. This sense of irony is clearly dialectical in that technology both reveals and enables new social formations and practices, as well as being simultaneously used to bolster old ones - in the name of progress. It seems fair to say that the dynamics of this appear all the more striking at this point in time. The essay raises this through a series of questions such as: '... in what ways is our 'sense of reality' being adjusted by new means of electronic and digital communication?' [...] 'Is it conceivable, for example, that contemporary transformations in the economic structure of capitalism, attended by technological change, institute a less individuated, more communal form of perception similar to that which was attendent upon face-to-face ritual and aura and is now mediated by anonymous circuitry and the simulation of direct encounter' (for example online seminars as part of this MSc programme) [...] and 'does the work of art in the age of postmodernism lead, at least potentially, to apperceptions of the 'deep structure' of post-industrial society comparable to the apperceptive discoveries occasioned by mechanical reproduction in the age of industrial capitalism?' (1988:26). Comparable - of course - but are the tendencies more or less pronounced? For instance, interactive systems extend dialogic structures, continuing to dispute single authorship as well as additionally becoming 'messages-in-circuit' (Nichols quotes Bateson's phrase from 'Steps to an Ecology of the Mind' New York: Ballentine 1972). Is it simply possible to extend this circuitous and interconnected form to issues of authenticity and authority as in the case of the artwork essay. If so, Jameson's statement come to mind - that computer networks 'offer some privileged representational shorthand for grasping a network of power and control even more difficult for our minds and imaginations to grasp: the whole new decentered global network of the third stage of capital itself' (1991:37). Nichols would add that cybernetics simulates social process itself through interaction: 'We can talk to a system [like Eliza] whose responsiveness grants us an awesome feeling of power and control... [but users] are allowed no choices regarding the ultimate values and purposes of the system' (1988:32). More a case of interpassivity perhaps - to use that phrase again.
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The distinction between the industrial mode of production and what some call the late-industrial mode of information is important in revealing certain general tendencies. Broad distinctions are made in this essay for convenience: between entrepreneurial capitalism, monopoly capitalism, and multinational capitalism (largely taken from Mandel's phases of economic expansion and stagnation, quoted in Jameson too - more on this in later discussions) underpinned by corresponding shifts in the technical apparatus: between steam and locomotive power, electric and petro-chemical power, and microelectrics and nuclear power (1988:27). For instance, it is generally agreed that culture has moved from a model of 'product' to 'process', and from representation to simulation, and from being defined in relation to machines to cybernetic systems (we are, after all, already cyborgs according to Haraway et al). In the light of these changes, unquestionably profound as they are, the more general question remains as to whether old theoretical frameworks remain useful for the purposes of criticism. I am reminded of the same dialectical twist, in that one needs to ask new questions of old ones and old questions of new ones, perhaps.
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He ends with reminding the reader that they play a part in a self-regulating system, and that purpose is paramount. This is the cybernetic metaphor that he wishes to employ echoing and quoting Bateson that we are 'part of larger systems and that the part can never control the whole' and adds that 'The cybernetic metaphor invites the testing of the purpose and logic of any given system against the goals of the larger eco-system where the unit of survival is the adaptive organism-in-relation-to-its-environment, not the monadic individual or any other part construing itself as autonomous or 'whole' (Nichols quoting Bateson directly or indirectly, 1988: 46).
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More notes:
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For Benjamin the reminders of the productive apparatus were an essential part of the process: 'The equipment-free aspect of reality here (in films) has become the height of artifice; the sight of immediate reality [such as cameras, lights, workers, sets and so on] has become an orchid in the land of technology' (in Nichols, 1988:33). Awareness of this is obscured but we might add that transparency is the responsibility of the artist/producer. In the words of Benjamin (but from another essay):
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'an author who has carefully thought about the conditions of production today... will never be concerned with the products alone, but always, at the same time, with the means of production. In other words, his [/her] products must possess an organising function besides and before their character as finished works." (Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, London: Verso 1992: 98)
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Nichols argues that this equipment-free aspect is more pronounced with cybernetic systems, deeply embedded in code and operating systems. It is no longer merely a question of a suspension of disbelief but of our absorption into code; as our interest is diverted from products and objects to process and simulation. Hence, the contemporary artistic preoccupation with software production or an interest in the aesthetics of code itself (as opposed to the dead-end commodity production of art). But this is not new, even the Victorian Zoo according to Nichols exhibits the same logic of a self-regulating system and simulated animal nature and 'natural' environment (1988: 34) (in this case as opposed to the dead-end mausoleum of the museum) - much like the idea of virtual worlds presumes the (real) world as we perceive it to be 'real'. Nichols captures the debate about artificial life through the lens of Benjamin: 'Casting the issue in terms of whether existence within the limits of an artificial life-support system should be considered 'life' obscures the issue in the same way that asking whether film and photography are 'art' does. In each case a presumption is made about a fixed, or ontologically given nature to life or art, rather than recognising how that very presumption has been radically overturned. And from preserving life artificially it is a small step to creating life by the same means.' (1988: 37).
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However, computer-based systems offer the possibility of extending (this destruction of aura) 'the society of the spectacle' to the extreme of replacing reality altogether in 'the society of the simulation' (after all, Baudrillard was merely extending Debord's earlier work on an image saturation): '... by dint of being more real than the real itself, reality is destroyed' (Baudrillard, quoted in Nichols, 1988: 35). Notwithstanding disputes over property rights, copyright even over human DNA, new human-machine assemblages, this is more the stuff of the science fiction imagination - like 'The Matrix' or the writings of Jean Baudrillard (such as 'Simulations'). A happy medium is struck in the image of the cyborg (the cybernetic organism) that merges automata and human biology (studies in cognition are similarly encoded with cybernetic metaphors).
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Marx and clockwork:
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For Marx, clockwork begins the process the industrialisation - in suggesting ways of applying automatic devices to the production process (note: partly as a result of Vaucanson's experiments - not so much his duck, although the duck says something too about the industrial process and the automated production of shit). From the clock to the mill where the act of work is performed largely without human labour, even if the moving force involved human or animal effort. Interestingly, the industrial period is described in regressive terms (in keeping with a complex understanding of progress):
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'The industrial revolution begins as soon as mechanisms are employed where, from ancient times, the final result has required human labour; hence not where, as with the tools mentioned above, the material actually to be worked up has never been dealt with by the human hand.' (Letter from Marx to Engels, 1863, quoted in Benjamin, 1999: 696)
cybernetics-wiener.txt
Norbert Wiener (2000), Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948), Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
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Note: cybernetics is a general term but I could also call this area of research in organised systems, information theory or communication theory or systems theory - the beginnings of an understanding of complex systems.
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Herein, the entire understanding of control and communication (in the animal and machine) is characterised by the term 'Cybernetics' for Wiener (2000) - taken from the Greek word meaning 'steersman'. Writing in 1948, but recognising a longer history concerning governors (for instance, the first article on feedback mechanisms by Maxwell in 1863), the link to controlling mechanisms can be found in the etymological roots of the terms themselves (governor is a Latin corruption of the Greek word for steering) - the earliest references being to the steering of ships and the feedback therein (2000: 11-12).
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The link between philosophy and mathematical logic is crucial to an understanding of the development of cybernetics too, in the increasing mechanisation of processes for computation (by this, I mean the more general understanding of computation as the procedure of calculating; determining something by mathematical or logical methods). Leibniz in particular is important in combining 'universal symbolism' and 'a calculus of reasoning' into the 'construction of computing machines in the metal' (Wiener, 2000: 12). The link is thus drawn between mathematical logic and the mechanisation of processes of thinking.
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Factory:
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An interesting aspect of Wiener's work on cybernetics is that it carries a moral thread in accepting that new developments in mechanisation have 'unbounded possibilities for good and for evil' (2000: 27). He is thinking of an obvious instance such as the deployment of the atomic bomb, but more specifically the idea of the automatic factory and assembly line production. He sees this as a distinct reality, as a 'non-metaphorical problem' (2000: 27), imagining a workforce of mechanical slaves to perform human labour. He remains undecided as to whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, but thinks any assessment cannot be simply made in terms of the market (or money saved as a result of mechanisation) but must include an understanding of the conditions of labour. For him, any level of 'competition' between machine slave labour and human labour is a certain acceptance of the conditions of slave labour even if on the surface it appears to decrease human suffrage.
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Wiener traces the possibilities from the first industrial revolution - 'the devaluation of the human arm by the competition of machinery' to the 'modern' industrial revolution where the devaluation will become of the human brain (2000: 27; he is thinking of the brain of the skilled scientist and administrator in particular). In such a scenario, 'the average human being of mediocre attainments or less has nothing to sell that it is worth anyone's money to buy' (2000: 28). Therefore a society has to be forged that works on a set of principles other than those of market forces. This, for Wiener, is crucially important for anyone with an interest in labour conditions such as labour unions. In other words, labour requires a broader understanding of its conditions to include social, political, economic and technical questions.
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Automata:
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For Wiener, it is the desire to produce automata that is expressed at each stage of human and technological development - 'the living technique of the age' (Wiener, 2000: 39). If technical development can be traced from the age of clocks in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to a later eighteenth and nineteenth century age of steam engines to the twentieth century of control and communication, the clock mechanism continues to be a good object to describe such changes - and to describe analogue and digital processes.
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More precisely, in the time of Newton, it is clockwork automaton that combines technical achievement with philosophical ideas. For instance, Descartes considers non-human living things as automata at this time as a way of reconciling the idea of them having no souls (Wiener, 2000: 40). In this thinking, main and matter are seen to be autonomous entities but little attention is given to the dynamic interrelation of the two. This is why the work of Leibniz is particularly influential for Wiener, as someone engaged with the dynamics of mind and matter. Leibniz introduces the idea of 'monads', semi-autonomous entities that correspond to each other through a pre-established harmony (of God; 2000: 41). These monads are compared to clocks 'wound up so as to keep time together from the creation for all eternity', with such perfect workmanship of the Creator that they do not run out of time with each other (as would be the case with human produced clocks; 2000: 41). They reflect one another but this is not a causal relation, in that they are autonomous to all intensive purposes and closed from influence from the outside world. Automata, for Leibniz, is constructed like clockwork.
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In the nineteenth century, machine and natural automata (plants and animals) were considered rather differently in parallel to the predominant technology of 'energy'. Living organisms were thus seen in a limited fashion to be 'heat engines', burning fuel, but again with little attention to the complexities of operations - that take account of external and internal factors (such as energy flow, metabolism, and incoming and outgoing messages akin to sense organs). To Wiener:
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'In short, the newer study of automata, whether in the metal or flesh, is a branch of communication engineering, and its cardinal notions are those of the message, amount of disturbance or "noise" - a term taken from the telephone engineer - quantity of information, coding technique, and so on.' (2000: 42)
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In this thinking, an analogue is struck between the human and machine systems, but rather differently than simply seeing living things as machines. Storage and transfer of information might be described in physiological terms, but this is not to say one simply stands for the other or is equivalent but that a description in these terms might lead to complex understandings of the processes at work. In some ways this seems to be a return to a mechanistic world-view but a thoroughly agnostic one, and one complicated by a fuller description of living matter as organism.
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The relationship to time is also important for Wiener as he sees input-output as a consecutive relation of past-future (where does the present stand in such a conception?). According to Wiener (in his chapter 'Newtonian and Bergsonian Time'), the modern conception of automata conforms, not to a Newtonian model, but to a Bergsonian one - in keeping with the description of living organisms. Bergson emphasises the inadequacy of a Newtonian description of biology: 'the difference between the reversible time of physics, in which nothing new happens, and the irreversible time of evolution and biology, in which there is always something new.' (Wiener, 2000: 38; residing somewhere between the matter of Newton and the anthropomorphism of 'vitalism').
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Feedback (see Bill Nichols notes too):
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Much of the Wiener book is concerned with mapping these principles of describing the living organism in all its complexity (and the mathematics lies beyond my comprehension andgives me a big headache). One important aspect is 'feedback' that describes a certain intervention in the transmission and 'return' of information. Wiener describes this rather unpredictable aspect as a human link in a chain of events but also as an automated link with human intervention (2000: 96). His example is a thermostat, switching on or off depending on the temperature of a particular space at a point in time. If all works well, the temperature might remain constant. The governor of a steam engine is a classic example of a mechanical version of the same principle, regulating velocity depending on the load the machine bears and keeping its operations constant. The point for Wiener is that voluntary movement in humans is regulated in much the same way, and that human 'disorders' can be used to demonstrate faulty feedback in this way (such as Ataxia, and this can be further explained in mathematical terms but I prefer an act of faith in this regard). In such a scenario, a 'compensator' (something that can be controlled from the outside because the load fluctuates) is required as well as an 'effector' (the input-output relations) in order to compensate for the faulty information feedback and to reinstate control (2000: 113). This is grossly oversimplified (especially in this case, but also in the book) especially when translated to the human organism but the overall principles clearly hold some insights. [see Steve Grand's Creation: life and how to make it (2000) for a more contemporary but all the same simplified perspective]
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Feedback operates between the eye and muscles to make sense of the difference between objects (make meaning in other words) - a visual-muscular feedback system. This is relatively simple in the operation of a flatworm and thus easy to see the parallel between living organisms and artificial mechanisms. In the human organism (or more specifically in Wiener's example with human vision, 2000: 133-143), these operations are decidedly complex with interlinked subordinate feedbacks that work together in complex ways (like a computing machine to Wiener) - such that the organised whole is more than the sum of its parts ('gestalt'). The point of course is to better understand the human organism to built better artificial mechanisms, and in turn in the spirit of feedback, through this process to better understand the human organism (Wiener is thus hopeful about the potential for sensorial prothesis). He adds a warning to those who may draw 'specific conclusions from the considerations of this book do so at their own risk' (2000: 144; he is concerned with the correlation of cybernetics and psychopathology). The visual cortex (or indeed brain) and the computer have much in common but are not one and the same or reducible to one another. However, their behaviours are similar and reveal much about eachother in their chain of operations, perhaps especially in understanding errors and malfunctions (for instance, in distinguishing functional and organic disorders).
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By this comparison, it can be seen that it is not simply an empty physical structure of the computer that corresponds to the brain but 'the combination of this structure [hardware] with the instructions given it at the beginning of a chain of operations [software] and with all the additional information stored and gained from outside in the course of this chain [feedback]' (2000: 146). In other words, hardware and software operate through complex interrelation and correlation of form and contents. The human brain as the most complex and longest chain of operations in the animal world is thus particularly prone to disorder and breakdown (reparation extends the analogy through the deployment of disk-doctor when perhaps disk-psychoanalyst would be additionally required to satisfy the functional and organic errors).
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Stupid (not-intelligent) system
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This analogy is further extended in the chapter 'Information, Language and Society' to other organisational structures that are constituted through smaller organisational units (2000: 155; what has become known as 'cell theory'). This is apparent in examples from Liebniz to Hobbes; from an understanding of the human organism as a mass of smaller living organisms to the Leviathan nation-state made up of lesser parts and individuals. It is the social organisation that allows for the qualitative as well as quantitative difference in elevating the collective over the individual. Social animals such as humans (but also other herds, packs, nests, hives, colonies) organise themselves into efficient collective groupings that extend the individual to that of the overall system they are part of (like a nervous system). His example, and many since (such as Kevin Kelly), is the beehive where: 'All the nervous system of the beehive is the nervous tissue of some single bee. How then does the beehive act in unison, and at that in a variable, adapted, organised unison? Obviously, the secret is in the interconnection of its members.' (2000: 156) The interconnections are complex, and vary in complexity from the operations of the hive to that of civil society (from the Holy Roman Empire to the United States of America; extended again to the disorderly order of Hardt and Negri's 'Empire') that acts upon the intricacies of language and communication technologies for the transmission of information. These language skills are also in addition to the subtle communications skills that are intrinsic to the human or animal organism (ref. Chomsky on language?).
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Wiener describes the body politic as a particularly inefficient organism in this respect, demonstrating 'an extreme lack of homeostatic processes' (in other words, that a relatively stable equilibrium will be reached by independent elements of the system). This belief, he claims, has risen to an official act of faith in the United States where free competition is regarded as a homeostatic process much against evidence (what Wiener calls a simple-minded theory - a description of free market capitalism itself). In this view the individual capitalist is regarded as a public servant who deserves the profits gained from their actions - rather than a selfish individual who steals surplus profit and disrupts the social equilibrium. He says:
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'A group of non-social animals, temporarily assembled, contains very little group information, even though its members may possess much information as individuals. This is because very little that one member does is noticed by the others and is acted on by them in a way that goes further in the group. [...] There is thus no necessary relation between in either direction between the amount of racial or tribal or community information and the amount of information available to the individual.' (2000: 158)
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The market is a game (exemplified by Monopoly) with clear winners and losers (these operations have been studied elsewhere by Von Neumann and Morgenstern in their general theory of games; in John von Neumann and O. Morgenstern, Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944). In computer games in particular, there are clear analogies with politics and war where the individual strives for reward and the annihilation of competition, and clearly no emergent homeostasis is demonstrated. For Wiener:
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'We are involved in the business cycles of boom and failure, in the successions of dictatorship and revolution, in the wars which everyone loses, which are so real a feature of modern times' (2000: 159).
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It is perhaps an exaggeration to think of the individual player as completely ruthless as implied but there are disturbing tendencies and analogies to the political and social system all the same. There is a 'policy of lies - or rather, of statements irrelevant to the truth' (2000: 159) that encourage certain choices in the game of consumer capitalism and neo-liberal democracy - encouraging the 'fool' to buy certain products, and vote for particular candidates - to the profit of the 'merchants of lies'.
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The solution to this rather bleak description for Wiener relies of an understanding of the weight of pubic opinion, and the development of uniform levels of intelligence and behaviour within social groups. There can be demonstrated in small groups in particular where relative homeostasis can be discerned. The system self-organises into a relatively equitable one. Against this, larger communities protect these interests by privacy, property rights and individualism. As has been proven by recent history and is clearly evident in the workings of contemporary politics: 'the control of the means of communication is the most effective and most important' factor in this respect (2000: 160). This logic holds because each individual or organism is a conduit for the 'acquisition, use, retention and transmission of information' (2000: 161). Communications technologies hold tremendous power in the game of lies and in the transmission of half-truths.
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Wiener presents a passionate critique of contemporary society where 'natural and human resources are regarded as the absolute property of the first business man enterprising enough to exploit them' (2000: 161). Through the means of communication, certain 'state capitalist' [my interpretation] tendencies emerge:
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'the elimination of the less profitable means for the more profitable; the fact that these means are in the hands of the very limited class of wealthy men, and thus naturally express the opinions of that class; and the further fact that, as one of the chief avenues to political and personal power, they attract above all those ambitious for such power. That system which more than all others should contribute to social homeostasis is thrown directly into the hands of those most concerned in the game of power and money, which we have already seen to be one of the chief anti-homeostatic elements in the community. [... Tragically] the State is stupider than most of its components.' (2000: 161-2)
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The system is not intelligent after all. Is an intelligent system simply wishful-thinking?
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Certainly Wiener presents a scenario that is counter to much of the wishful writings of social and political theory in general. For Wiener any optimism for social change must take account of systems theory - and indeed, we might add that systems theory should take account of cultural theory. Part of the problem for Wiener is the 'loose coupling' with the phenomena under study - 'too small to influence the stars and too large to care about anything other but the mass effects of molecules, atoms, and electrons' (2000: 163). Indeed, as modern science has demonstrated, everything that we study is 'dispersed and distorted' by the act of studying it - an investigation of the stock market is likely to upset the stock market for instance (note: this is often characterised as the relationship of the observer to the observed that has since become a more common internal critique of the disciplines Wiener is referring to such as anthropology, ethnographer, politics and the social sciences - where subjectivity in addition to objectivity is accounted for. Von Foerster raised this reflexivity question in more detail of how to account for the role of the observer on the behaviour of the system, Heinz von Foerster (1981) Observing Systems, Seaside, Cal.: Intersystems Publications). Interestingly, and despite his undoubted faith in science, this is not a blind faith, or false optimism (but one tempered by realism) where the non-verifiable, the non-scientific work of the historian must also be taken account of.
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At the end of this chapter, there is a note that extends the interest in games theory whether it is possible to construct a chess-playing machine (2000: 164 - note: Coding can be compared to chess in terms of strategy). The link to the work of the historian might be further draw here in alluding to Benjamin's 'Thesis on the Philosophy of History'. (link to Benjamin allegory here)
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Chess is a particularly good example as in the human imagination, it appears to embody the ultimate intellectual challenge as well as the classic battle of opposites - think of at the time of the Cold War and the (ideological) contests between Fisher and Kasparov (USA ad Russia respectively) where political divisions are played out and sublimated into the game itself. Kasparov in fact, at the time world champion, played a computer and lost preferring to believe that it was not possible for the machine to win without human trickery (in Woods, 2002: 102).
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It would be relatively simply to construct a machine to follow the rules of the game without a sense of the merit of the play but to construct one with a will to win would be a more complex operation. To do this the machine would require an understanding of the opposing player's operations as well. This is altogether possible by constructing a machine that would calculate all its own and opponent's admissible moves and as a result assign valuations to these moves. It would operate at a level of proficiency equivalent to the majority of the human race (but fall short of Maelzel's fraudulent machine of 1818 - see section on the chess player). An ordinary digital machine could easily be adapted to the rules of the game. But how to make it even better, and less stupid?
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Characteristic of living systems, is the ability to learn and the ability to reproduce. Thus all living organisms adapt through evolution to conditions, changing behaviour that better suits the conditions to allow for continued survival and fitness better suited to the environment. The levels of this vary considerably depending on the complexity of the organism. The question for Wiener is as to what degree machines can be seen to do this? Clearly to some degree, man-made machines can learn and can reproduce themselves.
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The learning aspect can be demonstrated in games theory, where strategies and tactics to win or not lose the game are developed through experience. This is not a complete strategy but an approximation, such as the von Neumann 'approximate theory' where the player acts with caution to avoid defeat. However, many examples of tactics would demonstrate that caution is only one such tactic and suitable to particular circumstances, and against particular opponents. Thus, to develop a sophisticated chess-playing machine, it would need to adapt its behaviour and tactics according to the particularities of the circumstance (bearing in mind how literal its operations are). It would need to learn but its failures and successes across a series of games and adapt itself accordingly so as not to reproduce exactly the same moves under the same circumstances but to do so against learned criteria of success and failure. The learning process must be divided into a number of stages and not simply be subject to uniform evaluation and responses. In other words, it requires two orders of programming: one where linear one and one in which the past is used to determine the first. This predictive element again has significance in terms of the work of the historian - working both in a linear and non-linear way. So too the learning machine, must be programmed by experience or non-linear feedback (2000: 177) and not reduced to its limited, linear functionality.
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Self-propagating machines also work through the correlation of linear and non-linear processes, wherein an analogy is struck with living systems. Wiener's example is a non-linear transducer where the output is determined by the past of the input, but where the adding of inputs does not result in the corresponding outputs: 'One property of transducers, linear or non-linear, is the invariance with respect to a translation of time.' (2000: 178) He points to the analogy with genetics: 'when a gene acts as a template to form other molecules of the same gene from an indeterminate mixture of amino and nucleic acids, or when a virus guides into its own form other molecules of the same virus out of the tissues and juices of its host. I do not in the least claim that the details of these processes are the same, but I do claim that they are philosophically very similar phenomena' (2000: 180).
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Binary code (ref. digital dialectic):
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Wiener describes two main types of computing machines: the 'analogy machine' where the data is represented by measurements and 'numerical machines' where the 'data is represented by a set of choices among a number of contingencies, and the accuracy is determined by the sharpness with which the contingencies are distinguished, the number of alternative contingencies presented at every choice, and the number of choices given' (2000: 117 - for more on contingency, see Godel's formulation). In the case of the numerical machines, each choice is two as it is constructed on a binary scale of '1' or '0'. Instructions for computing, similarly operate in a binary mode - combining contingencies by using algorithms that follow this logic. One of the simplest is 'Boolean', based on the dichotomy between 'yes' and 'no'. Thus, data follows both an arithmetical and logical binary form, as a set of choices between two conditions - for instance, in the case of switching between 'on' or off' in a series of relays. These relays work as a series of actions as part of a set of iterative processes (akin to historical relations) that include 'memory' (the ability to use past results for future operations) which is the kind of analogous operations that allow Wiener to link the processes of natural and artificial machines (computing machines and the nervous system of animals). However, 'the brain, under normal circumstances, is not the complete analogue of the computing machine but rather the analogue of a single run on such a machine' (2000: 121 - this is rather like the best advances in artificial life making only the crudest analogue of plankton).
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An important principle that again displays the analogue is that a machine working on a repetitive cycle in this paradoxical manner answering 'yes' and 'no' would never arrive at an equilibrium. The idea of a machine that 'learns' becomes the way out of this paradox working on the principles of 'similarity, contiguity (where something evokes something else), as well as cause and effect' (2000: 127). In this way, a computing machine might display 'conditioned reflexes' as a 'nervous computing machine' (2000: 130) - more than simply a machine in action, which combines relays and storage mechanisms. This is clearly a description of a learning machine that might arrive at a solution but only (like a dialectician) as a result of an 'iterative process of successive approximations. The process must be repeated a very large number of times [...]' (2000: 130) - if indeed a final resolution is desirable at all (in the case of dialectics). For Wiener, care is required in setting up the problem in the first place so as not to compromise any later solution - this is a useful reminder for much of the applications of contemporary computation.
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For Wiener, 'Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day.' (2000: 132)
cyborg-haraway.txt
NOTES on Donna Haraway's, 'A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science. Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s'
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This is an influential essay, and has appeared in many collections but probably most notably in her own collection: Simians, Cyborgs and Women: the Reinvention of Nature, in 1990 (for a critique, see the Judith Squires essay 'Fabulous Feminist Futures' on the booklist. This title reveals a lot about the connections between technology and nature, and the author at the time of writing was a Professor of Biology - so particularly interested in the 'nature as culture' issue - as well as the stated: feminism, socialism and materialism. The essay is as much about feminist methodology, in processing some of the claims of postmodernism at this time - I think it was actually written mid 1980s). I think you can begin to see some of the useful connections being made between animals, humans and machines and that the stories that surround them are often presented as scientific fact (in one account she talks about the scientific laboratory experiments and field work on chimpanzees reflecting the debates about the family - you could trace the influence of feminism on sexual politics against the way people addressed the study of apes - no surprise of course really - in turn, this is often characterised as the 'science as culture' debate).
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In the manifesto, she states her purpose '... is an effort to build an ironic political myth... Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humor and serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honored within socialist feminism. At the centre of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg.' (pp.190-191)
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Why is the cyborg a good model?
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'A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction....
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Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs - creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted. Modern medicine is also full of cyborgs, of couplings between organism and machine, each conceived as coded devices, in an intimacy and with a power that was not generated in the history of sexuality.' (p.191)
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For instance, she sees this working against heterosexist binaries (and this cross-references back to Sadie Plant of course). The work of Orlan comes to mind too, similarly ironic perhaps and certainly focussed on the material body - though she says 'The body is my software...' following Artaud and the obsolete body (see also the work of Stelarc and many others in this genre of body art and post-body art). Haraway's essay is often used to legitimate cyborg fantasies when she is using it as a critical trope. Remember, she is not arguing that the body is obsolete - her subtitle is 'science, technology and Socialist-Feminism in the late twentieth century'. Her language is politicised in this direction:
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'Cyborg replication is uncoupled from organic reproduction. Modern production seems like a dream of cyborg colonization at work... Modern war is a cyborg orgy... Foucault's biopolitics is a flaccid premonition of cyborg politics...' (p.191).
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Biopolitics? Foucault theorised the body and technology as bound together in the construction of power. Foucault maintains that there is no unitary human subject except that which is produced through discursive processes and forms of rationality that produce the subject as the object of knowledge -in the complex relationship of knowledge/power. Throughout the nineteenth century, the body was continually made subject to medical and psychological examinations to render ruling capitalist and imperial ideology as 'true' knowledge. This is the normalising power of the 'carceral network' that did not exercise power directly on the body but on the body as the object of knowledge. New eugenics is just as obsessed with the cleansing of deviancy and the present assault on the (the poor, sick, foreign) body expressed in the deployment of biotechnologies in the service of the new world order. Critical Art Ensemble, in Flesh machine, describe this accordingly: 'The time is right for the second wave of eugenics because the economic foundation has been laid. Eugenic complements the grand pancapitalist principle of the total rationalisation of culture. [but] In order to truly accomplish the goal of making eugenic activity a part of everyday life, the public must be convinced that rationalised processes of reproduction are superior and more desirable than the non-rational means of reproduction' (Critical Art Ensemble, Flesh machine, Designer Babies, and New Eugenic Consciousness, Autonomedia 1998, pp.136-7).
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Haraway says: 'Communications technologies and biotechnologies are the crucial tools recrafting our bodies' (p.205)
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She goes further in thinking we are already cyborgs.
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'The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two centers structuring any possibility of historical transformation. In the traditions of Western science and politics - the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other - the relation between organism and machine has been a border war. The stakes in the border war have been the territories of production, reproduction, and imagination.' (p.191)
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For instance in the context of sexual politics, the myth operates:
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'... in the utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender, which is perhaps a world without genesis... The cyborg is a creature in a postgender world; it has no truck with bisexuality...' (p.192)
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It is also a ironic break with Western humanist model of subjectivity (the plot of original unity that Marxism and Psychoanalysis is predicated on).
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In contrast to these methodologies (that clearly Socialist-feminism is predicated on too):
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'The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence. No longer structured by the polarity of public and private... Nature and Culture are reworked; the one can no longer be a resource for appropriation and incorporation by the other. The relationships for forming wholes from parts, including those of polarity and hierarchical domination, are at issue in the cyborg world. Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein's monster [the first cyborg], the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration of the garden, that is, through the fabrication of a heterosexual mate, through its completion in a finished whole, a city and the cosmos. The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the Oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognise the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot return to dust.' (p.192-193)
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In this way, she is 'blasphemous' of her former project of socialist feminism and its methods as it is constructed on the foundations of that which it aims to question (this is the filter of postmodernism circa mid. 1980s). But this argument is no postmodern relativism, it is deeply polemical as you'd expect from a manifesto.
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'The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential.' (p.193)
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Whereas Haraway thinks of cyborgs as illegimate offsring, Judith Squires is more sceptical: for instance, in the section 'Cyborg as political paradox, she quotes Istvan Csicery-Ronay: 'Cybernetics is already a paradox: simultaneously a sublime vision of human power over chance and a multinational capitalism's mechanical process of expansion'; and to Shulamith Firestone: 'cybernetics like birth control, can be a double-edged sword. Like artificial reproduction, to envisage it in the hands of the present powers is to envisage a nightmare.' (in, Bell & Kennedy, eds, 2000:369).
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But Haraway's project is to critique socialist-feminism in recognition that things have shifted and machines are self-regulating.
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'But basically machines were not self-moving, self-designing, autonomous. They could not achieve man's dream, only mock it. They were not man, an author of himself, but only a caricature of that masculinist reproductive dream. To think they were otherwise was to be paranoid. Now we are not so sure... [now] Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.' (p.194) She continues: 'Microelectronics is the technical basis of simulacra, that is, of copies without originals. Microelectronics mediates the translations of labor into robotics and word-processing, sex into genetic engineering and reproductive technologies, and mind into artificial intelligence and decision procedures... Communications sciences and biology are constructions of natural-technical objects of knowledge in which the difference between machine and organism is thoroughly blurred; mind, body, and tool are are very intimate terms. The 'multinational' material organization of the production and reproduction of culture and imagination seem equally implicated.' (p.207)
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She is keen to emphasise the 'leaky distinctions' between animal-human and machines and their associated ideological struggles - based on dualism and the revolutionary subject. In this way, she imagines a cyborg world 'about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints. The political struggle is to see from both perspectives at once because each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point. Single vision [what she calls the 'god-trick of infinite vision'] produces worse illusions than double vision or many-headed monsters. Cyborg unities are monstrous and illegitimate; in our present circumstances, we could hardly hope for more potent myths for resistance and recoupling.' (p.196)
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This is her version of 'affinity politics' in recognition of fractured identities - affinity not identity, to counter endlessly splitting and searching for a new essential unity (this was the predominant way of socialist-feminists reconciling postmodernism at this time in the 1980s/early 1990s). Rather,
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'I prefer a network ideological image, suggesting the profusion of spaces and identities and the permeability of boundaries in the personal body and the body politic. 'Networking' is both a feminist practice and a multinational corporate strategy - weaving is for oppositional cyborgs.' (p.212)
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Sadie Plant follows this trajectory as do many other commentators in thinking that there is something particularly non-masculine about the web (see Zeros + Ones).
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In her questioning of the logics and practices of masculinist domination as expressed in dualisms (self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female, civilized/primitive, reality/appearance, whole/part, agent/resource, maker/made. active/passive, total/partial, God/man), she maintains:
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'High tech culture challenges these dualisms in intriguing ways. It is not clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine. It is not clear what is mind and what is body in machines that resolve into coding practices.' (p.219)
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There are many examples in science fiction and mythology - from Rachel in Bladerunner to Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale where women are simply cast as reproduction machines - and this essay itself is, after all, fabricated myth too. Throughout there is this artful tension between an authoritative manifesto and a tentative myth. She concludes:
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'Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia... It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, spaces, stories. Although both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.' (Haraway, p.225)
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Haraway's cyborg holds some similarity to Negri's concept of the 'socialized worker' as: 'a figure operating at variegated sites throughout the circuits of capital, immersed in a technoscientific environment where computers and communications have become so commonplace as to constitute a second nature' (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 178). In fact, it is explicitly recognised that subjectivity should be understood in terms of the cyborg. He crucial difference is between strategies of irony in Haraway or antagonism in Negri.
democracy-badiou.txt
Alain Badiou (2002) 'Prefazione all'edizione italiana' in _Metropolitica_, Naples: Cronopio
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Badiou ridicules the 'anti-globalisation' movement as missing the target. He characterises the struggle against neo-liberal democracy in this way:
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'Today the enemy is not called Empire or Capital. It's called Democracy.'
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(2002: 14)
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Alain Badiou (2006) _Metapolitics_, trans. Jason Barker, London: Verso.
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Democracy creates a discredited consensus: standing for the collapse of socialist states, the well-being of western capitalism, and the ongoing crusades against terror. Badiou takes this to be based on 'authoritarian' principles, for it is forbidden not to be democratic (2006: 78). The consensus it creates is a form of control and masks the underlying exploitation and antagonisms. In response to criticism of being undemocratic, he cites Lenin's defense in pointing to the distinction between bourgeois democracy and proletarian democracy, and also in linking the idea of the State to truth, thus (as with Schmitt) arguing for an understanding of democracy that is directly linked to the State and its effective sovereignty (the power of the people to rule themselves, the word democracy contains the words 'demos', the people, and 'keratin', to rule). Yet to Badiou the State is a fiction of sovereignty.
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The State cannot be separated from the interests of the demos - this is what Badiou describes as the truth of the collective (2006: 81). But Badiou is not arguing for an understanding of democracy with reference to a benevolent State nor that leads to generic communism but one that exposes politics in itself, that is understood as a form at a distance from the State. Democracy is susceptible to consensus through liberal hysteria (for instance, by invoking security issues over the war on terror, thus providing spurious comfort in perceived uncertain times).
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Jodi Dean (2009) _Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics_, Durham: Duke University Press.
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In disputing the notion of the post-political, Jodi Dean unpacks neoliberalism and the collective fantasies around the free market. As part of this, and along with others, she considers really existing democracy to be an empty cipher invoked by both right and left, arguing for a more radical political imagination. One of the problems is that a consensus based model like representational democracy fails to acknowledge that the political is necessarily antagonistic (2009: 13). This is Chantal Mouffe's position not least, as she draws upon Carl Schmitt's critique of liberalism (Schmitt famously argues that liberalism fails to account for the core opposition between friends and enemy that underscore the political) to stress the unavoidability of antagonism. Although taking a different position to Ranciere on the issue of the post-political, the point is that democracy is closely tied to systems of legitimacy (the law) such that it becomes the justification of various tyrannies - such as to invoke the 'state of exception' despite its contradiction with the principles of democracy.
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Dean uses the phrase 'communicative capitalism' to point to the convergence of democracy and the present form of capitalism, thus emphasizing the importance of networked communication technologies - indeed materializing them. The ability of these technologies to allow interconnections and participation indicates their ideological power, and despite appearances how scale-free networks contain hubs and hierarchies (here Barabási's explanation of power-laws proves useful, 2009: 31). Dean summaries this:
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'Communicative capitalism is a political-economic formation in which there is talk without response, in which the very practices associated with governance by the people consolidate and support the most brutal inequalities of corporate-controlled capitalism.' (2009: 24)
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'Communicative capitalism captures our political interventions, formatting them as contributions to its circuits of affect and entertainment - _we feel political, involved, like contributors who really matter_.' (2009: 49)
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Participation remains a fantasy in her terms, in clicking a button on an online petition for instance or as part of an interactive artwork (Zizek's use of the term interpassivity is cited, 2009: 31). The fantasy of social technologies would be a case in point to indicate how the social is produced ultimately as a passive relation. The collective fantasy extends to the idea of global unity materialized in the Internet (or events like the World Cup presently taking place as I write). Again referring to Barabási (2002), scale-free networks like the Internet can be seen to offer certain 'directness', divided into four continents for instance. The architecture is distributed and fragmented but imagined in terms of its totality, or what Dean calls the 'fantasy of global unity' (2009: 43).
democracy-dean.txt
To define what is meant by neoliberalism in more detail, like others, Dean turns to Foucault's lectures on governmentality between 1982-3 (Michel Foucault (2010) _The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the College de France 1982-1983, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). Foucault draws out a distinction between early liberalism and contemporary neoliberalism. Neoliberalism replaces the regulatory function of the state to the market with the market itself, and emphasizes the human subject in different terms reacting to the market rather than the limits of government. The goal of government becomes the construction of certain types of subjectivity in line with competition within markets (2009: 52).
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After the collapse of socialism, the fantasies of real existing democracy emanates from this logic.
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'Real existing constitutional democracies privilege the wealthy. As they install, extend, and protect neoliberal capitalism, they exclude, exploit, and oppress the poor, all the while promising that everyone wins.' (2009: 76)
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Participatory networked communications technologies consolidates the logic. This leads Dean to conclude that democracy is not the answer to contemporary political problems but a symptom.
democracy-ranciere.txt
Jacques Rancière (2007) _On the Shores of Politics_ trans. Liz Heron, London: Verso.
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In 'The Uses of Democracy', Rancière charactises Western democracy as a shadow of the real thing ('real-existing democracy'), a fiction masking selfishness and exploitation:
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'And in the current atmosphere of disillusionment we would seem to have the choice between only two position: either to recollectivize the idea of democracy, while accepting liberal democracy as an irreversible face (whence the search for an injection of more soul, as epitomized by the idea of participation); or else to frankly accept that what we call democracy is nothing but liberalism, and all the dreams of happy polities have never been anything but dreams, the self-deceit of a society of big and small capitalists who are finally complicit in the advent of the reign of the possessive individual.' (2007: 39-40)
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Both contain false assumptions according to Ranciere, based on revolutionary and romantic nostalgic assumptions about a totality of active citizens (or people as subjects). Democracy is not defined in relation to a sense of unity but is characterized by diverse agencies.
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Whereas participation is a strange fantasy filling the empty spaces of power, a mongrel idea according to Rancière, based on fallen grand narratives related to reformism and the revolutionary idea of the full involvement of its citizen-subjects in all domains. He says:
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'The guarantee of permanent democracy is not the filling up of all the dead times and empty spaces by the forms of participation or of counterpower; it is the continual renewal of the actors and of the forms of their actions, the ever-open possibility of the fresh emergence of the fleeting subject.' (2007: 61).
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In 'Democracy Corrected', speech is considered. The democratic subject speaks, and constructs a distance between words and things in terms of political rationality. 'Thus, democracy is not "just a word" or an illusion. Rather, it is a disposition of the name and appearance of the people, a way of keeping the people present in their absence.' (2007: 93) In other words, politics is the way people negotiate their relation to the reality and fiction of the public sphere. Consensus simply leads to compromise and dogma (such as Racism). Instead Rancière argues for a repoliticisation of conflicts and social problems, and to 'restore names to the people and give politics back its former visibility in the handling of problems and resources'. (2007: 106). This is based in the realm of representation and conflict. The theory of names is intriguing. He argues that the disappearance of the the name (such as 'worker') amounts to the disappearance of the politics around the name. Naming goes together with declaring a politics of that issue (for instance, naming 'class struggle' helps to establish it as active, and without a subject or object).
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Note: The word democracy: contains the words 'demos' (the people) and 'kratein' (to rule).
dialectics(neg)-adorno.txt
Theodor W. Adorno (2000) Negative Dialectics (first published 1966 in German), trans. E. B. Ashton, London: Routledge.
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In the preface to 'Negative Dialectics', Adorno describes how the negation of negation has been conventionally taken to achieve something positive by means of negation. In the paradoxical phrase 'Negative Dialectics,' he 'seeks to free dialectics from such affirmative traits' (2000: xix). This position is partly due to the apparent failure of philosophy to realise its aims, or to put its claims into practice: 'Theory cannot prolong the moment its critique depended on. A practice indefinitely delayed is no longer the forum for appeals against self-satisfied speculation; it is mostly the pretext used by executive authorities to choke, as vain, whatever critical thoughts the practical change would require.' (2000: 3) One can easily apply this to the academicisation of critical theory, the publishing industry that has built up around it, and the abstraction of theory from everyday praxis: 'The introverted thought architect dwells behind the moon that is taken over by extroverted technicians' (2000: 3). This is a sobering thought for the production of a PhD thesis not least, as 'no theory escapes the marketplace' (2000: 4). Adorno is arguing to a theory that is critical of itself.
dialectics-bhasker.txt
Roy Bhasker, Andrew Collier and Alan Norrie (1998) 'Dialectic and Dialectical Critical Realism' section, in, Margaret Archer, Roy Bhasker, Andrew Collier, Tony Lawson, Alan Norrie, eds., Critical Realism: Essential Readings, London: Routledge, pp. 559-739.
dialectics-bhasker.txt
Combining Philosophy and the human sciences, the term 'critical realism' is associated with the work of Roy Bhasker following the publication of his A Realist Theory of Science (1975). Critical realism might be subdivided into four main areas of interest: transcendental realism, critical naturalism, the theory of explanatory critique and the dialectic. I am most interested in his application of the dialectical method but will try to summarise the other categories briefly first (although they require more thorough explanation really as they are based on complex philosophical and scientific principles).
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The 'critical realist' partly draws upon the idea of 'transcendental realism' in which a critique is mounted against positivist conceptions of science rife in the early twentieth century (closely associated with 'hermeneutics' in opposition to positivism). Firstly, the critique is based on a number of historical sources including Karl Popper who argued that it was falsification not verification that lay the foundations for scientific method. Secondly, historians and sociologists of science, like Thomas Kuhn, had emphasised the social processes involved in scientific endeavour. Finally, it was influenced by the work of Wittgenstein that emphasised the mutable character of facts in science. Following a vertical or theoretical realism, scientific discovery could be seen to follow a certain dynamic logic that is revealed progressively. In addition, a horizontal or 'transfactual realism' was additionally necessary to sustain the universality of the workings of generative mechanisms or laws. Bhasker explains:
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'Laws, then, and the workings of nature have to be analysed dispositionally as the powers, or more precisely tendencies, of underlying generative mechanisms which may on the one hand - the horizontal aspect - be possessed unexercised, exercised unactualized, and actualized undetected or unperceived; and on the other - the vertical aspect - be discovered in an ongoing irreducibly empirical open-ended process of scientific development.' (1998: xii)
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Thus, he argues for the presence of structures and events (because science is stratified like nature) as well as open and closed systems (that differentiate data).
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Whereas western thinking has been dominated by dualisms such as the mind and body (or nature and society), 'critical naturalism' sought to overcome these dichotomies by studying each in the same manner. For instance, mind was simply seen to be an emergent property of matter (and society was considered in the same manner as nature) - not opposite to it. In the dichotomy between positivism and hermeneutics, causal explanation is opposed to interpretive understanding - the realms of physics and history for instance. Bhasker explains how structuralism and functionalism follow a positivist approach, whereas phenomenology follows a hermeneutic tradition. Some commentators, for example Max Weber and Jurgen Habermas, have attempted to combine these positions, and post-structuralism adds further theoretical complications.
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Critical realists, on the other hand, see both positivist and hermeneutic positions as sharing a false perspective on natural science. They propose a 'critical and non-reductionist, naturalism, based upon a transcendental realist account of science and, as such, necessarily respecting (indeed grounded in) the specificity and emergent properties of the social realm' (Bhasker, 1998: xiv). As a result, this view considers society as both the condition and outcome of human agency, and human agency both reproduces and transforms society:
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'Social structure, then, is both the ever-present condition and the continually reproduced outcome of intentional human agency' (Bhasker, 1998: xvi).
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Humans agents are actively able to transform society, and yet are simultaneously constrained by society.
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The 'theory of explanatory critique' refutes 'Hume's law' that the causal transition from fact to evaluation is inadmissible given that values are embedded in scientific discourse itself. Put another way: 'the theory of explanatory critique opens up the exciting possibility that we may be able to discover values, where beliefs prove to be incompatible with their own true explanation' (Bhasker, 1998: xviii). It presents parallels between the laws of nature and the social world in place of dichotomies.
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It is the dialectical aspect that is of relevance to this study, first initiated in Dialectic: Pulse of Freedom (1993). The objectives are ambitious to say the least, in enriching critical realism, developing a general theory of dialectics that extends beyond Hegelian thinking, and to form a critique of Western philosophy. It argues that Hegelian thinking is closed rather than open-ended, and that Marx never fully describes scientific realism. The dialectic in Marx is scientific, as it explains the contradictions in society in terms of the contradictory relations generating them as historical (rooted in the changes of the circumstances described), critical (demonstrating historical conditions) and systematic (tracing the historical conditions back to the mode of production) (Bhasker, 1998: xxi). Bhasker explains the Hegelian 'rational kernal' as a process of better knowing or learning through the dialectical process of greater critical depth. It generates what is already implicit but not explicitly articulated and by repairing some inadequacy. The Hegelian 'mystical shell' is the 'absence of the concept of determinate absence, and with it of uncancelled contradiction, open totality and ongoing transformative praxis' (1998: xxii). Dialectics in this way can be seen as the removal of absence towards a more total state of freedom: 'Dialectical contradictions are mutually exclusive internally related oppositions, conveying tendencies to change.' (Bhasker, 1998: xxiii)
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All this begins to come together in describing a transformative praxis. This is causal but requires an absence, is also subject to social structure, and requires a critique of duality with an understanding of emergence. The explanation in the introduction to the Bhasker book is far more complex and convoluted. Take the following quote as an example describing the dialectical approach of the critical realist applied to absence that is manifest in desire:
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'Then, by the logic of dialectical universalizability, we are driven to absent all dialectically similar constraints, and then to absent constraints as such in virtue of their being dialectically similar; and finally to engage, on the basis of the progressive generalization of the concept of freedom to incorporate flourishing and potentialities for development, and the negative generalization of constraint to include ills and remediable absences generally, in the totalizing depth praxis that would usher in the eudaemonistic or good society, which in this way can be shown to be already implicit in the most elemental desire.' (Bhasker, 1998: xxiv)
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[Oh dear, yet] Interestingly it is desire that holds the potential for emancipation in Bhasker's statement (evoking Deleuze and Guattari). Bhasker sees Marx as lacking methodological rigour and so attempts to supplement his insights on emancipation and praxis. Critical realism thus uses dialectic thinking both in terms of argument and immanent critique (epistemologically) but also to describe the dynamic of conflict and the mechanism of change (ontologically). This explanation is clearly adopted from Hegel who described the dialectic as the logical process of reason and 'the dynamo of this process, the method, practice or experience of determinate negation' (1998: 576).
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In Bhasker's terms, the concept of 'absence' is crucial to this in a process of absenting constraints or 'absenting absences' in such a way that the negativity is a prerequisite of positivity (1998: 562; he cites Gšdel in thius connection in that absence implies incompleteness that leads to greater completeness, 1998: 589). This is what Hegel calls the 'grasping of opposites in their unity or of the positive in the negative' (in Bhasker, 1998: 580). The negative does not simply cancel the positive but reveals the logic that 'a genus always contains, explicitly or proleptically, its own differentiae; [...] negation always leads to a new richer determination - this is transformative negation - so imparting to categories and forms of life an immanent dynamic and to their conflict an immanent resolution rather than a mutual nullification' (Bhasker, 1998: 580). Dialectics contributes to the gradual elimination of absences in this way. This is the power of negative thinking. The speculative reasoning of dialectics is necessarily generative.
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Without this approach, centrism, endism, and other fundamentalisms will dominate in what Bhasker calls 'irrealist dialectics' (1998: 598). Conversely, dialectics seen in Bhasker's way opens up the fixity of the subject or the 'propositional form' and becomes the 'great loosener' permitting 'empirical "open texture"' and structural fluidity and interconnectedness' (1998: 594; in a Marxian-Bakhtinian fashion). The positive sense of absence or of the negative is characterised in terms of emergence. Emergence, for Bhasker, is the generation of new possibilities, a 'quantum leap: matter as creative or autopoietic' (Bhasker, 1998: 564). It is dialectical contradiction that allows connections to both operate separately and as part of a whole or totality - Bhasker describes these as 'intra-actively changing embedded ensembles' in the domain of totality (1998: 566). In this way the here and now is characterised by the influence of the outside and the past in such a way that social phenomenon can be seen to contain emergent properties.
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Emergence describes the creative, autopoietic operation wherein new properties are 'generated out of pre-existing material forms from which they could have been neither induced or deduced'. This is the quantum leap Bhasker described earlier that produces 'irreducible real novelty' and goes beyond Hegelianism that is simply too linear and teleological (1998: 599). Marx, like Hegel, is too concerned with internal and linear negation for Bhasker. Here, and in general description, the materialist dialectical contradictions lead necessarily to a replaced and better society. Instead, Bhasker describes the world as an open system: in his words, as an 'open-systemic entropic totality, in which results [...] are neither autogenetically produced nor even constellationally closed, but the provisional outcome of a heterogeneous multiplicity of changing mechanisms, agencies and circumstances' (1998: 600). Emergence suggests non-causal, non-teleological formations that entails 'the possibilities of overlapping, intersecting, condensing, elongated, divergent, convergent and even contradictory rhythmics (causal processes)' (1998: 604). Bhasker conceptualises agency in similar terms of incompleteness or insufficient totality or absence that drives the dialectic, and it is his concept of 'transformative agency' that characterises his work as 'extra-Hegelian dialectics' (1998: 638).
dialectics-buckmorss.txt
Susan Buck-Morss, (1995) The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
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History:
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Benjamin's history writing aimed at destroying the 'mythic immediacy of the present' in order to free the political will for change (Buck-Morss, 1995: xi). The present is therefore not to be taken as the culmination of a cultural continuum but to explode this continuum as part of history's ideological function. Historical knowledge is this way can awaken consciousness that is fixed in a dream-state. Thus, the material world can be redeemed through allegory (or dialectical images) rather than historical myth (argued more extensively in his Trauerspiel study). History could be seen in terms of its discontinuity, perhaps of the distant past and the most modern in a montage-like construction. Thus 'the dialectical penetration and actualization of the past as it connects with the present is the test of the truth of present action.' (in Buck-Morss, 1995: 288)
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Susan Buck-Morss explains how a literal translation of 'Geschichtsphilosophie' into English is misleading. In German, two concepts come together (in a montage, like other compound words in German) to construct, not a philosophy of history, but a philosophy out of history in reconstructing historical material as philosophy (1995: 55). In contrast to traditional philosophy, the approach of Benjamin looks for truth in the 'garbage heap', the 'rags, the trash', the 'ruins of commodity production' (Buck-Morss, 1995: 217-8; citing 'Thesis on the Philosophy of History').
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[see notes on dust and ordure project]
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The theory of evolution is relevant here in arguing that nature unfolding in a non-repetitive way. In its time, this has a critical function to underline creationist belief but has since been corrupted to explain domination of one social group over another (this is further complicated if one builds in Benjamin's own considerable interest to Messianism and the Kabbalah to understand the nature of historical progress and redemption - that would be too much of a tangent in this connection). A reading of evolution that poses nature and history as dialectically opposed immediately reveals inherent contradictions in Social Darwinism making for a more dynamic understanding of natural history. Buck-Morss quotes Benjamin: 'No historical category without natural substance; no natural substance without its historical filter.' (1995: 59) Natural history is simultaneously ideological and holds the potential to reveal the truth and therefore incites action. For Benjamin, Darwin's thesis of natural selection is simply too bound to the notion of progress as automatic. Indeed, 'There is nothing natural about history's progression.' (Buck-Morss, 1995: 80)
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Montage:
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Benjamin, in rejecting and being rejected by academia, turned his attention to mass culture and the marketplace, asking:
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'Was it possible, despite capitalist form, to subvert these cultural apparatuses from within? The effect of technology on both work and leisure in the modern metropolis had been to shatter experience into fragments, and journalistic style reflected that fragmentation. Could montage as the formal principle of the new technology be used to reconstruct an experiential world so that it provided a coherence of vision necessary for philosophical reflection?' (Buck-Morss, 1995: 23)
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Collecting:
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'Thus there is in the life of a collector a dialectical tension between the
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poles of disorder and order. Naturally, his existence is tied to many other
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things as well: to a very mysterious relationship to ownership [...] also, to a relationship to objects which does not emphasize their functional,
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utilitarian value - that is, their usefulness - but studies and loves them as the scene, the stage, of their fate.'
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Walter Benjamin, 'Unpacking My Library', Illuminations, trans Harry Zohn, (New York: Pimlico) p. 62.
dialectics-maver.txt
Duna Maver (2002) 'avant.garde - transfigured or dead?',
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March 19.
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In response to Eric Kluitenberg's 'Transfiguration of the Avant-Garde/The Negative Dialectics of the Net'â Duna Maver consigns dialectics to the 'rubble-heap of history'. Mavor is bitingly cynical about the interventions of groups like RTMark and sees these strategies as tired repetitions of obsolete logic leading to inevitable recuperation. So it goes:
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'Dialectics never died. It lives every time another tired exhibit of the relics of dada or situationism opens at the houses of culture across the world. It lives when the hackers who haunt the net repeat the slogans and gestures of the dead and then congratulate themselves when they are finally inducted into the halls of power of the Venice Biennale or Ars Electronica. It lives when the theorists and cartographers of new deterritorialized flows of desire sell their interests by entering a classroom to become functionaries of the empire of production, offering packaged knowledge to students who eagerly produce whatever stupidity is asked of them in exchange for the general equivalent of a grade. It lives when the
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anti-globalization "multitude" faithfully ascend to the stage of negation to recite their memorized roles, proudly displaying the garments of an ideology that long ago betrayed its exhaustion. Dialectics consumes the desire of life as it beats its wings against the limits of the impossible.'
dialectics-zizek.txt
Slavoj Zizek (1999a), 'Hegel's "Logic of Essence" as a Theory of Ideology', in Elizabeth Wright & Edmond Wright, The Zizek Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 225-250.
dialectics-zizek.txt
In Zizek's 'Hegel's "Logic of Essence" as a Theory of Ideology', stresses Hegel's 'tarrying of the negative' to describe the retention of contradiction rather than the false harmonising at the point of synthesis (1999a). To Zizek, any harmonising dialectical synthesis that leads to an evolutionary advance must be rejected. This is, in other words, a rejection of 'higher-order synthesis' (although note that Hegel does not actually use these terms 'thesis', 'antithesis' and 'synthesis'). This is a move from 'in-itself' to 'for-itself' in Hegel's terms - from 'ground' to 'conditions' where ground is the essence and the conditions are the conditions that bring this about. The two opposing factors must be combined without losing the antagonism. There must be an antagonism between ground and conditions, between the inner essence and the external circumstances that gives rise to that essence.
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In Hegel, the subject can only arrive at essence once all obstacles have been abolished - and Zizek sees a parallel in Lacan's view of the subject but this is not my concern here. What is useful is that the human subject must perform a 'creative act of constructing necessary entities out of the material found' (in Zizek, 1999a: 226). This is not simply a retrospective recognition of false conditions nor projected by some concept of an autonomous subject (on which many a post-structuralist critique of Marxism is based) but an antagonistic interaction of the two - both internal and external factors (this is close to the position of Arendt and Lefebvre of course and their readings of the dialectical method). Instead the subject exists within an 'absolute unrest of becoming' built upon the antagonism between contingency and necessity (Zizek, 1999a: 239), themselves expressing the dialectic of what is possible and actually exists.
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This raises the question of whether human subject create the external world from within or as a result of external circumstances. Zizek, quotes Marx from the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte':
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'Men [sic] make their own history; but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.' (in Zizek, 1999a: 228) Hegel, as Zizek points out, would reject this view as too deterministic. It does not take account of the ways in which inner essence can be transformed into external conditions and vice versa. This is a radical anti-evolutionary approach to dialectic synthesis. Zizek explains:
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'The simultaneous reading of these two aspects undermines the usual idea of dialectical progress as a gradual realization of the object's inner potentials, as its spontaneous self-development. Hegel is here quite outspoken and explicit: the inner potentials of the self-development of an object and the pressure exerted on it by an external force are strictly correlative; they form the two parts of the same conjunction.' (1999a: 228)
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The point can be applied to the revolutionary subject of course - whether it can be said that the potential is necessarily in the proletariat and that the potential can be realised or actualised by external circumstances. This does not assume an autonomous subject by any means but a subject partly formed and forming external circumstances, including those related to history. It is simply an error of judgement to think that potential was not realised because of external conditions. For Hegel, external circumstances are not to be blamed, but on the contrary 'the very arena in which the true nature of these inner potentials is to be tested' (Zizek, 1999a: 229). Put another way, the knowledge required for revolution is self-referential. In historical materialism, the subject is required to act through self-knowledge of their role in history in order to become a revolutionary subject. Zizek explains this 'class consciousness' neatly as the change from 'class-in-itself' to 'class-for-itself' (1999a: 231). This expresses the antagonism between possibility and actuality that underpins radical thinking and action.
digitaldialectic-heim.txt
Michael Heim (2000), 'The Cyberspace Dialectic', in, Lunenfeld, ed., The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
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As one expect of someone who is a consultant for the computer industry, Michael Heim is keen to distance himself from the dialectical materialist interpretation of dialectics, instead employing an earlier description that preserves the 'joke or paradox that propels all dialectical thinking' (2000: 26). He sees analytical potential in using dialectical thinking to analyse what he calls the new reality layer, characterising two positions: 'naive realists' and 'network optimists' that both belong to the cyberspace dialectic (2000: 38). Despite citing Leibniz's rationality and Hegel's idealism and even Plato's dialogues (that included a concept of the dialectic), the essay has little to offer. He simply argues that an ongoing exchange between competing positions is a useful analytical strategy, and rejects out of hand deeper antagonisms related to power. He posits a safe middle ground to his crude distinction between na•ve realism and network optimists as that of 'virtual realism' (2000: 41). He is careful to not call this a synthesis but instead wishes to continue the oscillation between realism and idealism assuming some kind of equivalence and ignoring politics altogether.
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That these oppositions have more to them is evident in Carol Gigliotti's contribution to the same book (Lunenfled, 2002). She quotes Terry Eagleton's The Ideology of the Aesthetic to describe the dialectical relation between opposites: 'All "oppositional" identities are in part the function of oppression, as well as of resistance to that oppression; and in this sense what one might become cannot be simply read off from what one is now.' (2002: 52).
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Social transformation is only possible under these terms. Without an understanding of this, the oppressed simply remain oppressed but under the illusion of free choice - just like the readers of Heim's essay imagine themselves to be learning something (I am being antagonistic to prove my point). A clearer example might be the essay in which Heath Bunting's position in relation to the art world was considered na•ve. It was argued that he was clearly implicated in the culture that he wished to distance himself from:
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'Bunting is best known among the digeratti for his intended subversive actions and attacks on corporate and consumer culture. [...] Bunting's na•ve stance revealed his ignorance of the hard lessons learned 20 years ago [...] Had he been paying attention, he could have learned sooner that there is no outside to corporate culture or more importantly, that 'outside' is just another target market.' (in Stallabrass, 2003: 88).
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The wonderful irony of this is that this nettime posting allegedly by Timothy Druckery 'Heath Bunting: Wired or Tired' (1997) was not written by Druckery at all and possibly was posted by Bunting himself. That artists need to work, to do commerce, is simply a reality - it is a question of how these relationships are pitched and understood in terms of social relations that remains in question.
disorder-joxe.txt
Alain Joxe (2002), Empire of Disorder, Los Angeles/New York: Semiotext(e).
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Overall project:
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According to Joxe, we exist in a world exemplified by 'chaos' under the pressure of neo-liberalism. The title of his book Empire of Disorder, sets it in the context of Hardt and Negri's 'Empire' and an understanding of contemporary forms of sovereignty and power. Yet Joxe's project in rather different in implicating complexity theory (not explicitly though) and in his defensive position of seeing European Republics as the best resistance to Empire (note: he is an expert on Peace). He sees the American Empire as the 'Empire of Disorder' and meanwhile positions himself in opposition to this:
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'I defend the idea that Europe, as a pluralistic power and a crossroads of continents, probably represents the primary line of resistance to this empire for structural, and not only ideological reasons but for political and security reasons as well.' (2002: 16)
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He sees the power of the United States as not simply economic but military too (proved more so in recent times); a rich mix 'gained by their mastery of the practical effects of the electronic revolution, both in the military, aero-satellite sphere and the economic and financial sphere' leading to 'globalisation' and 'intolerable asymmetrical effects' (2002: 14). It is 'Empire' that regulates disorder.
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Empire is as a result of globalisation thus (cf. Hardt and Negri's definition of Empire):
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'The general effect of globalisation, its most general strategic definition, could be stated as follows: the disjunction of political, military and economic criteria once coordinated by the state at the geographic level of the state.' (2002: 85)
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He sees Hardt and Negri's 'Empire' as lacking crucial analytical questions, in not taking sufficient account of the military question and of seeing globality as only answerable in kind (hence 'globalise resistance'):
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'I do not think they have taken the military question seriously enough. They have a somewhat idealistic vision, perhaps even a Clintonian vision, of the expansion of the capitalist system. What we are seeing now calls into doubt not the veracity, but the capacity Negri has to represent the Empire in question.' (2002: 75)
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On the other hand, how is resistance to be characterised? Can this 'chaotic neoconservative order [...] be eliminated by an immediate counter-offensive from those who are nostalgic for the revolutions of 1649, 1793, 1848, 1871, 1917, 1968. Is it at least possible to slow it down, to hinder its progress, to lead the world towards a more pleasant chaos?'[...] (2002: 107)
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The choice remains (for Europeans, in his view) of which form of chaos they prefer, in counter distinction to that sense of 'disorder' maintained by the Americans.
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More precisely the 'empire of disorder' that 'claims to order everything through disorder is usually called the market' (2002: 122).
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This asymmetry is partly as a result of the 'decomposition' of Communist power. Disorder can be perceived where Communism has been dismantled along with the Nation State - you cannot do both simultaneously, he claims, without making a big mess - he says; 'No one asked Poland to eliminate Poland. For federations like Russia or Yugoslavia, breaking down the Communist State has been more destructive' (2002: 28). Perhaps, the more current disorder in Iraq can be seen in this light too in that an ideological battle ensues between Western and Islamic notions of ruling 'order'. He sees conflict as far more complex than, for instance, Samuel Huntington's theory of the 'clash of civilisations' (2002: 91) - is the clash between industrial civilisation and the computer civilisation the next step in a civil war (as Toffler remarks, in Joxe, 2002: 208). One would have to look at the interrelations between political, military, financial and religion for a more useful understanding of the complexities at work.
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He sees this as the crucial site of contradictions of power drawing particularly upon the work of Hobbes and Clausewitz. He asks:
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'Is globalism inherently violent and apolitical, ie. bent on destroying popular sovereignty?' (2002: 175)
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He maintains that, under the forces of globalisation, the desire for the elimination of all nations (apart from one of course - USA) will lead to complete disorder unless alternatives are sought. As the one nation to survive, American ideology is caught in an internal and irredeemable contradiction as it ultimately weakens its own sense of internal order and democracy.
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Empire + Complexity:
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He sees chaos as a global idea and complexity as something that can be deciphered at a local level that is generally less chaotic (not sure about this - surely is manifest at every level) (2002: 22).
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'The world today is united by a new form of chaos, an imperial chaos, dominated by the imperium of the United States, though not controlled by it. We lack the words to describe this new system, while being surrounded by its images. (2002: 78)
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Disorder is traditionally useful of course, when existed order needs to be transgressed but now power is more complex and has taken the form of resistance itself. Order is expressed through disorder if you like. In such a scenario, the strategic standpoint of resistance seems powerless to resist power. Politics requires new forms, arguably.
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'In the absence of a declared enemy, the most formidable enemy one must face in politics is disorder. [...] Disorder is present everywhere, like liberty, and this type of threat is never lacking as long as an elite brings it to the fore. This is the case today, although only because neo-liberal ideology (the "universal language" that has taken over the ideological sphere dominated by corporate presidents) paradoxically considers disorder to be positive and order negative, the equivalent to an abuse of power. Yet the representation of disorder as something harmful was the original source of the political desire for order.' (2002: 118)
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'Isn't a defence still possible, first through an ethical refusal and then by basing resistance on the structure of chaos itself? By reshaping their oligarchic power through control of the electronic chaos, the oligarchs have a head start. Need we believe that the people as a multitude, the nation as a pact, the state as a local reason are incapable of establishing a non-hierarchical, pluralist action against the real and symbolic power of the electronic aristocracies ....' (2002: 108-9)
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It begins to sound more like complexity theory, when he says:
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'Disorder is only a new beginning becaiuse it potentially contains a variety of possible orders, a variety of scales of possible orders. Disorder always opens a new choice of degrees of order.' (2002: 121)
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He sees periods of disturbance and disorder recurring in rhythm across history, in cycles of power than decompose and recompose.
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Freely organised crime, the prevalence of mafias and dual economies have become allies to free trade - leaving the distinction thoroughly unclear 'between the criminal economy and the transnational economy in general' (2002: 157). There is no such thing as dirty money - or rather, all money is dirty.
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He says '... we need to rid ourselves of this Disneyland political logic and face up to the complex system that creates a coherent link between omnipresent violence and the peaceful expansion of the free-market economy' (2002: 161).
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This violence is computerised and networked. Communications networks that appear disorderly and unregulated are increasingly controlled and hierarchicised. According to Joxe, Fukuyama was premature in declaring the 'end of history' because of 'politico-military sovereignties maintaining spaces that prevent total market economy unification' (2002: 195) - the so-called ';axis of evil' all represent counter structures to the neoliberal model expressed as Marxist states (China, Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba) or a state-controlled economy (Iran, Serbia, and until recently Iraq).
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Furthermore, 'Class conflict has not disappeared but... should be now be inscribed at a global level' but this makes the dominant class increasingly hard to identify (2002: 201). It appears in neo-Darwinist terms as the superiority of one species that eliminates the other species (2002: 207).
emergence-johnson.txt
Steven Johnson (2001), Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software, London: Penguin.
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There are many well-worn examples of organisms that oscillate between single and collective states - slime mold is a classic example of this phenomena. The interest is in how an adaptive complex organism could assemble itself 'bottom-up', without a central 'top-down' control mechanism. This 'emergent behaviour' has clear implications for the study of living and artificial things, as well as decentralised thinking in general. In characterising this area as 'the unknown science of self-organization,' Johnson cites an interesting mix of historical figures: Adam Smith, Friedrich Engels, Charles Darwin and Alan Turing (2001: 18) - and this says something about its interdisciplinary foundation and application. To define the terms in more detail: 'emergence' takes place when low-level routines lead to complex interactions that produce a coherent higher-level pattern; when this has a purpose or responds to its environment, it can also said to be 'adaptive' (Johnson, 2001: 20).
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The study of ant colonies reveal that there is no discernable hierarchy at work despite appearances. Although humans have named the ants in provocative terms, the 'queen' is not an authority figure, merely an egg-laying ant and does not direct or exploit the workers (incidentally, the workers are female and unpaid; a marxist-feminist analysis could be useful here but outside my scope). It is not a 'command economy' but one that demonstrates decentralised behaviour (Johnson, 2001: 32). Johnson describes the development of the industrial city of Manchester in parallel, revealing its chaotic emergence at the centre of the industrial revolution. It is famously described by Engels, in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), witnessing its urban squalor, its 'filth and disgusting grime, the equal of which is not to be found [...] a planless chaos of houses, more or less on the verge of uninhabitableness, whose unclean interiors fully correspond with their filthy external surroundings. And how can people be clean with no proper opportunity for satisfying the most natural and ordinary wants.' (1978: 580 & 582). Clearly Engels is not observing chaos as such but an underlying order where the workers and the industrialists are separated in class distinctions - he would see the complex local interactions forming a particular totality. The conditions he observed had clear origins:
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'Everything which here rouses horror and indignation is of recent origin, belongs to the industrial epoch. [...] This manufacture has achieved, which, without these workers, this poverty, this slavery could not have lived.' (1978: 584)
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The city may not be planned like this as such, for it is far too complex, but it emerges according to class interests - the new world order of its time. But how? Engels sought to explain this by the dialectical laws in nature but also expressed his disgust of a lust for profit in other subsequent texts. Many commentators continue to regard the destruction of the urban environment as integral to the accumulation of capital (the more recent work of David Harvey, for instance).
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In contrast, Johnson does not develop this as an ideological problem, but instead chooses to explain this 'pattern' as 'systematic' complexity, as 'a strange kind of order, a pattern in the streets that furthered the political values of Manchester's elite without being planned by them' (2001: 40). He further cites the work of Alan Turing in his 'morphogenesis' paper (1954) detecting patterns in the apparent chaos of code, as an early example of the understanding of emergent behaviour. For Johnson, this has lead to the use of complexity for urban planning, regarding the city as a self-organising organism - working on the principle that a system learns through evaluating feedback loops.
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Feedback is in direct correlation to the interconnectedness of the system. Building upon Wiener's work on feedback and control in Cybernetics (1949), Johnson describes the development of software that does not simply follow instructions but that responds to the idea that simple instructions might lead to complex behaviour. Working with genetic algorithms, the principles of 'natural selection' and evolution theory could be seen in parallel to the development of fitter programs. Software can be seen in terms of 'genotypes' (DNA in cells) and 'phenotypes' (the higher level form of behaviour) as machine code and what happens when it runs. The programmer would set the parameters that defined the fitness, and the software would evolve 'autonomously'. Fundamental questions remain here on the position of the programmer and the idea of autonomous behaviour. The programmer writes the rules for the software and although the software also demonstrates other behaviours, the conditions are also determined externally. There is a dialectics of control and feedback or emergence perhaps.
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Inspired by the program Tracker that simulated the behaviour of the ant colony of sixteen thousand ants, Johnson's conclusion is that despite our tendency to look for a controlling mechanism, 'we are starting to think using the conceptual tools of bottom-up systems. Just like the clock maker metaphors of the Enlightenment, or the dialectical logic of the nineteenth century, the emergent worldview belongs to this moment in time, shaping our thought habits and colouring our perception of the world (2001: 66). This says it all. What his analysis lacks here is an understanding of history and, although unwittingly he describes ideology's mechanism of shaping thoughts and perception, of politics. Importantly, emergence is not a mystical force but can be explained, and responds differently to different external environments (Johnson, 2001: 116). Society is a system that is self-organised but also is capable of learning and can be seen to be adaptive from the bottom up. This is the popular definition of 'intelligence' after all, and humans are relatively 'self-aware'. It is also a very general description of political consciousness - cue Luk‡cs's History and Class Consciousness or the like.
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[add something here to qualify this]
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Emergent behaviour is not simply the natural order of things, and its understanding should result in imagining and making better systems. Feedback is crucial to this - in the example of society, could education be characterised as feedback encouraging adaptive behaviour? Johnson gives the example of a thermostat to describe the necessity of feedback in more detail:
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'Negative feedback, then, is a way of reaching an equilibrium point despite unpredictable - and changing - external conditions. The "negativity" keeps the system in check, just as "positive feedback" propels other systems onward. [...] It is, in other words, a way of transforming a complex system into a complex adaptive system.' (2001: 138-9)
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Negative feedback is the more adaptive version, controlling the temperature according to external conditions. His further example in the context of economics is Adam Smith in identifying the prices of goods and the 'feedback' of wages (2001: 156). Emergent systems are rule-based systems, working with low-levels rules from which the emergent behaviour derives. Feedback loops too clearly express control and the expression of (surplus) values:
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'When we come across a system that doesn't work well, there's no point denouncing the use of feedback itself. Better to figure out the specific rules of the system at hand and start thinking of ways to wire it so that the feedback routines promote the values we want promoted.' (Johnson, 2001: 162).
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At last, there's an echo of the revolutionary impulse in the description of emergence. Towards the end of his book, Johnson does discuss the political implication of emergence. There is plenty of evidence of decentralised or distributed systems thinking across the political spectrum - to criticise centralised control of the State and the unelected powers of multinational corporations (2001: 224). The metaphors are difficult though and can be skewed accordingly - in support of the anti-capitalist protest movement that combines smaller localised groups or in support of globalisation as an unregulated free market.
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What we may discover is what Dostoevsky observed in London in 1862: '... that apparent disorder that is in actuality the highest degree of bourgeois order' (in Berman, 1999: 88)
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What distinguishes emergence from complexity is that emergence is physical whereas complexity is also conceptual genesis (according to Isabelle Stengers, in Kember, 2003: 190). Thus it entails more metaphorical potential.
empire- hardtnegri.txt
Empire
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[check american spellings should remain in quotes, ie. 'labor']
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'Empire is materialising before our very eyes' (2000: xi) is the opening sentence of this much discussed book describing contemporary forms of sovereignty. Empire is the term that they ascribe to this new form - composed of 'national and supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule' (2000: xii). Empire is rule-based undoubtedly but its rules are complex and express a world order (an order 'expressed as a juridicial formation', 2000: 3). Capitalist sovereignty now operates through the relays and networks of relations of domination, no longer reliant on a single centre of power or crude hierarchy. Crucially, though, this does not mean that the imperial apparatus is not unified (2000: 341).
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The coming of empire as Hardt and Negri see it, develops out of changed (and changing) economic and cultural exchanges, and distinguishes it from previous forms that relied on imperialisms and the declining sovereignty of nation-states. Empire fundamentally changes the map as it requires no fixed territorial centre of power. In this new world map, the periphery and centre are thoroughly embedded in eachother (first world in third world and third world in first world) - look at any major city for evidence of this (although it has to be said that this was also the case at the turn of the last century when Jack London commented on the extreme poverty and misery at the heart of the greatest Empire at that time, in The People of the Abyss, London: Journeyman Press, first published 1903; his 'reportage' set in the East End of London).
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With no centre of power (was it always a myth?), it is difficult to identify the imperialist mechanism (or class enemy). No nation state can any longer hold such a pivotal position, even the United States of America is only mistakenly identified as the centre of an imperialist project. 'American imperialism' may be prevalent and there is no denying the powerful position that the USA occupies, but Hardt and Negri contest that it is no longer possible to act imperialistically (from the basis of nation-state) as European powers previously operated.
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On the contrary, Empire is a:
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'decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers. Empire manages hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges through modulating networks of command' (2000: xii-xiii. Note: I kept the American spelling for effect).
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This is Hardt and Negri's concept of Empire that they attempt to theorise. Essentially, this sounds rather like a description of the latest capitalist mode of production as it opens up the global market - capitalist globalisation, in other words. They emphasise that the processes of globalisation are not 'unified or univocal' that might be understood and redirected:
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'Our political task... is not simply to resist these processes but to reorganise them and redirect them towards new ends. The creative forces of the multitude that sustain Empire are also capable of autonomously constructing a counter-Empire, an alternative political organisation of global flows and exchanges' (2000: xv). Thus, they reveal their militant anti-capitalist and anti-globalisation tendencies. The myth of neo-liberal globalisation is that it is somehow natural and neutral, merely arising spontaneously from conditions, its sense of order merely responsive to autonomous economic and cultural change. Yet, however much it can be said to be a project, it is not simply a centred, rational 'conspiracy' (they call this the 'conspiracy theory of globalisation').
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Importantly, the globalisation of capitalist production and its world market are constituted differently according to Hardt and Negri. Although capitalism has always been global (and this has been my argument thus far - that history reveals the continuum), they claim a significant rupture in capitalist production and relations of power, to realise:
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'a properly capitalist order. In constitutional terms, the processes of globalisation are no longer merely a fact but also a source of juridicial definitions that tends to project a single supranational figure of political power.
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[...] a new inscription of authority and a new design of the production of norms and legal instruments of coercion that guarantee contracts and resolve conflicts.' (2000: 9)
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There is plenty of evidence for this machine of authority legitimating its actions, even in the short time since the publication of the book itself (completed between the Gulf war and war in Kosova, before so-called terrorist attacks on New York and Afghanistan). Thus unfolds the 'new world order' that is dynamic, fluid and entirely flexible. Hardt and Negri claim 'the new paradigm is both system and hierarchy', in shorthand as a hybrid of Luhmann's systems theory and Rawls's theory of justice (2000: 13-14). This demonstrates the structural logic of "governance without government" (this is the title of a book by Rosenau and Czempiel, quoted in Hardt and Negri, 2000: 14), operating through apparent consensus but masking a systemic violence. In terms that seem to prefigure Bush/Blair's 'axis of evil':
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'Empire is emerging today as the centre that supports the globalisation of productive networks and casts its widely inclusive net to try to envelop all power relations within its world order - and yet at the same time it deploys a powerful police function against the new barbarians and the rebellious slaves who threaten its order.' (2000: 20) In recent times, the 'police' have been acting like the fascists they are commonly labelled.
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globalisation:
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Hardt and Negri argue for a 'counterglobalisation', a counter-Empire' in recognition of its utopian spirit, as opposed to an isolationist rejection of globalisation. By implication, this is simultaneously a rejection of capitalism's abuses: 'The bizarre naturalness of capitalism is a pure and simple mystification, and we have to disabuse ourselves of it right away' (2000: 386-7). Even global capitalist development for Marx and his followers could bring about positive change and in suggesting new forms of freedom (from previous domineering precapitalist regimes and from the ravages of capitalism itself). Perhaps this is not so hard to imagine in the context of slavery, that flourished and developed new forms under early capitalism (despite its logic being antithetical to wage labour, however impoverished). Slave labour was a kind of apprenticeship to factory exploitation.
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Thus, (despite the undoubted eurocentrism in Marx) capitalism sets the tone for change in its use of global networks and exchange. Hardt and Negri argue that reality is not simply dialectical but colonialism is (as it is produced artificially). Despite having no basis in nature (is this arguable?), Fanon effectively employed this Hegelian dialectical relation between master and slave. The logic proceeds as follows: the dialectic reveals the artificiality and denaturalisation of the relation; making clear that this is a result of violent struggle that should be renewed as this articulates power from one to the other (coloniser to colonised); lastly,
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'posing colonialism as a negative dialectic of recognition makes clear the potential for subversion inherent in the situation. For a thinker like Fanon [in Black Skin, White Masks], the reference to Hegel suggests that the Master can only achieve a hollow form of recognition; it is the Slave, through life-and-death struggle, who has the potential to move forward to full consciousness. The dialectic ought to imply movement, but this dialectic of European sovereign identity has fallen back into stasis. The failed dialectic suggests the possibility of a proper dialectic that through negativity will move history forward.' (2000:129)
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The brand of negative dialectics might be called the project of anti-racism of course, as a strategy better suited than multiculturalism (I need that Zizek quote here). Hardt and Negri have problems with this dialectical logic as they see it as illusory - Fanon thinks counterviolence only can lead to liberation and any other sense of freedom will be spurious freedom. Their argument is that this does not lead to synthesis only counter-antagonism. That this simply prepares the ground for politics but at this point is not politics in itself. This may be the case, but how does this sit with their call for counter-globalisation? (calling it 'counter-' rather than 'anti-globalisation') And how is this to be achieved (in the context of the alleged militancy of Negri)? There are severe contradictions here but they are right to point to when the real struggle takes place - after the revolution - and on the thorny issue of a conclusive synthesis or not. They point to the example that the end of colonialisation has not brought about freedom but yielded new forms of rule that they call Empire (the counter argument would simply be this is a further stage of imperialism under capitalism).
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These issues of race are further compounded as racism is no longer defined through biological terms but cultural terms too - producing a new racism that Balibar calls a 'differentialist racism, a racism without race' (2000: 192; referring to ƒtienne Balibar's 'Is There a Neo-Racism?', in, Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class, London: Verso, 1991: 21). This echoes Deleuze and Guattari's contention that racism does not operate through exclusion and binaries, but through 'differential inclusion' (2000: 193).
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complicit theory
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However, I am more convinced when they question whether postmodernism and postcolonialism actually serve and reinforce the new strategies of rule. They simply question whether the new paradigm of power has 'come to replace the modern paradigm and rule through differential hierarchies of the hybrid and fragmentary subjectivities that these theorists celebrate' (2000:138). This seems without question to my mind that these are at least 'effects', and I would further support the more extreme position of Arif Dirlik in calling these thinkers the 'intelligentsia of global capitalism' (from The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism, Boulder: Westview Press 1997: 77, quoted in Hardt and Negri, 2000: 138).
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Far from eliminating master narratives as is argued in orthodox postmodernism, it is argued that these (and especially those narratives of ideology; by ideology, I mean those ideas that are superstructural, external to production) are enhanced and reproduced in order to legitimate its own power base. Even groups that appear to operate on the moral high ground acting for human rights and relief work, ultimately serve the purpose of Empire, and work to its logic of identifying privation and sin (Oxfam, Amnesty International, MŽdicins sans frontires, for instance - sometimes called non-government organisations; NGOs are what Hardt and Negri describe as 'the community face of neoliberalism', 2000: 313). This is extended to the police mentality of the United States in its unilateral 'preventative strikes', 'terrorist' activity - with or without the backing of the UN - these actions arise out of the same logic and expression of the so-called new world order.
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Although these power operations might be described as virtual, they have real consequences and effects both in the centre and on the margins (the distinction actually makes little sense in this connection). 'Empire thus appears in the form of a very high-tech machine: it is virtual, built to control the marginal event, and organised to dominate and when necessary intervene in the breakdowns of the system (in line with the most advanced technologies of robotic production).'(2000: 39)
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It is a dynamic, 'globalised biopolitical machine' (2000: 40) wherein social production is enacted drawing together economic production, politics and subjectivity. They maintain this is a more productive reconception of politics than Hannah Arendt's concept of 'political space' taken up in academia (for instance, Craig Calhoun and John McGowan, eds., Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1997.
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biopolitical production and immaterial labour:
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The mode of production has transformed wherein industrial factory labour has become less significant and 'communicative, cooperative and affective labour' more significant - what Hardt and Negri call 'biopolitical production'. Importantly, this does not contradict but aligns with Marx's emphasis on the mode of production: 'The realm of production is where social inequalities are clearly revealed and, moreover, where the most effective resistances and alternatives to the Empire arise' (2000: xvii.). To define this power base more closely as plural and multiple (and not centred), they draw upon Michel Foucault's concept of biopower where power is decidedly not centred (and where disciplinary power is exerted on the subject's body and consciousness, and thus across social relations too) and Gilles Deleuze and FŽlix Guattari's thousand plateaus that describes the paradox of power (from A Thousand Plateaus, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1987, where even resistance is disrupted - no longer marginal but active in the centre and expressed in networks). Both analyses offer little in terms of resistance, power is dispersed but ultimately all powerful, adapting to change and circumstance. In the case of Deleuze and Guattari, social reproduction is described as chaotic and indeterminable. If it cannot be grasped, how can it be resisted?
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This is where the idea of biopower becomes significant, operating in the tradition of materialist production and the ways in which subjectivities (bodies and consciousness) are constituted through production (extending crude Marxist orthodoxy and economic determinism for an additional recognition of culture and subjectivity).
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Machines both produce objects and subjects of course. Industrial powers do not simply produce commodities but also subjectivities (needs, bodies, minds) (2000: 32). This is a similar line of argument to Bourdieu's concept of 'cultural reproduction' - as Negri/Hardt put it:
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'In the biopolitical sphere, life is made to work for production and production is made to work for life. It is a great bee hive in which the queen bee continuously oversees production and reproduction.' (2000: 32) - in complex, interlinking, interactive relationships. Negri introduces biopolitics thus:
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'Politics today is not exercised on a plane of abstract power (administratively separated), but on a plane that has invested the whole of life. [...] Politics and life have become engrained into one another.' [debate on counter-empire at sherwood, 23-24 february 2002, http://www.sherwood.it/controimpero/ May 17, 2002]
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'The legitimation of the imperial machine is born at least in part of the communications industries, that is, of the transformation of the new mode of production into a machine. [...] The machine is self-validating, auto-poietic - that is, systemic. It constructs social fabrics that evacuate or render ineffective any contradiction; it creates situations in which, before coercively neutralising difference, seem to absorb it in an insignificant play of self-generating and self-regulating equilibria. ' (2000: 33-4)
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generating subjectivity:
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Similarly, subjectivity is constantly generated through social processes. In the 'factories of subjectivity' (echoing Foucault), all subjectivity can be recognised as socially constructed and artificial. Hardt and Negri argue that as the place of production becomes more and more place-less, subjectivities become correspondingly indeterminate, still generated but generated in new forms: 'The imperial social institutions might be seen, then, in a fluid process of the generation and corruption of subjectivity.' (2000: 197)
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'The Empire's institutional structure is like a software program that carries a virus along with it, so that it is continually modulating and corrupting the institutional forms around it.' (2000: 197-8)
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Hardt and Negri's use of the term 'corruption' is interesting; taken from Aristotle, it refers to a perpetual becoming of bodies that is complementary to generation (from De generatione et corruptione, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). Thus, corruption might be called 'de-generation - a reverse process of generation and composition, a moment of metamorphosis that potentially frees spaces for change' (2000: 201)
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This lends itself well to my reading of Ordure::real-time and its dialectical operations, even if, this in itself, is a corruption of Hardt and Negri's project. Corruption (a good term as it lends itself to viruses and is a form of violence) is the negation of generation (for more on this, see Reiner SchŸrmann, Des hŽgŽmonies brisŽes, Mouvezin: T.E.R., 1996, cited in Hardt and Negri, 2000: 389). For instance, the violence of corruption is self-evident in the capitalist relations of production as exploitation. Hardt and Negri say capitalism is by definition a system of corruption, and the task is to investigate 'how corruption can be forced to cede its control to generation' (2000: 392).
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It all sounds uncannily dialectical to me in describing Empire as:
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'characterised by a fluidity of form - an ebb and flow of formation and deformation, generation and degeneration' (2000: 202)
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Th catalyst for generation in Hardt and Negri is desire (following in the tradition of Deleuze and Guattari). They see this as indicative of collective human action - what might be called agency in old terminology:
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'This production is purely and simply human reproduction, the power of generation. Desiring production is generation, or rather the excess of labor and the accumulation of a power incorporated into the collective movement of singular essences, both its cause and its completion.' (2000: 388)
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In their terms, generation is a 'collective mechanism or apparatus of desire' (2000: 388); what I am attempting to argue is something similar to this but more frigid (without desire) but no less dynamic. Where we differ is of whether generation itself is dialectic.
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Yet, we remain in broad agreement that politics needs to articulate itself in terms of generative processes in lieu of the regenerative mechanisms built into capitalism itself; in the sense that production is generative. They say:
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'Generation is there, before all else, as basis and motor of production and reproduction. The generative connection gives meaning to communication, and any model of (everyday, philosophical, or political) communication that does not respond to this primacy is false.' (2000: 389)
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Multitude:
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In a perverse twist, the multitude has set the tone for globalisation (aka Empire). The relative success of international movements and resistance to imperialism has in a way set the scene for globalisation. It can be seen to have called for relations that turn on power in a way that has unleashed even greater levels of exploitation. In the new world order, smaller minorities control even greater levels of wealth; racial oppression has become more pronounced despite the apparent end of colonialisation and imperialism. That is not to say earlier kinds of exploitation were preferable. Hardt and Negri think the present situation opens new opportunities for resistance (such as those expressed by the anti-capitalist movement):
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'We claim that Empire is better in the same way that Marx insists that capitalism is better than forms of society and modes of production that came before it.' (2000:43).
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Their argument, like Marx's is that a rejection of previous regimes of exploitation is clearly for the better, and correspondingly that the potential for liberation is increased with any new situation. They are also keen not to fall into a false dichotomy between local and global forces and especially the valorisation of the local or even the nation state as some perverse rejection of global capitalism. There is often a false logic at work that the local preserves difference and the global tends towards homogenisation. The struggle against global capitalism must be as global as the thing it wishes to dispose (hence the sentiments of groups like 'globalise resistance' that draws upon a history of leftist internationalism). The phrase 'Workers of the world unite' effectively carries this sense of internationalist solidarity. However, Hardt and Negri have problems with this sense of the proletariat - more on this later - and suggest the tragic irony that 'what they fought for came about despite their defeat' (2000: 50). Globalisation is a consequence of the power of the multitude, in their terms.
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The distinction is made between the multitude (from Thomas Hobbes, De Cive, 1949) and the people - where the people are tied to the concept of the sovereign nation, of a single will, while the multitude is multiplicity, an open set of relations. (The crowd might figure here too - see Canetti.) They remain in conflict such that 'every nation must make the multitude into a people.' (2000: 103) Thus, for Hardt and Negri, the nation stands as a dominant force of stasis for the most part (in europe, producing otherness and alterity - note: both are produced not natural, and are dialectical in the relation of self and other) and only takes on a revolutionary function in terms of subaltern nation (and then only temporarily). This explains the poor record of socialist regimes as they are tied to the totalitarian logic of the nation: for example Stalin's pamphlett on Marxism and the national question of 1935 collapses the revolutionary spirit of communism for nationalism. Hardt and Negri see this as tragic irony in that nationalist socialism comes to resemble national socialism because the same machine of national sovereignty lies behind the logic of both.
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They remain communists: we are not anarchists but communists who have seen how much repression and destruction of humanity have been wrought by liberal and socialist big governments. We have seen how this is being re-created in imperial government, just when the circuits of productive cooperation have mad labour as a whole capable of constituting itself as a government.' (2000: 350)
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Definition of the proletariat in their terms (multitude):
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They define the proletariat thus:
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'We understand the concept "proletariat," however, to refer not just to the industrial working class but to all those who subordinated to, exploited by, and produce under the rule of capital. From this perspective, then, as capital ever more globalises its relations of production, all forms of labour tend to be proletarianised.'(2000: 256)
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They claim the proletariat has transformed and correspondingly so does an understanding of it - both redefined as the subject of labour and revolt, under new conditions of production (that has always separated the producer from the means of production and thus creates proletarians and capitalists). They employ the term 'proletariat' as a broad category to includes 'all those whose labour is directly or indirectly exploited by and subjected to capitalist norms of production and reproduction' (2000: 52) Although they are clearly broadening the category beyond the industrial working class, they also recognise differences and stratifications. This is certainly not a rejection of the revolutionary potential out of hand (yet there are serious problems with their analysis - see Callinois).
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'The proletariat is not what it used to be, but that does not mean it has vanished' (2000: 53).
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Immaterial labour figures here in their redefinition of the proletariat as a class - as both within and sustaining capital. Correspondingly, they see new forms of proletarian resistance, solidarity and militancy - quite some optimism in fact.
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The key lies in the power of the multitude (this strange religious sounding term) who have constructed Empire and thus hold the key to its destruction:
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'Since the spatial and temporal dimensions of political action are no longer the limits but the constructive mechanisms of imperial government, the coexistence of the positive and the negative on the terrain of immanence is now configured as an open alternative. Today the same movements and tendencies constitute both the rise and the decline of Empire.' (2000: 374)
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Thus, Empire presents a greater potential for revolution than previously - transforming class conflict: 'The new proletariat is not a new industrial working class' (2000: 402). The previous agents of change, they argue, only operate as the privileged site in the context of a Marxist concept of value that could be measured - this is no longer possible if it ever was. Derrida puts this well: 'We lack the measure of the measure' (1994: 78). The claim is that distinctions between productive, reproductive and unproductive labour have become blurred, and as a result, both material and immaterial labour, both intellectual and corporeal, are exploited by capital. Control over communication has increasingly become a key site of struggle, building upon the work of JŸrgen Habermas (in his Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy, Boston: Beacon Press, 1984)
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The multitude both hold to key to its development and form, and its alternative with little direct control over these processes. The multitude has become the political and revolutionary subject: 'whose struggles have produced Empire as an inversion of its own image and who now represents on this new scene an uncontrollable force.' (2000: 394)
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Biopolitics again:
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The biopolitical dimension is recognised in the changed nature of productive labour, and what contemporary (mainly Italian) Marxists have called 'immaterial labour' (see my 'The Author as Producer' upgrade for more on this). The productive labour of the industrial factory is increasingly becoming replaced by intellectual, immaterial and communicative labour (making everything like a factory). Simultaneously, the changed social relations of this changing pattern of labour also indicate new subjectivities - both in terms of exploitation and resistance to exploitation. Thus production has (again) become the site of focus (to understand how relations of production unfold for instance). Negri says:
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'This process of dissolution of the political categories of modernity coincides with the third industrial revolution: IT and the constitution of production as decentred throughout society. This also has a double effect:
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-An expansion of biopolitical power, capitalist command of the general intellect
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-A reappropriation of the instruments of labour.
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Life style is reinvented as productivity. Labour, living labour, activity remains at the centre of our lives, so do exploitative relations. By exploitation I mean your capacity to steal my labour versus my capacity to take it back and use it for my own desires [...]
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The concept of sovereignty changed. Sovereignty was always a relationship, even in modernity. It couldn't be defined in terms of the sacred or unidirectionality. Exercising sovereignty means to have a relation with the subject (subjected). This relationship becomes more complex when this
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subject produces and is posed in a creative dynamics. Sovereignty, in its dialectical mode, always posed an obstacle for the subject to overcome.' [debate on counter-empire at sherwood, 23-24 february 2002, http://www.sherwood.it/controimpero/ May 17, 2002]
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The argument is that national sovereignty is linked to national mythologies.
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The form of political subjectivity is not at all clear any more (not as simple as imagined by Marx perhaps nor as bleak as his opponents). Hardt and Negri look to Spinoza for a possible answer (Negri's essay 'The Savage Anomaly' of 1980 develops his position on Spinoza, as in the theory of autonomy, in the privileging of potential against power). See below.
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Modernity:
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is defined by conflicts. Hardt and Negri see it as 'Modernity itself is defined by crisis, a crisis that is born of the uninterrupted conflict between the immanent, constructive, creative forces and the transcendent power aimed at restoring order.' (2000: 76) Herein lies the synthesis of the development of productive forces and relations of domination that are embedded in a history of modernity (slavery is a pertinant old, and current, example).
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It might seem that they are disregarding critiques within modernity itself - but they recognise the power of critiques like that of the Frankfurt School yet reject its dialectical method as within the very logic of the modern project that they seek to undo.
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In describing those that attempted to map the crisis of modernity and seek redemption, such as Walter Benjamin: 'Certainly the dialectic, that cursed dialectic that had held together and anointed European values, had been emptied out from within and was now defined in completely negative terms' (2000: 377). They are particularly thinking of his 'Thesis on the Philosophy of History'. They argue for a new materialism outside of the dialectic, rejecting models such as the transcendence of history. Here Benjamin lies in contrast to the non-dialectical thinking of Deleuze, Derrida et al.
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The rejection of binaries is the foundation of much postmodernist and postcolonialist theory. Their example is the work of Homi Bhabha whose work aims to reject binaries such as those the colonial project was based on. Thus, it is nondialectical in method, despite being haunted by Hegelian dialectical logic according to Hardt and Negri. Bhabha proposes hybidity as a radical alternative as if all forms of power are locked into hierarchies based on binaries. In other words, the alternative it proposes presupposes a particular power set of power structures. Empire is based on the notion that this is a different form of power that needs conceptualising anew.
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Evidence is found in numerous sites but a relevant example to the above would be 'fundamentalisms' (of all kinds, Islamic and Christian included) that despite the appearance of being a return to tradition are in fact, new inventions in response to perceived threats. Fundamentalism is a refusal of Western modernity making it 'anti-Western' and 'anti-Modern' (the revolution in Iran is a neat example of the rejection of the global market). This is not pre-modern but thoroughly post-modern.
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The global market similarly rejects the model of the nation-state, making national economics increasingly irrelevant. In this (postmodern) way, 'The world market establishes a real politics of difference' (2000: 151), and postmodernism presents us with the logic for these operations of global capitalism (echoing the sentiments of Arif Dirlik in calling these postmodern thinkers the 'intelligentsia of global capitalism' (from The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism, Boulder: Westview Press 1997: 77, quoted in Hardt and Negri, 2000: 138 - this is a repeat quote but great all the same). Difference is enacted through capital's mobility, flexibility, and hybridity - not rejecting hierarchies but establishing new hierarchies (much against what it appears to stand for of course). The so-called intelligentsia (particularly of the US) unwittingly support this logic in their championing of postmodern and postcolonial sensibility, even in terms of critique of capitalism itself. Mobility and flexibility, rather than representing some sense of freedom from hierarchies (or even old binaries), in fact are forced upon much of the world populations in enforced migration as a result of the search for work or as a result of war. Migration takes on special significance for Hardt and Negri (along the lines of 'nomadism':
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'A spectre haunts the world and it is the spectre of migration. All the powers of the old world are allied in a merciless operation against it, but the movement is irresistible. Along with the flight from the so-called Third World there are flows of political refugees and transfers of intellectual labour power, in addition to the massive movements of the agricultural, manufacturing, and service proletariat.' (2000: 213) This simultaneously presents escape from misery and hope for betterment that often ends in more misery. More positively, migration represents levels of struggle and resistance to imposed and symbolic borders.
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On another level, migration also takes place between humans, animals and machines, between genders and sexualities in recognition that nature is artificial and open to mutations and hybrid forms (echoing Donna Haraway's 'cyborg fable' and a whole host of other imitators). What is required is a body that does not submit to command: 'If you find your body refusing these "normal" modes of life, don't despair - realise your gift!' (2000: 216; with respect to Guattari's resistance to normalising bodies). There is nothing 'normal' about nature.
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'The force that must instead drive forward theoretical practice to actualise these terrains of potential metamorphosis is still (and ever more intensely) the common experience of the new productive practices and the concentration of productive labour on the plastic and fluid terrain of the new communicative, biological and mechanical technologies.' (2000: 218)
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measure: (add to chaos and fractal measurement perhaps)
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Under the conditions of modernity, 'If there is no measure, the metaphysicians say, there is no cosmos; and if there is no cosmos, there is no state. In the framework one cannot think of the immeasurable, or rather, one must not think it.' (2000: 355) In other words, measurement signalled order. To Hardt and Negri, beyond the measurable lies virtuality (and postmodernity): 'The passage from the virtual through the possible to the real is the fundamental act of creation' and it is living labour that 'constructs the passageway from the virtual to the real; it is the vehicle of possibility'. (2000: 357; in part, this refers to Henri Bergson's ideas in, 'The Possible and the Real' in The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle Andison, New York: Philosophical Library, 1946, pp.91-106)
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The relationship between possibility and virtuality sounds rather contradictory, yet: 'contradiction is never static, however, in material logic (that is political, historical and ontological logic), which poses it on the terrain of the possible and thus on the terrain of power' (2000: 360)
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Labour (immaterial and material), that which appears outside measure (old ideas of value, etc), 'appears simply as the power to act, that which is at once singular and universal: singular insofar as labour has become the exclusive domain of the brain and the body of the multitude; and universal insofar as the desire that the multitude expresses in the movement from the virtual to the possible is constantly constituted as a common thing (2000: 358; this 'common thing' relates to the idea of community in their view).
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informational production:
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The generally accepted view is that we have moved from the modern or industrial period (in which industry and manufacturing of durable goods) into a new current paradigm of informational production (in which services are provided and manipulating information is the predominant mode of production). Amongst others, this is the argument of those like Daniel Bell, Coming of Post-Industrial Society, New York: Basic Books 1973 - who also allegedly coined the contentious term 'post-industrial'.
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Correspondingly, there has been a general migration of labour form the industrial factory to the service sectors (particularly in the US and UK, and much like the earlier migration from agriculture to industry). By service sector, this covers education, transport, health care, entertainment and advertising to name but a few, those areas that demand mobile and flexible workers, and that are characterised by knowledge, information, and communication - making the informational economy. Importantly, the claim is not that industrial processes have ceased or that they have simply shifted to another part of the world, but that even industrial processes have been changed by the informational revolution. To a large extent, in the 'over-developed world', the assembly lines have been replaced by the network as the organisational model and metaphor for production of all kinds. This is what Deleuze and Guattari describe as the 'rhizome' - the myth of a democratic, nonhierechical, noncentred network structure (2000: 299; in, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans, Brian Massumi,, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, pp.3-25). Relations now are established from all points and nodes which simultaneously act in favour of organised struggle and against it (like the formation of the internet itself designed to resist attack).
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The distinction between traditional manufacturing and the provision of services has become less distinct, wherein communication and information play an increasingly central role in production processes. A classic example is that of the automobile industry - charcaterised as the shift from 'Fordist' to 'Toyotist' models. (Corresponding to the introduction of the assembly line and mass manufacturing, Taylorism allowed for modifications in the production process and Fordism in its regulation of social reproduction.) Toyotism differs from Fordism in that it maintains its efficiency of production but allows the market to feed back into this process - in other words, it completes the feedback loop that was previously too slow and inefficient. Thus, production decisions are made immediately in reaction to the market, following the network paradigm of integrated production and distribution. Significantly, the network brings a model of production and distribution simultaneously (and is thus fundamentally different to the alleged role of railways as part of the industrial revolution). In its extreme, commodities are only produced after the consumer has ordered it. (2000: 290)
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Immaterial labour:
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Wealth is increasingly immaterial in the form of social relations, communications networks, informations systems, so too the nature of labour. The labour involved in this new type of production of 'immaterial goods' is cast as 'immaterial labour' (after Maurizio Lazzarato's definition in 'Immaterial Labour', in, Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, eds., Radical Thought in Italy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). This can partly be recognised in relation to the computer, in the way it has redefined labour as well as social practices and relations. Hardt and Negri argue that we increasingly think like computers, ordering our thoughts, practices and productive activities like networked communications technologies and their model of interaction. The reverse applies too in that: 'one novel aspect of the computer is that it can continually modify its own operation through its use' (2000: 291). Labouring practices follow this pattern in which the separation of the labouring body, mind and machine and increasingly blurred.
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It is argued that with the increased computerisation of labouring practices, the worker is increasingly removed from the object of his/her labour (2000: 292) - tending towards a condition of abstract labour (alienated or not). But this takes as its examples processes of production where a physical, mechanical machine has been replaced by a virtual one, rather rather than software production so appears a rather wild general point. The production of hardware also raises an interesting point of direct engagement with the physical material but nothing of the functionality of computing (see quotes elsewhere). Once the hallmark of the industrial process, collaborative and collective effort is now increasingly organised through communications networks and not by capital itself. The role of Unions suffers accordingly but also perhaps and arguably their need - as 'In the expression of its own creative energies, immaterial labour thus seems to provide the potential for a kind of spontaneous and elementary communism' (2000: 294). What optimism - note the word 'potential' and it doesn't seem so wild - within a few pages, new communications technologies have in fact created new lines of exclusion and inequality, with suitable global reach and spontaneity (2000: 300). To stress the negative aspects: the networking of groups of labour power has led to unprecedented competition among workers and hence lower wages, as well as information technologies have served to indirectly break the structural resistance of labour power in terms of wage demands - traditionally organised through unions. (See No Logo for more detail on this)
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General intellect:
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Marx's term 'general intellect' goes some way to describe the influence of science, communications and language on labour practices. Thus, labour is made more collective by the sharing of techniques and knowledge. Hardt and Negri extends this to include intellectual and corporeal (brain and body) labour in their redefinition of labour practices. (2000: 364) As a result, production has become 'a machine that is full of life' (2000: 365), that expresses new collective and cooperative possibilities. Thus, 'labor becomes increasingly immaterial and realises its value through a singular and continuous process of innovation in production; it is increasingly capable of consuming or using the services of social reproduction in an ever more refined and interactive way.' (2000: 365). This is the creative process of the production of revolutionary subjectivity (akin to my figure of the artist-programmer - not really?).
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Machinic:
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Marx was no technophobe. On the relationship between workers and machines, in Capital, Marx says: 'It took time and experience before the workers learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and therefore to transfer their attacks from the material instruments of production to the form of society which utilises these instruments.' (1976: 554-5)
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Hardt and Negri's argument is that the multitude go further in merging with the machines; 'the subject is transformed into (and finds the cooperation that constitutes it multiplied in) the machine' (2000: 367). Here they are clearly drawing upon the concept of the 'machinic' from Deleuze and Guattari (Gilles Deleuze and FŽlix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Lane, Helen lane, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). Humans and machine are somewhat hybridised, and their argument turns on the desire of the multitude to take exert control over these machinic transformations. 'The virtual and the possible are wedded as irreducible innovation and as a revolutionary machine'. (2000: 369). I would say they are dialectically engaged.
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The multitude are machinic, using machines and technology productively. According to Hardt and Negri, the political demands are as follows:
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1. global citizenship; 2. A social wage and guaranteed income for all; 3. The right to reappropriation (2000: 400-6). The last category is of interest as this emphasises that machines are not simply to be used to produce more efficiently, but the multitude become machinic in that the means of production is integrated in their minds and bodies (2000: 406).
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They offer the figure of the 'social worker' to give a sense of the rising militancy:
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'This is the order of the social worker and immaterial labor, an organisation of productive and political power as a biopolitical unity managed by the multitude, organised by the multitude, directed by the multitude - absolute democracy in action.' (2000: 410)
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Although not clear about the precise forms, they see this growing militancy as a constituent form not representational (thus, not simply representatives of the working class in the sense that Benjamin might have meant in 'The Author as Producer').
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'This militancy makes resistance into counterpower and makes rebellion into a project of love.'
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And finally the last lines are:
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'This is a revolution that no power will control - because biopower and communism, cooperation and revolution remain together, in love, simplicity, and also innocence. This is the irrepressible lightness and joy of being communist.' (2000: 413)
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inside/outside:
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Their claim is that the border between 'inside' and 'outside', fundamental to modernity and the place of its crisis, is no longer discernible. They say:
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'In this smooth place of Empire, there is no place of power - it is both everywhere and nowhere. Empire is really an ou-topia, or really a non-place.' (2000: 190)
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The history of modernity and its critique operates traditionally at this juncture of inside and outside, and correspondingly between private and public space. Hardt and Negri trace the diminishing importance of these distinctions and the rise of hybidity in its (non) place. The importance in terms of analysis is that 'in effect, the place of politics has been de-actualised' (2000: 188; somewhat in the manner described by Debord in The Society of the Spectale). Here, they are echoing Fukuyama in that the end of history is the end of the crisis of modernity, and that history has ended in so much as it is described in Hegelian terms of dialectics. The opposing view would be something along the lines of the repeating cycles of economic development, that the present crisis is simply another phase (clearly not a position that Hardt and Negri would agree with).
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In Marx's theoretical method too, the place of exploitation and liberation are dialectically determined. Labour power is both inside and outside capital; affirming the distinction between use and exchange value. Hardt and Negri's critique of the 'value' and 'usefulness' of this determining conception of domination rests on the change in the process and non-place of production (this is drawing upon Negri's earlier work such as 'Value and Affect' boundary2, 26, no.2, 1999). It can no longer be simply defined, nor can the distinction between use and exchange value (always based on an 'illusion of separability').
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But: 'That does not mean that production and exploitation have ceased. Neither have innovation and development nor the continuous restructuring of relations of power come to an end.... Empire is the non-place of world production where labour is exploited.' (2000: 210)
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Capital and labour are antagonistically opposed - 'this is the fundamental condition of every political theory of communism' (2000: 237). (note: Hardt and Negri call themselves communists, 2000: 350)
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And: 'The identification of the enemy, however, is no small task given that exploitation tends no longer to have a specific place and that we are immersed in a system of power so deep and complex that we can no longer determine specific difference or measure.' (2000: 211)
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Outside/inside:
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The imperialist character of capitalism is well founded in Marxist thought (but perhaps particularly through the work of Lenin and Rosa Luxembourg - without going into their differences). Capitalism requires this sense of the outside as it constantly seeks to widen its markets and circulation:
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'Capitalism is an organism that cannot sustain itself without constantly looking beyond its boundaries, feeding off its external environment. Its outside is essential.' (2000: 224)
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Rosa Luxembourg sees this more in terms of pillage and theft. Following this logic, the only way to put an end to imperialism is to put an end to capitalism (or this will simply happen when natural resources run out - it is not an unlimited resource or without its own sense of exploitation). 'Formal subsumption' (Marx, Capital, pp.1019-38) describes the way in which capital incorporates labour practices outside its domain into its own set of relations of production. This sense of discipline, in turn, produces its antithesis and the desire to be free of these constraints. This is particularly common in the global market where Third World labourers exist in the first world (and vice versa). 'Third Worldism' describes this antagonism between the labour of the third world and the capital of the first world. (note: Actually the term 'Third World' arising from imperialism, offers little credibility at this point in time - once criticised for being too generalist, now ineffectual as it was coined to describe those countries outside the primary conflict of the bipolar cold war between dominant capitalist and socialist nations, 2000: 333).
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Alex Callinicos, on Empire, marxism 2002, 10 july
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By March 2002 (2 years after publication), Empire had sold 52,000 copies (massive number for an academic book), and has been translated into 10 languages. It has also replaced No Logo as the bible of the anti-capitalist movement despite its academic tone.
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Interestingly, it reveals many of the same tensions and problems related to this movement. It is unashamedly materialist yet non-dialectical (as it argues that modern power, itself dialectical, is over, and has been replaced by Empire's 'network power').
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Firstly, the context for the book is important: developing out of Negri considerable political history and relationship to the 'autonomists' and 'disobedienti' (the disobedient ones) in Italy. He some from a tradition of granting primacy to revolutionary subjectivity (and de-emphasising objective relations as a study like Marx's Capital sets out to do). He also borrows something of his method from the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (and Guattari, via Spinoza, Nietzsche and Foucault), partly to reconcile the defeat of the Italian working class (workerism) at the end of the 1970s (the fiat workers strike and defeat was a parallel to what was happening in the UK with the miners strike). Deleuze argues that resistance is implicit in life itself, mostly through force of the complex nature of desire. This is an optimistic idea. Callinicos reminds the audience of Gramsci popular quote: 'pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will'.
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Note: 'pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will'
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attributed to Gramsci but actually a varaiation of Romain Rolland's phrase 'pessimism of the intelligence, optimism of the will' in Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971: 174 (footnote).
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Some well-placed pessimism is part of an analysis of the conditions to move beyond resistance to the transformation of society.
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In summary:
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Empire defines how capitalism is developing as transnational, fluid, centre-less (in parallel to the decentred subject of post-structuralism). Hardt and Negri say 'there is no place of power, it is everywhere and nowhere'. This clearly rejects the classical marxist position of imperialism. Hardt and Negri argue this has been transcended by a single power of Empire (and this is not to be confused with the simplistic notion of the imperialism of the US).
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This is not just a new phase of capitalism but a new form of sovereignty that is no longer based on the model of the nation-state (this transformation from the sovereignty of the nation-state to the contemporary new world order is well rehearsed elsewhere too - for instance, Saskia Sassen, Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization, New York: Colombia University Press, 1996). Thus, it is subject to no limits, no boundaries.
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It is the multitude that has produced these changes. The controversial figure of the multitude (not crowd) are the subjects of transformation.
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Two key concepts emerge: Empire and Multitude.
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Empire (aka globalisation) sounds rather like liberal descriptions of cosmopolitan democracy (kevin robins's contribution to the kahve event even - pt this reference in perhaps). It clearly makes reference to international law, human rights and so on, but it does not follow that national divisions or imperialisms are transcended. For example (despite a rejection of US imperialism as such) military strength, demonstrated in recent times not least, is based on national state - in the case of the war on afghanistan, the US rejected a wider remit of NATO involvement, in favour of single authorship - to prove their nation strength. What better example of us unilateralism than the prison camps being in cuba of all places (or even the more recent international court issue where the US has insisted on being outside the law). Hardt and Negri simply answer that the US is an agent of Empire not Empire itself.
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The Multitude (aka revolutionary subjects) is a self-confessed poetic image intended to demonstrate how class conflict is realised under contemporary conditions (it is a metaphor, but does it operate beyond metaphor?). In a sense it tries to have its cake and eat it - by combining Marxism and post-structuralist ideas of fragmentation. This, they claim, is a new way of thinking class conflict that includes everyone who is oppressed by capital. Surely Marx's view of exploitation is more precise and useful, productive - as it identifies the working class as those whose work generates profit for others. It is precisely because of this that they have the power to resist, to overthrow capital. (This is not romanticism in believing the working class will spontaneously rise up but dialectical logic in reversing the way power unfolds - according to this logic, this is the only way change can happen). This more precise and more useful for political practice. The working class have the power to break the system (a lesson unfortunately ignored by the anti-capitalist movement unless it combines forces with the traditional agents of change). Anti-capitalists have to embrace this principle not merely the multitude (as they already do).
empire- hardtnegri.txt
Too much reliance on the multitude can lead people up a blind alley, relies on spontaneity, fluidity and network metaphor not organised solidarity. It seems to develop the swarm metaphor (from No Logo), add academic gloss - these are direct references that the Anti-capitalist movement turns on, is turned on by.
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It seems necessary to oppose the trajectory of Empire with classical Marxism. Even in Empire these tensions remain unresolved. Ambiguities remain between the nation-state and Empire; between the proletariat and the multitude.
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This crucial link between the anti-capitalist movement and the proletariat is fundamental to the work of Bourdieu on neo-liberalism. Although Negri argues against the dialectic, the old and the new need to brought into tension (with a return to Hegel). The Benjamin quote that 'a history of civilisation is simultaneously a history of barbarism' makes a similar point.
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All these qualifications enable the shift from resistance to social transformation (eg. hackers are locked into resistance mode only).
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Hegel:
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Allegory of the divine order. Transformation into the 'dialectical dramaturgy and in every scene the end is everything' (Hardt & Negri, 2000: 82). Their problem with Hegelian resolution is its teleology and implied attack of Spinoza's sense of immanence - to their minds a revolutionary theory.
enlightenment-jay.txt
Dialectic of Enlightenment, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer
enlightenment-jay.txt
The Institut's disillusionment with orthodox Marxism was reflected in the shift away from the centrality of class conflict with 'a new motor of history' (Jay, 1996: 256) reflected in Adorno's and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment. Here the hope remained of a break in the continuum of history. The focus was on the larger conflict between humans and nature before and after capitalism. This was partly in recognition of the fact that forms of domination were being expressed in forms other than simply economic ones, and might be traced back to the early development of science and technology. Cultural issues were no longer to be explained with recourse to the relationship between superstructure and substructure of orthodox Marxism. Thus, even Marxism was cast in the enlightenment tradition and a legitimate target for critical theory. (The concept of reification was crucial in this respect).
enlightenment-jay.txt
There were tendencies in the enlightenment that had influenced the rise of instrumental reason as opposed to objective reason, and in its rational attack on myth had produced its own myth. Things, and nature too, were seen to be inferior objects, that might be controlled and ordered accordingly. Concepts were replaced by formulae, and mathematics was taken to provide explanations of all phenomena. Other more dynamic, contradictory explanations were dismissed as unscientific and mythic. Historical development was simply explained as a series of repetitions. The discovery of atoms was paralleled by the increasing atomisation of humankind (Jay, 1996: 261). According to Enlightenment thinking (Cartesian duality), the separation between subject and object was absolute, and explained other hierarchical distinctions as if they were natural and unchanging. Thus domination was seen to simply be the natural order of things and a justification for imperial expansion, mastery of nature, racism, sexism, fascism, and the like. For Adorno, this is where negation must be used to reveal such falsehoods (and to make its undialectical 'one-dimensionality' apparent in the case of Marcuse). For Adorno and Horkheimer, 'Nonidentity' stood in contrast to any reconciliation of the opposites of subject and object.
enlightenment-jay.txt
Adorno and Horkheimer reject the optimistic thinking of Hegel and historical materialism as no distinct praxis presented itself - within reason. This belief rested on too many assumptions - it was too 'instrumental' for A & H. This is not to say that they thought it a bad idea to change society or indeed a recognition that it needed changing, but simply that no obvious or viable way to do this seemed to present itself to logic. Emancipation from oppressive conditions, rested on a memory of what had been lost (this is echoed in Berger's essay on the human relationship to animals, and the connection to the rural landscape). The problem can therefore be seen as how to forge a reconciliation with nature? They rejected Engels's crude version in the dialectics of nature, and wrestled with the dichotomy of history and nature. Hegel thought the process of history was of the human spirit becoming conscious of its alienated conditions. They rejected this view (from idealist philosophy) as it assumed that consciousness and subjectivity were somehow transcendental (I think?) preferring the idea of nonidentity alongside negation. This explanation makes clearer the quote (elsewhere) about their emphasis on the motor of history and questioning of the agents of change (workers reaching a stage of revolutionary consciousness) and the reliance on the economic substructure (determining the cultural superstructure). The dream of the negation of negation (of alienation returning to itself) in Hegel and Marx, was limited by Adorno to 'the dialectic... could only be negative' (1996: 278). This is what Negative Dialectics explores. Praxis therefore also was de-emphasised as it was felt that praxis was not possible (except in theory itself). This is in stark contrast to Marxist thinking that sought to unify theory and praxis. Critical theory was a revision of Marx and a rejection of some of the founding principles.
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They employed historical materialism in an open-ended way rather than as a set of received truths.
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[this is where Zizek appears in the recentring of the ego for strategic purpose]
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They were highly skeptical of the 'ego cogito' (Descartes) - it was cast as a tool of domination although alternatives were not posed. Reason had lost its way, and what they called instrumental, subjective reason 'was the handmaiden of technological domination. [Yet] Nonantagonistic reason was always a hope, but one whose existence, albeit through negation of the status quo, prevented the uncritical apotheosis of nature.' (Jay: 1996: 272)
enlightenment-jay.txt
In light of the 'culture industry' essay, and without a clear strategy for action, the only solution was to cultivate negation (cf. Jeremy Valentine suggests concentrating on untranslatability and unpredictability). To Adorno, 'negation and the truth it precariously preserved could be expressed only in tentative, incomplete ways. Here Critical Theory's fundamental distrust of systematising was carried to its extreme. The location of philosophical insight was no longer to be found in abstract, coherent, architectonic systems, as in Hegel's day, but rather in subjective, private reflection.' (Jay, 1996: 277)
enlightenment-jay.txt
Adorno's Minima Moralia uses aphorisms to this effect. For instance, 'the splinter in the eye is the best magnifying glass' demonstrates how pain might be turned to effect (p.80).
enlightenment-jay.txt
The negative critical impulse allowed the future possibility of writing poetry that would no longer be an act of barbarism. This paraphrases how martin Jay ends his book trying to reconcile the famous Adorno quote: 'To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric' (1996: 298 - from Prisms, p.34).
enlightenment-jay.txt
I wonder how one might begin to write code that is not barbaric.
excess-bataille.txt
Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volume 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1991).
excess-bataille.txt
The notion of excess is elementary to Bataille's view of a general economy based upon the intentional production of nonutilitarian goods such as luxuries or spectacular displays of wealth and weapons systems. Bataille's notion of "General economy" is where expenditure (waste, sacrifice, or destruction) is considered more fundamental than the economies of production & utilities. E.g., the sun freely expands energy without receiving anything in return. If people intend to be free (from imperatives of capitalism) they should pursue a "general economy" of expenditure (giving, sacrifice or destruction) then they will escape the determination of existing imperatives of utility. For Bataille, people are beings of excess; full of exorbitant energy, fantasies, need, drives, & heterogeneous desires.
excess-bataille.txt
The notion of "excess" energy is central to Bataille's thinking. Bataille's inquiry takes the superabundance of energy, beginning from the infinite outpouring of solar energy or the surpluses produced by life's basic chemical reactions, as the norm for organisms. In other words, an organism in Bataille's general economy, unlike the rational actors of classical economy who are motivated by scarcity, normally has an "excess" of energy available to it. This extra energy can be used productively for the organism's growth or it can be lavishly expended. Bataille insists that an organism's growth or expansion always runs up against limits and becomes impossible. The wasting of this energy is "luxury". The form and role luxury assumes in a society are characteristic of that society. "The accursed share" refers to this excess, destined for waste.
flash-manovich.txt
Lev Manovich (2002), Generation Flash, http://www.manovich.net/TEXTS_04.HTM
flash-manovich.txt
'Flash aesthetics' is the term that Lev Manovich gives to describes the sensibility of a generation who have rejected the divisions of art and design in the tradition of the Bauhaus and replaced media criticism with software criticism. The Flash generation 'writes its own software code to create their own cultural systems, instead of using samples of commercial media' (2002). He acknowledges the category of 'software art' as indicative of this new dynamic practice that includes the use of Flash's ActionScript, Director's Lingo, Perl, MAX, JavaScript, Java, C++, and other programming and scripting languages. He says that 'suddenly, programming is cool' (we might add, not least, because Lev Manovich is writing about it).
flash-manovich.txt
To examine this phenomena, he characterises the figures of the modernist artist, postmodern media artist and software artist. He thinks that the first two figures necessarily take existing media as a starting point, unlike the software artist who writes original code and use the computer as a programming machine. This is a ludicrously simplistic position, emphasized by the statement that: 'Programming liberates art from being secondary to commercial media' (2002). This appears to be a paradoxical position given that he is valorizing artwork made by the proprietary software Flash whatever its capabilities. At best, it is a confusion driven by the need to characterize software art as a paradigm shift in media arts (and moving image culture in particular) rather than see it in the tradition of experimental arts and literature more generally that deals with issues of its technical apparatus.
floss-berry.txt
David M. Berry (2008) _Copy, Rip, Burn: the Politics of Copyleft and Open Source_ Pluto Press.
floss-berry.txt
Clearly there is much speculation on the social implications of open source. But alarmingly, the concept of the 'public' is underplayed in discussions as if public good can be achieved in a straightforward manner. Berry also uses the term 'commons' in relation to intellectual property, the 'intellectual commons', and is keen to uncover some of the ambiguities of the term in a situation where it seem to be interchangeable with 'public domain/sphere', and the 'creative commons' or GNU GPL of the digital commons (2008: 79). Behind this is identification of common assets and digital objects, and the ways these are organised, governed, used in practice, and then are subject to particular ownership regimes. The importance of a discussion of the intellectual commons lies in emphasising that this is not simply a legal issue but an institutional one (echoing Rossiter), and one that necessitates political action to protect the commons from privateers. Indeed arguably new forms of politics emerge out of these socio-techncal networks - 'new online social formations' with communicative dimensions (as Berry puts it, 2008: 190).
floss-berry.txt
(Kelty follows well from here)
floss-berry.txt
In 'The Contestation of Code', Berry also points out how 'openness' has tended to be understood through transparency and freedom that is based on individualist notion of how society might be better organised (2008: 182). Indeed open source ideology can be used to ignore the concept of the public. Similarly the Free Software movement, although stressing community-driven processes and action, avoids a wider discussion of democracy, or more precisely democratic freedoms. For Berry, the arguments are far too rooted in an 'engineering philosophy of technology' (2008: 185; this is something peer production has attempted to do as a post-capitalist alternative to standard democratic models - here I am thinking of the P2P Foundation in particular). He explains that Stallman' position is that technology can save us from technology, more not less technology rather than recognising the ways in which technology is shaped by society. The Free Software Foundation is at best, a kind of guild or trade union for programmers (Berry 2008: 192), with a radical kernel but one not fully formed into a radical politics as such. More specifically, coding practices are subject to similar ideological compromises such that skill and efficiency are emphasised as opposed to broader conditions in which networks take on more significance in terms of articulations of power. The network offers alternative form to traditional ways of organising human actions (such as those associate with representational democracies). Clearly technology and software increasingly mediate our realities in ways that necessitate a deep understanding of and access to source codes. How otherwise to take part in public affairs?
floss-berry.txt
Against technical and instrumental understandings of FLOSS, Berry argues that social issues such as those related to labour, property rights and control are inherently encoded in software. For Berry, this is 'The Poetics of Code' (2008: 188) and one that emphasises human creativity. By poetics, Berry is pointing to the creative and communicative turn in understanding sociality, underpinned by the ways in which 'capital attempts to own and control meaning and culture (and mediated by code)' (2008: 192). He insists that FLOSS represents 'technologies of the commons' (with the free software developer, operating like an artist in a similar way to the way Hannah Arendt suggested the artist is the only real worker in society, 2008: 194). Drawing on Arendt's distinctions between work and action, and indeed an understanding of code as a speech act (in a footnote), Berry suggests that FLOSS offers the potential for political action based on 'decentralised, transparent, non-market commons-based production'; a 'politics of the commons' (2008: 199). Furthernmore, he likens this to poetics through its root as 'poeisis' meaning 'to bring forth, to lead or to bring out - in other words, to produce' (2008: 2000). In this way, poetry is understood as something not present that is brought into action, rather like source code. To Berry, the commons is brought forth in a similar fashion, and through code in the case of FLOSS, into sociality and the public realm where politics resides.
frankfurtschool-jay.txt
The Frankfurt School and Critical Theory
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(Martin Jay (1996), The Dialectical Imagination)
frankfurtschool-jay.txt
The Frankfurt School approach - often associated with the abandonment of the idea of the proletariat as the agents of revolution (Marcuse).
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'The clearest expression of this change was the Institut's replacement of class conflict, that foundation stone of any true Marxist theory, with a new motor of history.' (Jay, 1996: 256)
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The idea of progress, human emancipation based on class struggle is rejected for more mixed, contradictory narratives of rise, fall, and recurrence.
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This is a convincing position given the dramatic changes in production (both in the West and existing socialism of the 1970s - what is elsewhere called post-fordism) and the compression of time and space through technological innovation that Harvey describes as follows:
frankfurtschool-jay.txt
'capitalism is becoming ever more tightly organised through dispersal, geographical mobility, and flexible responses in labour markets, labour processes, and consumer markets, all accompanied by hefty doses of institutional, product and technological innovation' (Jay, 1996: xvi, in his 'Preface to the 1996 edition', quoting Harvey, (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity: an Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Oxford).
frankfurtschool-jay.txt
Over the last thirty years or so, Labour markets have become increasingly globalised with the migration of cheap foreign labour and the weakening of trade union movements. Added to this, international financial capital has become increasingly powerful in relation to the nation-state. In such a scenario and under the passifying influence of mass culture, the idea of the proletariat as agents of change seemed to represent misplaced optimism (added to this was the view that Marxists had fetishised labour). Equally, the argument for the possibility of a benevolent state also significantly weakened. An interest in the work of the Frankfurt School coincides with these developments - not so much in terms of economic theory but for its engagement with culture.
frankfurtschool-jay.txt
The critical theory of the Frankfurt School stands in sharp contrast to orthodox postmodernist thinking. (see hybrid notes on funky business). For example, Martin Jay cites Habermas' view that modernism is an unfinished project, Lowenthal's warning against the concept of 'post-history', and Adorno's insistence of the separation of high and low culture (1996: xvii). Adorno and Horkheimer's essay 'The Culture Industry' best explains the worries of the integrative power and levelling tendencies of mass culture in this regard (1999: 120-167). The critical theorist responds to this. In The Dialectic of Enlightenment, a radical critique of 'instrumental, technological rationality', it is not that reason is given up altogether as is the (the anti-enlightenment tendency of postmodernism) but it is replaced by a cynical reason. Moreover, this brand of critical theory is important in re-engaging thinking about culture; but crucially about culture and aesthetics in connection to the political economy and ideological critique (what you might call the interaction between the substructure and superstructure that occurs at all times). Critical theory therefore rejects the derivative nature of culture (as simply responding to the economy).
frankfurtschool-jay.txt
Central to this is the relationship of the individual agent to the system (individual to society), especially when the system (and subject) itself has become rather fluid and dissolved (or fractured). It is as if the Marxist notion of change has become stable, and digitisation has become the currency for this approach (ref. Jeremy Valentine talk). The system has become thoroughly flexible and distributed - networked, in other words.
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Central to the project is the inter-relationship of theory to practice, in the Marxist lexicon known as 'praxis' - aptly described for my purposes, as 'to designate a kind of self-creating action' (Jay, 1996: 4) - in other words, it is action informed by theory (ironically perhaps, the Frankfurt School might be criticised for its lack of engagement in practical political actions or praxis - however, they believed in the primacy of theory, even in the case of Marcuse, when he was writing positively about activist protest).
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Benjamin argued, taking a cue from Brecht that,
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"Crude thoughts... should be part and parcel of dialectical thinking, because they are nothing but the referral of theory into practice... a thought must be crude to come into its own action".
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quoted in Hannah Arendt, "introduction", to Illuminations, p.21.
frankfurtschool-jay.txt
The re-working of Marxism was still rooted in dialectical method, opposed to closed systems of thinking and remaining open-ended and unfinished. This approach, for members of the Frankfurt School, was characterised as critical theory (although the phrase has become much maligned in recent years as the theory strand of practice-orientated arts programmes in universities). Critical theory expressed a dialogue with other critiques, theories and systems - using a 'dialectical materialist' method (note: be careful about the distinction between historical materialism and dialectical materialism) and drawing heavily on a German philosophical tradition especially those 'Left Hegelians' that began to apply his thinking to social phenomena, most famously Marx. The FS project can be partly described as a recovery of these dialectical roots that had long been superceded by more positivist scientific approaches by the early twentieth century - that had arguably lost sight of itself. This part return to Hegel had a number of significant implications: chiefly, that consciousness and subjectivity were seen to be important (partly from the influence of psychoanalysis), and to identify its philosophical roots (Kant and Hegel) as well as reflect upon more recent philosophical traditions (especially Nietzsche, Weber, and Husserl perhaps); all serving to invigorate its critical and theoretical dexterity (Jay, 1996: 42-3). Added to that, critical theory had to take account of the current economic and social conditions; the ambiguities of soviet communism, and the monopolistic tendencies of capitalism, as well as the integration of the proletariat into the system and as a result a loss of confidence in whether it could continue to represent the revolutionary agent of change it was once believed to be.
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So if the Frankfurt School project can be partly described as 'Hegelianised Marxism', in its embrace of the dialectical method, and nature of reason and reliance on logic, it also remained skeptical of a number of its key principles, such as its claim to absolute truth (sometimes called Hegelian synthesis). Jay says:
frankfurtschool-jay.txt
'a system that tolerated every other view as part of the "total truth" has evitably quietist implications. An all-embracing system like Hegel's might well serve as a theodicy justifying the status quo. In fact, to the extent that Marxism had been ossified into a system claiming the key to truth, it too had fallen victim to the same malady.' (1996: 46, refering to Horkheimer's views)
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Horkheimer argues truth is a distraction from a focus on social change. (ref. to Jeremy Valentine argument that change too, in turn, has become ossified). This example serves to emphasise the rejection of all absolutes, such as Hegel's absolute subject (or absolute spirit) but not an outright (absolutist) rejection that would lead to scientific positivism. The rejection of one for the other, or mere opposition (of the individual and society or of relativism versus determinism, for instance) would simply be anti-dialectical. Critical theory allowed a more measured dialectic position to emerge that was also sensitive to its ossification. A totalising over-emphasis on either the individual or the system, or materialism as opposed to idealism, merely reinforces the status quo and dead-end oppositions that lead nowhere. Dialectical method suits this purpose as it is not outside human influence, nor is it simply a model that is imposed on a chaotic reality. Rather, it lies in a 'perpetual state of suspended judgement' (Jay, 1996: 54) between consciousness and being, subject and object - in a 'force-field' of contradictions in any mediated totality - not with truth in mind but social change.
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In this sense, critical theory is thoroughly 'negative' in refusing to fix itself. Marcuse explains this through the relationship between ontology and history as follows:
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'The totality in which the Marxian theory moves is other than that of Hegel's philosophy, and the difference indicates the decisive difference between Hegel's and Marx's dialectics. For Hegel, the totality was the totality of reason, a closed ontological system, finally identical with the rational system of history.... Marx, on the other hand, detached dialectic from this ontological base. In his work, the negativity of reality becomes a historical condition which cannot be hypostatised as a metaphysical state of affairs.' (Marcuse quoted in Jay, 1996: 79; from Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, 1960, pp.313-4)
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Critical theory remains theory linked to action, to praxis. In fact, theory is a guide to action. Herein lies the role of the intellectual and researcher. The tension between the intellectual and the proletariat is 'necessary in order to combat the proletariat's conformist tendencies' (Jay, 1996: 84, quoting Horkheimer again) under present conditions of authority and the emergence of mass culture. In all this, the researcher is always part of the subject of study according to Horkheimer (Jay, 1996: 81) - in a phrase that sounds like the discovery in quantum mechanics that the person conducting the experiment alters the experiment through their very presence. To Horkheimer, this is no bad thing, as knowledge and interest are tied together and this should be made explicit. In this way, the aesthetic judgements in scientific experiments would be accounted for and theorised rather than simply seeing this as a lack of analytical integrity.
frankfurtschool-jay.txt
Note on Engels:
frankfurtschool-jay.txt
According to Marcuse, Engels had been wrong to assume he could apply dialectical thinking to nature as he would history. 'Natural being was different from historical being; mathematical, nondialectical physics was valid in its own sphere. "Nature," Marcuse wrote, "has a history, but is not history"' (Jay, 1996: 73).
freedom-balibar.txt
Etienne Balibar (2008 [1998]) _Spinoza and Politics_, trans. Peter Snowdon, London: Verso.
freedom-balibar.txt
Although the sovereignty of the State seems necessarily absolute, Etienne Balibar examines the relationship with individual freedom of expression by making reference to Spinoza's _Tractatus Theologico-Politicus_ (published in 1670). Individuals participate in the State, and the State guarantees their participation by offering them freedom of thought and expression (2008: 25).
freedom-balibar.txt
Rather than the apparent opposing tendencies of authoritarianism and democracy being reconciled, they operate in a reciprocal relation. Spinoza stresses the distinction between thoughts/words and actions. He maintains that since it is impossible to act with one voice (that no one can be forced to think like another or speak like another), the individual gives up their right to act freely on this basis in solidarity with the State but not their right to think freely. To Balibar, this poses some problems, and he considers that 'obedience does not lie in the motive from which one acts, but in the conformity of the act itself'. Furthermore, '_certain words are actions_, in particular those which deliver judgements on the policy of the State and which may serve to obstruct that policy' (2009: 26-7).
freedom-balibar.txt
Balibar explains that the liberal tradition has emphasises the distinction between the private and public realms - between individual opinions and collective actions - whereas they 'reciprocally "underwrite" each other' (2008: 27). Spinoza recognises this: that the State and individual are not separated nor even in contradiction but in tension. This is demonstrated when the State tries to suppress freedom of speech: 'The more violent the constraints that are placed upon individual freedom, the more violent and destructive will be the reaction against them.' (2008: 28) When individuals are forced to think like others, the State itself is in danger. The diversity of human imagination cannot be suppressed.
freedom-balibar.txt
'On this basis, the State must open up of its own accord the largest possible domain for the expression of individual opinions. The "complexion" of each individual will then no longer be seen as an obstacle to the sovereign's power (_potestas_), but as an active, constitutive element of the power (_potentia_) of the State. When individuals consciously take part in the construction of the State, they naturally desire both its power over them and its preservation. By promoting freedom of opinion, the State maximises its chances of reaching rational decisions; at the same time, it places the individual in a situation in which obedience is the only form of conduct he can choose that is truly to his advantage. It is given that _thoughts and words are once more actions_, in the strongest sense of the term.' (2008: 30-31)
freedom-balibar.txt
The process is based on 'reciprocal limitation' (or 'self-limitation') where each element (the individual and the State) '"interiorises" the utility of the other' (2008: 31). The institution of democracy is explained by Spinoza in this way, through a contract (_pactum_) in which 'each individual transfers to the collective sovereign (of which he is himself one part) the right to legislate, to command and to punish crimes...' underpinned by freedom of opinion to 'enable the citizens to construct a common will and to determine their common good' (2008: 114). According to Balibar, Spinoza overestimated the capacity of the masses to rule themselves and to form democratic regimes (2008: 115). The Republican regime, of 1650 to 1672, to which he referred was in effect an oligarchy. Recognition of this leads Spinoza to investigate the process by which individuals become 'collective individuals' (and this is where the contemporary interest in the _multitude_ connects):
freedom-balibar.txt
'The collective is an 'individual of individuals' with a body and a soul (the body politic). The soul 'is a way in which that body can be represented in imagination and reason; it is the condition of effective decision (that is, government); and it is also an instrument for the expression of the collective passions' (2008: 116).
freedom-balibar.txt
Individuals must actively imagine their 'participation' in what ultimately is part of their very subjugation and freedom. Individuals _must_ voice their diverse opinions, both for and against the State, in order to legitimate its effects. This is the basis of liberal democracy as part of the 'violence of participation' (as direct violence against divergent opinions against the State serves to undermines the State itself) as well as the basis of its democratic renewal (as in non-representational democracy, for instance). Sovereignty is in effect the totality of the diverse opinions (and not in conflict with networks as stated elsewhere). At best, the collective becomes a mechanism for the multiplication of power. As Balibar puts it:
freedom-balibar.txt
'In losing their absolute autonomy, State and Individual have lost only a fictive freedom, a powerlessness. In return, they have actively committed themselves to the project of their own liberation.' (2008: 118)
freedom-balibar.txt
Freedom, although opposed to constraint, is not opposed to determinism: 'it does not consist in the absence of causes for human action [...] _For our liberation has always already begun_.' (2008: 123). Politics, for Balibar, is ever present in the collective human imagination.
freespeech-stallman.txt
Richard M. Stallman (2002) _Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman_, Joshua Gay, ed. Free Software Foundation.
freespeech-stallman.txt
There is an ambiguity over the term 'free' in 'free software' which is why the distinction is made: free as in free speech not as in free beer. In other words it does not mean 'non-commercial' - or to explain further, there is no contradiction between free-commercial: selling copies and offering them gratis. It is not given away 'for free' as this confuses the issue with price not freedom. As Stallman clarifies:
freespeech-stallman.txt
'"Free software" is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of "free" as in "free speech," not as in free beer.' (2002: 41)
freespeech-stallman.txt
Rather than considering the ambiguity a problem, it is explored by Superflex in their project 'Free Beer' in which they collapse the distinction and attempt to make free beer as in free speech. As they jokingly put it:
freespeech-stallman.txt
'FREE BEER is a beer which is free in the sense of freedom, not in the sense of free beer.' (http://www.superflex.net/projects/freebeer/)
freespeech-stallman.txt
To be more precise, according to Stallman, free software means:
freespeech-stallman.txt
Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program, for any purpose.
freespeech-stallman.txt
Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs. (Access to the source code is a precondition for this.)
freespeech-stallman.txt
Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.
freespeech-stallman.txt
Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits. (Access to the source code is a precondition for this.)
freespeech-stallman.txt
(Stallman 2002: 41, first written in 1996)
freespeech-stallman.txt
A program is free if the users have these freedoms. The freedoms are protected by copyleft conditions, not as a further restriction of freedom as with many rules but to ensure that conditions associated with freedom are maintained. See http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html (although this is not the issue here, however important).
freespeech-stallman.txt
The ambiguity is not easily settled by substituting the word free with others: open clearly indicates another set of problems. The history of this line of thinking is impossible to chart, or is as old as the sharing of recipes:
freespeech-stallman.txt
'it is as old as computers, just as the sharing of recipes is as old as cooking' as Stallman puts it (2002: 15). Some kind of history of Stallman's involvement is summarised in his book _Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution_ (O'Reilly 1999). [note: use of word 'voices'] The Free Software Foundation was created in 1985 to facilitate free software development propagating the free software production and distribution ideology - see the GNU manifesto (first written in 1984). Although generally describing the same category of software (the free software community), the distinction from the term 'open source' is thoroughly ideological in emphasising 'freedom, community and principle' over 'the potential to make high-quality, powerful software' associated with the open source movement (2002: 300) - people or profit in wider terms. (See Medosch for more on this.) The definitions come close but open source software (OSS) is a more open one, or weaker if you subscribe to the free software ideology. All the same, clearly the problem (or class enemy) here is not open source but proprietary software.
future-shanken.txt
Edward A. Shanken (2003), 'From Cybernetics to Telematics: The Art. Pedagogy, and Theory of Roy Ascott', in Roy Ascott, Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 1-94.
future-shanken.txt
Rather than a historical approach much work in the area of technology is forward-looking theories such as Roy Ascott's 'visionary work' in that it follows in the tradition of futurologists like Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller, as well as the futurist Filippo Marinetti. This approach is often criticised as 'technological utopianism' (Shanken, 2003: 2). I would advocate a theory that looks forwards and backwards simultaneously - to engage in one or the other can be too deterministic (ideological in terms of a belief in progress and teleological perhaps - although Ascott would argue nonlinear no doubt).
future-shanken.txt
There should be feedback loops here too. I say this in connection with Ascott's radical pedagogy - in which art and the teaching situation was seen in the tradition of cybernetics as a creative situation in which feedback loops exist within the system producing/inducing learning behaviours. Thus potential learning exists in the sense that: 'Out of the flux, a many-sided organism may evolve' (2003; 102) and correspondingly '"the generative idea... is worked out in perpetual interweaving"... which is no longer the product of a single author but is now pleated together through the process of distributed authorship' (Shaken quoting Ascott quoting Barthes, 2003: 66). In this way and in line with the conceptual tradition of the time, Ascott could surmise that 'the art of our time is one of system, process, behaviour, interaction' (2003: 214) extending this to: 'Culture has been well defined as "the sum of all the learned behaviours that exist in a given locality"' (2003: 99; Jasia Reichardt's exhibition 'Cybernetic Serendipity', 1968, is largely regarded as a historical marker for combining art and cybernetic ideas). Thus the production of art and learning might be seen to be mutually supportive:
future-shanken.txt
'The two activities, creative and pedagogic, interact, each feeding back to the other' bound together becoming a 'force for change in society' (2003: 98; often bound together in the form of writing - again in the tradition of conceptual art of the time). For Shanken, this points to the 'paradoxical nature of knowledge and the contradictions inherent in formal epistemologies' (2003: 5) - views predicated on an understanding of information and systems theory. From this perspective, symbolic information systems like text or numbers or code - any linguistic or mathematical systems - might be seen to be artistic material. Ascott famously extends this conceptual framework to behaviour in the quote from 'The Construction of Change' in Cambrige Opinion 37 (1964) that introduces Lucy Lippard's Six Years: The Dematerialisation of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972):
future-shanken.txt
"To discuss what one is doing rather than the artwork which results, to attempt to unravel the loops of creative activity, is, in many ways, a behavioural problem. The fusion of art, science and personality is involved. It leads to a consideration of our total relationship to a work of art, in which physical moves may lead to conceptual moves, in which Behaviour relates to Idea...'An organism is most efficient when it knows its own internal order.'" (Ascott, in Lippard, 1973: 1; & Ascott, 2003: 97).
future-shanken.txt
From this principle of feedback, you can see how Ascott might come up with the following logic: 'The computer may be linked to an artwork, and the artwork may in some sense be a computer.' (2003: 129) This could just as well be extended to software of course, but the focus on hardware or the technical apparatus has a distinct history. Shanken cites the well-known source for new media commentators in Brecht's comments on radio. Unfortunately, the potential for radio as a two way send and receive communication media was not realised at that time.
future-shanken.txt
'[L]et the listener speak as well as hear... bring him [her] into a relationship instead of isolating him. On this principle the radio should step out of the supply business and organize its listeners as suppliers... [I]t must follow the prime objective of turning the audience not only into pupils but also into teachers. It is the radio's formal task to give these educational operations an interesting turn, i.e. to ensure that these interests interest people. Such an attempt by the radio to put its instruction into an artistic form would link up with the modern artists to give art an instructive character.'
future-shanken.txt
(Berthold Brecht (1932) 'The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication' in Shanken 2003: 55)
future-shanken.txt
Shanken makes a spurious connection here. The quote owes more to the spirit of Benjamin than Ascott - for the engagement with the apparatus here is a means to engage with the relations of production (something that Ascott is fairly unconcerned with); it is instructional in terms of politics of course. Turning receivers into senders (what Benjamin calls readers into writers) contradicts the broadcast principles of centralised, authoritarian politics, art and teaching. A critique of much interactive art and its spurious choices might be formulated in much the same way (of turning observers into participants perhaps) unless social relations are invoked - but this lies outside the scope of the work here. To avoid the techno-determinism of McLuhan, it is worth noting that Shanken sees it as imperative to maintain the 'dialectic between medium and message as co-determining elements of social practice' (2003: 84). One might simply re-read Benjamin or Brecht for a more detailed position on this non-separation of form and content.
generativeart-galanter.txt
Philip Galanter (2003), 'What is Generative Art? Complexity Theory as a Context for Art Theory,' Generative Art 03, international conference, Politecnico di Milano, Italy. http://www.generative.net/
generativeart-galanter.txt
In defining Generative Art, Philip Galanter immediately identifies with systems, and more precisely with complexity theory, and so sees generative art systems as displaying organising principles of order and disorder (2003). He sees the definition as contributing to wider discussions around art criticism and acknowledges the controversy and history of the term - from algorithmic composition to the Demo scene. Clearly it is a wide field of activity as to generate something accounts for most creative activity - with Marcel Duchamp, John Cage and Sol Lewitt, to name but a few key figures demonstrating generative principles in their work. Galanter's definition is by now well established and is a particularly inclusive one, that positions generative art as preceding the computer:
generativeart-galanter.txt
'Generative Art refers to any art practice where the artist uses a system, such as a set of natural language rules, a computer program, a machine, or other procedural invention, which is set into motion with some degree of autonomy contributing to or resulting in a completed work of art'
generativeart-galanter.txt
The producer concedes control to some extent over the production of the work, but the precise application of the term 'autonomy' here seems crucial. He says the system must be 'self-contained enough to operate autonomously'. It is in this connection that he find complexity science useful in describing dynamic and self-organising systems. The text remains descriptive though and concludes poorly in stating that:
generativeart-galanter.txt
'Generative art is ideologically neutral.'
generativeart-galanter.txt
This is a misunderstanding of art and systems in general. Oh dear.
generativity-brown.txt
Paul Brown, ed. (2003) 'Generative computation and the arts', in, Digital Creativity, vol. 14, no.1, Lisse: Swets & Zeitlinger.
generativity-brown.txt
The connection between generative computation and the arts has a history that perhaps particularly draws upon the traditions of constructivism and systems art (Brown 2003: 1; the Russian constructivists believed that technology might ellicit social change). Rather than reject this as out-moded modernism, Paul Brown stresses the merits of this approach in contrast to the metaphorical excesses of late-modernism. He is thinking of the old belief in the 'truth to the medium' that many art education programmes propagated in the 1970s and 1980s (at the Slade and Middlesex University in the UK) that computer artists needed to understand the 'medium' they were working with at a deep level of understanding before employing other more graphical or metaphorical (proprietary) applications. Many of Brown's generation lament the forgotten history of this period when artists were allegedly working at the level of the 'metamedium' (Kay, 1984).
generativity-brown.txt
> from: http://www.noteaccess.com/APPROACHES/G.htm
>
> Generative Art - "A form of geometrical abstraction
> in which a basic
> element is made to ' generate' other forms by
> rotation, etc. of the
> initial form in such a way as to give rise to an
> intricate design as
> the new forms touch each other, overlap, recede or
> advance with
> complicated variations. A lecture on 'Generative Art
> Forms' was given
> at the Queen's University, Belfast Festival in 1972
> by the Romanian
> sculptor Neagu, who also founded a Generatiave Art
> Group. Generative
> art was also practised among others by Eduardo
> McEntyre and Miguel
> çngel Vidal [1928- ] in the Argentine."[Osborne,
> Harold, editor. The
> Oxford C ompanion to Twentieth-Century Art. Oxford
> University Press.
> 1988.]
generativity-brown.txt
On the distinction between software art and generative art:
generativity-brown.txt
IN relation to the historical precedents for 'generative art', John McCormack (in Brown 2003) explains that the earliest applications of computers to arts practice were necessarily generative in that artists had to write their own software in order to generative the outcomes. Surely we can go further and simply say that all software is generative in this way - whether the artist was involved in the writing of the software or not is beside the point that someone was - artist or programmer or both. However, the focus on generative processes was characterised in these early practices by explicit reference to systems and information theory. Of particular note is Max Bense's theory of 'generative aesthetics' that drew together informations theory, semiotics and aesthetics to stress the open-ended aspects (1971); broadly, Bense is understanding the aesthetic object in terms of Pierce's semiotics and Chomsky's 'generative grammar'. In defining generative art now, McCormack would draw upon this legacy of cybernetics and linguistics but add biological metaphors - and in particular the terms 'genotype' and 'phenotype'. Put simply, he generalises that the authoring process is directed towards a genotype as the specification of a process, and when this process is executed it generates the phenotype as the 'experience of the artwork' (in Brown 2003: 5; wherein the genotype is the outward physical manifestation, the observable structure of an organism; and the phenotype is the internally coded, inherited information as a set of instructions or genetic code for building and maintaining a living creature). This is no simple distinction but a way of breaking down determinism towards something more organic and less predictable.
gesture-agamben.txt
Giogio Agamben (2000) 'Notes on Gesture' in _Means Without Ends: Notes on Politics_, trans. Vincenzo Binetti & Cesare Casarino [1992], Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
gesture-agamben.txt
'Politics is the sphere of pure means, that is, of the absolute and complete gesturality of human beings' (Agamben 2000: 59)
gesture-agamben.txt
The argument here is that gesture rather than the image (he is thinking of cinema) belongs to the realm of politics (and not simply to aesthetics) - evoking Benjamin: like awakening from a dream. Gesture is associated with action, and more particularly set apart from acting and making/producing. He is referring to a distinction made by Varro who is drawing upon Aristotle, as follows:
gesture-agamben.txt
'For production [poiesis] has an end other than itself, but action [praxis] does not; good action is itself an end.' (Aristotle, in Agamben 2000: 56)
gesture-agamben.txt
What is distinctive in Varro is a third type of action in addition to the above two: if production is a means to an end, and praxis is an end without means, gesture disrupts the false distinction and presents means without end. In this way, gesture is not goal-driven or a movement from A to B (in the way that dance movement, for instance, may have a goal of aesthetic value). For Agamben:
gesture-agamben.txt
'The gesture is the exhibition of a mediality: it is the process of making a means visible as such. It allows the emergence of the being-in-a-medium of human beings and thus it opens the ethical dimension for them.' (2000: 57)
gesture-agamben.txt
What he emphasises is that this is not action as a means in itself but the 'sphere of a pure and endless mediality' (2000: 58). In relation to language, words are not simply objects of communication but as a means in itself with nothing to say in itself - it is a 'gag': something that could be put in your mouth to hinder speech or express the inability to speak. The event of language is political in as much as it relates to the free use of pure means.
gesture-agamben.txt
The false distinction between means and ends paralyses politics:
gesture-agamben.txt
'Politics is the sphere neither of an end in itself nor of means subordinated to an end; rather, it is the sphere of a pure mediality without end intended as the field of human action and of human thought.' (2000: 116)
gunther-paul.txt
Joachim Paul (----), ÔGotthard GŸnther, the "Einstein" of Philosophy,Õ http://www.vordenker.de/ggphilosophy/ggeinstein_en.htm
gunther-paul.txt
Drawing upon an occidental history of philosophy, Gotthard GŸnther in 'GrundzŸge einer neuen Theorie des Denkens in Hegels Logik, ('Main Features of a New Thinking in Hegel's Logic') establishes a new kind of formalism that situates classical binary logic as part of a more general and comprehensive multivalued or many systems logic. For GŸnther. 'the subject has to recognize that there is not only one but a multitude of individual and different subject-object-relationships' (----). Binary logic is thus argued inadequate:
gunther-paul.txt
'Our reality as a whole however is not only a collection of an infinite number of "ontological locations", locations of individual being. In isolation they can still be described by a binary logic. But for the whole and for interplay of these "locations", reality can only be depicted by a multivalued system.' (Paul, ----)
gunther-paul.txt
In Andreas Leo Findeisen's obliquely entitled '(Mostly WestEastern-European Theoretical BlaBla-) Lego For a Meat-Theory of-Meta-Art-Forms' (in Goriunova & Shulgin, 2004), he explains how GŸnthers' work rejects Aristotelian logic for a new formalism of transclassical logic based on double reflection. Rather than simply thinking of something, GŸnther suggests an 'immediate reflection of a reflective dimension' I think I think of something (Findeisen, in Goriunova & Shulgin, 2004: 208). GŸnther famously planned to build a 'transputer,' a machine based on his 'polycontextural logic' based on how he modelled human consciousness. To GŸnther, technology means self-expression and self-realization of the human subject.
gunther-paul.txt
There is some contemporary interest in this logic in as far as it relates to the networked communications: 'communication and media theories of the future need to reflect Gotthard GŸnther's theory of many values, his polycontextural logic' (Paul, ----).
hacking-warksollfrank.txt
McKenzie Wark (2001), 'Hacker Manifesto 2.0', http://www.feelergauge.net/projects/hackermanifesto/version_2.0/
hacking-warksollfrank.txt
There is a general ambiguity around the term hacking but a general definition sounds positive in describing: 'any process of knowledge where data can be gathered, where information can be extracted from it, and where in that information new possibilities for the world produced, there are hackers hacking the new out of the old.' (Wark, 2001)
hacking-warksollfrank.txt
In the hacker manifesto, there is a suitably optimistic, if not utopian, tone in the production of new concepts and perceptions 'hacked out of raw data'. The term 'hacking' has its origins in electrical engineering and computing. The reach and contemporary relevance of these activities makes hacking an appropriate metaphor for creative production in general.
hacking-warksollfrank.txt
In this general sense, hacking can produce new understandings from existing materials and in various forms such as programming language, poetic language, or in other creative output. McKenzie Wark sees the hacker as a new class with a political agenda over property (alluding to the communist manifesto in this respect). He explains:
hacking-warksollfrank.txt
'And yet while we create these new worlds, we do not possess them. That which we create is mortgaged to others, and to the interests of others, to states and corporations who control the means for making worlds we alone discover. We do not own what we produce -- it owns us.' (2001)
hacking-warksollfrank.txt
The manifesto calls for hackers to take control of this situation and seek autonomy over what they produce, to identify their interests as a class in order to serve society as a whole, and strike alliances with other workers who do not own the means of production. Hackers require a political agenda in other words.
hacking-warksollfrank.txt
Property rights have been extended from land to capital to information. The hacker is involved in immaterial labour associated with the material production of information. Reflecting his other essay that stresses the material and immaterial nature of labour in this new economy, Wark claims:
hacking-warksollfrank.txt
'Information is no less real than physical matter, and is dependent on it for its existence. Since information cannot exist in a pure, immaterial form, neither can the hacker class. Of necessity it must deal with a ruling class that owns the means of extracting or distributing information, or with a producing class that extracts and distributes. The class interest of hackers lies in freeing information from its material constraints.' (2001)
hacking-warksollfrank.txt
According to his logic, information like other goods is owned and controlled by class interests, and the hacker is in a position like the proletariat to overturn these relations. Whole parts of this manifesto are paraphrased from the communist manifesto to effect, for instance: 'Class conflict becomes more fragmented, but creeps into any and every relation that becomes a relation of property.' (2001)
hacking-warksollfrank.txt
This hacker class, according to Pit Schulz, can be seen in the tradition of Gramsci's 'organic intellectual', although he sees the concept of immaterial
hacking-warksollfrank.txt
labour as more fruitful, as it includes the user of systems (2002b). The core of the argument for Wark lies in the transformation of information into property and hence takes the form of patents, trademarks, copyright and the moral right of authors. The hacker is able to disrupt the resultant class relations in this respect. Wark explains:
hacking-warksollfrank.txt
'When the hack is recognised in an abstraction of property rights, then information as property creates the hacker class as class. This intellectual property is a distinctive kind of property, in that only a new creation may lay claim to it. New property is created only in its qualitative difference.' (2001)
hacking-warksollfrank.txt
Cornelia Sollfrank (2001) 'Hacking the Art Operating System', interviewed by Florian Cramer, Chaos Computer Club, Berlin; also version published in 2002-3, in Simon Yuill and Kerstin Mey, eds., Communication, Interface, Locality, Manchester University Press in association with Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design.
hacking-warksollfrank.txt
In 'Hacking the art operating system' (2001), Cornelia Sollfrank draws together the principles of hacker culture and arts practice, and many of the preconceptions of both fields (her interest is in women hackers in particular). The interview reveals the historical separation of applied art or craft and pure art or aesthetics. Sollfrank's ironic claim that 'a smart artist makes the machine do the work' has relevance here too as a clarification of 'hacking the art operating system' (2001). If hacking is seen in this light, it appears to undermine the distinction and the preferred image of the geeky male hacker. Concerned with these gendered views and her own disappointment at the lack of female presence in the scene, Sollfrank began to invent female hackers and to make documentaries to alter preconceptions (note: she is also a key member of the cyberfeminist group 'old boys network'). She describes this strategy as switching 'from the journalist-research modus to the artistic-modus' and in terms of pedagogy or what Florian Cramer calls 'social hacking' (2001). In this way, Sollfrank's practice of fabrication can be seen as hacking the 'art operating system' by analogy (employing Thomas Wulffen's phrase). This interference with art's program, system and interface is most explicit in her project 'female generator' of 1997 in which multiple female media artist submissions were fabricated for the 'extension' net art competition by the Hamburger Kunsthalle. 'Female Extension' consisted of several hundred art websites under different female artist names generated by a computer program, making a feminist hack of a net art competition.
hacking-warksollfrank.txt
Hacking is also Pit Schultz's description of Alex McLean's winning entry to the transmediale 2.0 festival that in itself would somewhat valourise hacking (2002). Schulz claims that:
hacking-warksollfrank.txt
'Hacking is more than a metaphor [...]. The strongest tools of the web at the moment, p2p filesharing networks are built on the principle of open system architectures with minimal access restrictions. Insecurity in terms of openness is a basic feature of the net. Maybe one has to embrace it to get hacked and celebrate? How detached does the "media culture" discourse have to get from the phenomena of everyday digital life to finally become a full part of the reactionary logic which it seems to try to critique?' (2002) There is a further danger here too identified by Cramer and Sollfrank as the possibility of the programmer or hacker not simply as independent spirits but as a return to the myth of the 'autonomous artist coined in the 18th century, the freelance genius' (2001). This is not the case either with the free software movement that is thoroughly stitched into the corporate field of software development. Pit Schultz quotes Richard Stallmann's ironic 'free software song' to emphasise the potential evangelism around the fuigure of the hacker:
hacking-warksollfrank.txt
'When we have enough free software; At our call, hackers, at our call; We'll throw out those dirty licenses; Ever more, hackers, ever more.
hacking-warksollfrank.txt
Join us now and share the software; You'll be free, hackers, you'll be free.' (2002b)
hacking-warksollfrank.txt
Certainly there is no guarantee of ideological position. Amy Alexander makes a similar point in stressing the ambiguity of the term and the apolitical motivation of much activity in this area. Although hacking generally describes an activity like crudely hacking a piece of wood with an axe, the application to computing is rather more subtle but still a general procedure of taking something apart - in this case code. Alexander explains the confusion partly as the mixing of 'hacking' and 'cracking' that suggests the breach of security: 'some hackers crack, many hackers believe in exploratory cracking but not destructive cracking' (2001). A hacker is thus someone with proficiency and practical understanding of the structure and operations of computer networks and systems. Those with more malign intentions are sometimes known as crackers (aka terrorists).
hacking-warksollfrank.txt
It is worth pointing out that open source is not a security issue, as has been argued by Microsoft et al who withhold operating system specifics on this basis. An operating system like Linux is therefore no less secure than Windows. On the contrary, the open source transparent model might encourage the fast identification and patching of potential security flaws. Microsoft's 'closed source' model is open to abuse not least because of its objectional politics. This logic is exemplified by the issue of 'intellectual property' in which the intellectual claims 'property rights' demonstrates restricted intellect (restricted to the capitalisation of its in- and outcomes, according to Thorsten Schilling, 2000).
hardware-bowles.txt
On hardware:
hardware-bowles.txt
William Bowles (1990), 'The Macintosh Computer: Archetypal Capitalist Machine?' (first written in 1987) Retrofuturism 13,
hardware-bowles.txt
As somewhat of a precursor of Matt Fuller's deconstruction of Microsoft Word, this essay examines the peculiarities of the Macintosh computer from an overtly Marxist perspective Bowles is concerned to understand how technology is employed to 'wrest more and more surplus value from labor' (1990). He charts the historical parallel with the introduction of technologies in the industrial period and finds consistencies in approach. New machine tools were introduced that transfer skills from the human to the machine itself in a process of feedback. He explains this feedback thus:
hardware-bowles.txt
'The end product of this process is the emergence of what I refer to as a "general tool", that is, a tool whose basic principles embody not only the specific skills of the craftsperson, but more importantly, the "skills" are embedded in the lathe in such a way as to "mask" not only the craft origins of the process in terms of skills needed by the operator to use the machine, but more importantly, the tasks are standardized via specific elements incorporated into the operating system of the lathe.'
hardware-bowles.txt
His argument is that these ideas have been heightened by the computer, and that it operates as the '"end product" of industrialism in the sense that it acts as a unifier of discrete, industrial processes in the same way that the lathe did for craft processes'. The Macintosh computer represents a further development of this rationalised process of development as a 'general tool' for 'generalised education' in that it is designed to be easy to operate. He explains this as an entirely logical development in keeping with the industrial period.
hardware-bowles.txt
The Macintosh computer in particular, and in contrast to a pc at that time (as well as in contrast to its current unix-based operating system of OSX) has some contradictory tendencies in this connection. He describes it as a form of 'state socialism'. The user interacts with the operating system via a command structure, using a toolbox, and so on, that parallels the kinds of standards developed in machine tools. To all intensive purposes, the operating system '"masks" the "real" operation of the computer by interposing itself between the user and the Central Processing Unit'. Despite appearances, the processes are decidedly complex and there is a vast amount of expertise invested in this operating system. The Macintosh presents itself as a 'black box', masking its inner workings and denying access to its depths (unlike its current form OSX). It may be easy to use but it is made impossible to use it at a greater level of operation. It is a closed system that somewhat 'mystifies' the processes involved and the choices open to the user. For Bowles, this encourages an 'unquestioning acceptance of the supremacy of technology'.
hardware-bowles.txt
This trick can be traced historically back to the beginnings of the industrial period not least, reflecting a trend to alienate the worker/user from the very processes they are involved in. The relations of production are organised in this way to maximise surplus value. The articulation of this is far more complex when the processes are more difficult to perceive, reflecting the relationship between consumer and producer underpinned by the knowledge economy.
hardware-bowles.txt
'The specialization necessary for modern science-based production methods is predicated on the existence of a stratum of the work force who possess unique knowledge of the processes involved. This technocratic "caste" is indispensable to modern productive forces...'.
hardware-bowles.txt
Labour is organised in such a way that technology replaces labour as well as is bound to it. Each aspect is assimilated by society in such a way that it is normalised, and becomes part of the general knowledge of that society. What Macintosh tried to do was to make a 'universal' graphic user interface, to set a standardised way of operating a computer that enabled the relatively 'unskilled' user to gain access to computers 'without resort to educating everyone to the level of the university' (the irony is that much educative work using computers has been done on macs, especially in art and design subjects).
hardware-bowles.txt
The importance of this is that it is only through this approach that a ruling class can sustain itself: 'If the technical/professional elite are to maintain the system, they must make it as simple as possible to operate' (Linux clearly lies outside these parameters as is the operating system of choice for the Free Software and Open source communities accordingly).
hardware-bowles.txt
For Bowles, this is entirely expected:
hardware-bowles.txt
'What we are seeing is then is an exact duplication of the first industrial revolution where craft skills were stolen and locked into the industrial machine, then perfected to the point whereby general principles could be extracted and applied to ever more sophisticated machines, each in turn, requiring less and less skill (and labor) to operate!'
hardware-bowles.txt
The Macintosh computer combines contradictory impulses and conditions. It is both a means of ensuring the dominant relations of production and offers the potential to make knowledge accessible (as the 'antithesis of capitalism' in encouraging highly socialised forms of labour).
hardware-bowles.txt
Much has happened since this essay was written.
history-benjaminhegel.txt
For thesis -how new media and categories such as 'software art' are historicised - need to recognise this dynamic - past/future - etc. the past of the historian is to reveal these contradictory forces.
history-benjaminhegel.txt
the snail of history
history-benjaminhegel.txt
'A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.'
history-benjaminhegel.txt
(Benjamin, 1992:249)
history-benjaminhegel.txt
the snail is progress
history-benjaminhegel.txt
Dear Children: (Grass, 1997:5) This idea of moving at a snail's pace summarises well the critical strategy of slowing down the speed of modernity. What better way of stepped out of pace with the rhetorical claims of new media and its claims for the speed of change and innovation. 'The Future is Stupid' (Holzer) - as opposed to 'The Future moves faster than this' (AMD Athlon processor: a future to look forward to, billboard poster, July 2000); or think of the contradictory nature of the speedy snail race in the recent Guinness adverts (1999). History forms a slimy trail.
history-benjaminhegel.txt
[Add: 'The future is now' is simply a truism. As Nowotny (1994: 53 puts it 'The future is disposed of as if it were the present moment, and an extended present is thereby produced (in Helga Nowotny, (1994) Time: The Modern and Postmodern experience, Cambridge: polity press)]
history-benjaminhegel.txt
In this scenario, 'snail mail' triumphs over the uncritical claims of e-mail and its simultaneous speedy transfer of data. Similar happenings in slow motion are a familiar strategy expressed just as well in the allegorical (but true) image of the C19th century fashion for taking a turtle for a walk. '"Around 1840 it was elegant to take turtles for a walk in the arcades, (This gives a conception of the tempo of flanerie)"... taking turtles [substitute snails] for urban strolls had become enormously dangerous for turtles, and only somewhat less so for flaneurs. The speed-up principles of mass production had spilled over onto the streets, waging "war on flanerie". The "flow of humanity... had lost its gentleness and tranquillity"' (Buck-Morss, 1995: 344, quoting Benjamin's The Arcades Project).
history-benjaminhegel.txt
'In 1839, a rage for tortoises overcame Paris. One can well imagine the elegant set mimicking the pace of this creature...' (Benjamin, 1999: 881)
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The cyber-flaneur perhaps finds refuge on the Net with snail-like connectivity.
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ideas in/on progress
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Like Benjamin's thesis (1993), Hegel's concept of history is predicated on the necessity of progress, that historical change and positive development can take place in the human condition and consciousness. History is no mere accident but happens 'necessarily' (Hegel, 1953). This view is is sharp contrast with recent theorising - the Postmodern/deconstructionist approach that would tend towards a position that history is merely 'his'-'story'; just another 'totalising narrative' (Hutcheon, 1991: 63). Postmodernism's project in this regard was to question this totalising impulse of Enlightenment thinking. However, just like Postmodernism paradoxically developed into its own 'grand narrative' - the very thing it sought to undo - similarly, 'anti-totalising totalisations' are evident in the approach to historical processes and teleology (teleology is the belief that things are best explained in terms of purpose rather than cause). Seemingly, on the one hand, there is a contradictory approach to history exemplified in the title of Manuel De Landa's study, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (1997), and on the other hand, a Hegelian faith in progress that relies on the reduction of thinking to logical structures - a synthesis of these positions appears to be expressed by computation.
history-benjaminhegel.txt
Hegel boldly says: 'The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom' (1953:19). This guiding principle is what influenced Karl Marx in the belief that history provides an unfolding of meaning towards freedom, later perverted into Fukuyama's 'end of history' thesis describing what he saw as the triumph of liberal democracy over political alternatives (1992; the argument cast crudely is that the American Empire brings an end to European history, Hardt and Negri, 2000: 384).
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It is through reflection on the past that the direction of history can be traced. Take for example the ways in which Greek city structures have been taken as a way of understanding the democratic potential of the internet. Many commentators are keen to draw an 'historical analogy' between the emergence of 'technically-advanced societies' (Poster, 1995:24) and what might be characterised as the 'pre-industrial' period. Such models, for instance, are derived from the Greek 'polis' (city-state) and public life in the 'agora' (market-place). These terms are fashionable references for the Internet and its association with the Public Sphere. In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas (1989) traces this evolution as one relatively unregulated by established authority and where society was held in check by popular debate, criticism and protest until the first half of the nineteenth century. After this, he argues the public sphere came to be dominated by state and corporate interests as result of capitalist development, with increased flows of commodities and information across distance (early postal routes, for instance); information that in turn came to be commodified. In this period, Habermas argues the media ceased to facilitate public debate and instead attempted to manipulate/coerce public opinion. In these terms, the Internet is often seen as a utopian zone 'revitalising the public sphere', where meaning and community can be recovered and where lost social value can be restored (Rheingold, 1994:12), or where new decentralised subjectivities and political formations are produced in decentralised networks - what Mark Poster calls 'cyberdemocracy' (1997:210).
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For Hegel, Greek history also provides a model of individual freedom and democratic structures, if rather a underdeveloped one in that freedom in this sense requires forms of exploitation to function. Similarly discussions around 'electronic agoras' have tended to avoid detail on the slave economy and that participation in public life correspondingly depended on private freedom from labour. This might easily be translated into more recent manifestations of the public sphere's bourgeois forms and issues of access to the Net. The citizens of Ancient Greece remained incomplete as they lacked the freedom to oppose the dominant collective view - they could not distinguish between their individual interests and those of the community. Freedom should exist simultaneously at both subjective and objective levels; thus free choice of the individual and the needs of society at large are not, or should not be, in conflict. In ancient Athens, every citizen had the right to take part in public assembly and participate in the decision-making body of the city-state but while other activities were carried out by slave-workers. Herein is the problem of 'alienated labour', where through the process of labour the worker externalises consciousness into the object. If as under conditions of slavery, the object of labour is the property of another then the worker is seriously disenfranchised losing their sense of 'objectified essence' according to Hegel. Marx, of course, extends this logic to workers enslaved under the forces of capitalism. The abolition of private property becomes one way to throw off the chains (the dynamics of this are echoed on the internet).
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A prerequisite for this freedom according to Hegel was the ability to reason, to reflect critically upon the ideological forces at work perhaps. This is no easy matter either though, as when we attempt to observe reality the observations are filtered and mediated (in a scientific experiment, the act of recording and the recording apparatus necessarily interferes with the experiment itself, as well as the subjectivity of the scientist doing the recording). Whether reality is cast in pixels or continuous tones, the crucial point is that it is mediated all the same. There is no such thing as objective knowledge, and accordingly ideas of progress, rationality and scientific objectivity which legitimated western modernity are thrown into doubt - what Sandra Harding calls 'point-of-viewlessness' (of male scientists in white coats)(1990). However, the idea here is to supplement these faulty ideas with less-partial, less distorted ones rather than discount them out of hand. My emphasis here is to find better lies or less bad truths as opposed to eventually finding the absolute truth as such.
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Hegel's The Phenomenology of Mind (1967) is useful here in pointing to the ways in which the mind itself appears to the observer (and this is inextricably linked to history and making progress towards a consciousness of freedom; in other words, to Hegel, history is the development of the mind). Therefore to study the mind is to study the way the mind appears to itself. To do this, form and content cannot be separated - as mind shapes the perception of the mind. Gregory Bateson's idea of 'metalogue' springs to mind (from cybernetic anthropology); as a term for a conversation in which the form of discussion embodies the subject being discussed (as is the intention of this research) (1972). Once this process is grasped, what appears to the mind is clearly not true knowledge but what appears to be known, adding another level of consciousness, and so on, in a developmental and generative process of learning. Although the goal is absolute knowledge, more importantly it suggests a progressive process of critical reflection, the recognition of inadequacies and the pursuit of new knowledge to make up for these inadequacies - in a spiral-like pattern that alludes to Fredric Jameson's economic analogies for the way culture advances and the logic of late-capitalism (1992). Not surprisingly, I'm not so much interested in the viability of this idea of reaching absolute knowledge but investigating the process of getting there - through dialectical thinking. This is what Benjamin describes as a 'tiger's leap into the past'; for the 'leap in the open air of history is a dialectical one', the awareness of which will 'make the continuum of history explode' (1992: 253). In other words, the critical impulse is to brush history against the grain.
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Benjamin puts it more elegantly:
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'History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now [Jetztzeit]' (1992:252-3).
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dialectical rhythm
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The dialectical method has a 'simple rhythm' of thesis, antithesis and synthesis according to Hegel (1969:65), although it should be noted that this triad of thesis, antithesis and synthesis is attributed to Fichte, in, Raymond Williams's, Keywords (1988:107). Take for example the earlier discussion of Hegel's approach to history: a specific example might be quoted from ancient Greece of its citizens committed approach to community. This forms the thesis. The next stage is to prove this inadequate or inconsistent, in revealing the lack of independent thought. This negation of the first position is the antithesis. The next stage proves this to be inadequate too as a sense of social engagement is lost. Both 'customary harmony' and 'abstract freedom' are inadequate and must be brought together in a more adequate way as the synthesis (here I have summarised the example made in Singer, 1983:78). The dialectic, put simply, is a dynamic, even generative (capable of producing) process by which an argument is posed only to be disputed by another in order to bring about a combinatory resolution. Importantly, the dialectical movement results in the synthesis but this is not simply the conclusion, but part of a critical process. With more reflection the synthesis will reveal itself to be a thesis in some other respect and so require the same dialectical treatment, and so on, in order to continue a chain of knowing better. Hence the dialectical approach to history I have tried to express; and furthermore that culture and technology follow this rhythm too. This is what makes the process generative.
history-benjaminhegel.txt
So far I have introduced the Hegelian sense of the dialectic but the term itself has a rich history and varied application (more on what makes hegelian dialectics hegelian - what makes it marxist is the materialist aspect of course). Its etymological root derives from the Greek di‡lektos as the art of discussion (and is closely related to dialogue), but by the C14th becomes synonymous with logic and the investigation of truth by discussion (Hoad, 1993:123). Raymond Williams' Keywords charts its use more carefully and appropriately in historical context (1988:106-8). He begins with Plato and the dialektike meaning the art of defining ideas and related method of determining the interrelation of ideas (logic and metaphysics respectively), proceeding through a chain of influences to mediaeval English usage quoting Stanley in 1656: 'Dialectick is the Art of Discourse, whereby we confirm or confute any thing by Questions and Answers of the Disputants'. Perhaps more significantly, it is within German idealist philosophy that the notion of contradiction is extended not only to the process of discussion but to reality itself. For Hegel, this contradictory principle is central to the dialectical process in the 'continuous unification of opposites, in the complex relation of parts to a whole' (Williams, 1988:107). This principle of 'progressive unification' is grounded by Engels by emphasising matter and materiality in the concept 'dialectical materialism'; or the more usual Marxist definition of 'historical materialism' that stops short of applying the concept as widely (ie. to nature). For Marx, the dialectical process of contradictory forces are accounted for in history itself. This teleological approach, like a progress bar, sets the goal as utopia (not spiritual transcendence, as Hegel would have it. Hegel imagined an ultimate 'reconciliation' of these opposing forces). This issue of closure is a complex one with many positions: Hegelian, neo-Hegelian, anti-neo-Hegelian.
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For many 'post-Marxists', dialectical oppositions are suspect as they don't occur in nature or society. (see owens text) Surely what they overlook is the poetics of it as a critical method of argumentation (as poetic, it is both a pleasing form and useful method in itself). Negri, in describing the Grundrisse as an open work ('plural universe'), puts it this way:
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'Thus there is no linear continuity, but only a plurality of points of view which are endlessly solicited at each deterinant moment of the antagonism, at each leap in the presentation, in the rhythm of the investigation, always looking for new presentations. [...] Each research result, in the presentation, attempts to characterize the content of the antagonism and to see it, tendentially, in its own dynamism; when this dynanism takes off, we observe a veritable conceptual explosion.' (1991: 13) The method's power lies in taking a concept and exploding it, and thus opening it up to further critical work. Negri continues: 'this dynamism of the method determines a "plural" universe in which it is risky to move, difficult to understand, and exciting to make progress' (1991: 14).
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It is not deterministic:
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'The dialectical approach is added to the materialist approach not in order to furnish the key to a totalitarian solution to determinacy, but in order to recognize the structural totality as the possibility of scission [dividing].' (Negri, 1991: 46)
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Like the teleological description of continuous time or history, analogue systems use continuously variable representational relationships of tone and pressure. In contrast, all digital input is translated into rigid binary structures and code. Time that was once marked by the smooth moving hands of an analogue clock have for the most part been upgraded to the jerky moves of the digital clock. But history has always been a complex mechanism whether seen in terms of cogs and wheels, ticks or switches. The suggestion here is that this is a productive way of looking at history - not as a continuous upward slope but as a series of jerky steps - like a motor engine, or even walking in which it is not possible to proceed with out moving your back foot forwards (or expressed in Ivor Cutler's recommendation for effective walking: 'put you best foot forwards [thesis], but don't forget the other one [antithesis]'); of 'spiral-like' patterns and 'screw-turns' (Foster, 1996). Benjamin's 'Thesis on The Philosophy of History' would add more detail here, given the time to process it.
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In this way, a digital/dialectical method might operate as both a description of a system and critical method? Peter Lunenfeld in his introduction to The Digital Dialectic (2000) is cautious of this easy conflation of the digital and the dialectic (and this is what he seeks to address with the book of course). He claims that the on/off switching of cybernetic calculation does not create a synthesis and merely reflects the contradictory condition of thesis and antithesis. Yet Lunenfeld sees this as a potential advantage in not uncritically imagining a digital utopia. I'm not so sure. I think what Lunenfeld describes as merely impelling the regeneration of the system is part of the dialectical process itself. This would be consistent with Hegel's view in describing the dynamic social relations of history; a process of back and forth movement that I am preferring to regard as continuous - therefore not with utopia in mind but a series of more modest improvements. However, Lunenfeld is not rejecting the dialectical method out of hand merely drawing attention to its limitations (and after all he has a book to proffer). He is keen to point to its strength in the central dialectic of theory/practice and in its application to detail in pursuit of the general - this is with reference to a quote by Adorno that the dialectic unfolds 'the difference between the particular and the universal' (2000:xviii). In the spirit of historical materialism, this approach brushes the recent (amnesiac) history of new media criticism against the grain.
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There are plenty of detractors of the dialectical method who are more systematic (and less sweeping). Some commentators simply see the method as too crude to account for the ways in which communications are organised and dispersed in complex systems. Detractors of the dialectical method see it as far too crude and hierarchical, with Gilles Deleuze and FŽlix Guattari preferring rhizomic patterns to describe networks and nodal root structures (1984). It is this approach that informs Manuel De Landa's appropriately titled A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (1997). Undoubtedly, dialectical thinking has its limitations, but a synthesis of these opposing positions would suggest that the overall structure of the Internet lends itself to rhizomic patterns (universal), but the generative code sitting on a server (the particular) operates in a quite different way through action and response. Even on a network, the individual computer is fundamental to the controller switch.
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Also in The Digital Dialectic, Michael Heim describes cyberspace as in a 'cultural limbo'. He describes this limbo as characterised by a 'zigzag holding pattern' between 'utopian fantasy and hateful cynicism' (2000:25). The technophile and technophobe stand in dialectical tension; he crudely characterises these standpoints as 'Network Idealists' and the 'Na•ve Realists' accordingly that he collapses as the paradoxical 'virtual realism' (2000:41). The argument maybe dialectical in style but is rather limited in disregarding the internal dialectical conflicts in any one position; he avoids the particular and sees only generality and the universal - for instance, rather than recognising progressive plural syntheses as part of the process, he concludes that synthesis is not yet possible offering up his notion of 'virtual realism' in support of an inconclusive dialectic and therefore rejecting progress as such - for in his view class conflict is a thing of the past. Even if this were true, which it is clearly not, the rejection of history in itself is anti-dialectical.
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The dialectic is often conflated with negative associations around ideology. Yet, even ideology is a 'generative matrix' (Zizek, 1997) that sustains itself in a dialectical rhythm. The dialectic resists stability but so does ideology itself. One of the fundamental dialectical principles springs to mind from Terry Eagleton's The Ideology of the Aesthetic, in that: 'All "oppositional" identities are in part the function of oppression' (quoted in Gigliotti, 2000:52); and in other words, keep the system operational. Nevertheless even those sympathetic to the continued use of the dialectical method in some fashion, remain unsure of how it should be recoded for the digital age. However, amd in conclusion for now, critical work on the nature of digital culture (like the execution of code) is always in progress.
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'In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it' (Benjamin, 1999: 247).
history-roberts.txt
John Roberts (1994) 'Introduction', to _Art Has No History! The Making and Unmaking of Modern Art_, London: Verso, pp. 1-36.
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Software Art Has No History:
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The title is ironic: borrowing from John RobertsÕs ÔArt has no HistoryÕ, in turn based on AlthusserÕs ÔIdeology has no HistoryÕ, that itself is a reference to Marx and EngelsÕs _The German Ideology_ in which he proposes that ideology is an illusion produced by those in power, but also its sense of history is a mere reflection of 'real history' - it has no history of its own.
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The deliberately mischievous title belies the obvious fact that art has a lot of history. When Althusser claimed ideology had no history, he was expressing what he perceived to be its unchanging basic structures. The use of the phrase in John Roberts's 'Art Has No History' attempts to playfully reveal some of the paradoxes of art history: 'that there is no such thing as _art_ history, _Art History_ and art _history_' (1994: 1). The first issue derives from a sociology of art, the second with what at the time was referred to as 'new art history' (leftist in character) to critique the assumptions of art history as a unitary field of inquiry, and the third with a more fluid understanding of historical processes. That debate might be developed across the three aspects reveals the usefulness of historical materialism to critique the assumptions of traditional art history for the study of visual culture, and the dynamic and uncertain interplay between theory and practice. Much the same applies to the field of software art and culture, where practices resist easy categorisation and historicisation - and the figures of artist, programmer, critic and historian have become rather more fluid. In such a scenario, the artist-programmer is not simply doing work that becomes the object of history but intervening in the very processes of history - as Raymond Williams puts it (in his essay 'The Uses of Cultural Theory'), reflecting 'the socially and historically specifiable agency of [(software) art's] making' (in Roberts 1994: 36).
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This line of thinking evokes the older reference too. In _The German Ideology_(1845-46), Marx and Engels clarify their 'materialist conception of history' based on the premise that humans 'must be in a position to live in order to be able to "make history"'. In other words, the first historical act is the production of the means to satisfy essential needs to live: 'the production of material life itself. And indeed this is an historical act, a fundamental condition of all history...' (1972: 155-156, in Robert C. Tucker, ed., 1972, _The Marx-Engels Reader_, New York: Norton, pp. 146-200).
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From this derives the the dialectics of labour relations, the central paradigm in which history is perceived to be a process between humankind and nature, mind and reality, present and past.
human-arendt.txt
Hannah Arendt (1998 [1958]) _The Human Condition_, Chicago: University of Chicago Press
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Hannah Arendt's _The Human Condition_ (of 1958) is a controversial text that tries to understand the human capacity for action in the world, underpinned by a sympathy with participatory democracy and grassroots citizen councils (such as the one that arose during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956). The human capacity to act is enduring, as demonstrated even under the most difficult and repressive circumstances. Central to the recognition of the centrality of action to politics is its distinction from work and labour. The human activities of work and labour are more settings for politics rather than politics in itself, and this has been largely overlooked in political philosophy according to Arendt. The three intersecting areas of labour, work, and action need to be distinguished to understand the human condition: labour understood as relating to biological life of the human animal; work, relating to the building of artificial objects; and action, relating to what she refers to as the plurality of distinct human individuals.
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'Action, the only activity that goes o directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on earth and inhabit the world. While all aspects of the human condition are somehow related to politics, this plurality is specifically _the_ condition [...] of all political life.' (1998: 7)
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Indeed all human activities are conditioned by society but Arendt stresses that 'it is only action that cannot even be imagined outside the society of men. [...] and only action is entirely dependent upon the constant presence of others' (1998: 22-3). Action together with being, is thoroughly political according to Aristotle, and quite distinct from the social that is not a specifically human condition but more generally related to other animals too (note: Lost in translation from Greek to Latin, the terms 'political' and 'social become confused and somewhat interchangeable, Arendt 1998: 23). That the social now constitutes the public organisation of the life process appears to occlude a deeper understanding of the political (perhaps this is no where as evident as in social media where human activities have become almost entirely codified). Even labour is made better in the public realm:
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'Every activity performed in public can attain an excellence never matched in privacy; for excellence, by definition, the presence of others is always required, and this presence needs the formality of the public, constituted by one's peers, it cannot be the casual, familiar presence of one's equals or inferiors.' (Arendt 1998: 49; excellence in this sense comes close to virtuosity, or _virtus_ in Latin, requiring a public to distinguish one over the other.)
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The public realm is the place for excellence, or ethical action.
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Concerning human activities, two in particular were taken to be political in Greek thought, 'and to constitute what Aristotle called the _bios politikos_, namely action (_praxis_) and speech (_lexis_), out of which rises the realm of human affairs [...] from which everything merely necessary or useful is strictly excluded' (1998: 25). In this way, the political realm is constituted by action and speech, and outside the sphere of violence which remains mute. In Aristotle, it is only _nous_, the capacity for contemplation that cannot be rendered in speech, beyond the capacity for _logos_ related to speech or reason. The public sphere (_polis_) relates to this, as the sphere of freedom (whereas the private sphere of the household related to life). The public realm was distinguished from the private realm in its understanding of equality: from a realm of equals to the inequality of the household. The logic of this relies on an understanding that the ruler of the household could be equal amongst peers whereas those not equal could not become part of the public realm at all (and of course, slaves were not able to enter public life). In this sense, 'to be free meant to be free from the inequality present in rulership and to move in a sphere where neither rule nor being ruled existed' (Arendt 1998: 33). Of course this is far from a modern understanding of the differences between public and private realms or of equality. Despite the distinctions making little sense anymore, Arendt agrees with the Greek understanding that a life outside of the common is 'idiotic' (derived from _idion_, life spent in the privacy of 'one's own', 1998: 38).
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Arendt maintains that a fundamental condition of politics is the ability of plural human actors to interact and create something anew - political action as 'doing'. As such, human action is both contingent and unpredictable. In describing political action as doing, rather than making (more in tune with 'work'), she is breaking from the orthodox Marxist conception that humans can make their own history. Instead she offers a more unpredictable and contingent description of human capacities. To Arendt, Marx understands history in terms of processes of production and consumption close to animal life - more labour than work - and therefore history is understood as a collective life-process (more in tune with the Aristotlelian term 'bios politikos'). But unlike Marx who would tend towards a view that history is an inevitable process, Arendt takes it to be a process related to the contingent human action (rather like Roy Bhasker's 'transformative agency'). In other words, humans are creatures who act, and in doing so set off a train of events - for better or worse, thus necessitating an engagement with the relationship between action and responsibility - or 'ethical action'. There is some hope in the recognition that humans are able to intervene and interrupt a chain of events set in motion by previous actions. Yet, unpredictability of action is coupled with unpredictability of effects.
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An example of this is a situation where artificial machines possess the ability to do thinking and speaking.
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'If it should turn out to be true that knowledge (in the modern sense of know-how) and thought have parted company for good, then we would indeed become the helpless slaves, not s much of our machines as of our know-how, thoughtless creatures at the mercy of every gadget which is technically possible, no matter how murderous it is.' (Arendt 1998: 3)
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This is political for Arendt, not so much for the lack of social responsibility and the application of ideas, but in as much as it concerns speech. And she distrusts science as a context where 'speech has lost its power', where a language of mathematical symbols have replicated spoken statements but cannot be translated back to speech (1998: 4). To Arendt, whatever can be known or experienced can only make sense in relation to speech, and the human capacity for thought and thoughtlessness (itself subordinate to speech and action). Her proposal: 'it is nothing more than to think what we are doing' (1998: 5). My proposal is to think what we are doing when coding whilst remain attentive to how coding as doing might retain qualities of speech and action, and hence excellence in the public realm or common.
ideology-althusser.txt
Louis Althusser (1997), 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Toward an Investigation' (1969) in Slavoj Zizek, ed., Mapping Ideology, London: Verso, pp. 100-140.
ideology-althusser.txt
Althusser begins his famous essay 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Toward an Investigation' with the Marxist idea of the reproduction of the conditions of production (from Volume 2 of Capital). Every social formation is both produced and reproduces itself in order to maintain its hold over the productive forces and the relations of production (1997: 100-1). Althusser investigates this self-serving procedure initially through the reproduction of labour-power. Labour reproduces itself through wage-capital and not as a condition of the material reproduction of labour (although this clearly takes place too in the bourgeois family) to make sure the worker turns up for work over and over again. Unlike social formations of slavery, the reproduction of the skills or the lack of them required are provided by the capitalist education system and other institutions. Prospective workers learn the technical skills and knowledge needed to slot neatly into the working hierarchy - as manual labourers, technicians, engineers, managers, and so on. Althusser calls this 'know-how' but they also learn the rules of social behaviour that 'actually means rules of respect for the socio-technical division of labour and ultimately the rules of the order established by class domination' (1997: 103). Workers learn skills and rules that reproduces the labour-power appropriate to the dominant ideology.
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The Marxist conception of the social whole is important here (as distinct from Hegel's conception) as it is founded on levels: the infrastructure or economic base (both the productive force and the relations of production) and the superstructure (which contains the politico-legal apparatus and ideology). The spatial metaphor reveals that the base literally supports the rest, and determines its operations somewhat - or rather is determined by the 'effectivity' of the base, as the superstructure is both relatively autonomous and the superstructure exerts a reciprocal action on the base (Althusser, 1997: 105). For Althusser, 'descriptive theory' such as this in the way contradiction works in requiring something beyond the description. It is from this description that Althusser proceeds in conceiving the superstructure in terms of reproduction.
ideology-althusser.txt
The Marxist tradition casts the capitalist State generally as a repressive apparatus, as a means of repression ensuring domination and exploitation in the form of generating surplus value. This description demands its 'supersession' for Althusser - not that it is not correct but more is required - in a further supplementary theoretical development. This, of course, is the notorious theory of the 'ideological State apparatuses,' not to be confused with the 'repressive State apparatuses' (that includes the government, army, police, courts, prisons, etc.) that 'functions through violence' (1997: 110; perhaps through symbolic violence or 'administrative repression'). The ideological State apparatuses (includes the family, schools, church, legal apparatus, political system, trade unions, communications media, arts and culture, etc.) works not only in the public domain but in the private realm too - perhaps contributing to making the distinction meaningless (and in itself only meaningful in a capitalist context of course). Both function through repression and ideology but the essential difference is that rather than predominantly acting by repression or violence, it functions through ideology and more covertly. State power is thus maintained by the State apparatus that includes institutions that represent the repressive apparatus and the ideological apparatus (Althusser, 1997: 113). It requires this expanded description of the apparatus to understand its reproduction.
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This is not a new phenomena. In pre-industrial times, the ideological state apparatus worked through the Church predominantly, controlling other apparatuses like education, communications and culture. Antagonism was correspondingly directed at this oppressive ideological formation. Althusser, writing in 1969, thinks this central position has been taken by the education apparatus in capitalist social formations (1997: 116; coupled with the family in both cases), and the contemporary conception of the knowledge economy would appear to confirm this thesis. It is in school that the 'know-how' is 'wrapped in the ruling ideology' (1997: 118) and the introduction of a national curriculum makes this explicit (note: our recycling it into blank paper was a mild gesture of antagonism in this regard. The publication 'The Impossibility of Art Education' also has something to add on this subject, as does Alan Sekula in his essay 'School is a Factory'). In school there is a captive and free audience for the reproduction of the capitalist social formation: 'the relations of exploited to exploiters and exploiters to exploited, are largely reproduced' (Althusser, 1997: 119). This is why the politically committed still see teaching as a vital activity of counter-ideological struggle - sadly less and less in these post-political times.
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Ideology:
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Ideology has no history, claims Althusser (something the art historian John Roberts emulated in his 'Art has no History' book title). Here he is not disregarding that allegedly Cabanais and Destutt de Tracy et al coined the term to describe a '(genetic) theory of ideas' or that Marx then formulated a theory of ideology, but to confirm that ideology necessarily expresses class positions as a non-historical reality (1997: 120 & 122). The paradoxical statement is taken from Marx's The German Ideology in which he proposes that ideology has no history, 'since its history is outside it, where the only existing history is, the history of concrete individuals, etc.' (1997: 121). The idea that ideology has no history is a negative thesis to indicate that ideology is pure illusion produced by those in power, but also its sense of history is a mere reflection of 'real history' - it has 'no history of its own' (1997: 122).
ideology-althusser.txt
Althusser defines ideology more closely again in terms of representation: 'ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their conditions of existence.' (1997: 123). It is an imaginary representation of the real conditions of production. He also claims that ideology has a material existence for it exists in the apparatus and its practice just as physical matter (and this is no surprise to someone versed in conceptualism, and immaterial production). The ideas of a human subject are 'material actions inserted into material practices governed by material rituals which are themselves defined by the material ideological apparatus from which derive the ideas of that subject' (1997: 127). This proposition leads Althusser to assert that there is no ideology outside subjectivity (and he includes himself and the reader in this scenario as both 'in ideology'). This is a certain recognition of ideology as opposed to the function of misrecognition. To Althusser, we are 'always-already subjects' practising the rituals of ideological recognition: 'all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects' (1997: 130). Ideology interpellates or recruits subjects by hailing 'Hey, you there!' (1997: 131; the note says like the police hailing a suspect of a crime).
ideology-althusser.txt
Althusser further explores the Freudian connections here in the construction of the subject and in the free acceptance of this condition:
ideology-althusser.txt
'the individual is interpellated as a (free) subject in order that he shall submit freely to the commandments of the Subject, i.e. in order that he shall (freely) accept his subjection, i.e. in order that he shall make the gestures and actions of his subjection "all by himself". There are no subjects except by and for their subjection. That is why they "work all by themselves".
ideology-althusser.txt
"So be it!..."' (1997: 136)
ideology-althusser.txt
This is the mechanism of ideology. For Althusser, ideology is thus seen to be 'misrecognition', and the 'reproduction of the relations of production and of the relations deriving from them' (1997: 136).
ideology-althusser.txt
In Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977), Pierre Bourdieu's theory of 'habitus' that works slightly differently in examining the mechanisms by which ideology operates in everyday life. He proposes the idea of the 'collective unconscious' to describe the ways in which actions are regulated without a conscious obedience to rules.
ideology-lukacs.txt
Terry Eagleton (1997), 'Ideology and its Vicissitudes in Western Marxism' in, Slavoj Zizek, ed., Mapping Ideology, London: Verso, pp. 179-226.
ideology-lukacs.txt
Georg Luk‡cs (1976), History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxism, (1922) trans. Rodney Livingstone, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
ideology-lukacs.txt
Georg Luk‡cs takes the idea of revolutionary consciousness in as much the social transformation renders 'reflects' or 'fits' the history to which it is bound (Eagleton, 1997: 179). Unlike false consciousness, consciousness in this sense can be seen to be a positive transformative force synchronous to the reality it seeks to change. False consciousness as a description of the lag between the way things are and the way we know, does not take sufficient account of the process of the way when we know something it has already transformed into something else by the act of knowing it. This is 'self-knowledge' in as much as to know something is a recognition of the change this has brought about in knowing - this is emancipation through self-knowledge, in other words. In this sense (and evoking Hegel), consciousness is performative, active and dynamic.
ideology-lukacs.txt
In Luk‡cs's History and Class Consciousness (1976) written in 1922, addresses these issues in taking consciousness to consist of both thought and creativity - and rejects the simple correspondence between false consciousness and ideology. Ideology in the negative sense, demonstrates through reification the ability to separate the seemingly autonomous parts from the systemic whole, to see isolated parts as opposed to society as a whole. Luk‡cs proposes that a truer recognition is the social whole, within which the proletariat can be seen to be positioned oppressively - what he calls 'the problem of totality' (1976: 151). He develops the idea of 'self-reflection' to counter the difficulties of both knowledge as external to history that appears to be the case with orthodox Marxist science (Eagleton, 1997: 181). To put things into perspective, a view of the social system as a whole is required as well as partial views within it. Despite the now contentious idea that the proletariat alone holds the potential for emancipation (the bourgeois class cannot see the whole), the emphasis is both with the particular and the general without which an understanding of social conditions cannot be grasped. For instance, globalisation should be understood in these terms.
ideology-lukacs.txt
For Luk‡cs, the commodity-form dominates all aspects of society through reification, dehumanising human existence. Eagleton explains this in terms of Lukacs's concept of totality:
ideology-lukacs.txt
'The "wholeness" of society is broken up into so many discrete, specialized, technical operations, each of which comes to assume a semi-autonomous life of its own and to dominate human existence as a quasi-natural force.' (1997: 183)
ideology-lukacs.txt
Through reification, the human subject is left without recognition of the larger system in which they co-exist nor their potential creative practice or praxis - which is only possible once the effects of reification are recognised. In Hegelian terms, recognition of this would be a unification of subject and object within history. Through dialectics, subject and object are united through understanding and transformation. Eagleton explains that in effect, Luk‡cs has adopted Hegel's 'absolute idea' for the proletariat and that through the dialectical method truth can eventually be found in the whole - 'it is only by the operations of dialectical reason that such static, discrete phenomena can be reconstituted as a dynamic, developing whole' (1997: 184). In such a way, our everyday experience of false consciousness can be made true and whole. Luk‡cs's interpretation of this is that reification can be dealt with in a similar dialectical way and eventually overcome (here lies a problem inherent in Hegelian dialectics of course - that of 'totalising' resolution). It is worth adding here that Luk‡cs's work is criticised heavily for being idealist, even 'essentialist' (Eagleton, 1997: 185), in as much as it centres everything on reification and the Hegelian idea of totality at the expense of other lasting contradictions.
ideology-lukacs.txt
Add notes on historical materialism from lukacs book
immaterial-lunenfeld.txt
Roy Christopher (2002) 'Peter Lunenfeld interview', Rhizome Digest, 5 Oct.
immaterial-lunenfeld.txt
In Snap to Grid (2002) Peter Lunenfeld introduces the term 'dialectical
immaterial-lunenfeld.txt
immaterialism,' to contribute to critical discussions about technology untethered to the constraints of production' - this is a misunderstanding of the term 'immaterialism' in the sense that autonomists use it at least absolutely connected to production.
immaterial-lunenfeld.txt
McKenzie Wark
immaterial-lunenfeld.txt
The concept of 'immaterial labour' is much misunderstood. Labour is both material and immaterial as Mckenzie Wark points out (2002b). He thinks there has been too much emphasis on labour in the 'over-developed' world (and in the work of Hardt and Negri), in the emphasis of information over matter. In fact, 'the immaterial comes to exist precisely "because" it becomes a form of property;' more precisely in the form of intellectual property (2002b).
intellect-terranova.txt
Tiziana Terranova (2002), ÔThe degree zero of politics: virtual cultures and virtual social movementsÕ, Film-Philosophy, Feb 06.
intellect-terranova.txt
Felix Stalder and Jesse Hirsh (2002), ÔOpen Source IntelligenceÕ, First Monday, volume 7, number 6, June, http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_6/stalder/index.html
intellect-terranova.txt
In analysing the emergence of network-organised forms of political organisation, Tiziana Terranova sees mail lists as crucial to this development. They allow for connectivity and afford users the 'possibility to continuously formulate and reformulate the types of problems they wish to address on the basis of collectively produced information.' (2002) In this way, she argues that the Internet materialises 'general intellect': 'a collective assemblage of bodies and machines where connectivity implies the release of a surplus value of potential.' (2002) Of relevance to this argument is the early internet as a reinvention of the public sphere, as a participatory media, in turn to be recuperated to a greater or lesser degree. Terranova cites the independent news work of Indymedia in this regard, as an example of a relatively open force reflecting the needs of activists at the time of the protests in Seattle in 1999. This composition of this, and the protests in general, rejects the centralised of mainstream broadcast media for a position based on a rejection of a unified position.
intellect-terranova.txt
Terranova says: 'Calls for political unity under a single signifier are regularly opposed by those claiming that this unrepresentable diversity is the strength of such movements.' (2002) Networked technologies both reflect and serve this purpose as an extension of what the autonomists call a 'social factory'. Terranova is concerned with the split that occurred between cultural studies and political economy, and the notion of a 'stalled dialectics' in which the working class no longer can be seen to be the agents of social change. The challenge for intellectuals, and those working in Universities, is to engage in the public sphere without simply falling into the research and enterprise culture of capitalist renewal. This is where the concept of general intellect is useful arguably.
intellect-terranova.txt
Although initially applied to the development of software, the collaborative gathering and analysis of information is somewhat reflected in the open source movement and what Felix Stalder and Jesse Hirsh call 'open Source Intelligence (2002). They point to open source principles of peer review, the free sharing of products, and flexible levels of involvement and responsibility - all derived from practice and the technical possibilities of the internet technologies in general (not merely the www) that facilitates free and easy information sharing among peers. In turn this relates to what Lawrence Lessig calls an 'innovation commons,' which partly explains the fast and effective growth of the internet itself (2001). The effectiveness of 'open source intelligence' is clear to see even under economic terms. Stalder and Hirsh's examples are more varied in scope: from the 'collaborative text filtering' of the nettime mail list itself running on the open source list package 'majordomo', to 'Wikipedia' the free encyclopedia built on open source principles and the technological platform of Wikiweb in which users can see the source code but also freely edit the content that is also archived and published under the GNU Free Document license. The link between social and technological structures are evident here suggesting that teh better and more open use of technology is both a requirement and reflection of society at large.
internet-stallabrass.txt
Julian Stallabrass (2003), Internet Art: The Online Clash of Culture and Commerce, London: Tate Publishing.
internet-stallabrass.txt
Stallabrass begins his book with a symptomatic example of the clash between the commercial art world and activist cultures, giving the example of RTmark's rejection and auction of their invitations to take part in the prestigious Whitney Biennial and its 'exclusive networking opportunity' (2003: 8). The normalised complicity of artists can be set against resistant strategies of the avant-garde. Stallabrass cites Peter BŸrger's Theory of the Avant Garde (1984) in this respect to highlight that 'the avant-garde cannot simply return from formalist autonomy to a direct engagement with subject matter but instead takes the condition of autonomy itself as its subject matter' (2003: 35). This can be seen in much of the best net.art especially in those works that clearly articulate something about the formal concerns of the Net and in its rejection of the idea of being characterised as avant-garde.
internet-stallabrass.txt
The work of Jodi is a good example in their deployment of dysfunctional interfaces and software, and the overall lack of user control or understanding of the processes at work. Stallabrass says that 'Jodi turn software inside out' (2003: 38) revealing something of the hidden ideological nature of the system in clearly materialist terms. In another example, and as a response to the inevitable concessions of exhibiting at Documenta X, Jodi simply produced a link that on clicking made the visitor's machine crash (in Stallabrass, 2003: 121). It is important not to simply read these examples as simply an engagement with formalist concerns but more as an engagement with autonomy. The work of Jodi is scrutinised in more detail by Florian Cramer in 'Discordia Concors: www.jodi.org' (2002). He argues that Jodi's work simultaneously affirms and negates its place within a network, like experimental text works did previously with the system of language. Much of this is expressed as noise and apparent randomness. This is no simple analogy though, in jodi's work, randomness occurs not simply structurally within the work (hardware) but in its transmission (2002). There is a tendency here in the negation of software rather than hardware.
internet-stallabrass.txt
The desktop metaphors say it all, turning the user necessarily into a worker:
internet-stallabrass.txt
'Thus, in a compact that Adorno would have immediately recognised, work became playful, and play training for work' (Stallabrass, 2003: 72; paraphrasing Adorno's essay 'Free Time').
internet-stallabrass.txt
This is also exemplified in Microsoft's animated help assistant.
internet-stallabrass.txt
[add Matt Fuller's Microsoft Word deconstruction]
jetztzeit-benjamin.txt
two allegorical figures: the angel of history and the puppet of history (as these are visualised so effectively and might suggest ideas for future work).
jetztzeit-benjamin.txt
There is a vast amount of scholarly work on this important essay 'Thesis on the Philosophy of History' [Uber den Begriff der Geschichte - sometimes translated as 'On the Concept of History'] as it is fundamental to an understanding of Benjamin's philosophy (see for instance, Andrew Benjamin & Peter Osborne, ed., Walter Benjamin's Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, London: Routledge 1994; though I draw upon Esther Leslie, Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism, London: Pluto 2000). Two key allegorical figures emerge - the angel and puppet of history.
jetztzeit-benjamin.txt
First of all 'Jetztzeit' is a fundamental concept:
jetztzeit-benjamin.txt
'History is the object of a construction, whose site is not that of homogeneous and empty time, but one filled with now-time' (Leslie translation of Benjamin, 2000:198). What is crucially different here is that a moment in time is traced historically in order to reveal oppressions, and hence the possibility of change in the present. Allegory is a technique to rewrite history according to a different set of principles - re-recording history.
jetztzeit-benjamin.txt
Following the Brecht maxim 'don't look after the good old things but the bad new ones' (in 'Conversations with Brecht, in Understanding Brecht, p.121)
jetztzeit-benjamin.txt
In Benjamin's philosophy of history, despite generally following the 'bad new ones', the contradiction is resolved in the concept of jetztzeit, (the presence of the now), in which 'time stands still, where past and future converge not harmoniously, but explosively, in the present instant' (Stanley Mitchell, 'introduction' to, Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, p.xvii-xviii).
jetztzeit-benjamin.txt
Leslie describes this concept in more detail:
jetztzeit-benjamin.txt
'Benjamin focuses on the notion of allegory as a literary-technical means to present the complex epistemology of the now... Allegory is a disfiguration of social disfigurement. It has two important technical properties: the anti-symbolist ability to disrupt aesthetic illusions of the real, and the forcing together, through montage or image pile-ups, realms that are seemingly discrete, but actually connected. One example of this is the allegorical relationship of prostitute and worker. Allegory is a technical means to retransmit discontinuity, fragmentation and a catastrophic structure of history' (2000:199).
jetztzeit-benjamin.txt
For Benjamin, the 'Angelus Novus' image captures history's catastrophic structure and capacity for progression and regression:
jetztzeit-benjamin.txt
'There is an image by Klee called Angelus Novus. On it an angel is depicted who looks as if he is about to distance himself from something that he is staring at. His eyes are wide-open, his mouth is agape, and his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. He has turned his face towards the past. Where, in front of us, a chain of events appear, he sees one single catastrophe. This unrelentingly piles rubble on rubble and flings it at his feet. He would really like to stay, awaken the dead, and repair the repair the smashed pieces. But a storm is blowing over from paradise, and it is tangled in his wings and is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm forces him irresistibly into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of rubble in front of him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.'
jetztzeit-benjamin.txt
(Leslie translating Benjamin from the German, 2000: 202; hence this differs from the Harry Zohn translation, see Benjamin, 1992:249)
jetztzeit-benjamin.txt
Like Benjamin, the angel wants to gather up the wreckage of terrible events, wasted lives and worthless objects. The angel wants to make things better, but cannot do this because of the dominant forces at work. Esther Leslie cites a statement by Adorno (in a radio lecture, 1962) who insists the angel is not only the angel of history but the angel of the machine. This would suggest that the renewal of the idea of progress is through the better use of history and technology.
jetztzeit-benjamin.txt
The puppet figure in the opening of the essay is intriguing too suggesting that an automated mechanism always appears superior to human intelligence. Esther Leslie explains that the autonomy of the machine is fake, and that the illusion is achieved through trick mirrors, specialised knowledge, and by employing technology to effect (Leslie, 2000: 173). Of course, the intention is to reveal that the dynamic of history is fake too, achieved through the use of trick mirrors, specialised knowledge, and by employing technology to effect.
jetztzeit-benjamin.txt
Jetztzeit takes on a messianic role, in its opposition to homogenous, empty time - the unfulfilled time of the present is activated by revolution. The parable of the puppet makes this clear as it enlists the services of theology.
jetztzeit-benjamin.txt
'The story is told of an automaton constructed in such a way that it could respond to each move in a game of chess with a countermove that ensured him victory. A puppet in Turkish attire, and with a hookah in his mouth, sat in front of a chessboard placed on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion of a table transparent from all sides. Actually a hunchback dwarf, who was an expert chess player, sat inside and guided the puppet's hand by means of strings. One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet known as 'historical materialism' is always supposed to win. It can easily be a match for anyone if it ropes in the services of theology, which today, as the story goes, is small and ugly and must, as it is, keep out of sight.' (Leslie translation, 2000: 172)
jetztzeit-benjamin.txt
note: the hunchback
jetztzeit-benjamin.txt
The 'little hunchback' according to Hannah Arendt is a consistent threat pf danger in Benjamin's work - he met the little hunchback in Port Bou. This refers to a German fairy-tale figure who causes all of life's misfortunes. Fittko thinks he met his own Benjamin hunchback in Port Bou.
jetztzeit-benjamin.txt
Lisa Fittko, 'The Story of Old Benjamin, in (Benjamin The Arcades Project, 1999: 954)
jetztzeit-benjamin.txt
Historical materialism is introduced as the automated doll, but then the purpose of the essay seems to be to update this conception, to redefine historical processes. The dwarf is rather obscure, linked to theology - perhaps reminding the reader of practice, the labour of the operator, or consciousness (Leslie, 2000:173); and that the success of the doll is contingent on the recognition that the dwarf has to gain control of the technology (a bit like access to the means of production perhaps). It's a confusing image but all the more intriguing for it. An investigation of the history of the Chess Player machine reveals more detail and the relative roles of puppet, puppeteer and opponent.
jetztzeit-benjamin.txt
The chess-playing machine (see also section on game-playing in Wiener notes):
jetztzeit-benjamin.txt
From Gaby Wood (2002), 'An Unreasonable Game', in Living Dolls, London: Faber & Faber, pp. 55-103.
jetztzeit-benjamin.txt
The idea of a thinking machine has a long history. Benjamin is drawing upon a well-known example of chess-playing automata built by the Hungarian mathematician Wolfgang von Kempelen in 1769. Kempelen regarded it as a toy but it received widespread attention, and toured Europe playing chess against even skilled opponents. Gaby Wood (2002) tells of a game in the Academy of science in Paris, against Francois AndrŽ Danican Philidor, the greatest player of the time who was known for playing blindfold. Whether blindfold or not, what he could not see was the force behind the apparatus. There was much speculation as to whether the machine was driven by magic or by some other illusory device - a spectre or demon. Even fiction of the time (Hoffman's 'The Sandman') referred to the invention connecting the animation of life to a living death - it was said that when spoken to the machine would answer from the depths of the questioner's soul (in Wood, 2002: 59). By the time it was exhibited in London in 1783-4, a parallel interest sought to expose it as an illusion in another sense - as a trick based on a disbelief that a machine could demonstrate intelligence sufficient to play chess.
jetztzeit-benjamin.txt
Part of the theatre of the presentation was for Kempelen to show the audience the clockwork mechanism beneath the automaton, opening doors to compartments of the desk one by one and revealing what lay beneath the Turkish attire (the figure known as the 'Turk' undoubtedly engaged Orientalist fantasies of the time). On the one hand, Karl Gottlieb von Windisch described this as the 'automaton stripped naked' and therefore authentic - unwittingly echoing the alternative title of Duchamp's 'The Large Glass' (Duchamp himself of course being a keen chess-player interested in the automated aspects of the game itself. He says: 'a game of chess is... mechanical, since it moves... it is the imagining of the movement... that makes the beauty in this case.' (quoted in Woods, 2002: 90) On th other hand, Joseph Friedrich Freiherr zu Racknitz in a pamphlet of 1789 suggested that someone was hidden in the desk; a person small enough to move from section to section as the doors were opened - rather like a the magician's illusion where someone is seen to be sawn in half. A similar idea was suggested: 'the Automaton chess player is a man within a man; for whatever his outward form be composed of, he bears a living soul within' (in Woods, 2002: 66). This is the dwarf that Benjamin refers to first suggested by Henri Decremps and embellished by Racknitz who described the hiding place in detail and how the dwarf would operate the chess pieces by the use of magnets and a duplicate board hidden inside the machine. In engravings, the scenario is imagined in such a way that the dwarf looks like a puppet of the Turk rather than the other way around.
jetztzeit-benjamin.txt
After Kempelen's death, Johan Nepomuk Maelsel bought the machine in 1818 and embarked on a second exhibition tour displaying various automata including the chess player. Maelzel added some improvements including speech - the announcement of 'Žchec' (check) by means of bellows. It is this version that Wiener refers to as a 'fraudulent machine' in his note (2000: 165) on the accomplishment of artificial intelligence. Similar claims of fraudulence were made at the time, notably by Robert Willis in 1820, claiming again that a person moved from section to section during the display of the mechanism, and during the game moved into the body of the Turk. This way the 'man within the man' could see out of the chest and put his arm within the Turk's arm to move the chess pieces (in Wood, 2002: 70; interestingly through the left arm - another source of intrigue for commentators who saw this otherwise unnecessary display of a human flaw as further proof of its fraudulence). This explanation for Willis alleviated the ethical concerns that man and machine were little different.
jetztzeit-benjamin.txt
In this connection, Edgar Allan Poe, writing in the Southern Literary Messenger compared the chess automata to Charles Babbage's calculating machine asking: 'What should we think' of a machine that operates 'without the slightest intervention of the intellect of man? It will, perhaps, be said in reply, that a machine as we have described is altogether above comparison with the Chess Player of Maelzel. By no means - it is altogether beneath it - that is to say, provided we assume (what should never for one moment be assumed) that the Chess Player is a pure machine, and performs its operations without any immediate human agency.' (in Wood, 2002: 72; see Poe's essay 'Maelzel's Chess Player' in The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe)
jetztzeit-benjamin.txt
Human agency here is expressed rather differently of course by Benjamin. Here the illusion is something that can be corrected (add more on Benjamin's approach to history here). For Poe, the machine-like apparatus simply serves to conceal the real workings of the illusion. In Benjamin's allegory, the puppeteer appears to be in the service of the puppet - suggesting perhaps that it is not the machine that is life-like but the human figure that is machine-like unless action is taken otherwise. This seems to concur with Esther Leslie in that the dwarf has to gain control of the technology. It is the autonomy of the machine that is fraudulent.
jetztzeit-benjamin.txt
The actual mechanism of the chess player turns out to be a mixture of the various accounts but serves little purpose in describing in detail here. The point for Benjamin is about illusion and whether the public are content to be baffled or seek the truth. To extend the analogy, it is the human-machine apparatus that holds the key to the unlocking its secrets - the means of production and in turn to any possibility of change in the relations of production. The theatrics simply reveal the lengths that manufacture goes to in order to mask the actual processes that operate. Pretending to reveal the actual mechanism has become an orthodoxy and indeed part of the illusion itself of history.
jetztzeit-benjamin.txt
And allegory:
jetztzeit-benjamin.txt
Most allegories lack the power to map the system sufficiently in detail - there's that Jameson quote that talks about networks operating in such a way, I would add that generative systems add another dimension of understanding of the power matrix.
knowledge-lazzarato.txt
Maurizio Lazzarato (1999) 'New Forms of Production and Circulation of Knowledge' in, Josephine Bosma, et al, eds., Readme! Filtered by Nettime. ASCII Culture and the Revenge of Knowledge. New York: Autonomedia.
knowledge-lazzarato.txt
Culture seems to have become integrated in the process of the creation of capital, with cultural regeneration as the clearest example of this tendency of capital's renewal. Art clearly follows economic imperatives for the most part. To Maurizio Lazzarato, culture has become subordinated to economics, and objections to this tend to be concentrated on the strategy of 'cultural exception' where the separation is enforced by intellectuals and artists, as well as some governments. Lazzarato sees this as an untenable position with regard to new modes of the production and circulation of knowledge. Instead he argues that the new modes of the production of knowledge and culture are not the same as the production of wealth, and therefore it is this that should influence the economy (1999: 159).
knowledge-lazzarato.txt
Lazzarato quotes Gabriel Tarde who in 1902 theorised the production of culture, and knowledge in particular, in such a way as to reject the traditional analysis of the political economy. Rather than concentrating on use-value, he posited the idea of 'truth-value' in that knowledge is the result of a process of production. However, unlike other products, knowledge is a mode of production that cannot simply be reduced to the market or through exchange without distorting its production and consumption value (Lazzarato, 1999: 160). Capital tries to treat knowledge as it does any other goods or else suffer the consequences of the treat to property rights and the relations of production. In Lazzarato's terms, capital is obliged to turn 'immaterial products' into 'material products' to product its logic ('immaterial economy' is Lazzarato's term for the informational economy). His example is the production of books, and we might consider the production of this volume, the intellectual rights and its exchange value - license agreements of the creative commons come to mind, as does the use of freely downloadable PDFs from the internet. A book's exchange value can be determined by the market as a product but not as knowledge which is more determined by moral issues of gift or theft (Lazzarato, 1999: 162). Relations of power extend beyond the market in other words.
knowledge-lazzarato.txt
A further example of this is provided in terms of pedagogy. Again, the production, communication and appropriation of knowledge can be seen to be different from that of wealth. Clearly changes in government policy appear to desperately want to subordinate knowledge to the economy with the introduction of 'top-up' fees in the UK as the most clear example of this tendency. The wide and free distribution of knowledge over the internet somewhat reverses this trend. Incidentally, the Lazzarato essay was first distributed over the nettime mail list in 1998, later published in paper form. The significance of this for Lazzarato is that 'these qualities of intellectual production is in the process of becoming a new "contradiction" within the information economy, for which the challenges represented today by the internet are but the premises of opposition to come'. (1999: 163)
knowledge-lazzarato.txt
Therefore to call for the autonomy of culture misses the point for Lazzarato. If capital appropriates knowledge and culture for its purpose, then its opposition must be to use knowledge and culture to influence the economy. For Tarde, 'artistic labour is productive labour' (Lazzarato, 1999: 165) and holds the potential to influence labour in general. In this way, the economy might be influenced by culture and influence a change of operational logic.
knowledge-lefebvre.txt
Henri Lefebvre (1991), The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, Oxford: Blackwell.
knowledge-lefebvre.txt
'The ruling class seeks to maintain its hegemony by all available means, and knowledge is one such means. The connection between knowledge (savoir) and power is thus made manifest, although this in no way interdicts a critical and subversive form of knowledge (connaissance); on the contrary, it points up the antagonism between a knowledge which serves power and a form of knowing which refuses to acknowledge power.' (Lefebvre, 1991: 10)
knowledge-lefebvre.txt
This dialectical approach to knowledge articulates the way I seek to describe the articulation of code and the technical apparatus.
labour-lazzarato.txt
Maurizio Lazzarato (1996) 'Immaterial Labour', trans. Paul Colilli & Ed Emory, in Paolo Virno & Michael Hardt, eds., _Radical Thought in Italy_, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 132-146.
labour-lazzarato.txt
The importance of the investigation into new forms of the organisation of work lie in the power relations this implies. 'Immaterial labour' is defined in this context as the labour that 'produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity' (1996: 132). It therefore refers to the labour processes that involve cybernetics and computer control as well as cultural activities often not considered in terms of work including artistic work (as a result of what Lazzarato calls 'mass intellectuality'). This shift is in recognition that since the 1970s, manual labour involves intellectual work and knowledge such as that involves in operating computer systems. To Lazzarato, the significance of this cuts across classical class distinctions, and undermines the old dichotomy between manual and intellectual work - or between material and immaterial labour - and transforms it:
labour-lazzarato.txt
'The split between conception and execution, between labour and creativity, between author and audience, is simultaneously transcended within the "labour process" and reimposed as political command with the "process of valorization".' (1996: 133)
labour-lazzarato.txt
Thus new conflicts arise from this organisation of work that expresses new forms of control and command over subjectivity. Lazzarato stresses this point: 'participative management is a technology of power, a technology for creating and controlling the "subjective processes"' (1996: 134). The imposition of command in this way through facilitation rather than order, and the ensuing 'violence' takes on a 'normative communicative form' in this way (1996: 135). This critique would allow for a more considered address of the open source movement for instance. The central issue is whether power is redistributed under such conditions - the capitalist recognises the increased autonomy of labour but at the same time attempts to limit the redistribution of power that arises from new collective forms
labour-lazzarato.txt
The production of software is an explicit example of so-called 'immaterial production' and is a good case study for the ways in which manual and intellectual labour are entwined - combined technical and creative skills. This is often described as independent work of 'self-employed', 'freelance', and is characterised by 'precariousness, hyperexploitation, mobility' in which leisure time becomes indistinguishable from work time, and 'life becomes inseparable from work' (1996: 137). In this way, it also disrupts the relationship between production and consumption:
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'The role of immaterial labor is to promote continual innovation in the forms and conditions of communication (and thus in work and consumption). It gives form to and materializes needs, the imaginary, consumer tastes, and so forth, and these products in turn become powerful producers of needs, images, and tastes.' (1996: 137)
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It tales on an ideological function in other words in producing not only commodities but the capital relation - immmaterial workers 'satisfy a demand by the consumer and at the same time establish that demand' (1996: 142) thus breaking down the distinction between supply and demand.
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Lazzarato stresses that immaterial labour takes as its starting point a social labour power that is relatively autonomous that industry is required to adapt for its purpose. He draws upon systems theory in this respect to describe the new forms of organisation and regulation. The concept of immaterial labour extends this thinking to begin to describe a space for a radical autonomy. Lazzarato sees this a a break in the continuity of production that breaks away from the centrality of waged labour:
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'A polymorphous self-employed autonomous work has emerged as the dominant form, a kind of "intellectual worker" who is him- or herself an entrepreneur, inserted within a market that is constantly shifting and within networks that are changeable in time and space.' (1996 139)
labour-lazzarato.txt
'The "author" must lose its individual dimension and be transformed into an industrially organized production process' (1996: 143). The concept of immaterial labour casts creativity not in terms of 'individuality' or 'superiority' but in rather different terms. Lazzarato draws upon the work Simmel and Bakhtin to elaborate on a view of social creativity seeing Simmel's views bound up with class division. On the contrary, whereas Bakhtin 'defines immaterial labour as the superceding of the division between "material labor and intellectual labor" and demonstrates how creativity is a social process' (1996: 146). Software art would make a good case study of such a process of immaterial production.
labour-lazzarato.txt
(these notes below are done)
labour-lazzarato.txt
Maurizio Lazzarato in his essay 'General Intellect: Towards an Inquiry into immaterial Labour' (trans. In progress, Ed Emery, http://www.emery.archive.mcmail.com/public_html/immaterial/lazzarat.html)
labour-lazzarato.txt
Lazzarato examines some of the new forms of labour and new relations of production. Immaterial labour as he calls it, constitutes itself in forms that are collective, and , in terms of the network and flows - no longer just confined by the walls of the factory. It is, thus, a 'mutation of "living labour"' (Lazzarato) and a certain restructuring of the relationship between production and consumption. Immaterial labour transforms the forms and conditions of communication and in turn consumption, making commodities like images, tastes, needs material. Industry and capital is not particularly in control of these processes but recuperates it for profit. To understand this process, it is generally agreed that you need to combine neoclassical economic analyses with systems theory. Whether this is a new historical phase of capitalism and its processes of accumulation is the issue, perhaps?
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The market is transformed, mobile and networked, and the worker is both tied to old forms of waged labour as well as autonomous from it at times.
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Note: allegedly 'immateriality' takes form in the postmodern writings of Lyotard (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 168)
labour-lazzarato.txt
In 'A Means of Mutation' that charts the development of I/O/D's alternative browser 'webstalker', Matt Fuller describes the situation in the dot.com boom where web designers seemed to have a direct link to the 'creative economy'. This is entirely in keeping with the social and communicative nature of labour in the digital economy; what Maurizio Lazzarato calls 'immaterial labour' that produces 'first and foremost a social relation... [that] produces not only commodities, but also the capital relation' (in Fuller, 2003: 54). Fuller cites Lazzarato again to assert that this practice is founded on the raw material of subjectivity, and states: 'This subjectivity is an ensemble of pre-formatted, automated, contingent, and "live" actions, schemas, and decisions performed by software, languages, and designers. This subjectivity is also productive of further sequences of seeing, knowing, and doing.' (2003: 54)
labour-marcuse.txt
Vincent Geoghegan (1981) Reason & Eros: The Social Theory of Herbert Marcuse, London: Pluto.
labour-marcuse.txt
In questions over the viability of a revolutionary subject, Henri Marcuse famously ties together the personal and the political taking into consideration what people do, especially to eachother, at all levels as political acts. There is a hint of Deleuze and Guattari in Marcuse in the power of sexuality and desire to unsettle the repressive work ethic that sustained capitalism.
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The waning potential for revolutionary praxis might thereby be seen as a psychological problem (not just latent class consciousness but the influence of psychanalysis that the Frankfurt School brought to bear on social theory) like repression as a way of reconciling a larger disillusionment and uncertainty with the rise of fascism, and existing 'socialism' in 1930s Russia. He maintained: 'Theory will preserve the truth even if revolutionary practice deviates from its proper path. Practice follows the truth not vice versa.' (Geoghegan 1981: 37; from Reason and Revolution, London: Routledge 1969: 322). Marcuse argues that the proletariat cannot fulfill their historical role as agents of revolution because they have ceased to be the negation of domination, and lacking an object to turn against (class enemy). This leads Marcuse to the concept of the 'Great Refusal' (or 'absolute negation' in dialectical terms) to describe the ideas and actions that reject current reality in favour of superior life (that includes art, philosophy and sexuality).
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Art, have a privileged position in Marcuse's thinking with both a critical and anticipatory function tying it to politics. According to Marcuse, and somewhat controversially as it is a somewhat romantic position, art has autonomy outside of the intentions of the artist, and can be used to engage politics, and is not reducible to ideology having certain universal properties.
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Technology is considered totalitarian in contrast. The opening of the first chapter of One-Dimensional Man reads: 'A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a token of technical progress.' (Geoghegan 1981: 73; Marcuse 1972: 16) This is the triumph of what Marcuse calls 'technological rationality'. Art and technology express different tendencies in that the rarefied and individualised high art can be seen as positive next to the mass culture of organised capitalism where individualism is destroyed. Like Adorno, popularity was taken as uncritical.
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This position is somewhat apparent in his approach to work and how this relates to the realm of alienated and non-alienated labour. To Marcuse, labour expressed and realised the essence of the human species. Although the human subject is always forced to work, elements of freedom are expressed in some forms of labour more than others; such as intellectual work (and in particular in the arts and sciences). He says labour can never be totally unalienated: 'In labor one is always distanced from one's self-being and directed toward something else; one is always with others and for others' (Geoghegan 1981: 9; from 'On the Philosophical Foundation of the Concept of Labor Economics', in Telos 16, 1973: 17). However, in play, the subject is somewhat freed from the alien quality of objects: 'While playing, one does not conform to the object' (ibid 1981: 10; in 1973: 14-15 ). His interest in sexuality (in Eros and Civilisation, 1972) might be seen in this context as non-work or leisure, with so-called 'perversions' such as narcissism and homosexuality potentially acting as a challenge to the exploitative organisation of labour as expressed in procreative sexuality that stands for social reproduction (Geoghegan 1981: 53-4). In Marcuse's terms 'Eros' had to be unleashed and not partial or directed onto normalised objects. Play allows for this, as does the dialectical potential of total automation where labour is no longer required: 'The elimination of human potentialities from the world of (alienated) labor creates the preconditions for the elimination of labor from the world of human potentialities.' (Geoghegan 1981: 57; in Eros and Civilisation, 1972: 83) Present reality is slavery that eros unleashes. More precisely, he is drawing upon Marx in the Grundrisse who predicts the end of capitalism through automation, wherein the exploitation of labour is undermined (1981: 83).
labour-terranova.txt
Tiziana Terranova (2000), 'Free Labor: producing culture for the digital economy', Social Text, 63, Vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 33-58.
labour-terranova.txt
Richard Barbrook (1999), 'The High-Tech Gift Economy', (first written in 1998) in Josephine Bosma, et al, eds., Readme! Filtered by Nettime. ASCII Culture and the Revenge of Knowledge, New York: Autonomedia.
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For Tiziana Terranova, the complexity of labour in the digital economy is characterised by 'free labour' in the production of free and open source software but also participation in discussion on mail lists and so on (2000: 33). She is drawing upon the ideas of immaterial labour here (Lazzarato, 1996) in stressing that there is a material foundation that structures the cultural and economic flows of the network society (Castells 1996). She is critical of Richard Barbrook's adoption of the 'gift economy' (1999) to explain how gifts of time and ideas might indeed overthrow capital from within (2000: 36). This is explained, for Terranova, as not an alternative to capitalism as such but new forms of labour that 'developed in relation to the expansion of the cultural industries and are part of a process of economic experimentation with the creation of monetary value out of knowledge/culture/affect' (2000: 38). To simply see the Internet as a free market is grave mistake and one born of utopianism that ultimately neutralises the power of capital.
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But Barbrook's position should not be dismissed out of hand as it is also one that responds to what he calls 'the Californian ideology' to characterise the combination of technological determinism and free market principles (that underlie the discourse of Wired magazine for instance - an ideology based upon 'Darwinian thinking and techno-mysticism', in Stallabrass, 2003: 149). His reference to the gift economy is through the Situationists and their rejection of the market (and State) altogether. This is also a reference (although unstated) to Marcel Mauss's (1970) The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, that examines 'economies' and systems of exchange that lie outside capitalism. Exchange in this sense is nor exclusively goods and wealth, property and things of economic value but a system of 'total prestations' (1970: 3; to include courtesies, entertainments, rituals, services, people, dances, feasts, and so on) or in its agonistic form 'potlatch' (1970: 5). Thus things can be seen to have emotional as well as material value in societies. To Mauss industrialism and commercialism is in conflict with morality. He says: 'The economic prejudices of the people and producers derive from their strong desire to pursue the thing they have produced once they realize that they have given their labour without sharing in the profits.' (1970: 64) Things created (such as a work of art) were once considered public property as a result of individual and collective endeavour detached from previous incarnations - that is until the law establishes 'right of pursuit' (in the French context 1923). Mauss is referring to 'motives of action' such as 'the joy of giving in public, the delight in generous artistic expenditure, the pleasure of hospitality in the public or private feast' (1970: 67). The morality therein is that Mauss believes: 'The mere pursuit of individual ends is harmful to the ends and peace of the whole, to the rhythm of its work and pleasures, and hence in the end to the individual.' (1970: 75) However, the point for Mauss is that the 'producer-exchanger' is 'giving something of himself, his[/her] time and his life. Thus [s/]he wants recompense, however modest, for this gift. And to refuse him[/her] is to incite him[/her] to laziness and lower production.' (1970: 75) The question remains of how to organise a society in which producers-exchangers give, receive and repay to the satisfaction of mutual interests (without the use of arms). This begins to sound like the position of Lawrence Lessig's 'Free Culture' (2004) which focuses on the social dimension of creativity: 'how creative work builds on the past and how society encourages or inhibits that building with laws and technologies'.
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For Mauss, this is one of the secrets of wisdom and solidarity, found 'in the rhythm of communal and private labour, in wealth amasses and redistributed, in the mutual respect and reciprocal generosity that education can impart' (1970: 81). This constitutes the commons as the basis of society and the 'supreme art - politics in the Socratic sense of the word' (1970: 81). This rejection of the so-called free market for the commons is characterised by Barbrook as 'anarcho-communism', enterprises based on donations of free time and money from supporters rejecting all state and commercial subsidy. Barbrook calls this a participatory ethic that shapes radical politics today in DIY culture (Barbrook, 1999: 132). The internet itself has a certain connection to this ethic build by the users themselves to some extent. Furthermore, Barbrook points out that the scientific community also thrives on academics giving papers at conferences and sharing knowledge - socialising their labour in his terms (albeit with other rewards of peer recognition and cosy salaries anyway). These are complex claims but serve to underwrite the slogan that 'information wants to be free'.
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At the core of the argument for Barbrook is that despite complications over commercialisation and intellectual property, the high-tech gift economy continues to flourish (1999: 135). A recent history of the music industry is a case in point. However the high-tech gift economy is entwined in a complex relation to the commercial sector. What is considered 'free' is clearly based upon an infrastructure that is thoroughly commercialised. Barbrook cites the paradoxical example of Netscape releasing its source code in order to maintain its market position by tying itself to the open source community: 'anarcho-communism is now sponsored by corporate capital' (1999: 138). Since the time of writing this is a more and more common practice. What was once revolutionary has become an everyday reality. This articulates something about the power of capital to make information valuable (here I am paraphrasing Porterfield's essay 'Information wants to be valuable' - not free).
labour-terranova.txt
The free exchange of software is also a concern for Julian Stallabrass but he rejects the comparison with the gift economy that Barbrook makes. He sees the copying and distribution of software as fundamentally different from other goods as it is almost cost-free (2003: 107). Labour is clearly invested in the writing of the software but once written copies can be made with no effort on the part of the originator. This is the basis of the argument that Richard Stallman makes, that to think of software in terms of material goods and to adopt its legal protections is anachronistic. He cites Stallman's online essay 'Why Software should not have Owners' to make the claim, not that developers shouldn't make money, but that sharing makes good sense as more people have access and there is no corresponding negative comeback in terms of efficiency or resources (2003: 107). Like Terranova, for Pit Schultz there is an illusion here that: 'Capitalism cannot be criticised from within capital; even gifts work within an economy of reputation, credibility and cultural capital, and inany case today the outside of the market is almost unthinkable' (in Stallabrass, 2003: 109). Stallabrass is somewhere between these positions in quoting Hardt and Negri that the new mode of production makes cooperation completely immanent to the act of labour. Communities produce, and create value but do not need to operate within the organisational logic of capital. This is wishful thinking, the concept of cultural capital is useful here in pointing to the ways in which the various fields define value.
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An extreme but historical position on this is Norbert Wiener's warning that responsive machine would replace human labour and the economy of buying and selling. As Stallabrass points out, Wiener did not deduce that humans were disposable, but that an alternative society based on values other than buying and selling would need to arise (2003: 153).
language-marazzi.txt
Christian Marazzi (2008) _Capital and Language: From the New Economy to the War Economy_, trans. Gregory Conti, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
language-marazzi.txt
In _Capital and Language_ (first written in 2002), Christian Marazzi claims that the capitalist economy can be understood in terms of language; on account that finance is understood through linguistic conventions and also that new forms of labour are produced through language and are analogous to speech acts. As has been established elsewhere, work in the social factory is increasingly characterized by its linguistic characteristics. General intellect, for Marazzi, lies in the networks of machines but also in linguistic communication and social cooperation. So too with the world of finance that takes on a controlling function in relation to labour and social relations but at the same time reveals the potential for autonomy from it. The recognition of the reliance of financial markets on collective speech acts (or communicative action) indicates the potential of freedom from its contraints.
language-marazzi.txt
'The theoretical analysis of financial market operations reveals the centrality of communication, of _language_, not only as a vehicle for transmitting data but also as a _creative force_.' (Marazzi 2008: 27)
language-marazzi.txt
The importance of language is revealed in the following passage:
language-marazzi.txt
'Our body is born "in" language, "in" relation, in that linguistic relation in which the prime symbolic level is given as the _union_ of life and language.' (Marazzi 2008: 32)
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Marazzi also cites Austin's _How to do things with Words_ to cast finical conventions in similar terms of performative utterances - describing and producing something at the same time - indeed quoting Virno 'He does not speak about what he is doing, but he does something by speaking' (2008: 33). When it comes to digital work, Franco Berardi talks of the changed relationship between conception and execution in this respect, in that the work is conceptual and is then enacted materially by the instructions that are produced by a machine (in Marazzi 2008: 40). Marazzi also cites John Searle who makes the link to finance, with reference to printed currency that is not simply a description of a fact but creates one. 'A performative utterance is one in which saying something makes that something true. (2008: 34)
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The 'fact-that-one-speaks', produces the fact merely by the fact that it has been said. Marazzi further explores the self-reflectivity of the performative, to explain the crisis of the financial markets. For he claims that whereas the self-referentiality of financial markets speak but presuppose the negation of the body of the speakers, the self-referentiality of the 'absolute performative' presupposes the body of the speaker (2008: 35; absolute performative is Virno's phrase).
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Speaking in this sense gives rise to the multitude (the collective body), a plurality of different voices that demonstrate transformative potential. Again Marazzi cites Virno:
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'Biopolitics exists where the foremost priority, in immediate experience, is given to what belongs to the potential dimension of human existence: not the spoken word but of the faculty to speak; not work actually done but the generic capacity to produce.' (in Marazzi 2008: 156)
life-kember.txt
Sarah Kember (2003) Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life, London: Routledge.
life-kember.txt
If Donna Haraway's Manifesto for Cyborgs (1990) was predicated on cold war inspired developments in artificial intelligence (first written in 1985), Sarah Kember's book Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life (2003) attempts to update these ideas to post-cold war developments in artificial life (2003). In the discourse of artificial life, the fundamental issues of autonomy (the self organisation of agents in a system) and artificiality (the evolving condition of agents and environments) are evidently constituted in shared and distributed networks. Kember is keen to acknowledge some of the scientific claims in this area of within the cultural narrative of the time. For instance, Richard Dawkins's Darwinist The Selfish Gene (1976), can be read against the intellectual discussions around subjectivity during the 1970s under the influence of post-structuralist thinking. Hence the cultural narrative can be seen to be 'about displaced agency, about a subjectivity that has the illusion of control while the real locus of control lies with another agent who inhabits the subject and uses him for its own ends' (Kember quoting N. Katherine Hayles, 2003: 18). This tendency in a-life, like cybernetics before it, explains the human as an animal that is like a machine, and is thoroughly ideological and deterministic. The human is seen as an autonomous machine that can construct, maintain and reproduce itself in more or less selfish ways.
life-kember.txt
The issue of biology as ideology is further emphasised in the detail that Darwin was influenced by the economic theory of Thomas Malthus researching populations' growth and the more efficient management of scarce resources. Kember argues that the Darwinian worldview is developed in parallel to the economic paradigm in which the autonomous human subject is in general seen to shape society rather than the other way around (the post-structuralist view) - the cause rather than effect of society (2003: 20, citing the geneticist Richard Lewontin). Clearly the cause and effect thesis of much scientific thinking in this area is a limited one, reductive and over-reliant on the universal laws and logic (especially from physics and chemistry). This is expressed profoundly in the cybernetic desire to equate humans with machines. Kember quotes the biochemist Steven Rose in this respect, in describing:
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'modern science as the inheritor of nineteenth-century mechanical materialism, itself tightly linked ideologically to a particular phase of the development of industrial capitalism' (2003: 21).
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'Techno-revolutions' are favourably publicised if the interests of individuals and capital overlap. Critical Art Ensemble would go as far as to suggest that this is rebirth of eugenics driven by the market to both make more profit and make better workers: 'the values/needs of capital are now being inscribed on the body at a molecular level' (2002: 59-60).
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Biology, like technology, is thus clearly caught up in complex cultural narratives of power, knowledge and subjectivity despite its claims otherwise. For instance, Lewontin sees the human genome project as another way in which knowledge and power serve the interests of institutions over individuals (Kember, 2000: 157). Although marketed as curing hereditary diseases, but the industry is really driven by the promise of huge profits of selling 'cures' to the wealthy. The fact that much research in this area is predictive is a cause for concern in the screening of workers for defects, promising:
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'a DNA-level quality control over the reproduction of labor power, control aimed not at the cure of disease but at the disgrading of potentially unproductive, oversensitive, or expensive units' (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 106; especially in cuntries such as the USA where companies carry health insurance payments for employees).
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In Donna Haraway's terms the mapping of the human genone is another 'god-trick' of absolute and unquestionable knowledge. Biology inevitably constructs scientific fact and fiction. Thus Darwinian thinking has been used to justify contrasting political and ethical positions - somewhere between right-wing individualism and the communitarian left, between selfishness and altruism (Kember, 2003: 48).
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In contrast to Dawkins's view of the passive human organism, Steven Rose argues for an active human subject that is capable of acting upon the world. Echoing Marx, he claims 'we have the ability to construct our own futures, albeit in circumstances not of our own choosing' (in Kember, 2003: 22; I am thinking here of the Brumaire quote). Thus is a thoroughly humanist approach that gives some hope for human agency but not in terms of autonomy but 'auto-poeisis' - making the agents neither determined or determining but thoroughly dynamic and active all the same. The term auto-poeisis (from poeisis meaning creation) is taken from the work of Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela in 1971, to describe production and reproduction of living organisms in this way as anti-reductionist (Kember, 2003: 23). This is also an argument against what Evelyn Fox Keller calls the 'endgame' of molecular biology in discovering the ultimate code or secrets of life (Kember, 2003: 25) secrets bound up in sexual politics around reproduction. Thus, artificial life is a heterosexist discourse - if one removed the desire to reproduce from a definition of life, different models would emerge perhaps based more on metabolism and less on reproduction. Kember sees autonomous creation as masculine and without the female body rendering it obsolete. The computer is a 'pristine birthing environment' without mess (2003: 75).
life-kember.txt
To avoid genetic determinism and account for otherwise unaccountable social and cultural complexity, Dawkins proposes 'meme' to characterise the cultural aspect of evolution (a hybrid term combining the Greek word for imitate 'mimeme' and gene of course). These memes, according to Dawkins, are ideas that pass from human to human but still subject to the laws of natural selection. There may be agency but only in a selfish sense (like the gene) in response to the scarcity of resources and survival. Kember sees a paradox and weakness here:
life-kember.txt
'Free will, it would seem, simultaneously counters and legitimises determinism. Metaphors of genetic and memetic agency and the ideological loop-hole which Dawkins constructs within them permeate the creation of artificial life worlds which are, to this extent, biologically determined.' (2003: 39)
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Genes and memes articulate very little about something as complex as society at large. Both socio-biology and evolutionary biology mount ideological challenges to the determinism of Darwinian biology.
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[note: obvious parallel here between debates about theories of evolution and generative work]
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The concept of auto-poeisis is useful in this respect as it offers a model of limited agency, but one that is neither determined nor determining. Similarly in the discourse around artificial life, contradictions abound. A clear indication of this is the 'creationist' imperative of making artificial life at all even if this is in itself an exploration of evolutionary ideas - God re-emerges as the creator of life either embodied in the computer, program or programmer. These contradictions of genesis or natural selection are mentioned by Kember in her discussion of Dawkins and his 'biomorph' program in which the development, reproduction and evolution of natural life forms is simulated (2003: 54). Similar conclusions might be made about artistic work in this area, where complex forms emerge from an initial blueprint in shared authorship between creator and computer. Many artists working in this area are searching for bio-aesthetic or 'transgenic' form that takes into account behaviour as part of the creative work but much of it employs crude analogies (Eduardo Kac's transgenic rabbit Alba is one provocative example that does engage with the discourse; Techosphere, circa 1995, is one particularly illustrative example). Perhaps computer programming in general, and especially concerning genetic algorithms, suffers from a masculinist fantasy of creation - or is this argument simply too crude and biologically determinist (VNS Matrix's computer game in which the heroine sabotages the Big Daddy main frame comes to mind)? Without doubt, there is much critical work to be done by feminists and cultural commentators in this field introducing some 'humanism' into debates dominated by structuralist thinking that tends to deny human agency in favour of the structuring of the system.
life-kember.txt
Much work in this area seeks to simulate life and to generate increased levels of complexity, and in so-doing redefine what might be considered a life-form beyond simply carbon-based life in actual space. Of course, much so-called natural life is artificial anyway - pets, animals in captivity, or influenced by human intervention (something John Berger points out in his essay 'Why Look at Animals?', 1980).
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[note: vivaria situates itself in this context]
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In general the term 'artificial life' is an oxymoron, in that it can only ever be an artificial simulation of life and it can only exist in an artificial environment. In this way, it owes its currency once more to post-structuralist thinking in considering the boundary between what is real and the copy as somewhat blurred, or even that simulation has indeed replaced the real (Baudrillard). For instance, Thomas Ray's 'Tierra' is a simulation of life in a virtual computer environment - simply machine instructions, self-replicating algorithms (Kember, 2003: 60). The claim is that although the forms are artificial they describe an evolutionary, emergent and complex process that is actual (Kember quoting Langton, 2003: 63). Indeed, some cultural commentators take 'connectionist' models (where complexity is developed from the bottom up and by parallel-processing or neural networks) and apply them to cultural phenomena.
life-kember.txt
In general, the critical work in this field is notably lacking - or emergent perhaps. Crude analogies abound between technical and social systems. The term 'synthesis' is used in this field to describe emergent properties (not in terms of dialectics) that are too often reduced to the magic of the computer system or program rather than the work of the systems designer or programmer. Computer code is anthropomorphised and the 'organism/machine analogy is 'naturalised' through a bio-technological ideology (Kember, 2003: 77, citing the work of Hayles once more). The field is full of contradiction and wild claims orientated around the dialectic of creation and evolution.
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Note: one might think of 'interbreeding' rather than interdisciplinary work
life-solegoodwingrand.txt
Ricard SolŽ & Brian Goodwin (2000), Signs of Life: How Complexity Pervades Biology, New York: Perseus Books.
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[Add to notes on chaos, complexity and emergence]
life-solegoodwingrand.txt
The examination of life itself appears a fundamental example of complexity theory. The origins of life continues to confound modern scientists aiming to create life out of 'primordial soup': even Darwin recognised that there must be a beginning for evolution (SolŽ & Goodwin, 2000: 240; this is where artificial life begins to speculate on life-forms using computer simulations). Building upon the work of mathematicians and physicists, biologists have developed a keen interest in the emergent order out of the complexities of life's material foundations. That a local part is dynamically linked to the global whole is demonstrated in the case of the human organism where various part can indicate information about the condition of the system as a whole and imbalance in any part therein (take Chinese medicine as a good example of this).
life-solegoodwingrand.txt
SolŽ & Goodwin see this as an opportunity to move beyond the scientific impulse to explain, predict and control nature that operates in a linear fashion of orderly cause and effect, to an understanding of human participation in nonlinear natural processes, not least in the way the observer is embedded in this (2000: 1 & 28). They point out that an understanding of nonlinearity is nothing new, the stable cycle of the clock pendulum has served as a paradigm for control in this respect where adjustment is simply made by altering the length and mass of the pendulum and - the dualistic 'tick-tock' logic of the mechanical age. That the world is not clock-work but more chaotic was recognised by Henri PoincarŽ (in 1913) observing that small differences in initial conditions produce enormous errors the final phenomena. This is not simply a 'stochastic or random process, where the irregularity arises from the cumulative effects of a multitude of many extraneous influences', but is a 'generic dynamic state' containing its own intrinsic logic (SolŽ & Goodwin, 2000: 3). Unlike the clock pendulum, chaos is both deterministic and unpredictable.
life-solegoodwingrand.txt
[leads to Lorenz 50 years later - see other notes]
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Complexity is neither complete order nor disorder, but 'displays nontrivial correlations that are not reducible to smaller, more fundamental units' (SolŽ & Goodwin, 2000: 34). In this sense, it is a fractal object.
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The principles of the living things, for SolŽ & Goodwin, lie in the complex operations and dynamic organisation of the gene and the cell. Genes do not simply generate coherent behaviour but a pattern of order involves emergent properties, 'changes of state can occur spontaneously, without any defined internal or external cause. By definition these changes are epigenetic phenomena: dynamic processes that arise from the complex interplay of all the factors involved in cellular activities including the genes.' (2000: 63) They explain how 'epigenesis' is a term from Aristotle to describe how embryos develop from the interaction of emergent parts in contrast to 'preformatism' where the embryo simply grows (this is essentially 'genetic determinism' and a gross oversimplification). The study of bacteria has been fruitful in this connection, and in particular how mutations occur.
life-solegoodwingrand.txt
Researchers have discovered that cells can operate as closed networks (what Kaneko and Yomo call 'autocataytic'), demonstrating all the properties of a system to maintain itself and grow. Also 'Cell division occurs when a particular constituent, defined as a division factor, exceeds a threshold. Cells can also die of starvation.' (SolŽ & Goodwin, 2000: 64) Taken together, cells demonstrate nonlinear dynamics wherein genes do not determine the development of the organism, but stabilise 'generic patterns of emergent complexity in these multicellular systems' (2000: 66).
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[link to the cell in the commodity - Marx/Mandel?]
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Stuart Kauffman approximated the regulatory dynamics of genes in terms of binary switches, a gene state of 'on' or 'off' - Boolean logic applied to gene dynamics. He set up a network where genes are selected at random from a set, and allowed to interact with random couplings, and examined the state transitions that the network underwent. The network demonstrated a unexpected high degree of dynamic order (in SolŽ & Goodwin, 2000: 72-5). In this, very simple rules of interaction with a complex system can be seen to generate 'emergent order or what Kauffman has called "order for free" in evolution: unexpected constraints on the large-scale dynamic patterns of gene activities that provide the living state with the properties needed for generating flexible, adaptive and robust behaviour.' (in SolŽ & Goodwin, 2000: 78)
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[this is what Katherine Hayles was talking about as a radical critique of the way we understand nature - reducible to binary logic]
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This is not a deterministic theory; the gene is reducible to code as a way of understanding these properties and dynamic relations.
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The brain is perhaps easier to compute, requiring a model of networked simple elements or interconnected neurons. For instance, in 1982, John Hopfield introduced a very simple model of a neural network, comprising of interconnected binary units, that would 'learn' by association to describe a basic structure and dynamics (in SolŽ & Goodwin, 2000: 124-5; although clearly this is not pedagogy as such). Clearly there are massive limitations in terms of any analogy to neural activity in the brain, but this is where learning really has taken place in the development of more sophisticated models that ironically confirm that the functioning of brain is chaotic. The brain demonstrates many of the same properties of other nonlinear dynamic systems, involving multiple attractors requiring order and disorder to operate (SolŽ & Goodwin, 2000: 145).
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In a social context, the study of insects reveals some of the emergent patterns more overtly:
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'It is very interesting to see how simple is the answer to our initial problem: individuals dealing only with local, noisy information are able to generate ordered, large-scale structures through the amplification of initial perturbations. These individuals are unaware of the progressive emergence of higher-order structures, although it is they who create them. There is an underlying dialogue between the individuals and the structures they create.' (SolŽ & Goodwin, 2000: 155)
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This communicative aspect is crucial to the stability of the system. Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers indicate that there is an antagonism between stable and instable forces; as a system's complexity increases, fluctuations also increase in parallel (SolŽ & Goodwin, 2000: 157). The delicate balance of an ecosystem reflects these principles, small changes (environmental or as a result of human action) can produce radical shifts in the food chain or in species survival.
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On Darwin:
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Darwin's theories of evolution are much cited but also misunderstood. SolŽ & Goodwin describes its key contributions as the recognition that there is an intrinsic (chemical) source of variability in living organisms, and that population size is limited by the finite nature of the resources available (2000: 248). The resource limitations clearly relates back to the issue of the variability of the organisms, itself generating through reproduction. Darwin's The Origin of Species articulates this emergence as evolution by natural selection - as a 'historic process of successive accumulation of changes' (2000: 249) or increased divergence as a result of being able to adapt to environmental changes. It is Stephen Jay Gould who advocates contingence as part of the process, taking into account nonlinear dynamical aspects of life as 'network dependent' (in SolŽ & Goodwin, 2000: 269). It is important not to conflate this critique with the reactionary creationism of fundamentalist Christians - whose sophistication stopped with the first chapter of Genesis (Bateson, 2000: 434). Cybernetics first introduced the concept of self-corrective systems that somewhat complicated matters. It was Russel Wallace who in effect proposed the first cybernetic model (at the time of Darwin) by confirming 'that natural selection acts primarily to keep the species unvarying', but that at higher levels, it may act to keep 'constant that complex variable which we call "survival"' (Bateson, 2000: 435).
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Artificial life:
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Some of this can be demonstrated in 'artificial life' scenarios and the study of life-like phenomena. The term is derived from John Von Neumann's experiments in constructing a self-replicating automata, and applied to biology and evolution by Thomas Ray in his studies of complex ecologies. His model, Tierra, is a set of computer programs that compete for processing time not food. SolŽ & Goodwin explain the process: that a short ancestral program evolve into diverse forms of increasing length and behavioural complexity (2000: 272). In time, social behaviour emerged as did extinctions as a result of parasites that relied on others to reproduce. What researchers in this area have found is that the more robust organisms were the more complex ones, able to withstand the effects of mutations. Steve Grand made a hugely successful game called Creatures in 1992, in which synthetic life-forms were propagated over online networks by a community of non-experts in the field (2001: 10). Like non-artificial life, interactions at all levels are fundamental to the health of the system.
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This is no simple Frankenstein scenario, although Steve Grand would point to the parallel problem of the missing 'Žlan vital' or soul within artificial life (2001: 2; and he is making a distinction from 'A-life' which is the scientific discipline rather than the quest to make artificial creatures). It is not perhaps surprising that at the time of Mary Shelley, electricity, as the new technology of the time, held the imagination in terms of possibilities of generating life from seemingly lifeless matter. After all, in 1780, Luigi Galvini had demonstrated that electricity passed through amputated frog's legs could re-animate them. Grand sees this as part of the quest for the understanding the nature of life. He describes how in the middles ages, it was thought that a special chemical substance held the answer. Grand sees this 'vitalist' perspective associated with a materialist one, in seeking to find an embodiment of the life force or a physical form for something as spiritual as the life essence (2001: 4). As a computer programmer, he sees the logic of regarding mechanical processes as capable of human endeavour and recognising this can be traced historically back to Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, itself interpreted by Ada Lovelace as an early computer that might 'think' (herself the wife of the poet Shelley, whose friend Lord Byron was the father of Ada Lovelace). For Grand, materialism is truth of the matter but not the whole truth - it can provide answers that are too simple rather than complex (2001: 5).
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Grand sees the task of artificial life of putting the life back into technology (2001: 9). Incidentally, in Marxist terms, one might equate this with putting life back into, or re-animating, dead labour. Clearly societies can be seen to regulate themselves through laws and social mores in a similar way to the ways an organism regulates itself through catalysis and adaptation (Grand, 2001: 71; 'catalysis' is the process by which something facilitates or speeds up a chemical reaction without destroying itself in the process - hence 'autocatalysis' where the parts themselves further perpetuate the process as feedback - just like adaptation to change is feedback too). Persistent phenomena such as this, through feedback use a form of predication that can be seen to be like learning.
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This is not simply a 'sausage-machine' as Grand calls it to undermine some of the top-down models of developing computer programs (implying a commercial imperative too unintentionally). His preference is for emergence stressing that things emerge from data not from code. This is counter to the accepted logic of computer science in which it is assumed that code drives data. Although computers deal with the language of processing, they also deal with structures. He says: 'Instead of telling the computer what to do, we are telling it what to be' (2001: 103). This is a different sense of programming in which behaviours emerge in a less deterministic manner. Here he is making the distinction between algorithms where instructions are followed and second-order structures where groups of objects act in parallel (by 'parallel' he simply refers to interactions with a population - this makes them potentially 'intelligent' for Grand, or behave as if it were alive, 2001: 106) as if there are many computers running simultaneously.
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This is what AI research has been attempting, running serial algorithms to demonstrate the ability to think. In most cases, these programs or 'expert systems' demonstrate the stored intelligence of their programmers, but fail as demonstrations of intelligence. To show intelligence, to Grand (and evoking Castells formulation unwittingly), the program must not simply follow rules but make them (2001: 110). To do this, it is important to recognise that the human brain, that gives the appearance of intelligence, is only ever a network of billions of very stupid machines. A computer program can work in serial and parallel - both synchronically and diachronically - and in this way operates as a network of behaviours from the 'inside-out' with no central 'outside-in' controller. It is the interaction between components at all scales that make a living organism less and less stupid. Grand sees this a critical issue in artificial intelligence in that it is fruitless to try to develop one function at a time, they all need to be implemented simultaneously in order to build an integrated whole machine otherwise it will not be integrated (2001: 169). He emphasises the point:
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'Life is not the stuff of which it is made - it is an emergent property of the aggregate of that stuff. Even the stuff itself is no more than an emergent property of a still smaller whirlpool of interactions. Living beings are high-order persistent phenomena, which endure through intelligent interaction with their environment. This intelligence is a product of multiple layers of feedback. An organism is therefore a localized network of feedback loops that ensures its own continuation.' (Grand, 2001: 175)
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randomness (add to section on this as distinct from emergent phenomena):
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Randomness is a notoriously poorly defined term. Grand says 'just because something is indeterminate (by which I mean it cannot be known), we must not conclude that it is undetermined (has no prior cause).' (2001: 248). Randomness is an effect that has causes that simply remain unknowable or irrelevant. So even random events have definite causes. In the case of Grand's game Creatures, the user is part of the system as a form of external random noise but the complexity of the rest of the behaviours are entirely determined and yet as a whole unpredictable.
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On the question of order emerging from apparent random events, Bateson looks to Genesis for a clear articulation of the separation of land and water and species as a problem of description. This leads to the question: 'If random events lead to things getting mixed up, by what non-random events did things come to be sorted?' (2000: 343; in an essay about creationism). Do we call it evolution or something else like creation? And if so what kind - from the many creation myths around the world to contemporary theories of evolution.
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Complexity and Markets:
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The same logic can be applied to the marketplace, where products and companies compete for dominance. SolŽ & Goodwin describe the mathematical model of George P—lya (2000: 280). The formulation considers an urn with one black ball and one white ball. The rules are simple: if you pick one ball you return it with another ball of the same colour. When this is repeated, the system reaches well-defined steady states but their number is infinite with any possible ratio of white to black balls possible. This has been used to explain how the economy follows dynamical patterns, and self-organises in space and time. Speculators follow this logic in trying to predict the behaviour of markets as nonlinear systems - displaying predictable and unpredictable elements - as well as trying to understand collapses and extinctions (the dot.com crash for example).
loops-hofstadter.txt
loops
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The phenomena of 'strange loops' or 'tangled hierarchies' has its reference in mathematical principles of symmetry and patterning (Hofstadter, 2000: 15). This is an endless and paradoxical process that Douglas Hofstadter aligns with Bach, Escher and the mathematician Kurt Gšdel. A paradox like 'certainty is certainly false' (link to when I said that before), 'this paper is intentionally blank' (title of a co-authored blank book) or 'this statement is false' wherein the apparent opposites of true and false make no sense can be explained through a self-referential mathematics turning to its own methods. This is explained through 'Gšdel's Incompleteness Theorem':
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'To every w-consistent recursive class k of formulae there correspond recursive class-signs r, such that neither v Gen r nor Neg (v Gen r) belongs to Flg (k) (where v is the free variable of r). [or in other words:] All consistent axiomatic formulations of number theory include undecidable propositions.' (2000: 15)
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Similarly the truism comes to mind: 'There are two kinds of people in the world: those that think there are two kinds of people in the world and those who do not.' This might be explained as self-referential critique of language and dualistic thinking. This approach has close connection to the dialectical law of motion.
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That numbers stand for words in the formula is a crucial element in establishing the 'code' by which the logic unfolds (of numbers for words both adhering to rules of course). According to this, the statement is not false but does not contain proof. The true statements of mathematics are not false but neither true nor false. Whereas for the most part mathematicians would agree what is true and false, this is held in contention when numbers are taken to be words that follow a rule-based logic. Hofstadter, with the aid of words, neatly describes the condition of the 'strange loop' like this:
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'The following sentence is false.
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The preceding sentence is true.' (2000:21)
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In terms of this (my) thesis, both statements are embedded in dialectical tension.
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Computer loops
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Babbage's 'Difference Engine' rested on the logic of the 'method of differences' (extending Leibnitz's machines for performing fixed operations in the C17th), yet the 'Analytical Engine' took this further again. It employed the principle of the 'strange loop', 'to eat its own tail' in Babbage's words; or one capable of altering its own stored program (Hofstadter, 2000: 25). Ada Lovelace imagined the engine to 'compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent' (quoted in Hofstadler, 2000: 25). Hofstadter sees the development of Turing theories of computation in parallel to Gšdel's 'metamathematical' theories (2000: 26). Strange loops suggest rules by which new rules will emerge, rules that change themselves in self-organising structures. This emphasises not just paradox at work, but the dialectical idea that expresses a complex structure of true and false statements, and of order and disorder.
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Recursion
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Through its distinction from a cursive figure (in drawing practice for instance), Hofstadter explains recursion as a scenario in which the negative form (or ground rather than figure) can be recognised as a positive form in itself (2000: 68). He extends this to the distinction between melody and accompaniment in music (figure and [back-]ground accordingly). Both examples emphasis the point that a well-formed theorem contains both the theorem and negations of theorems as Hofstadter puts it (2000: 71); logical contradiction or in terms of thesis and antithesis if you will. Recursion is a domain where 'sameness-in-differentness' operates simultaneously (2000: 148).
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Commonly, recursive structures include stories within stories or Russian dolls within Russsin dolls - '(even parenthetical comments within parenthetical comments)' says Hofstadter within parenthesis (2000: 127). They define something in relation to itself, but in terms of a simpler version. But if this sounds like a qualitative judgement, it shouldn't be. On the contrary it should be simpler as in more refined). Hofstadter points to the significance of this principle within computer science, it means moving from level to level in an operation, whilst storing in memory all previous levels such that operations might be returned to (2000: 128). This is important in A.I., and is evident in the ways we use construct expressions in language, through syntax in sentences and in a thesis as a whole, returning to the point or central argument at various points along the way. Similarly if this is expressed in dialectical style, the thesis becomes more refined at each point of synthesis.
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Recursion also operates at the lowest level of matter according to Douglas Hofstadter. He tells us that Physicists claim that elementary particles (electrons, protons, neutrons, photons) all interact in a way that can be described as recursive. Physics subscribes to grammatical rules:
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'What happens is that no particle can even be defined without referring to all other particles, whose definitions in turn depend on the first particles, etc. Round and round, in a never-ending loop.' (Hofstadter, 2000: 142 - pity the last sentence doesn't subscribe to the rules of grammar.) These interactions operate in recursive structures, in networks, and at a level of complexity.
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Grammar and syntax are fundamental too in the writing of computer code where recursive transitions are crucial. For instance, parenthesis is used to produce sub-clauses whilst retaining the overall flow of logic. Recursivity in computer programmes, implementing 'return' can lead to 'infinite regress' (I have an example of that, I think, in my dialectics.bas code which would simply carry on producing 1's and 0's until the system crashes). Hofstadter says: 'Even the most heterarchical program structure bottoms out - otherwise it wouldn't run! It would just be constantly expanding node after node, but never performing any action' (2000: 134). This is precisely what might be used to map the actions of the system itself (ref. Alex McLean's 'fork bomb') in what might be called an 'infinite loop'. Loops are commonplace in setting out instructions to perform repeated tasks, usually stopped at a certain point, and loops rest within loops in intricate ways, what Hofstadter calls 'nested loops' indicating 'good programming style' (2000: 149) - literally parenthesis within parenthesis.
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The aspect of unpredictability in these processes is what characterises them as generative for the purposes of this thesis. Hofstadter describes this as follows:
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'Recursive enumeration [generated from a set of starting points] is a process in which new things emerge from old things by fixed rules. [...] [Furthermore] recursively defined sequences of that type possess some sort of inherently increasingly complexity of behaviour, so that the further out you go, the less predictable they get' (2000: 152).
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Contradiction is a valuable source of clarification, not least in mathematics. However, as has been stated elsewhere, disorder is generated in orderly ways.
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systems (link to factories & fork bomb)
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Some clear separation is necessary between programs and machines - between software and hardware as it were - between the sequences of code (instruction systems)and the machines (operating systems) that perform the instructions (by analogy, the score and the musical instrument).
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Also any system is a combination of interacting parts, wherein not only the whole is more than the sum of its parts, but wherein each part demonstrates behaviour based on its interrelationships within the whole system as well as retaining its own individual distinctiveness. This is what characterises any system, in fact, whether within the tradition of physics, computing or social science. Even within the programme, every bit plays a role in determining the output and its unpredictability. Thus an overall system is useful in that it now only allows its parts to function appropriately but with increased functionality as a result of being part of a wider system. This is what the fork bomb points to - its performance is modulated by the performance of the operating system, of which it is part.
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And furthermore, some systems (like language) are able to reproduce themselves. Meanings are not encoded but are decoded as part of an overall understanding of the systems within which they operate.
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(and with reference to Magritte's 'Ceci n'est pas une pipe')
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'1. This sentence contains five words.
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2. This sentence is meaningless because it is self-referential.
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3. This sentence no verb.
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4. This sentence is false. (Epidemides paradox)
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5. The sentence I am now writing is the sentence you are now reading.' [evoking barthes' comment: 'he is dead and about to die' under the photograph of a prisoner on death row, in Camera Lucida] (Hofstadter, 2000: 495)
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The referent 'the sentence' is understandable only within the overall context of the words making a sentence in itself and this being one of the structural elements of written language as a whole. Imagine a programme running that writes itself anew as it runs (there's an example of this one of the msc students gave, Xavier? - find the reference). This appears to be an extreme case of taking the relationship between code and the output as fundamentally linked.
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The linguistic metaphor serves its purpose. However we should be skeptical given the post-structuralist critique of structuralism's reductive capacity in not taken enough account of subjectivity as part of the equation. (link to creative subjective). However attractive a concentration on syntax and structure in code may be, it needs to take account of subjectivity more fully. My way of doing this is to look at the figure of the creative subject in more depth - and as not simply a function of discourse, or just part of the system, but operates both inside and outside the system as a disruptive and unpredictable element.
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Hofstadter muses over the distinction between the original and copy by thinking about the printing of output from code. He describes three versions of this in terms of translation. In the first of these, the program when interpreted by some interpreter simply prints out the program; in the second scenario, the printout additionally contains a copy of the interpreter (also a program); thirdly, it acknowledges the 'union of program, interpreter and processor' as well as data (2000: 504).
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This serves to illustrate how systems are organised by combination of overt, informal systems (software if you like) and more covert, formal systems (hardware) that combine to provide a complex mechanism that runs to definite ordered rules, even when it appears that disorder is being expressed. This doesn't simply imply that any system is explained by mathematics, but offers an explanation of why such a level of complexity is almost beyond explanation.
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machine-authors
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Although Hofstadter's interests are the limits of thinking and artificial intelligence (and what he calls the '"camp" clichŽ of the giant electronic brain), he offers some useful thoughts on authorship. A key principle here is that software and hardware are systems but also inextricably linked as part of a larger system. He takes his cue from AI and its take on 'originality' in asking: 'what if an AI program comes up with an idea... which its programmer has never entertained - who should be given the credit?' (2000: 606). The simple answer would be it's a collaboration, a complex interaction between parts, but he is more precisely interested in intellectual property although he doesn't say as much. He claims that the human author 'can be referred to as the "meta-author" - the author of the author of the result, and the program as the (just plain) author' (2000: 607).
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However autonomy is also a key issue here. These are familiar but unresolved issues in post-Duchampian creative practice. Hofstadter asks whether it is possible to think of the computer composing. The answer might simply be: yes, but only if the programmer says so (in parallel to Duchamp saying 'it is art because I say so' - exact quote?).
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Mechanised or automated creativity is not a contradiction of terms. Hofstadter says 'Almost, but not really. Creativity is the essence of that which is not mechanical... the mechanical substrate of creativity may be hidden from view, but it exists. Conversely, there is something unmechanical in inflexible programs, even today.' (2000: 673)
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He quotes Norbert Wiener in saying that machines can transcend some of the limitations of their designers, but does so in connection to Arthur Samuel's rebuttal of machine consciousness (2000: 684). Samuel's argument is based on the fundamental conviction that 'nothing comes out that has not been put it', it simply is following instructions. The reply is probably: almost, but not really. Again he quotes Samuel: 'No computer ever "wants" to do anything, because it was programmed by someone else. Only if it could program itself from zero on up - an absurdity - would it have its own sense of desire.' (Hofstadter, 2000: 685)
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The counter argument seems obvious to anyone with a sense of how subjectivity is constructed - that humans conform to the same logic and are not 'self-programmed'. They are part of a shared overall social system - that contain relatively fixed hardware and variable software, appearing as covert and overt processes. The rules of the system may well lie somewhere in the system but are so deeply embedded and complex that they remain hidden to all intensive purposes - but there are rules. This is in danger of making too easy (not complex enough) a parallel between humans and machines but at least serves to throw emphasis on the ideological importance of the system within which both operate. The rules change, and we can change them in the same way that we change, software packages can even change their own rules but at the bottom rules do not change - expressing an 'inviolate level' (Hofstadter, 2000:687) even in the case of self-organising systems.
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This is where paradox enters the frame again, or the 'strange loop' for Hofstadter. In describing a game of self-modifying chess, he explains this principle as: 'The distinction between game, rules, metarules, metmetarules has been lost. What was once a nice clean hierarchical set-up has become a Strange Loop, Or Tangled Hierarchy. The moves change the rules, the rules determine the moves, round and round the mulberry bush...' (2000: 688). He further illustrates this by the Escher lithograph Drawing hands (1948) where 'that which draws, and that which is drawn - turn back on eachother, creating a Tangled Hierarchy' (2000: 689). In these examples, some aspect acts upon the system as if it were operating outside the system. It is both simultaneously outside and inside the system, acting and being acted upon, both subject and object - breaking down simple dualisms. Like feedback, it endlessly effects itself - like the operation of code being executed and yet being embedded in the very thing executed. How might such an operation be demonstrated?
machines-pasquinelli.txt
Matteo Pasquinelli (2004) 'Radical Machines Against the Techno-Empire: From Utopia to Network', trans. Arianna Bove, http://www.rekombinant.org/downloads/radical_machines.pdf (french version, part of 'Subjectivation du Net : postmŽdia, rŽseaux, mise en commun', _Multitudes 21_, http://www.eurozine.com/partner/multitudes/current-issue.html).
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'Rather than of general intellect we should talk of general intellects. There are multiple forms of collective intelligence. Some can become totalitarian systems, such as the military-managerial ideology of the neocons or of Microsoft empire. [...] 'Good' collective intelligences, on the other hand, produce international networks of cooperation such as the network of the global movement, of precarious workers, of free software developers, of media activism. They also produce the sharing of knowledge in universities, the Creative Commons open licenses and participative urban planning, narrations and imaginaries of liberation.' (Pasquinelli 2005: 1)
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Matteo Pasquinelli sees three kinds of action - labour, politics and art - as integrated into each other making us all 'workers-artists-activists' or rather that that they no longer hold much significance and belong to the sphere of collective intellect (2005: 2). In the knowledge-based economy, the distinction between 'cognitive' and 'precarious' work has collapsed (or the networkers and networked in Castells terms) into what chainworkers.org describe as 'precogs'.
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[note: Chainworkers.org's slogan is 'Chain and brainworkers unite'(http://www.chainworkers.org/) in which brainworkers are the creative workers and chainworkers are workers working in distribution according Lazzarato 2003.]
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Therefore new collective characterisations are required, according to Pasquinelli, who is suspicious of the hegemony of the terms 'multitude' and the concept of 'immaterial labour'. More so: 'There is a hegemonic metaphor in political debate, in the arts world, in philosophy, in media criticism, in network culture: that is Free Software.' (2005: 3) His concern is how the rhetoric around open source and free software relates to action in the real world.
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If the whole of society has become a factory, then how do workers-artists-activists 'reappropriate the means of production' where the control of production is exerted in immaterial, cognitive and networked forms? (or precarious ways of working and living) New antagonisms are formed around 'social software' representing two intelligences of exploitation and resistance to exploitation. Pasquinelli asks:
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'How can we turn the sharing of knowledge, tools and spaces into new radical revolutionary productive machines, beyond the inflated Free Software? This is the challenge that once upon the time was called reappropriation of the means of production.
'Will the global radical class manage to invent social machines that can challenge capital and function as planes of autonomy and autopoiesis? Radical machines that are able to face the techno-managerial intelligence and imperial meta-machines lined up all around us? The match multitude vs. empire becomes the match radical machines vs. imperial techno-monsters. How do we start building these machines?' (2005: 4)
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He is looking towards dysfunction in this respect:
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'Technical machines obviously work only if they are not out of order. Desiring machines on the contrary continually break down as they run, and in fact run only when they are not functioning properly. Art often takes advantage of this property by creating veritable group fantasies in which desiring production is used to short-circuit social production, and to interfere with the reproductive function of technical machines by introducing an element of dysfunction.' (Deleuze & Guattari, quoted in Pasquinelli 2005: 1)
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In Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Deleuze and Guattari, 1990; first as L'Anti-Oedipe in 1972), it is the unconscious that is seen to be productive - not longer to be regarded in terms of oedipal drama. Deleuze explains this anti-oedipal position: 'the unconscious is not a theater, but a factory'; and quoting Artaud, that the body, or more accurately the sick body, is an 'overheated factory' (Guattari, 1995: 75). It might be more productive to think of the unconscious as a worker. Deleuze and Guattari describe the capitalist machine n the following terms:
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'Capitalism is in fact born of the encounter between two types of flows: the decoded flows of production in the form of money-capital, and the decoded flows of labor in the form of "free worker". Hence, unlike previous social machines, the capitalist machine is incapable of providing a code that will apply to the whole of the social field.'
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Capitalism thus produces schizophrenia, a body without organs, 'manic-depression and paranoia are the product of the despotic machine, and hysteria the product of the territorial machine.' (1990: 33)
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It is this decoding of flows to extract ever more surplus value that characterises industrial capitalism.
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Nature is now experienced as a process of production in other words: 'There is no such things as man or nature now, only a process that produces the one within the other and couples the machines together. Producing-machines, desiring-machines everywhere, schizophrenic machines, all species of life: the self and the non-self, outside and inside, no longer have any meaning whatsoever.' (Deleuze & Guattari, 1990: 2)
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Within society, the spheres of production, distribution and consumption have been seen to relatively autonomous. Deleuze and Guattari would have it that this is predicated upon Marxist description of the division of labour and the idea of false consciousness. To them, this is simply not the case, and these spheres are not autonomous at all, but collapse into eachother making everything production: the 'production of productions, of actions and of passions' (1990: 4). For them 'process' incorporates recording and consumption within production, and the human subject too is simply the producer-product.
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It is from this characterisation of 'desiring-production,' that the concept of machines of desire, or of 'desiring machines,' is derived in addition to technical machines and social machines (thus in excess of the technical and the organic):
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'To desire consists of this: to make cuts, to let certain contrary flows run, to take samplings of the flows, to cut the chains that are wedded to the flows. [...] The problem is to recognize how the unconscious functions. It's a problem that concerns the use of machines, the functioning of "desiring machines."' (1995: 76; note: the 'machine' carries a further sense in French - to designate an undefined object. Further reference might be made to Sol Lewitt and the 'the idea is the machine' in this connection - see Lippard.)
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Desiring machines are binary machines, following rules of association, in which one machine is always coupled with another. Deleuze and Guattari espouse:
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'The productive synthesis, the production of production, is inherently connective in nature: "and..." "and then..." This is because there is always a flow-producing machine, and another machine connected to it that interrupts or draws off part of this flow (the breast - the mouth). And because the first machine is in turn connected to another whose flow it interrupts or partially drains off, the binary series is linear in every direction. Desire causes the current to flow, itself flows in turn, and breaks flows.' (1990: 5; evoking Negri's and Castells's use of the term 'flows,' adopted by information or systems theory). The allusion to information theory is made evident in their explicit reference to code. They say that every machine has code built into it: 'The data, the bits of information recorded, and their transmission form a grid of disjunctions of a type that differs from the previous connections' (1990: 38).
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Desiring-production is always production of production because every machine is connected to another machine. In contrast, the body without organs lies in the realm of 'antiproduction'. In constrast to ideas around systems and ecology, Artaud says: 'the body is the body/it is all by itself/and has no need of organs/the body is never an organism/organisms are the enemies of the body' (in Deleuze & Guattari, 1990: 9). In a more overt rejection of the body as a complex system:
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'An apparent conflict arises between desiring-machines and the body without organs. Every coupling of machines, every production of a machine, every sound of a machine running, becomes unbearable to the body without organs. Beneath its organs it senses there are larvae and loathsome worms, and a God at work messing it all up or strangling it by organizing it. [...] The genesis of the machine lies precisely here: in the opposition of the process of production of the desiring-machines and the non-productive stasis of the body without organs.' (Deleuze & Guattari, 1990: 9)
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Deleuze and Guattari proceed to draw a parallel between desiring-production and social production, allowing them to assert that capital is the body without organs of the capitalist. In classical Marxism, the opposition is set between labour and capital, and so desiring-machines can be seen to operate in parallel to labour. Similarly the body without organs can be seen to appropriate desiring production just as the capitalist extorts value from labour. They claim that social reproduction (reproduction neatly connects machine and biological processes) or what they would describe as the recording rather than the producing of production, characterises the couplings or 'connective synthesis' differently. 'Either-or' takes over from the 'and then' of production. More precisely:
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'Whereas the "either/or" claims to mark decisive choices between immutable terms (the alternative either this or that), the schizophrenic "either... or... or" refers to a system of possible permutations between differences that always amount to the same as they shift and slide about.' (1990: 12) They describe this as the 'disjunctive synthesis' of recording taking over from the 'connective synthesis' of production. At this point, the organ-machine clings to the body without organs in a dual process of attraction and repulsion, allowing them to suggest that: 'So true is it that the schizo practices political economy, and that all sexuality is a matter of economy.' (1990: 12)
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As such, desire can be seen to be potentially revolutionary, especially when the desiring machines are networked and promiscuous. This network clearly must extend outside of the 'Mommy-Daddy' family circle of traditional bourgeois psychiatry (note: Picabia describes the machine as "the daughter born without a mother," in Guattari, 1995: 125). This again draws upon the work of Artaud who says: 'I don't believe in father/in mother,/got no/papamummy' (quoted in Deleuze & Guattari, 1990: 14). Freud does not stretch beyond this tripartite Oedipal formula of 'daddy-mommy-me'. The critique of the Oedipal drama or code wrests the analysis out of the family, or at least begins to treat the family as an institution or as a factory, to the wider mechanism of power that would include the subject's historical and cultural context - and thus owes something but is in excess of the anti-psychiatry movement of R.D. Laing. Laing says:
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'In the context of our present pervasive madness that we call normality, sanity, freedom, all our frames of reference are ambiguous and equivocal.
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A man who prefers to be dead rather than Red is normal. A man who says he has lost his soul is mad. A man who says that men are machines may be a great scientist. A man who says he is a machine is 'depersonalized' in psychiatric jargon. [...] Thus I would like to emphasize that our 'normal' state is too often the abdication of ecstasy, the betrayal of our true potentialities, that many of us are only too successful in acquiring a false self to adapt to false realities.' (1965: 11-2)
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Yet perhaps Freudian analysis needs to be read as a critical tool and metaphor (after all, the family is a bourgeois construct of the industrial period; and for Zizek, the State is the authority or name of the father). Desire shapes history - even when it goes wrong (such as in the rise of Nazism). 'Desiring energy' exists in the social division within the family and work structures, and in the relation between people and machines.
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Desire is crucial to this, and is productive. They explain in suitably excessive language:
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'Desire is the set of passive syntheses that engineer partial objects, flows, and bodies, and that function as units of production. The real is the end product, the result of the passive syntheses of desire as autoproduction of the unconscious. Desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object. [...] As Marx notes, what exists in fact is not lack, but passion, as a "natural and sensuous object". [...] Desire then becomes this abject fear of lacking something.' (1990: 26-7)
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Real needs are derived from this desire rather than desire emanating from needs as advertising might suggest. The social field is invested with desire, and as a product of desire can invade the forces and relations of production. They say 'There is only desire and the social, and nothing else.' (1990: 29)
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In this sense, Serge Leclaire thinks that the desiring machine is a 'partial object', in the sense that Melanie Klein describes, and one that can only work in breaking down. (Guattari, 1995: 103). According to psychoanalytic theory, humans pretend that things are perfect and whole, to avoid the reality that they are flawed and in parts. Klein says: 'It is a 'perfect' object which is in pieces' (Melanie Klein, Love, Guilt and Reparation, London: Vintage, 1988: 270). She considers desire from the perspective of wholeness, of complete objects. In Deleuze and Guattari's terms 'a flow of sperm, shit, or urine that are produced by partial objects and constantly cut off by other partial objects, which in turn produce other flows, interrupted by other partial objects. Every "object" presupposes the continuity of flow; every flow, the fragmentation of the object' (1990: 6). The partial object is suitably 'detotalized, deterritorialized' and lacking in individuality (Guattari, 1995: 104) and desiring-production is irreducible to any sense of unity. Instead it exists as multiplicity:
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'We believe only in totalities that are peripheral. And if we discover such a totality alongside various separate parts, it is a whole of these particular parts but does not totalize them; it is a unity of all these particular parts but does not unify them' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1990: 42). But this does not really answer Leclaire's observation that their theory is too perfect - it works too well and is contradictory in this sense in that it is not in flux sufficiently. Leclaire would like to reintroduce some dualisms (like that of the real and the symbolic, or the base and the superstructure).
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Responding to confusions such as this, Guattari defines 'desiring machines' more closely in an essay 'Balance-Sheet Program for Desiring Machines' distancing them from real machines (in the Symbolic) and dream machines (of the Imaginary) - neither gadgets nor phantasies and therefore not commodities (1995: 120) - nor is this a case of metaphor. The machine is 'a system of interruptions or breaks' and is related to a continuous material flow that it cuts into: 'the anus and the flow of shit it cuts off' (1990: 36). The machine is constituted by 'recurrence and communications' - and 'the adaptation of the man to the machine, and of the machine to the man' (1995: 121). This can be traced to the evolution of the tool into machine as a projection of the worker, in which the machine gradually becomes more and more independent of the worker (described by Marx amongst others). Clearly Guattari goes further in considering machines as separate from tools: machines are a factor of communication whereas tools merely extend control through direct contact:
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'When one refers the tool to man, in accordance with the traditional schema, one deprives oneself of any possibility of understanding how man and the tool become or already are distinct components of a machine in relation to an actual machinic agency.' (1995: 123)
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The example cited is a telephone exchange that makes unlimited connections in all directions (an idea developed by Avital Ronnell, in describing the telephone as schizophrenic, ref?). The machine possesses two characteristics: the power of continuum and the rupture in direction or mutation. The machine, therefore, is a 'break-flow' process of connections and their rupture (1995: 126-7). Hakim Bey posits a similar formulation in his description of the Net and counter-Net - in the potential Internet (see notes elsewhere). The desiring-machine needs to conceived of in terms of the social body not simply the human organism. This is central to Guattari's critique of Marx in wrongly thinking social relations to lie outside of the tool or machine. The worker and tool are already part of the machine - both engineered ever more overtly (1995: 142).
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Machines are not simply invented or imagined. This is not simply an oedipal fantasy of creation - as Donna Haraway points out elsewhere. To Guattari,
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'Desiring-machines are not in our heads, in our imagination, they are inside the social and technical machines themselves.' (195: 137) This is an important principle as it is the regime of power to which the machine is subject that is crucial to its understanding as part of an overall mechanism of desire, repressed or expressed openly. 'Technology presupposes social machines and desiring-machines, each within the other, and, by itself, has no power to decide which will be the engineering agency, desire or the oppression of desire.' (1995: 140; note: he uses the term 'engineering agency' to describe the body of society) This is why Guattari would regard technology acting on its own, under autonomy, as necessarily expressing a fascist tone in oppressing desire, and very little technology appears to promote desire as it is against dominant economic and political interests (sometimes presented as art, but rarely - Italian Futurism is an example of this tendency of the fascist desiring-machine).
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Fascism is a good way of discussing the issue of desire in the social realm - in recognising the 'totalitarian machine which never stops modifying and adapting itself to the relationships of force and societal transformations' (1995: 237). Moreover, it is a certain excess over the desiring machine of capitalism and socialism that needed to contain its excess of mass desire - its demonisation is rather too reassuring perhaps. Deleuze and Guattari cite Wilhelm Reich in this connection to understand the mechanics of fascism (link to Frankfurt School in general). Desire explains in a more sympathetic way Reich's astonishment that the masses do not steal and strike on a regular basis, and tolerate being humiliated and enslaved. Although Reich casts desire as irrational in the social realm, Deleuze and Guattari do not accept this dualism between rationality of social production and irrationality of fantasy-production (1990: 29-30). Capitalism continues to fear the desiring masses (note: Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power would add detail here) perhaps made manifest in the alleged 'fundamentalisms' of Islam in the contemporary scene. The military machine responds (as it has done) with fascist zeal and desire (and the protestors are right when they declare the fascist tendencies of Blair despite his liberal democratic lineage). Its effectiveness is how well it channels 'the capacity of collective arrangements, subject-groups, to connect the social libido, on every level, with the whole range of revolutionary machines of desire' (Guattari, 1995: 245).
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Guattari stresses the point of how power can be channelled to particular purpose:
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'The question we ought to ask is not how the technical machine follows after simple tools, but how the social machine, and which social machine, instead of being content to engineer men and machines, makes the emergence of technical machines both possible and necessary.' (1995: 143)
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This is a desiring-machine that works not through ideology but through the unconscious where desire resides. The relations of production described in Marx do not go far enough, and in this formulation are internal to the desiring machine to take account of desire, not as relations but as parts of the production machine (1995: 145). On the contrary, Negri would see this conceptual trajectory already evident in Marx's Grundrisse (see notes elsewhere). Deluze and Guattari would have us reread Marx, but also Hitler, to understand the desiring-machine (1995: 248).
manifesto-moglen.txt
Eben Moglen (2003) '\DEF\MYTITLE{DOTCOMMUNIST MANIFESTO}' in Ivet Curlin, Anna Devic, Natasa Ilic, Dejan Krsic, Sabina Sabolovic, eds., What, How & For Whom: on the occasion of the 152nd anniversary of the Communist Manifesto, Zagreb: arkzin, pp. 216-223.
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'A specter is haunting multinational capitalism - the spectre of free information. All the powers of "globaism" have entered into an unholy alliance to exorcize this spectre: Microsoft and Disney, the World Trade Organization, the United States Congress and the Eurpean Commission.
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Where are the advocates of freedom in the new digital society who have not been decried as pirates, anarchists, communists? Have we not seen that many of those hurling the epithets were merely thieves in power,whost talk of "intellectual property" was nothing more than an attempt to retain unjustifiable privileges in a society irrevocably changing? But it is acknowledged by all the Powers of Globalism that the movement for freedom is itself a Power, and it is high time that we should publish our views in the face of the whole world, to meet this nursery tale of the Specter of Free Information with a Manifesto of our own.' (Moglen, 2003: 216)
manifesto-morenotes.txt
Annotated bibliography for http://www.46LiverpoolSt.org/Manifest
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to mark the 153.35th aniversary (very precise detail needed when I know when/if it will be published - original date mid Feb 1848)
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[add illustrations - in this order, how many? all to scale with 1:5 or whatever declared - very formal and library-like]
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Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto (1848), ed. Frederic L. Bender, New York: W.W. Norton & Co. 1988, ISBN 0-393-95616-4
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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, 'The Communist Manifesto' (1848), in Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan, New York: Prometheus Books 1988, ISBN 0-87975-446-X
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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, 'The Communist Manifesto' (1848), in eds. Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, The Communist Manifesto Now, Rendlesham: The Merlin Press 1998, ISBN 0-85036-473-6
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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, 'The Communist Manifesto' (1848), in ed. Dirk J. Struik, Birth of The Communist Manifesto, New York: International Publishers 1993, ISBN 7178-0320-1
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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition (1848), London: Verso 1998, ISBN 1-85984-898-2
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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), trans. Samuel Moore, London: Pluto Press 1996, ISBN 0-7453-1034-6
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Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), ed. Samuel H. Beer, New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts 1987, ISBN 0-88295-055-X
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Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), ed. David McLellan, Oxford: Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-283437-1
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Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), trans. Samuel Moore, Harmondsworth: Penguin 1974, ISBN 0-1402.0915-8
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Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), trans. Samuel Moore, Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics 1985, ISBN 0-14-044478-5
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Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), ed. Christopher Phelps, New York: Monthly Review Press 1998, ISBN 0-85345-936-3
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Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), trans. Paul M. Sweezy, New York: Monthly Review Press 1998, ISBN 85345-062-5
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Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Kommunistiska Manifestet (1848), trans. Per-Olaf Mattsson, Stockholm/Malmš: Vertigo Fšrlag 1998, ISBN 91-973112-0-0
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Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Det Kommunistiske Manifest (1848), Oslo: Falken Forlag 1984, ISBN 82-7009-178-2
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Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Det Kommunistke Manifestet (1848), trans. Frans Masareel, Oslo: Falken Forlag 1984, ISBN 82-7009-178-2
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Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifest (1848), eds. Tim Brennan and Geoff Cox, London: Working Press 1999, ISBN 1-870736-48-6
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Carlos Marx and Federico Engels, Manifiesto Comunista (1848), Madrid: B‡sica de Bolsillo Akal 1997, ISBN 84-460-0927-7
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Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto Comunista (1848), Sao Paulo: Ched 1982, 80-1063
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Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifest Komunisticke Partije (1848), trans. Mosa Pijade, Zagreb: Bastard Biblioteka 1998, ISBN 953-6542-07-2
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Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (1848), Stuttgart: Reclam 1998, ISBN 3-15-008323-0
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Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifeste du Parti Communiste (1848), trans. Corinne Lyotard, Paris: Librairie GŽnŽrale Francaise 1973, ISBN 2-253-01491-5
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Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 'The Manifesto of the Communist Party' (1848), in ed. Mark Cowling, The Communist Manifesto: New Interpretations, trans. Terrell Carver, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 1998, ISBN 0-7486-1035-9
manifesto-morenotes.txt
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), Moscow 1999, ISBN 5-7027-0922-5
manifesto-morenotes.txt
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), Peking: Foreign Languages Press 1977, 1/1-E-736
manifesto-morenotes.txt
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), London: Lawrence & Wishart 1983, ISBN 0-85315-732-4
manifesto-morenotes.txt
Karl Marx and Friederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), trans. and ed. Frederick Engels, New York: International Publishers 1998, ISBN 0-7178-0241-8
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'The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first existence for all industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real condition of life, and his relations with his kind.
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The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.'1
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Thus, Marx and Engels expressed the transition to the industrial mode of production. Undoubtedly, the mode of production has evolved since 1848, but it has not simply transformed into something else; the present phase of production still remains predicated on the speed and frequency of communications technologies as well as its organization on a global scale. Clearly then and now, these forces are not immutable, and what appears solid is in dialectical conflict with a 'melting vision'. Marshall Berman in All That is Solid Melts into Air (quoting the quote) describes this dialectical conception of modernity in fluid terms: 'it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal'.2 For Berman, what appears solid is fundamentally subject to change and influence, endlessly becoming less solid. But is this coherent vision of useful irony and contradiction still valid?
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'Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei' was first printed as a pamphlet in mid-February 1848, in the office of the Workers' Educational Association (Communistischer Arbeiterbildungsverein), 46 Liverpool Street, Bishopsgate, in the city of London. Since that date it has been reproduced in countless contexts and editions - making it not only one of the most widely read texts but also one whose message has been made literally manifest on a number of occasions to various and arguable levels of success. In a sense, it needs no introduction (and I'd hesitate to pitch myself alongside those lofty historians and intellectuals who have introduced it anyway - what do I know?). It lends itself to and requires translation and reinterpretation. Nevertheless, this process of translation and reproduction from one specific historical and cultural context to the next reveals some contradictory responses. And surely its lasting power lies in these lived contradictions?
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There was some useful irony in the sheer volume of publishing activity at the point of the 150th anniversary subjecting it to the rules and mechanisms of contemporary marketing. A classic example is the Verso edition The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition, with its high production values and silky red bookmark ribbon. Verso knowingly described it as the 'Prada handbag' edition, and it was received enthusiastically with an edition of 32,000, and by June 1999 had sold 21,000 in North America and 3,400 in the UK and other export. Clearly, this indicates something about its commodity status and the market forces in which Capital appears to have commodified radical politics as something reduced to both nostalgia and fashion simultaneously. Moreover, there is some danger in a project (like this) in rendering politics aesthetic; evoking Benjamin's preferred reading: 'Communism responds by politicizing art' (offering a politics of aesthetics).3 How would one begin to approach the design and packaging of such a book - to conceive of it in terms of form and function, its use and exchange value? To simply judge a book by its cover would be a grave mistake in almost all circumstances.
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Whilst Marxism remains to some (although not that many), a potent form of analysis or even social praxis (collective action), others have simply grown rather cynical of Capital's alleged triumphal claims. In 'post-communist' Eastern Europe this must be particularly evident. Slavoj Zizek's title for another very collectable anniversary edition, published in Zagreb, makes the point: 'The Spectre Is Still Roaming Around!'4
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There is a commonplace assumption that material structures of production have been all but swept away - into a mode of information for instance. On the contrary the publishing industry is a case in point, despite the introduction of computers into the process, books are still produced through mechanical lithographic reproduction that largely remains unchanged from 1848. Furthermore, the computers themselves are assembled in factories and on production lines. Associated technological imperialism 'may well serve as a adequate shorthand to designate that enormous properly human and anti-natural [alienated] power of dead human labour stored up in our machinery'.5 I am reminded here of a similar quote: 'Ironically, it is the very people whose labour is so carefully hidden inside the hygienic white boxes on the desks on the wired world... who will be left outside in the world their work creates. In this way, the production of the material infrastructure for the internet is itself erased under the sign of the universality of its language, its claim to speak for all and with every voice...'.6 The visibility of 'totalizing' global politics is increasingly rendered invisible through clever tricks and effective marketing. Importantly, technology does not determine change but reflects the development of capital still interested in profit above human suffrage. Late Capitalism according to the economist Ernst Mandel (1978) is capitalism in a purer form - commonly described as Multinational Capitalism with its relentlessly expanding global markets and increased mobility to ensure the cheapest work-force.
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Things change and things remain the same. Considered as a mode of production, capitalism is still based on the commodification of labour power, the private ownership of the means of production and hence the private appropriation of the surplus generated, with production organized for exchange and profit. In contrast, 'Statism' (Castells's term for the mode of production dominant in the state socialist or communist bloc) is based on the partial decommodification of labour power and state control over the means of production and appropriation of the surplus, with production organised towards maximizing the power of the state over society. In the 1970s according to Castells, a major global economical crisis necessitated restructuring on a global scale. Capitalist restructuring attempted to escape the social and political restrictions imposed by state-controlled industrial forces, by going global. In this way, information technologies were utilized and expanded to facilitate this organisational and growth in productivity through the development of multinational corporations. Ultimately, if only to dispute both versions of events as too straightforward, Castells asks: 'was the new technological paradigm a response by the capitalist system to overcome its internal contradictions? Or, alternatively, was it a way to ensure military superiority over the Soviet foe, responding to its technological challenge in the space race and nuclear weaponry?'7 Fashion is closely associated with war.
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Clearly material concerns remain, yet are obscured in the rhetorical language of global and technological networks. For example, according to Doreen Massey, globalization hides its political specificity and the agencies that regulate and produce it.8 The rhetoric of globalization suggests we live in a unitary world in which space and time have collapsed and distance imploded, propelled by an unstoppable force that produces international free-trade, the end of the Cold war, and so on. But this present 'world order', entirely consistent with Marx's view of 'capitalism' as a world system, is far from solid and is marked by tensions and contradictions at local-global levels. A more complex mapping would reveal preferred measurements, spatialities and geographies. This is what Massey refers to as 'two completely different geographical imaginations of the world' contrasting free-trade with tight immigration legislation.9
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In the new world order, power is collective and dispersed. The economist Doug Henwood explains: 'Right now it sure looks like a truly global ruling class is constituting itself through public institutions like the I.M.F. and private ones like the Davos World Economic Forums[...] with the U.N. and N.A.T.O. acting the part of imperial enforcers, and stock markets arranging ownership and discipline,'10 but these tendencies are more difficult to oppose or offer alternatives for. To Zizek, liberal capitalism manifests as the 'real' and remains solid despite the fact that everything around it is described in terms of fundamental technological change or scientific paradigm shifts. He is drawing on a (Lacanian) distinction between reality and the 'Real' that determines reality through its unerring generative 'logic'. Herein lies what Jameson calls the 'Sartrean irony'11 wherein the totalizing system is described so effectively that the subject feels powerless to effect any change. It's all too easy to not bother voting when a single vote makes no difference if it counts at all, and the whole system is a charade - now proved beyond doubt in the Presidential elections in the USA. Although generally out of favour, totalizing thinking (by this I mean, any consensus but including class politics, for instance) is not all bad, and may simply be a strategic means of making a convincing enough case for change (rather like representational politics was intended once upon a time). On the other hand if you wish to be negative about the term, the most obvious example of totalization on a global scale is globalization itself. The recent protests against globalization and the W.T.O. (Seattle, London, Prague, etc.) might figure here - although they tend to only highlight opposition, and unfortunately for the most part do not to suggest any kind of working alternative. Correspondingly, Zizek suggests we might more readily assume the apocalyptic end of history or nature rather than a mere workable alternative to the capitalist mode of production. Even the recent anti-corporate protests against globalization are only reluctantly characterised as anti-capitalist. The problem for Zizek is: 'how we are to reformulate a leftist, anti-capitalist political project in our era of global capitalism and its ideological supplement, liberal-democratic multi-culturalism.'12
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All this points to what Zizek characterizes as the 'post-political' condition wherein, for the most part, a regressive separation takes place between cultural and economic struggles - this is typified as Anthony Giddens' 'third way' or in the UK, New Labour's ludicrous notion of the 'radical centre' (until recently prevalent in the USA too). Under liberal rule, it would seem that the diversification of constituencies of oppression works against the idea of effective political agency based on social relations of production. Zizek sees this as partly the failure of identity politics, in that the political field has become dispersed and fragmented too. Upsetting many, he goes as far as to suggest that perverse and multiple subjectivities are generated by the present conditions of global capitalism. In fact, this is the trick of capitalism to incorporate and normalise any potential threat - 'queer is the new straight' and so on. Even the 'radical' counter-culture of hacking is big business these days - in a scenario where yesterday's hacker becomes tomorrow's business executive. Clearly, the nicely packaged versions of The Communist Manifesto require close reading to balance their decorative function. Thus capital neutralises opposition by it very liberal acceptance and pseudo-tolerance of difference. In the light of this, Zizek's recent parody of the manifesto (in The Ticklish Subject, 1999) lends currency and persuasively demands a 'recentring' of political consciousness. He playfully begins:
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'A spectre is haunting western academia, the spectre of the Cartesian subject. All academic powers have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: the New Age obscurantist... and the postmodern deconstructionist... the Habermasian theorist of communication... and the Heideggarian proponent of the thought of Being... the cognitive scientist... and the Deep Ecologist... the critical (post-) Marxist... and the feminist. Where is the academic orientation which has not been accused by its opponents of not yet properly disowning the Cartesian heritage?'13
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Zizek is concerned to address this 'absent centre' of political consciousness, seemingly replaced by multiple forms of subjectivity that tend to obscure socio-economic forces. Contemporary forms of domination are expressed as fluid, multiple and rhizomic in structure like the theories that support it. The multiculturalist tendency extends to multinational interests and multimedia technologies seamlessly expressing freedom of choice, the free market and free internet connections. In contrast, new media commentators tend to think old materialist critical frameworks that embrace a concept of ideology must be rejected as they do not take sufficient account of the ways in which subjectivity is being produced as multiple and 'decentred'. The problem for Mark Poster (himself a lapsed Marxist) is that the idea of emancipatory politics is based on the idea that autonomous subject-agents can free themselves from externally imposed constraints, as if subjectivity itself was not the result of its own set of social and historical conditions, and subsequently as decentred is as the structures of the internet itself.14 He argues that critical frameworks need to be upgraded and dismisses the critical tools inherited from the industrial age, rejecting Marx for concentrating too heavily on action and institutions, and neglecting language. This may be the case but, in a way this claim in itself is subject to the same critique it proposes. In other words, the most obvious case of ideology at work is evident in the '... privileged place, somehow exempted from the turmoils of social life, which enables some subject-agent to perceive the very hidden mechanism that regulates social visibility and non-visibility'.15 So too, with this essay of course.
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There have been unrelenting attempts to unlock deterministic interpretations of Marx's work on ideology. For example, Louis Althusser set about examining the possibility that ideology possesses degrees of autonomy and internal logic.16 In this way, in addition to viewing the State as the overt 'machine of repression' (what Althusser calls the 'repressive state apparatuses'), there are also more subtle and less-violent articulations of social institutions (the 'ideological state apparatuses'), that discipline us into the kind of subjectivity most suitable for the continuation of the existing relations of production - this is what he calls a process of 'interpellation'. Interpellated subjects consider themselves as being free to 'choose' and liberated from social control when in actuality the ideological matrix holds them firmly in place. This offers a neat analogy for the spurious choices that much interactivity offers the user, better described for the most part by 'interpassivity'.17 Interpassivity neatly summarises the tendency to remain active whist being passive through another, reversing the conventional sense of acting through an agent while remaining passive. His example is the engagement with the virtual pet Tamagotchi that demands attention as if alive - what he calls 'pure demand', expressing a desire that is displaced into an inanimate object.18 He draws the comparison with people's active engagement with what they think matters at a political level whilst ultimately remaining passive and subject to the bigger picture of the logic of Capital. This spurious 'freedom of choice' lies at the very heart of capitalist ideology, rather like the freedom to choose any of the supplied books on offer that accompany this essay. After all, there is the glaringly obvious fact that: 'There is no Capitalist Manifesto'.19
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Perhaps Capital comes close but is a partial view...
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Manifestos are currently fashionable (fashionable enough to feature in a magazine of art and culture such as this). A search on the internet will offer countless examples of 'alternative' polemic views - such as A Manifesto for Bad Subjects in Cyberspace.20 It therefore seems all the more important to remain sceptical of the proliferation of manifestos and calls for change if they do not embrace contradiction. If contradiction is inherent in these processes, then change on all levels is inherent too. Change is built into the system, especially if the system is a generative one. For Zizek, the 'spectre of ideology' remains a 'generative matrix' regulating what appears 'old' or 'new', visible or hidden, manifest or latent, possible or impossible, as the case may be.21 The Communist Manifesto is fundamentally a description of this dialectical movement and contradictory aspect - what Berman calls 'revolutionary dynamism'.22 Moreover, globalization renders its thesis more actual than ever and the contradictions it describes appear even more pronounced and hence demonstrate the dialectical poetics of the phrase: 'all that is solid melts into air'.
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* This essay draws upon an earlier version written with Tim Brennan, and reflects upon the web site http://www.46LiverpoolSt.org/manifest, produced in collaboration with Adrian Ward.
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1 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto. London: Penguin, 1985) p.83.
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2 Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso, 1999) p.15.
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3 Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' in Illuminations, London: Fontana, 1992, p.235. A fuller quote would be: 'This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art'.
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4 Slavoj Zizek, The Spectre Is Still Roaming Around!, [an introduction to the 150th Anniversary Edition of The Communist Manifesto], Zagreb: Bastard Books, 1998.
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5 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991) p.35.
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6 Sean Cubitt, 'Orbis Tertius', in Third Text 47 (Summer, 1999) p.6.
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7 Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, Oxford: Blackwell 1996, p.51
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8 Doreen Massey, 'Problems with Globalisation', Soundings, issue 7, Autumn 1997.
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9 Massey, p.10.
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10 Doug Henwood, 'Does it mean anything to be a Leninist in 2001?' (for the conference Towards a Politics of Truth: The Retrieval of Lenin, Essen, Germany, February 4, 2001) published on Nettime, 10 Feb 2001.
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11 Jameson, Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). 1991: xviii
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12 Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: the absent centre of political ontology (London: Verso, 1999), p.4.
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13 Zizek, Ibid, p.1-2.
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14 Mark Poster, The Second Media Age. (Cambridge: Polity Press 1995).
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15 Zizek, 1997:3
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16 Louis Althusser, 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)'. In Zizek, ed. Mapping Ideology, (London: Verso 1997), pp.100-140.
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17 Zizek, The Spectre Is Still Roaming Around!, p.55
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18 Zizek, Ibid., p.62 but also 'Is it Possible to Traverse the Fantasy in Cyberspace?', in E & E. Wright, eds., The Zizek Reader. Oxford: Blackwell 1999, pp. 102-124.
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19 Slavoj Zizek, The Spectre Is Still Roaming Around!, p.18.
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20 http://www.eserver.org/bs/18/Manifesto.html
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21 Slavoj Zizek, ed., Mapping Ideology (London: Verso 1997).
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22 Berman, p.20.
marx(cyber)-dyerwitheford.txt
Nick Dyer-Witheford (1999), Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism, Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
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The information age has not dissolved old antagonisms between capital and labour but enhanced them. Nick Dyer-Witheford argues that computers, telecommunications and genetic engineering are 'shaped and deployed as instruments of an unprecedented, worldwide order of general commodification' whilst paradoxically also hold the potential for a (communist) sharing of wealth (1999: 2). He is no apologist for 'actually existing socialism' (that has all but disappeared), but wishes to focus critical attention on the current 'informational commissars' (1999: 7; that are difficult to discern almost as if Stalin has erased them from view). To many neo-liberal commentators, if totalitarianism was the inevitable outcome of Marxism, then the networked computer represented actually existing freedom - as if. Dyer-Witheford's approach considers the attacks on Marxism of neo-liberal and post-Marxist critique that claims Marxism is reductive and economically determinist (such as the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe). To Dyer-Witheford, some of these critiques point to there is simply too much unfinished business (1999: 9) - on the contrary, it is capitalism that is reductive and economically determinist.
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The two figures of Marx and Babbage are often opposed to indicate the tension (or class war) between the revolutionary and someone engaged in the scientific organisation of industrial capitalism to automate labour. Marx's chapter 'Machinery and Large Scale Industry' in Capital is somewhat of a response to Babbage's writings and the struggle of human and machine labour, as well as the expansion of the world market. In the mid nineteenth century as now, scientific advances were adopted by capitalists at the expense of all else. Drawing upon the Grundrisse, Dyer-Witheford explains this in terms of the contestation over 'general intellect':
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'capital's drive to dominate living labour through machinery will mean that "the creation of real wealth comes to depend less and less on labour time and on the amount of labour employed" than on "the general state of science and on the progress of technology." The key factor in production will become the social knowledge necessary for technoscientific innovation - "general intellect." (1999: 4; quoting the Grundrisse, pp. 705-6)
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In contrast, Daniel Bell's update of his 'postindustrial' thesis (as a further developmental wave of his preindustrial, industrial and postindustrial societies) characterises the 'information revolution' in the following terms, as:
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'a set of reciprocal relations between the expansion of science, the hitching of science to a new technology, and the growing demands of news, entertainments and instrumental knowledge, all in the context of rapidly increasing population, more literate and educated, living in a vastly enlarged world that is now tied together, almost in real time....' (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 21; this emphasis on information is in keeping with Mark Poster's 'mode of information', 1990, that supersedes the mode of production)
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Industrial production is superseded by information, and capital is regenerated in a new form suitable to the general state of science and progress of technology. Bell proposes that knowledge will replace labour and capital as the main factor of production (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 19; along with issues of subjectivity and language of post-structuralism). This new crucial material resource is technoscientific knowledge tied to informational technologies. According to this rhetoric, any reference to the exploitation of labour, alienation, and the concentration of wealth are seen to be only outmoded references to the industrial period. Indeed the information revolution will engender the classless society, nonalienated work and the dissolution of property that was once promised by Marxism itself. The irony is that Marxist logic is used against itself in such models. Dyer-Witheford puts this as: 'In a classic dialectical trope, historical materialism has been dematerialized' (1999: 28). History has simply refused to end - making Fukuyama's 'end of history' misguided.
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This is clearly not to say that Marxism requires some rethinking. It is bound to an industrial period that has long passed and some of its central tenets are outmoded. For instance, it presupposes the central importance of the material base over the superstructure in such a way that information and knowledge are seen as secondary. Put another way, in the information age, it places too much importance on hardware as opposed to software. The proletariat as the privileged agents of change also requires some attention under the present condition of production (see elsewhere).
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Workerless factory:
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Against accusations that Marx is technologically-determinist, there is a complex interaction of social and technological forces at work defining what would now be termed a 'socio-technical system' (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 40). The machine to Marx represents the potential for further enslavement and liberation from certain tasks and the opening up of new variations. The extreme situation is the image of the automated, worker-less factory, what Ernest Mandel calls the 'absolute inner limit of the capitalist mode of production' where surplus value can no longer be created because living labour has been eliminated. Indeed, Mandel observes that: 'Capitalism is incompatable with fully automated production in the whole of industry...' (Dyer-Witheford 1999: 45; quoting Mandel's Late Capitalism). He also rejects the idea that labour would shift to research activities as this would undermine the essential division between manual and intellectual labour. All this means, to the hopeful Mandel, that the fate of capitalism is inevitable under current technological conditions. This is not simply a case if capitalism automating itself to destruction (evoking machines turning on human society) but that the inner conflict between expansion and profit will create the conditions of antagonism required for its destruction. Sharing a determinist trajectory with Daniel Bell, Mandel's scenario is the counter-thesis to the enthusiastic celebration of the information revolution - in this case, information is tied to the logic of capital and evokes revolution.
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The worker-less factory is also discussed in more detail by David Noble in Progress without People (1995) in which he describes computerised labour processes. This is not simply a more efficient example of Taylorist scientific management but also an example of the need to exert complete control and to break the power of skilled unionised machinists (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 49-50). This can be read as an extension of what Adorno and Horkheimer predicted in their critique of scientific and technological rationality (1997; written 1947). To them, the forces of production have become the forces of domination, and moved beyond the factory to the culture industry at large (Fredric Jameson has more to add on this). Capitalism thus exerts a technological power made explicit in 'generalized or social Taylorism' that 'extends capitalist control of knowledge beyond the factory to society as a whole' (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 51; citing the work of Frank Webster and Kevin Robins as 'radical pessimists'). The debates about the role of culture in terms of domination are complex and raise a whole strata of claims and counter-claims in cultural studies from the decentralising of the human subject to the accusation of cultural studies as 'designer socialism'. Along with all that is solid, Marxist commitment has melted too, according to Sivanandan. (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 59; A. Sivanandan's sense of commitment is compared with the 'culturalism' of Stuart Hall). The key factor here is that human agency has been variously described under the conditions of the information revolution - a subjectivity that has been constituted differently in the 'socio-technical system'.
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Autonomista:
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Despite its various forms, there is a consistency in Marxist thinking that agency, antagonism, and self-organisation are crucial factors. For Dyer-Witheford, these concerns coalesce in 'autonomist Marxism' suitable to a contemporary engagement with technology (1999: 64) - not post-Marxism but 'Marx beyond Marx' (Negri, 1991). Autonomist Marxism considers the informational apparatus of capitalism as a further stage of its regeneration. It proposes that new forms are instruments of domination but also that they present new opportunities for resistance leading to an alternative vision of communication and community (actually existing communism). In order to develop and sustain the information technology sector, a new labour force also had to be produced (including systems operators, programmers, computer scientists, technicians, software engineers, designers, computer-literate office workers, and so on). Correspondingly, new forms of antagonisms have arisen, most notoriously in the form of the hacker with the potential to perform knowing acts of sabotage. Also new forms of collective action can take place in virtual space as in the case of virtual sit-ins, simply using communications networks to mobilise support of particular causes or the forming of 'virtual communes' (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 128). [I discuss these in more detail elsewhere]
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Autonomists emphasise labour, but not simply in terms of capitalist exploitation to produce surplus value, but labour as creative human energy - what Marx calls 'the living, form-giving flame' (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 65). In this scenario, the worker is placed at the centre as the active subject of production providing skills, cooperation and the innovation required for capitalism - that attempts to command labour as its passive object. The proletariat is defined in terms of this struggle for autonomy - as the collective working class subject not simply as capital's object of labour power. Negri sees the proletariat as a 'dynamic subject, an antagonistic force tending toward its own independent identity' (in Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 66). Living labour is thus expressed as the desire for autonomy from capital.
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The constant revolutionising of the means of production is capital's way of regenerating itself and breaking the alliances and collectives that oppose it. It does not wish to destroy it of course, as it is fundamental to its operations, but subdue its oppositional stance - and does so by turning the whole of society into a site of production (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 67; citing the work of Mario Tronti). Essential to this concept, is the expansion of the idea of productive labour to include reproductive labour as well as unpaid forms (thereby adding students and homeworkers to the mix - as well as those involved in the production of free software of course).
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(Note: The redefinition of 'proletarian' is further explained by its original meaning describing someone who only has the ability to reproduce themselves according to Peter Linebaugh, extending the Marxist interpretation as someone with only their labour to sell (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 107).)
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The autonomists call this restructuring aspect the 'cycle of struggle' (from which Dyer-Witheford takes the subtitle for his book) and recognise that resistance needs to transform itself in parallel to this process of renewal. The restructuring of capital and the recomposition of the proletariat chase each others tails - in what Tronti calls a spiralling 'double helix' (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 68). However unlike capital that needs labour, labour doesn't require capital; thus is potentially 'autonomous' and can use its creative energy differently.
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Given that technology is used as an instrument of control over labour, the struggle against it also requires an engagement with the technical apparatus. Clearly technological innovation is bound up with capital's restructuring and technologised managerial control. In general, the autonomists recommended that workers resist the controlling effects of technology by active refusal rather than passive acceptance. In Domination and Sabotage, Negri advocates a refusal to work; that 'workers should stop the innovations used against them - if necessary, by sabotage' (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 70). The creative power to use technology differently, to reappropriate it, rests in the workers themselves as they are the ones who have the expertise to operate it, what Negri calls '"invention power" - the creative capacity on which capital depends for its incessant innovation' (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 71; an explicit example is the activist Franco Berardi's involvement in the network of politicised pirate radio as part of the autonomist movement). The contemporary intersections of activism and creative use of computer technologies is a case in point. As an active part of the 'process of deconstructing and reconstructing technologies' (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 72), creative labour can reappropriate the instruments that are part of its very domination in the cycle of struggle between labour and capital. Transformation is embedded in creative human action.
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Autonomist writings define closely the ways in which informatics have changed the nature of work. These innovations serve to limit the oppositional power of the collective worker, leaving them fragmented, dispersed, and under different conditions of work characterised by globalisation. Proletarian autonomy involved in direct production in the factory appears to be a thing of the past. The autonomists propose the category of the 'socialised worker' to describe the worker now extended through production and reproduction from the factory to society itself (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 80; attributing the term to Romano Alquati and later extensively developed by Negri). This is the 'factory without walls'. The production process now extends to all aspects of production and reproduction: exemplified by changes in higher education - once a site of learning transformed into training and/or corporate research facilities (Note: Universities have become more and more subject to the industrial requirements of capital acting as research and training facilities for hig-technology development. Accordingly the conditions are right for academics to work with other oppositional social groups more than ever before under the conditions of 'general intellect' - see later notes on this crucial concept.) Negri claims the working day has been transformed into the life-span into the full realisation of Marx's concept of 'real subsumption' (as the swallowing of society by capital) (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 81). All this, intensifies the class struggle for Negri, in a synthesis of old working class collective organisation and new social movements.
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Negri proposes that the control of communication (rather than the wage in Marx) is the emergent arena of antagonism (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 85; in this concentration on communication he is clearly influenced by structuralist and post-structuralist thinking). He claims that capital tries to capture the communicative capacity of the socialised labour force and turn it into information. Any critique of exploitation must recognise this in the 'information factory'. Opposition to capital for Negri, in the form of the anti-capitalist subject is 'rooted in the communicative interconnections of socialized production' (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 87) - or to put it in the manner of the well-known hacker slogan 'information wants to be free' (wants to become communication again in Negri's terms to avoid the na•ve technological determinism).
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--
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Globalisation:
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In global capitalism, development and underdevelopment are held in dialectical tension. In 1975, Mario Montano describes two opposing dynamics: 'on the one hand, the "underdevelopment of development" - with the "Latin Americanization" of the United States and Europe - and on the other a "development of underdevelopment" with the industrialization of portions of the former Third World.' (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 133) All three former worlds are thus combined to exploit labour and maximise surplus value. (The world can only be described as an ideological mess when 'actually existing socialism' in the form of The People's Republic of China operates a political system of State Capitalism.) Alongside these restructuring processes is a new international division of labour in the service of globalised capital. This is a policy of (class) war - the enacting of real or symbolic violence on those without protection. Consequently, Dyer-Witheford explains, opposition takes the form of peace action in the coalition of forces (trade unionists, feminist, ecologists, indigenous peoples for instance) (1999: 157) - in the UK, represented in the anti-war protests, before, during and after Blair/Bush's second Gulf war (2003). The concept of 'netwar' emphasises the importance of communicative action whether for violent or peaceful ends.
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--
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General Intellect:
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The concept of 'general intellect' has become immensely important in discussions around contemporary forms of class antagonism and discussions on the knowledge economy. The original source is a section in the Grundrisse (1981) called 'Fragment on Machines' in which Marx describes that at a certain point in capitalist development, real wealth will be measured not on labour time in production but on technological expertise and organisation. The crucial element will be the 'general powers of the human head', 'general social knowledge', 'social intellect' owing to the increasing power of the importance of machinery (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 220; quoting Marx directly). The productive forces of the intellect, of human knowledge and skills are incorporated into capital itself. At the time, Marx is thinking of the increasing importance of automatic systems for production and the networks of its communication, the world market. The concept of the general intellect prefigured networked communications technologies, human-machine subjectivities and their importance for the restructuring of capital.
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The critical argument, in Marx, is that the general intellect unleashes contradictions by combining scientific knowledge and social cooperation. Firstly, as less and less labour is needed capitalism undermines its very social order that is based on class exploitation. Secondly, the increasingly social nature of labour undermines private ownership and systems of wage payment. Through the concept of general intellect, capital can be seen to be setting the conditions for its collapse.
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The descriptions seem prophetic yet the optimism appears misplaced (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 221). He points to the work of a group of French intellectuals associated with the journal Futur AntŽrior in search of a more hopeful scenario (the group includes many of the exported key players in the autonomia group including Negri and Paolo Virno, plus Michael Hardt, Maurizio Lazzarato, et al). Building on the concept of general intellect, and assuming it to be current, they begin to analyse the conditions in which capitalism has restructured itself to cope with its contradictions. They argue that the high-tech economy is supported by 'mass intellectuality' - a subjective element of general intellect (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 222). It is in this context, that Negri and Lazzarato propose the term 'immaterial labour' to describe the nature of work in a scenario where information and communication dominate the process of production. They conclude that capital appears to have successfully contained this 'mass intellectuality' within its structures by the complex management and control of knowledge. Therefore new forms of antagonism derive from this limited access and exclusions to what should be generally available. It is easy to see evidence of this in antagonisms over intellectual property for instance.
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The new antagonisms can also be seen in new management techniques that appear to place value on creativity, enterprise and problem-solving - Dyer-Witheford points to Negri and Lazzarato's discussion of 'participative management' in this connection (1999: 223). All the same, these are still 'techniques of power' in restructured form that appears to grant special privileges to active and creative labour. Lazzarato even thinks the technique is more totalitarian than the production line as it involves the willing subjectivity of the worker in the participatory process (1999: 224). As with interactive art, participation, whether through teamwork in the workplace or over global communications networks is thoroughly contradictory according to Lazzarato. As a result, conflict arises between capital's objective control and the relatively autonomous subjective nature of the work. The intellectual and creative activity of hacking is a prime example of the contradiction at the heart of capital's attempt at control as it is both necessary and criminalised when it is out of control. The deployment of communications technologies confirms the pertinence of the concept of general intellect (but it remains in question just how general it actually is). However, its active contradictions are evident in the willingness of some 'participants' to wrest control from capital. Dyer-Witheford sees evidence of new alliances struggling to 'actualize "general intellect," not according to the privatizing, appropriative logic of capital, but in ways that are deeply democratic and collective, and hence truly "general"' (1999: 233). The open source movement is one obvious example of such a tendency. Emergent tendencies of collective refusal use the very communications technologies that capital has created in a dialectical fashion.
memory-scribner.txt
Charity Scribner (2005) _Requiem For Communism_ Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
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Memory has a shifting understanding and is clearly more complex than in living memory. In the technological lexicon, it applies to: RAM (random-access memory) where programs are created, loaded and run, in temporary storage. Whether these are written to hard memory, into the computer's hard drive becomes a useful analogy to the ways in which working memory is written and more specifically how collective memory is produced. Clearly all sorts of temporarily stored memories are deleted. History is full of such examples.
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The archive too, as an institution of memory, resonates in such descriptions. The term itself has uncomfortable associations: its roots are from 'arkhein', both 'to begin' and also 'to rule' or 'to command' (the roots are partly what Derrida's _Archive Fever_ refers to). Charity Scribner highlights the differences between archive 9a beginning, and rule-based system) and museum (that looks backwards) by invoking the distinction between collective memory and history in the work of Maurice Halbwachs (in his book 'On Collective Memory' of 1922) in which there is a perceived dividing line between internal and external knowledge. Memory multiplies and disperses as it flows as part of the collective experience, whereas history pretends that memory can be fixed, and that it can be distributed intact from one point in time to another and one one place to another.
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'If history is a monument that calcifies lived experience, memory is a condition. If history records, memory responds.' (2005: 37).
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What is important about the conception of collective memory in Halbwachs, and different from what Henri Bergson presents in _Matter and Memory_ (wherein memory is imprinted in the unconscious but with total retrieval a possibility), is that memory is scattered unevenly (engaging both remembering and forgetting) and its meanings can only come into being through social context and communication. As such memory can only exist as a work in progress which is in flux and exists as part of collective experience (and in this sense comes close to a form of curatorial practice).
metaphor-bateson.txt
From a Brian Holmes posting to nettime, 18 Aug 2007.
metaphor-bateson.txt
The book is called Our Own Metaphor, and it includes at the end these statements by Mary Catherine Bateson:
metaphor-bateson.txt
"Any kind of a representation within a person of something outside depends on there being sufficient diversity within him to reflect the relationships in what he perceives... The possibility of seeing something, the possibility of talking about it and probably the possibility of loving, depends in every case on arriving in yourself at a comparable complexity... We can't relate to anything unless we can express its complexity through the diversity that is ourselves."
metaphor-bateson.txt
This was more or less the meaning what she got out of the conference (referring to a week-lomg seminar held at Burg Wartenstein, Austria, in 1968, involving her father Gregory Bateson) which is the idea that "Every person is his own central metaphor."
mind-bateson.txt
Gregory Bateson (2000), Steps to an Ecology of Mind (first published 1971), Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press.
mind-bateson.txt
The 1999 foreword by Mary Bateson reminds the reader that much has changed since the first publication of Gregory Bateson's Steps to an Ecology of Mind in 1971. It, however, makes an important point in that recent research on the human genome seems rather 'triumphalist' and can distract from the fact that the 'individual phenotype is formed by the interaction of multiple genetic factors, not by any one of them in isolation; and all of them are exposed in a complex dance with the surrounding environment, air and earth and other organisms' (2000: vii). This represents a shift of emphasis away from things to the interactions of things.
mind-bateson.txt
The 'steps' of the title represent points of reference, a mechanism for drawing together diverse essays and disciplines such as anthropology, communication theory, psychology, biology and cybernetics. In very general terms, Bateson's argument is that minds are the aggregates of ideas and the 'the ecology of mind is an ecology of pattern, information, and ideas that happen to be embodied in things - material forms' (from his Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity, 1972, quoted 2000: x). For Bateson, all ideas have to be understood within this broad ecological perspective whether understanding the words in a sentence or biological evolution. The ecological aspect is used to emphasise that ideas interact, in such a way that certain ideas dominate and other ideas become extinct, and as such seem to be subject to laws or limits. He asks: 'what are the necessary conditions for stability (or survival) of such a system or subsystem?' (2000: xxiii)
mind-bateson.txt
This approach might be called 'recursive epistemology' (Peter Harries-Jones's phrase in Recursive Vision, 1995, quoted in Bateson, 2000: xiii) in that it articulates processes of knowing but also considers the relationship between the knower and the known (and therefore has much in common with contemporary anthropology that considers the subjectivity of the observer). The 'inductive' (rather than deductive) tradition within science is that progress is made through the analysis of data leading to new concepts, predictions lead to hypotheses that are further tested by the analysis of new data - gradually improved until these 'heuristic concepts' can be seen to become more 'fundamental' principles (2000: xxvii). However, the data on offer is not the equivalent of actual objects but representations of these objects, and therefore a certain transformation or recoding takes place between the object and the scientist. Furthermore, the selection of data is determined by what is it is possible to observe. The data is therefore never 'raw' or pure, but subject to transformations by the human subject and the instruments used. It is from this position of some scepticism over the verification of findings that the scientific process should proceed - and what Bateson calls a 'critical faculty' is required on the part of the scientist to balance this 'mass of quasi-theoretical speculation' (2000: xxviii).
mind-bateson.txt
Bateson takes a similar position on art, emphasising not representation as such, but transformation - 'not the message, but the code' (2000: 130). And he is not interested in simply decoding the message but identifying the rules by which the code to uncover its meaning, the meaning of the code itself. Therefore, a particular form of art, communicates in that particular way and not in another form as it that kind of message (perhaps partly unconscious). This anthropological basis begins to see the production of art, and art as product, in terms of behaviours (Bateson, 2000: 147; and informs Roy Ascott's position; for instance, the application of cybernetic logic to learning in Bateson's 'The Logical categories of Learning and Communication,' pp. 279-308 can be compared to Ascott's radical pedagogy in 'The Construction of Change' 2003: 97-107). He says: 'in what form these rules exist we do not know, but presumably they are embodied in the very machinery which creates the transforms. [...] The explanatory world of substance can invoke no differences and no ideas but only forces and impacts. And, per contra, the world of form and communication invokes no things, forces, or impacts but only differences and ideas. (A difference that makes a difference is an idea. It is a "bit," a unit of information.)' (2000: 271-2; Bateson calls this 'double bind theory' informed by his understanding of reification).
mind-bateson.txt
Bateson recommends that scientific research should begin from two positions: the observations and the related fundamental known principles. If the two do not correspond, the observations are faulty or there is new insight into knowledge. For Bateson, advances in scientific thought come from a 'combination of loose and strict thinking' in which looseness is measured against 'rigid concreteness' (2000: 75), just as the process of learning takes place through trial and error (2000: 287). The scientist begins with an analogy, perhaps even a wild one, and then tests the analogy against formulations borrowed from the field from which he borrows the analogy (rather like the concept 'reification', as the movement from abstraction to the concrete perhaps - but perhaps I am simply using a loose analogy but not following it here). In this connection, Bateson points to the difference between homology and analogy in Zoology - something is homologous where two things are similar on a structural level (such as elephant trunk and human nose) but analogous where they demonstrate a similar use (elephant trunk and human hand) (2000:80). In this way, homologies are evidently engaged with contextual structure rather than content.
mind-bateson.txt
When Bateson uses the term 'context,' he is describing the ecology of ideas, and therefore any particular action is part of this ecological subsystem called context not an outcome or product of it. Paradoxes arise from this process precisely because the larger system is maintained by changes in its constituent subsystems (2000: 338-9; and as a consequence, this leads to his work around learning as not confined to participant in the learning environment).
mind-bateson.txt
Drawing upon systems theory, he argues that in the distinction between form and substance that underlies an analysis of matter, too much attention has been paid to substance at the expenses of form and pattern. It is easy to see from this, his interest in 'metalogues' (2000: 3-60, a conversation addressing a particular problem, where the structure of the conversation itself is relevant to the subject. This is reflexive, as, for instance, in a discussion about evolutionary theory where the conversation itself evolves in a somewhat parallel manner. In more general terms, this interdisciplinary approach lends itself to the understanding of human societies based upon the basic analogy between society and organism as complex systems.
mind-bateson.txt
Bateson's approach is more specifically informed by cybernetics that explains the course of events in terms of 'restraints', and that 'apart from such restraints, the pathways of change would be governed only by equality of probability' (2000: 405). In cybernetic observation, for example, a missing piece in a jigsaw puzzle is restrained by numerous factors including shape, colour, edges, orientation, etc.; similarly, a word in a sentence (in that, a certain letter is positioned as part of a text, and in so doing eliminates by restraint the other possibilities) or a part of an organism is explained through the analysis of restraints (Bateson, 2000: 406). In the case of the letter of the alphabet, information is quantified in negative terms as not being the other twenty-five possibilities - it is limited by the 'economics of alternatives' (2000: 409). A cybernetic explanation raises the question: 'is there a difference between "being right" and "not being wrong"?' (2000: 411). He is interested in the 'nontrivial' parallel of cybernetic explanation in considering information to other modes of logical or mathematical proof.
mind-bateson.txt
Two other restraining concepts are important in cybernetic explanation: 'feedback' and 'redundancy'. An important part of cybernetics is concerned with the formal characteristics of causal circuits and the condition of their stability. I have talked about feedback elsewhere. The patterning or predictability of particular events within a larger aggregate of events is technically called 'redundancy' by communications engineers (Bateson, 2000: 412). For the monkey to type Shakespearian prose, he/she would have to recognise deviations from and the patterning of prose. In this way, communication can be seen to be patterning:
mind-bateson.txt
'If then we say that a message has "meaning" or is "about" some referent, what we mean is that there is a larger universe of relevance consisting of message-plus-referent, and that redundancy or pattern or predictability is introduced into this universe by the message.' (Bateson, 2000: 413)
mind-bateson.txt
Redundancy exists if the receiver of a message can guess, despite some missing elements, the missing items with better than random success, hence differentiating between signal and noise.
mind-bateson.txt
'All that is not information, not redundancy, not form and not restraints - is noise, the only possible source of new patterns.' (Bateson, 2000: 416)
mind-bateson.txt
Society:
mind-bateson.txt
Bateson sees social change in these terms, as a slippage of the system in which there is the possibility that a variable my reach a point of crisis. The individual organism works in much the same way in that parts of the mind relate to the whole of the mind, so that a sense of consciousness and purpose arise. Bateson sees consciousness as put out of balance, as a pathology, by effective technology that supplements the purposes of consciousness (2000: 440). His concern is not technophobic, but that the feedback loops are not fully developed to maintain the balance of the system. Here is an ecological view in the clearest sense:
mind-bateson.txt
'It may well be that consciousness contains systematic distortions of view which, when implemented by modern technology, become destructive of the balances between man [sic], his [her] society, and his [her] ecosystem.' (Bateson, 2000: 446)
mind-bateson.txt
He explains that the computations of the mind can be confused by contradictions:
mind-bateson.txt
'It is in our power, with our technology, to create insanity in the larger system of which we are parts.' (2000: 473)
mind-bateson.txt
For Bateson, the rules of the game (following games theory), backed by computers, have been used to inform social and cultural policy. The rules become more and more dangerously rigid when the rules should be changed. There are many dangers in applying cybernetic theory unless it is recognised that there is also 'latent in cybernetics the means of achieving new and perhaps more human outlook, a means of changing our philosophy of control'. (2000: 485)
mind-bateson.txt
He sees the greatest ecological need is the propagation of ideas about ecology (2000: 513). The problem remains how to communicate a better ecological perspective, whilst recognising that this is an ecological problem in itself.
mind-bateson.txt
Plus c'est la meme chose, plus ca change - Bateson actually says the aphorism is wrong, that the reverse is the case: a constancy of some variable is maintained by changing other variables. The same logic applies to learning, and to social change.
mind-bateson.txt
Dream (add to Debord):
mind-bateson.txt
Dreams are considered metaphoric, in that they indirectly refer to the waking world. Unlike a play where the stage and theatrical apparatus allows the audience to understand the actions as illusion, in the dream, no such framing device is placed around the sense of reality unfolding. As Bateson sees it: 'The partial negative - "This is only metaphor" - is absent.' (2000: 428)
mind-bateson.txt
Dualism:
mind-bateson.txt
Western cultures abound in bipolarities - such as the politics of the right-left, sex differentiation, god and the devil, and are imposed on relatively non-dual phenomena such as old-young age, parent-child, labour versus capital, etc. according to Bateson; and in general, Western cultures lack the ability to apply triangular systems. The dualist tendency should not occlude the recognition of other systems, evident in other cultures (2000: 95).
mind-bateson.txt
Degeneration:
mind-bateson.txt
Borrowed from communications engineering, a 'regenerative' or 'vicious circle' is a chain of variables that progressively increases, leading to a greater intensity, a 'degenerative' or 'self-corrective' circle differs in that there will be feedback - such as a thermostat where the system self-corrects (Bateson, 2000: 109; thus, 'ordure real-time' is not generative and degenerative, but simply degenerative).
mind-bateson.txt
Autonomy:
mind-bateson.txt
In general, individual autonomy is related to the concept of 'free will' and is an essential component of democracy. Bateson asks what the relationship is between this positive expression of democratic spirit and 'compulsive negativism'. Although a negative viewpoint is of the same order of abstraction as autonomy, how do we make a judgement of the 'value' of such a position - through an evaluation of a particular habitual act or behaviour in relation to others and by setting it in a broader context (Bateson, 2000: 165; and here he is drawing upon the work of Margaret Mead).
modernity-berman.txt
All that is solid melts into air
modernity-berman.txt
Marshall Berman's introduction to 'All That Is Solid Melts Into Air' has the marvellous subtitle 'Modernity - Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow'; for our purposes, serving to encapsulate the dynamics of thinking backwards and forwards in time in the language of the everyday.
modernity-berman.txt
Early in this section he points to a dialectical conception of modernity that simultaneously unites and disunites human experience: 'it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal' (1983: 15). In this image of the maelstrom, a whirlpool effect is driven by new scientific discoveries, changes in industrial processes, the development of new technologies, and the speed of change (sounds like my washing machine). The forward and backward dynamics of Benjamin's angel of history (caught in the storm of progress) is instead described as a more spiral-like condition of being caught in the maelstrom (a large powerful whirlpool or any turbulent confusion). The definitive vision of modernity and portrayal of this 'state of perpetual becoming' (1983: 16) is referenced in the title of the book, taken from The Communist Manifesto of 1848:
modernity-berman.txt
'All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man [sic] is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real condition of life, and his relations with his kind.' (Marx & Engels, 1985: 83)
modernity-berman.txt
This is a vision and a time of change where human subjects might seize the opportunity to change the world that is changing them; and where a dialectics of modernisation and modernism emerges. Berman points to the early industrial revolution as a time when the public is aware of revolutionary changes in private, social and political life, but can also remember what it is to be pre-modern. It is within these conflicting relations that the idea of modernity arises. However, there is no such coherent vision in late modernity as 'we find ourselves today in the midst of a modern age that has lost touch with the roots of its own modernity' (1983: 17). Is it only with this corresponding sense of solidity that progress might be conceived?
modernity-berman.txt
Otherwise we are In Modernity's Wake (Phillipson, 1989) avoiding the Maelstrom perhaps, but are still cast adrift in icy waters (both off the coast of Norway according to the dictionary):
modernity-berman.txt
'In Old Norse, 'vaku' or 'vak' meant a hole in the ice. Subsequently, in its transformation into wake, 'vaku' came to refer to the stretch of smooth water left behind a moving ship, a ship moving perhaps through icy waters, an ice-breaker perhaps. Already the metaphor of wake begins to awaken us to art's experience of practice within contemporary culture; for practice does indeed find itself in arctic conditions, condemned to occupy the icy hole, to be in the freezing wake left by the engine of modernity... as that which holds art at arm's length at the culture's frozen margins: there art might be represented as a brass monkey, up to its waist in the icy waters, impotent, but still chattering.'(1989: 13)
modernity-berman.txt
Rather than being condemned to the frozen relations, Marx's melting vision reveals that what appears solid is fundamentally subject to change - and influence. Thus, he maintains faith in modernism and progress because of this contradictory aspect; for instance and to paraphrase Marx, Capitalism sows the seeds of its own destruction. The Communist Manifesto is fundamentally a description of this dialectical movement - what Berman calls revolutionary dynamism (1983: 20).
modernity-berman.txt
Berman tells us that for Nietzsche too, 'the currents of modern history were ironic and dialectical' and revealed untold possibilities against a backdrop of the absence of certainty and truth - what he called the 'death of God' (Beyond Good and Evil, 1882, quoted in Berman, 1983: 22). Again, there is faith in change: 'We moderns, we half-barbarians. We are in the midst of our bliss only when we are most in danger. The only stimulus that tickles us is the infinite, the immeasurable' (quoted in Berman, 1983: 23). But is this coherent vision of useful irony and contradiction still in place? Berman suggests not, and suggests that our thinking about modernity has stagnated. He says:
modernity-berman.txt
'Modernity is either embraced with a blind and uncritical enthusiasm, or else condemned... in either case, it is conceived as a closed monolith, incapable off being shaped or changed... Open visions of modern life have been supplanted by closed ones, Both/And by Either/Or.' (1983:24)
modernity-berman.txt
He is thus sceptical of many of the manifestos and cries for change if they do not embrace contradiction (such as the Manifesto of the Futurists - often seen as proto-fascist) despite the commendable wish to invent the world anew. Elsewhere, Benjamin adds that the Futurist obsession with the aesthetics of politics rather than the politics of aesthetics can lead only to one thing: war. And this is precisely what happened of course in an appropriate ironic twist where the leading figures were killed by the very machines they valorised. This rise of the 'Machine Aesthetic' and corresponding revolutionary claims for new technology appear to fall into this similar trap of uncritical enthusiasm on the one hand and condemnation on the other - unless contradiction is pursued. Berman even casts the Bauhaus, Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan as uncritical technocrats; as if humans subjects are reducible to machines too, programmed as individual and collective systems, entirely commodified. He rejects Foucault too for even casting our dreams as futile - merely a function of a discourse of power. This tendency is evident in a lot of recent talk too about the distinction between technology and biology: after all, we are only coded in DNA, our subjectivity is code too. Similarly he rejects more recent modernisms concerned with self-referentiality (pure form - the medium is the message), negation and opposition (pure revolt - auto-destruction), and post-modernism (complete and utter openness to anything, value-free). What has happened to human agency in all this? Do human subjects have little option under the all-conquering imperial advance of cultural and technological change? I'm attracted by the idea that contradiction is inherent in these processes so change on all levels is inherent too - change is built into the system.
modernity-berman.txt
Crucial to Berman, is this retention of progress and history as inherently unstable, restless, contradictory, dynamic and dialectical. He sees all the visions and revisions of modernity as ways of reconciling the present with the past and future, as a process of renewal: 'It may turn out, then, going back may be a way forward' (1983: 36).
modernity-berman.txt
More on modernity:
modernity-berman.txt
In Marx, the central drama is played out between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat - a play between the solid and melting vision of modern life to Berman (1999: 90). He describes the narrative:
modernity-berman.txt
'Nation states arise and accumulate great power, although that power is continually undermined by capital's international scope. Meanwhile, industrial workers gradually awaken to some sort of class consciousness and activate themselves against the acute misery and chronic oppression in which they live.' (1999: 91)
modernity-berman.txt
[link to Jeremy Valentine]
modernity-berman.txt
Berman points to the paradoxes of this transformative vision. Crisis and chaos appear to serve the vested interests of capital, strengthening it even. He explains that catastrophes are turned into lucrative opportunities for redevelopment and as an integrating force for the renewal of capital. The one real spectre is solid after all:
modernity-berman.txt
'In this world, stability can only mean entropy, slow death, while our sense of progress and growth is our way of knowing for sure that we are alive. To say that our society is falling apart is only to say that it is alive and well.' (Berman, 1999: 95)
modernity-berman.txt
The paradox is Marx, is that crisis is both the motor for the renewal of capital and the means of its demise. Similarly, Berman asks why we should believe in the solidity of a workers collective any more than we should believe in the commodities produced as a result of their labour, all produced under the conditions of capitalism itself. Here he is alluding to the critique of Marx that would see the privileging of labour and production over other creative human activities (such as in the work of Marcuse, especially in Eros and Civilisation, cited in Berman, 1999: 126). Negri would add detail here too in his expansion of the term proletariat.
modernity-berman.txt
If all new forms ossify, then how can a solid new alternative form emerge without being condemned to the same fate? Berman sees this danger evident in the ways in which creative work is transformed into enterprise, and even that revolutions themselves become commodified, promoted like any other product (1999: 114).
modernity-berman.txt
In dialectical style, Berman's point is that the inherent problems of modernity can only be fixed by an enhanced version of modernity, not by its demise. Modernity is filled with contradictory potentialities and so too Marxism. Berman doesn't want a way out of these contradictions but a deeper way into them:
modernity-berman.txt
'in spite of all, thrown together by the same forces that pull us apart, dimly aware of all we might be together, ready to stretch ourselves to grasp new human possibilities, to develop identities and mutual bonds that can help us hold together as the fierce modern air blows hot and cold through us all.' (1999: 129)
modernity-habermas.txt
JŸrgen Habermas, 'Modernity - An Incomplete Project' in Hal Foster, Postmodern Culture, pp.3-15.
modernity-habermas.txt
Preempting Jameson's preference for the phrase late-modernity rather than postmodernity, Habermas responds to ideas of postmodernity and posthistory in this essay 'Modernity - An Incomplete Project' (written as a talk in 1980 in receipt of the Theodor Adorno prize by the city of Frankfurt and later published under the title 'Modernity versus Postmodernity'). Firstly, and with some irony, he looks historically at the idea of modernity and traces the term 'modern', from its latin roots 'modernus' used in the 5th century to distinguish the present Christian times from the former Pagan past. To add some more detail here: Raymond Williams charts its early usage in English as something like 'just now', nearer the term 'contemporary' (which until the 19th century was 'co-temporary' - making it more 'of the same period' than 'of our own immediate time'). This is consistent with the association of the 'modern' in opposition to the 'ancient', but generally only in the 19th century did it become a positive term associated with improvement rather than mere alteration that needed further justification (Williams, 208-9). This for Habermas, serves to express the common understanding of 'modernity' as a transitional state between the old and the new - appearing at times of acknowledged renewal and fundamental change. Importantly, this coming obsession with 'the new' and the 19th century kind of aesthetic modernity is distinguished from being merely 'stylish' and therefore easily outmoded and in turn superseded - or should I say needing constant upgrades. Contemporary consumer culture is entirely contradictory in this respect as it is both obsessed with nostalgia and at the same time with the idea of almost instantaneous obsolescence, and can therefore be dismissed as ahistorical. New technology is the exemplary expression of this wanton post-modern consumerist condition of newness never being allowed to settle in the present, and without this remains useless unless attached to a concept of betterment. Habermas says 'the emphatically modern document no longer borrows this power of being a classic from the authority of a past epoch; instead a modern work becomes a classic because it has once been authentically modern' (4).
modernity-habermas.txt
Aesthetic modernity is characterised by a changed consciousness of the time and particularly through the metaphors of the vanguard and avant-garde. In this conception, newness is potentially revolutionary. He says:
modernity-habermas.txt
'The avant-garde understands itself as invading unknown territory, exposing itself to the dangers of sudden, shocking encounters, conquering an as yet unoccupied future. ... [but] this anticipation of an undefined future and the cult of the new mean in fact the exaltation of the present. The new time consciousness... does more than express the experience of mobility in society, of acceleration in history, of discontinuity in everyday life. The new value placed on the transitory, the elusive and the ephemeral, the very celebration of dynamism, discloses a longing for an undefiled, immaculate and stable present.' (5)
modernity-habermas.txt
In this way he accounts for the interruption of the continuum of history as 'modernity revolts against the normalising functions of tradition'; not ahistorical at all but rather against false history and historicism - in a version of posthistoricism even. He is drawing upon Benjamin's concept of 'Jetztzeit' in articulating the present as a moment of revelation. But this approach appears to be waning according to Habermas and he cites Peter BŸrger's notion of the 'post avant-garde' that appear to repeating the failed gestures of the early twentieth century (a trajectory more recently refashioned in Eric Hobsbawm 'Behind the Times' - this is not a classic text at all) - think of all the limp neo-Duchampian work of the past decade. And yet inherent in the any term that carries the prefix 'post', is that it suggests not a distinct break 9otherwise it would simply be a new word) but in some degree a continuation of the project it seeks to replace - Modernity as 'an incomplete project' is a case in point. This is in keeping with the classical root of the term itself according to the earlier etymological sources. The specific dangers of the distinct break thesis are covered elsewhere in this study as neoconservative, ahistorical and apolitical fashion. Having made such a bold statement, there are of course reasons to dispute the project of cultural and aesthetic modernity too, but this has always been the case with its internal critiques expressed in debates over art's autonomy from wider culture (although to questionable effect it must be admitted).
modernity-habermas.txt
The question of whether art is best served as a critical mirror to society or whether the separation of art and everyday life should be reconciled is a complex and contradictory undertaking and I hesitate to begin to engage with it as it lies outside the scope of my study. Following Adorno and no doubt with postmodernist art practice in mind (but citing the anarchism of dada and surrealism), Habermas is keen to point to the contradictions in the dissolution of distinctions between art and life, along with attempts to declare that everything is art and everyone is an artist, as the critical function of art requires its relative autonomy. I'm not so sure that one should conflate art's separation from society quite so clearly with modernity but it probably is the case that the negation of art merely destabilises its possible critical function outside of art (and this would be consistent with Adorno's view - (remember this was first delivered in receipt of the prize in honour of Adorno). Adorno's negative committment proposes aesthetics as potentially subversive but under present conditions, even this stance is less sure - or rather 'its criticality is now largely illusory (and so instrumental)' (Foster, 1993: xiii). Habermas calls this 'the false negation of culture' as for him reification is a much more complex business than a concern with mere art or the radical practice of individual artists. (1993: 11)
modernity-habermas.txt
Reification, remains a useful concept under consumer capitalism, more in fact a precondition, as traditionally the 'transformation of social relations into things' but also the 'effacement of the traces of production' (Jameson, 1991: 314), leaving people to happily consume free of guilt. Getting your computer connected requires disconnection from such productive issues, ironically displaced to another part of the globe that is supposedly made more accessible. And despite any new descriptions of the blurring of consumers and producers in trendy terms like users, reification continues to emphasis their separation in 'a Promethean inferiority complex in front of the machine' (Jameson quoting Gunther Anders, 1991: 315). In the cultural arena, it is as much a case of deification as reification; people or things only become part of the canon when they are already already dead, on the walls or in the vaults of the museum/masoleum, dead monuments to dead people and dead ideas. The idea of a radical canon is paradoxical - even Che Guevara and Mao ended up on T-shirts. The contemporary arts is full of tired old reproduction of all the worst aspects of modernist practice - individualist and self-validating to efface all traces of production. But rather than give up on modernity, Habermas's suggestion is to learn from past mistakes and from previous attempts at negating modernity. The problem is the way that these previous failures have become a defence for conservative positions that make resistance appear quite hopeless - he cites the premodernism, anti-modernism (and its notion of decentred subjectivity), and postmodernism (by now collapsed into anti-modernism or even worse post-postmodernism) as symptoms of this tendency (dare I add trans-modernism?).
modernity-habermas.txt
The Habermas essay was in contradistinction (at the time) to the other essays in the collection Postmodern Culture (or The Anti-Aesthetic, its American title) edited by Hal Foster (1993) although perhaps with similar purpose. Taking its cue from the incorporation of Modernism's once oppositional project, the collection of essays sought to revitalise this critical stance by rejecting the conservative stance that Habermas identifies. The difficulties were highlighted from the start: 'How can we exceed the modern? How can we break with a program that makes a value out of crisis (modernism), or progress beyond the idea of Progress (modernity), or transgress the ideology of the transgressive (avant-gardism)?' (Foster, 1993: vii) Taking its cue from Habermas, and the idea that modernity has lost its fixed historical reference, the idea was to trace the limits and the extent of change. Foster is keen to oppose the view that postmodernism is necessarily relativist or that it signals the end of ideology or history and that the engine of late-capitalism is so highly developed, so 'total', that resistance is impossible. However, he agrees that definitions revolve around the conflicts of new and old modes of cultural and economic exchange, and identifies a postmodernism of resistance that connects the cultural and social; whereas a postmodernism of reaction disconnects these spheres (x). he claims it tackles the 'false normativity' of the conservative form of postmodernism but isn't this what Habermas claimed was the project of critical modernism. Such contradictions abound. The term 'anti-aesthetic' (the alternative title in the States) is of further interest in this regard, as although intended to engage political questioning, it uses the modernist technique of 'negation'. For me, this simply suggests some hope in the debate (a well-worn one over modernism versus postmodernism) and stresses that conflict is in itself a useful preoccupation, and terms like modernity (with or without whatever adage) need to remain under suspicion but only after an understanding of its dynamics of resistance.
montage-wrightseaman.txt
Richard Wright (1998), Montage - Transformation - Allegory: A Study of Digital Imaging in Dialectical Film Making, unpublished PhD thesis, London Guildhall University.
montage-wrightseaman.txt
In 'Montage-Transformation-Allegory', Richard Wright argues that transformation operates in the spirit of montage, inducing new shock effects for the digital age (1998). This is informed by Walter Benjamin's concept of allegory in which new understandings emerge through the bringing together of historical fragments. Montage is a machine-like juxtaposition of fragments that can be forced out of the historical continuum. In this way, the objects that constitute 'the material world could be rearranged out of their conventional, found or "natural" order so that the forces which shaped them would become visible, manifest and accessible to the senses' (Wright, 1999). In dialectical allegory, objects are brought together through montage to disrupt the continuity of ideological conceptions. Rather than see digital imaging in terms of smooth and normalised transitions and imperatives, Wright argues for the possibility of a digital aesthetic that amplifies the dialectical method. Indeed, the 'tendencies of the montage method are not opposed by any unifying tendencies of the transformation but by its particular dynamics of dispersion' (Wright, 1999).
montage-wrightseaman.txt
In A Dialectical Approach to Film Form written in 1929, 'Eisenstein explains that conflict in the world and in art takes many forms and it is these conflicts that account for the constantly dynamic state of forces that drive change and new ideas' (Wright, 1999). Reality, for Eisenstein, is not described directly, but must be reconstructed to reveal the hidden structure that otherwise remains obscured by ideological preconceptions. Although this can be seen as replacing one ideology with another, it should be remembered that in 1930s Russia, under Stalin, montage methods were a diversion from Socialist Realism - not representing the real world in a naturalistic manner but in materialist terms.
montage-wrightseaman.txt
example:
montage-wrightseaman.txt
His screensaver ' The Bank of Time' [http://www.thebankoftime.com/] does just this. 'The Bank of Time' is a screensaver that is informed by the vagaries of the stock market, and the financial sector in general. Unlike much work in this area that uses financial markets or makes ironic reference to the business sector, The Bank of Time is a subtle and allegorical comment on idleness and growth. Wright notes how the germinating plant is a recurring metaphor in financial and investment advertising, as well as in Baroque imagery depicting the 'transience of earthly things'. It alludes to allegorical imagery in the best tradition of Benjamin in drawing together historical fragments through montage techniques to shock people into a new recognitions and understandings of the material world. In allegory, anything may mean anything else. Wright's background in computer animation is of relevance here, with animation as the task bringing inanimate matter to life - in this case the sequence is constructed by downloading images of a growing plant frame by frame from the internet in a slowed-down parallel operation. No longer twenty-five frames per second but the user's idle time is directly proportional to the rate of growth of the plant on their desktop - from seedling to fully grown plant through to its decay reflecting the allegorical reference it evokes. On the web, the user has access to the Idleness Growth Tables to see how their performance, or the lack of it, compares to other users. Wright sees this paradoxically as idle time turned into an investment, or growth through idleness, and claims there is an economy of lost time.
montage-wrightseaman.txt
The underlying politics and poetics of this, reflects the slumps and peaks of the economy in general. One might think of the culture economy too, and the Arts Council of England's (seed) funding that supported the work as part of this matrix. Wright comments on the inability of the art world to take stock of the information society and how idle most curators are in promoting and selecting this kind of work. Networked technologies have enhanced the effectiveness of global capitalism, enabling it to become more flexible, adaptable, faster, efficient and pervasive. Culture, too, has become integrated in the process of the creation of capital, with cultural regeneration as the clearest example of capital's project of renewal - through ideology, reflecting these processes as natural as the growth of plants. The art world reflects these trends. Is idleness a suitable response to this tendency? This further alludes to a more militant refusal to work associated with the autonomists. The Bank of Time doesn't exactly call for a refusal to work but does promote idleness as a suitable creative act. In the Bank of Time, the more idle the user the faster the plant grows and the higher up the performance table they rise. Although clearly not refusing to make art as such, Wright says: 'soon everyone will be working hard to waste as much time as possible'. Whether this is already the case in much arts practice under current conditions remains in contention.
montage-wrightseaman.txt
Bill Seaman (1999), Recombinant Poetics:
montage-wrightseaman.txt
Emergent Meaning as Examined and Explored
montage-wrightseaman.txt
Within a Specific Generative Virtual Environment, phd thesis.
montage-wrightseaman.txt
Using the term 'recombinatory poetics,' Bill Seaman's research employed a techno-poetic mechanism to generate emergent meanings - a poetics extended by computer-based technologies (1999). In a sense, Turing's 'Universal machine' is transformed into his 'The World Generator/The Engine of Desire'. He describes this techno-poetic mechanism as an abstract machine that not is merely text-based, but one that might suffer from associated problems of universalism (associated with Chomsky's work on generative grammar). Drawing upon Derrida's work, Seaman asks whether this constitutes a new form of writing or a 'new form of evocative exchange which cannot be defined in terms of past linguistic discourse?' (1999).
negation-virno.txt
Paolo Virno (2008) _Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation_, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andre Casson, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents.
negation-virno.txt
Paolo Virno's interest is in the ability of the human species to execute 'innovative actions' capable of modifying 'consolidated norms' (2008: 20). A key reference underpinning this is Noam Chomsky's description of the apparatus of power as inhibiting the innate creativity of verbal language (2008: 13). Language is clearly violent at a symbolic level, and Virno confirms how language radicalises 'aggression beyond measure' (2008: 19). He is also drawing upon Aristotle's description of contingency at the heart of our use of language (in _Ethics_); although clearly, when referring to the human animal specifically, the idea supports various prejudices against other humans and animals. Against Carl Schmitt's view of state sovereignty, Virno's concern is to develop a non-dialectical understanding of negation - through ambivalence, oscillation and perturbing - to outline a critique of 'hostile radicalism towards the State' and capitalistic production. He tries to identify institutions that 'metabolize ambivalence and oscillation, rather than postulating their unilateral resolution' (2008: 44). Of course, to Virno this involves 'not-yet public forms of government' (2008: 24). Acknowledged by Virno, 'negation of negation' is the dialectical way out of this paradox, and 'keeps in check the possibility of a reciprocal _non_recognition, thus constituting the implicit presupposition of rhetorical persuasion and, in general, of the permanence of a public sphere' (2008: 63).
negation-virno.txt
The ability of language is part of this in as much as it involves relations between a 'mass of speakers', necessarily shared and collective - and constituting a 'pure institution', and the matrix of all institutions to Virno (2008: 46). Language underwrites all other institutions. Quoting from de Saussure, he emphasises that the 'language system is a social fact' wherein the human animal is 'ready made for language, but not actually in possession of it' until entering into interactions in the social realm (2008: 47). This is part of early development but also remains evident in every utterance made - confirming to Virno the biopolitical dimension of the human animal in the world, and that language is 'more natural' and 'more historical' than other institutions (2008: 47, 49). In relation to negation, the system of language both 'does' negation (by identifying what something is not), and 'is' negation (in as much as it can only signify something): 'The negation, or something that language _does_, is understood, above all, as something that language _is_.' (2008: 50) He is speculating here on a nonrepresentational form of politics, and despite recognising the sovereign forces that restrain such abilities (such as 'ritual' and 'katechon'), concludes that:
negation-virno.txt
'Whether the self-government of the multitude can adapt itself directly to the linguistic aspect of the human species, to the disturbing ambivalence that characterizes the linguistic aspect, will have to remain an open problem.' (2008: 50)
negation-virno.txt
Underpinning political possibilities, for Virno, is the simple fact that the human animal is capable of modifying its forms of life (2008: 69). This is what makes for creativity, in the general sense that newly invented forms might diverge from established rules and perceived norms - based on the Chomskian innate creativity previously referred to. But creativity is too ambiguous for Virno (and unexpected), so this is what is meant in the realm of human praxis as 'innovative action'.
negation-virno.txt
To Virno, jokes represent an example of how humans diverge from norms, how 'linguistic animals give evidence of an unexpected derivation from their normal praxis' (2008: 72). I think we might look to something similar in the way fun is had in software - through jokes that exemplify the innovative action of code and coders ("have you heard the one about software?"). The emphasis of Virno is useful too in drawing attention to the function of jokes to innovative action in the public sphere (not as Freudian clue to the workings of the unconscious). In this way, to Virno, jokes are an example of a linguistic game that demonstrates innovative techniques and possibilities for transforming all linguistic games ('the logic of change'). This happens in two main ways: firstly by demonstrating how divergences in following rules often result in changing the rule itself (put differently the application of the norm also contains surprises and a 'state of exception'); and secondly, through the incorrect use of semantic ambiguity, an 'error' or glitch (2008: 73, 74). Rules are not only there to be broken, but applied differently, adapted and modified, transformed and even abolished. Virno refers to this sense of linguistic innovation as: 'how to do new things with words' (after Austin), in which the 'doing' relies on public action (2008: 82). Jokes only operate as 'praxis' in these terms, and praxis 'always presupposes and revives a public space' (2008: 83). So to Virno, witty utterances are similar to the performative utterances that Austin described (in 'how to do things with words'), where words constitute an action in and of themselves (2008: 85).
negation-virno.txt
But the point for Virno is not the content of jokes, ie. that might poke fun at social norms, hierarchies or the ruling order, for such jokes tend to obscure what is important: the apparatus or the '_logicolinguistic resources_ that jokes utilize' (2008: 165; in other words, not jokes about politics but the politics of jokes to borrow a dialectical formulation). The argument is that innovative action also uses these resources like a toolbox. In doing so it produces ambivalences: oscillating between the empirical and the grammatical as well as between the 'determined _rule_ and the _regularity_ of species-specific forms of conduct' (2008: 166). Such contradictory factors characterise the social mind of the human species, its creative force and its repression by power structures. (Note: Virno also explores 'intersubjectivity' to emphasise the social dimension of subjectivity; making reference to Winnicott and 'not-me', turning it into a 'we-centered space').
negation-virno.txt
'For political anticapitalist and antistate action there is no positive presupposition to be vindicated. Its eminent duty is to experiment with new and more effective ways of negating negation, of placing "not" in front of "not human".' (2008: 190)
neoliberal-armitage.txt
John Armitage (2002), 'Resisting the Neoliberal Discourse of Technology: The Politics of Cyberculture in the Age of the Virtual Class',
neoliberal-armitage.txt
The dominant political philosophy extends into what John Armitage calls the 'neoliberal discourse of technology' (2002). The discourse that relies upon ideas of telematics and virtuality serve to emphasise that human labour is no longer at the centre of production but technology itself - perhaps labour has been reduced to technology (for more on this, see Jeremy Rifkin's The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1995). Armitage wishes to redefine the terms here to develop a critical account of this neoliberal discourse to exposes the economic and social interests and their underlying political dynamics at work. There is both authoritarianism and democracy latent in technological systems. What is worrying is that currently there is a virtual class 'rewriting the history of virtual and other technologies while simultaneously controlling their organized production, distribution and consumption' (2002).
networkcriticism-lovink.txt
Geert Lovink (2002), Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
networkcriticism-lovink.txt
Critical Art Ensemble (2002), Digital Resistance: Explorations in Tactical Media, New York: Autonomedia.
networkcriticism-lovink.txt
Network criticism:
networkcriticism-lovink.txt
[add to Barabasi on networks]
networkcriticism-lovink.txt
Geert Lovink's criticism should be read against the backdrop of the increasing corporatisation of the internet - the relative closure of the openness of the internet. Despite the decline of liberties and potentialities - what he calls the 'post-euphoric period' (2002: 2) - he retains hope in the resistant power of net activism, file exchange within peer to peer networks, and the free software movement. This potential is exemplified by the title of his book 'Dark Fiber' describing the optical fibre infrastructure that lies in place but unused (2002: 376). His work resists the temptation to draw historical analogies with radio or other media (as Lev Manovich does with cinema) but instead examines the dynamics of how ideas transform social networks, institutions and structures.
networkcriticism-lovink.txt
Given the reach of the internet, his 'net criticism' on the nettime mail list and elsewhere, is still a relatively rare intervention in this field that lacks deep criticality - more concerned with surface; futuristic hype and technological determinism or utopianism (exemplified by Wired magazine). Lovink sees this as a serious lack and laments the uneven relationship between the cultural and technological fields: wherein science and technology is keen to gain 'cultural capital' but in a context where culture is generally regarded as 'bad science' (quoting Marvin Minsky, 2002: 5). The recent fashion for the 'creative industries' merely proves the point.
networkcriticism-lovink.txt
In the light of this, he calls this 'speculative media theory' (2002: 22) in recognition of the problem with the term 'media' on the one hand, and to register the fluidity needed to address the speed of change in this area. He engages with these issues from the position of what he calls 'radical media pragmatism' in recognition of the ambiguities at work that underlie media theory applied to the internet. For instance:
networkcriticism-lovink.txt
'Now the time has come for sophisticated forms of negative media pragmatism: living paradoxes rooted in messy praxis, unswervingly friendly to the virtual open spaces that are being closed everywhere.' (Lovink, 2002: 226)
networkcriticism-lovink.txt
Recognising the conditions at work, the strategy advocated is 'tactical media' that draws together media activism and radical pragmatism. The approach borrows from Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) which explores popular and radical uses of mass culture (CAE, 2002: 4). The term is variously defined but emerges from a group of media activists in Rome in 1996 whose motto is as follows: 'World war III will be a guerrilla information war, with no division between military and civilian participation.' (quoted in Lovink, 2002: 273) Lovink's understanding is an insider's view and informed by the tactical network itself, the 'Next 5 Minutes' festival (which began in 1993) and collaborative writings (for instance: 'The ABC of Tactical Media', 1997, with David Garcia; and 'New Rules for the New Actonomy', 2001, with Florian Schneider). In 'New Rules for the New Actonomy', the political field is represented as a fractured and chaotic space that requires new forms of tactical action accordingly. Lovink and Schneider explain that: 'The new actonomy involves a rigorous application of networking methods. It's diversity challenges the development of non-hierarchical, decentralized and deterritorialized applets and applications' (2001). They further explain that, when no other choice is possible 'sabotage can be seen as a sort of anticipated reverse engineering of the open source idea' in disputed unfavourable property rights.
networkcriticism-lovink.txt
Clearly building upon the 'independent media' and 'alternative media' traditions, tactical media describe campaigns rooted in localised dissent - not resistance as such - but 'temporary connections between old and new, practice and theory, alternative and mainstream. And then later to disconnect them again.' (2002: 256) It is a hybrid practice that lies somewhere between creative experimentation and an engagement with social change, shifting identifications, temporary alliances and strategic affinities according to the requirements of the context - liberated from 'leftist dogmatism and ghetto group psychology, their new shapes take viral forms' (Lovink, 2002: 259). For Critical Art Ensemble, this is a way of avoiding the dense arcane style of the Frankfurt School (2002: 27) it is also a way of asserting difference from avant-garde practices for 'electronic civil disobedience' (2002: 13). Lovink also explains this form as a 'temporary hybrids of old school political data and the aesthetics of new media'; for instance, producing anti-aesthetic software and other 'hackivist' strategies (2002: 262; an example might be 'Floodnet' software developed in 1998 by the Electronic Disturbance Theatre, allowing for 'virtual sit-ins' in the spirit of direct action). Critical Art Ensemble call this 'recombinant theater' in contradistinction from political theatre that simply takes place in public space to dubious effect. To them, street theatre involves: 'performances that invent ephemeral, autonomous situations from which temporary public relationships emerge that can make possible critical dialogue on a given issue' (2002: 96). It might be called tactical theatre, and might be extended to the Net . Lovink continues the description: 'tactical media are never perfect, always in becoming, performative and pragmatic, involved in a continual process of questioning...'. (2002: 264) Critical Art Ensemble would add 'participation, process, pedagogy, and experimentation are the key components for further recombination' (2002: 97). Lovink sees tactical media as a strategy of survival not a choice as such; it is the techno-cultural condition that generates infinite possibilities (2002: 272).
networkcriticism-lovink.txt
[see also Hakim Bey]
networkcriticism-lovink.txt
Intellectual:
networkcriticism-lovink.txt
There seems to be an adverse correlation between the rise of the media and the demise of the intellectual, somewhat in parallel to the demise of the public sphere. Lovink charts this crisis of the intellectual, tracing Gramsci's idea of the 'organic intellectual interfacing with ordinary people to the contemporary distrust of the concept of the intelligentsia in the post-political era. Lovink thinks the Leninist question 'what is to be done?' now lacks both subject and object (2002: 33). In the knowledge economy, the intellectual has become a faceless professional, and sadly lacks a public role in society. Accordingly, the suggestion is that the link between the intellectual and the public might be forged in virtual space - the 'virtual intellectual' (2002: 30). This might be wishful thinking, but expresses the potential for a new kind of collective engagement with ideas in keeping with a re-engagement with the internet as public sphere (located in the sphere of the negative as Lovink put it). Rejecting the 'free-market way of thinking' the virtual intellectual is more of a 'free-floating' knowledge worker (a less aloof term) who engages with other workers and is 'always under construction' (2002: 38-9).
networks-barabosi.txt
Albert-L‡szl— Barab‡si (2002), Linked: The New Science of Networks, Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus.
networks-barabosi.txt
Scientists have tended to work on the reductionist assumption that by taking something apart we will gain an understanding of how it works from its constituent parts. However, like humpty-dumpty, from knowledge of the pieces it does not necessarily follow that we understand how to put the pieces together or they operate together as a complex system. Nature runs as a self-organising system and only reveals its secrets in part through its parts. It is a network that operates under the laws of complexity - what Barab‡si calls the 'science of networks' (2002). He is drawing partly upon the popular idea of 'six degrees of separation' to describe interconnectivity, a principle introduced by Stanley Milgram in 1967, interestingly developed to understand social networks and the distance between any two people in the United States. Extended to the whole world by John Guare, the suggestion is that in a network of six billion nodes, any pair of nodes are on average only six links from each other (Barab‡si, 2002: 27-30).
networks-barabosi.txt
This network is society, but society is stratified. Despite the appearance of randomness in complex systems, clearly there is underlying order - all nodes are not equal by any means. Despite this, there has been a tendency to think of networks as equitable systems, viewed as fundamentally random simply because they are too complex to comprehend how power is distributed (although not discussing power at all, Barab‡si cites the work of Erd—s and RŽnji on the connections between randomness and complexity, 2002: 24).
networks-barabosi.txt
Information, however, is generally taken to be value-free. The World-Wide Web was clearly developed with this in mind (nineteen degrees of separation according to Barab‡si, 2002: 34) and with a different articulation of power in mind. Various browsers have also attempted to draw attention to the linking rather than the contents contained within web pages, showing an architecture and a cartography of information wherein distance is reconfigured but not necessarily shrunk as Barab‡si would claim into 'small worlds' (2002: 41; although he later claims there is no intrinsic scale, that networks are scale-free, 2002: 70. note: add some dialectical ideas on distance here). Connectedness and power are articulated through the density of linkages within the system despite the enormous size and apparent complexity of the system. This is deceptively simple as any one node connects to an exponential number of others through this logic (think of a search engine like google and its 'I feel lucky' link; in April 2004, if 'weapons of mass destruction' were sought using this facility a long ironic treatise would result - a story spread around communities on the internet but missed by the authorities that police google. This demonstrates 'value-added' rather than 'value-free' information).
networks-barabosi.txt
In social systems, nodes gather together in clusters but this extends to the ways in which other systems operate and is seen to be a generic property of complex networks (Barab‡si citing the work of Watts and Strogatz, 2002: 51) - a distinctly non-random behaviour. 'Connectors,' nodes with an large number of links or connections, are present within diverse systems (from society, to the cell - or cellular system that includes genes, proteins and other molecules) and further account for the redundancy of randomness and points to the lack of democracy within the system (and something that is crucial to an understanding of search engines for instance). The World Wide Web is dominated by highly connected nodes or 'hubs' and thus can be seen to not be an egalitarian space - an extension of the public sphere (a search engine would be a good example of a hub).
networks-barabosi.txt
[link to ideas of the public sphere here?]
networks-barabosi.txt
Hubs express power not centrally but in a decentralised manner in keeping with contemporary descriptions of power (in Hardt and Negri's Empire for instance) but whether they follow universal rules of nature is clearly debatable. Barab‡si quotes the work of the Italian economist, Vilfredo Pareto, who observed universal laws in that 80 per cent of peas were produced by 20 per cent of pea pods, extended to property in that 80 per cent was seen to be owned by 20 per cent of the population (2002: 66). Although this '80/20 rule' seems rather reductive to say the least, it does offer some truth, perhaps not to universal laws of nature but, to the politics of networked systems. There is such a mathematical expression called 'power law' that stands in opposition to the orthodox bell curve as a means of understanding quantities in nature. A power law does not have a peak and expressed as a histogram would be a continuous decreasing curve, wherein many small events coexist with few large events in keeping with the existence of large numbers of nodes but few hubs (Barab‡si, 2002: 67-70). The mathematical take on power is that few events manifest most of the action. In complexity theory, this is the emergent order within disorder. Clearly, there are similar 'laws behind complex networks' (Barab‡si paraphrasing Pareto, 2002: 73).
networks-barabosi.txt
A more pragmatic demonstration of power at work is that water is the most common substance on Earth and yet still some people have difficulty in gaining access to enough to sustain their health. Liquids strike a delicate balance between states - the forces that keep the molecules together are not strong enough to solidify them. In a sense, liquid is trapped between order and disorder, what Barab‡si calls a 'majestic dance' (2002: 73) the water molecules come together, form small groups, and then break apart to form other groups. Ice does alter this process into an ordered solid state - a 'phase transition' from disorder to order. Similar transitions in response to changes in energy take place when liquids like water are turned into gas once heated. The revolutionary transition of 'all that is [ordered] melts into [disorder]' is evoked. The properties of liquids is a complex phenomena demonstrating a self-organising 'BŽnard cell pattern' where a 'series of bifurcations describe greater and greater complexity of spatial pattern that is the precise spatial of the "march to chaos" via period doublings in the logistic equation, ending in turbulence as the liquid analogue of chaos. Here liquids obey the deterministic chaos of a strange attractor...' (SolŽ & Goodwin, 2000: 16-7). Perhaps another example is required of power laws in relation to fractal patterns. SolŽ & Goodwin describe the sandpile experiment: a grain of sand is added one by one; at first, the grains are seemingly independent of each other following the laws of gravity and friction; however, eventually a point of 'self-organised criticality' (coined by Bak) is reached and the pile collapses, first a few grains and eventually large amounts. A new collective behaviour or 'phase transition' has emerged that has no relation to the individual behaviour (2000: 54). This principle was modelled by Per Bak using 'cellular automaton' following the same basic rules thus demonstrating power laws and fractal behaviour.
networks-barabosi.txt
Note: In a similar way, the mathematician John Conway invented his 'Game of Life' in which each lightbulb or pixel on a compute screen is treated as a simple machine. It is able to sense whether its immediate neighbours are on or off, and executes simple rules. At regular intervals, each pixel examines the state of its neighbours and switches on or off accordingly. The process is repeated and produces startling effects, sometimes flickering briefly and other times continuing as a stable pattern. Steve grand describes his amazement at seeing a simple version of this called 'glider' where the pixels give the impression of movement from an emergent behaviour (2001: 47).
networks-barabosi.txt
The issue for Barab‡si is that these phase transitions from disorder to order demonstrate a consistency even within different systems and follow power laws. Power laws are 'patent signatures of self-organization in complex systems' (Barab‡si, 2002: 77). Clearly a politics is required, suggesting that the power laws themselves require transition. Interestingly, 'transition' in the Marxist lexicon, describes the transition in terms of a socialisation of property, a replacement of the relations of the market with relations of the organisation of social property, of social work (Negri 1991; 211; Negri would go further still and say that property and the law of work-value itself should be challenged).
networks-barabosi.txt
Barab‡si worryingly characterises the power law as the 'rich get richer' in his analysis of the evolution of networks in nature (2002: 80). They grow exponentially but this is not random but a highly selective process, demonstrating 'preferential attachment' that together with 'growth' generates a free-scale network (2002: 86) and conception of 'fitness'. No matter the size of the network, it will maintain this hub-dominated distribution of power in neo-Darwinian terms of without intervention. The intervention on a theoretical level, through quantum mechanics, is a better understanding of complexity itself as a critique of the deterministic logic of Darwinian evolutionary theory. Barab‡si explains that every network has its fitness distribution, more or less egalitarian, into two categories: 'winner-takes-all' and 'fit-get-rich' competitive networks. These are distinguishable in his terms, but might as well be described as totalitarian or neo-liberal to my mind - so a rather limited choice. The example of the success of Microsoft is mentioned in this connection. Installing Windows adds a link to Microsoft, binding together the operating system and the hardware as a very 'fit' market strategy (2002: 104). Barab‡si says: 'In the most complex networks, the power laws and the fight for links thus are not antagonistic but can exist peacefully' (2002: 103). But what other networks might emerge? Can we begin to imagine antagonist networks, with nodes that aim to contradict others, where weaker nodes combine forces to become a hub and then gain collective power. Viruses also clearly demonstrate these principles both in terms of biology and computing. In 2000, the 'I Love You' virus was a case in point: opening the message 'love letter for you' would erase documents from your hard drive and then propagate itself by sending new copies of itself through the address book of your mail program.
networks-barabosi.txt
On a biological level, parasites both contribute to the maintenance and generation of biodiversity in ecosystems. Often they act upon eachother as well as on their hosts. The metaphors abound when politics is added to the mix.
networks-barabosi.txt
The example of Linux, the free operating system, suggests some hope. More specifically, Armin Medosch points to the recent initiative exploiting the free 2.4 gigahertz frequency spectrum and 802.11 Wi-Fi technology to provide free networks. People are encouraged to make their own network nodes and to patch them together in a mesh peer-to-peer network making its own shared infrastructure (2003: 18). Thus the bandwidth legally owned is shared amongst a local collective of users. This example of collective action in the spirit of the idea of the public realm has been successfully implemented in many big cities, such as across East London (see http://www.consume.net/).
networks-barabosi.txt
Relative weakness, even in nature, is supported by interconnectivity to the system as a whole - and therefore the characterisation of the system is paramount. The historical development of the Internet is a case in point - wherein attack on any node is compensated by the linking structure of the system as a whole. Scale-free networks are relatively robust as a result of their topology, even when under attack by 'crackers' (hackers with malicious intent). But complex systems display elements of vulnerability too if attention is paid to the hubs rather than nodes. Thus any budding terrorist would do well to target the hubs; I could tentatively suggest that this is a class distinction (in targeting the bourgeois hubs rather than the proletarian nodes within the system. Also, interestingly, terrorist groups have known network theory intuitively organised in self-organised flexible networks, able to reorganise when required. In the case of Al Qaeda, Bin Laden remains a significant hub). In a similar way 'cascading failures' are well known explanations of this tendency, where a local failure redistributes responsibilities to linked nodes; this failure is cascaded through the system sometimes to disastrous effect depending on how central the role of the node is within the system as a whole. This can be demonstrated with a wide variety of systems: failed routers within the Internet, or species within an eco-system, or in economics with the collapse of a certain company (Barab‡si, 2002: 120). This is clearly of use to those wanting the system to become more robust or efficient or those wishing to bring about its crisis. Capitalism, Al Qaeda, Microsoft, AIDS, and other complex self-organising networks, are not value-free.
networks-barabosi.txt
In describing an optimal system, Paul Baran famously characterised three architectures: centralised, decentralised and distributed. Baran was designing a robust communications infrastructure that could withstand attack (from Soviet nuclear strike - this is 1964; in Barab‡si, 2002: 145). Both the centralised and decentralised model were too vulnerable and the distributed 'mesh' architecture was proposed but not used until much later. This underpins the development of the Internet and charts a developmental evolution that takes account of a growing understanding of complexity, leading to vast scale-free topology of routers and links, like an ecosystem - demonstrating growth and preferential attachment in Barab‡si's terms - and later: 'A scale-free network is a web without a spider' (2002: 221; the absence of the spider is what makes it self-organising). According to Lawrence Lessig, in Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, (1999) code should be regulated to limit the increasing rule of the 'natural forces' of the market (spiders catching flies). Barab‡si would suggest that code is separate from collective human action and only the first can be regulated and stating that 'Regulations come and go, but the topology and the fundamental natural laws governing it are time invariant' (2002: 175). Clearly there is little sympathy for a more detailed discussion of ideology or the formation of machinic subjectivities here. There's clearly more critical work to be done in this area of network theory (not least in its application to economics) that requires a politics without losing sight of how the network works on a technical level - not simply doing either, but both.
networks-gallowaythacker.txt
Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker (2007) _The Exploit: A Theory of Networks_, Electronic Mediations, volume 21, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
networks-gallowaythacker.txt
The Exploit follows in a critical tradition that takes networks to be a key organizational principle for understanding contemporary politics and life in general. Networks are undoubtedly pervasive – for example, from the activities of peer-to-peer file-sharing or swarm intelligence to the operations of economic and financial markets or viruses – but the book is not a further example of technophilic or popular scientific strands but an extension of the critical discourse that has developed around network culture (such as, for example, Rossiter's Organized Networks and Terranova's Network Culture). Exemplified by its title - a term used by crackers to take advantage of vulnerabilities in networks - the book demonstrates an understanding of how networks operate technically and politically. Suitably, perhaps, it does not follow a conventional academic structure but instead offers a more speculative and experimental approach opening with a short explanatory section on how to take advantage of the book (or perhaps make it vulnerable): the reader is invited to experience the book across the 'prolegomenon' (foreword), its 'nodes' (part I) and 'edges' (part II), and 'coda'; there is the added suggestion to skim the first section by reading italicized sections only (a particularly tempting suggestion for any reviewer). That the reader is informed how to do this in itself says something about the paradoxical subject of the book: in addressing the power relations between sovereignty and networks.
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The first section goes into detail on the current 'state of emergency today in the West' in the context of the end of the cold war, the rise of the networked economy and politics after 9/11. The exceptional character of the United States (evoking Schmitt's Politische Theologie of 1922, and indeed Agamben's State of Exception of 1995) is central to this in relation to an understanding of a system of control that appears to have migrated from decentralized hubs to the 'material fabric of distributed networks'. Rather than take contemporary sovereignty associated with the unilateralist/totalitarian position of the U.S. to lie in opposition to a description of networked informatic control, Galloway and Thacker argue for new understandings of the exceptional character of sovereignty in the age of networks. In this sense, they are following Hardt and Negri's Empire (in which power is everywhere and nowhere) but also characterisations of power in the work of Nietzsche, Foucault in which power as plural and decentralised, and others in which power is seen to be ever more mediatised and yet is inadequately identified and named.
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As is returned to again and again in the book, network forms of organization actually prescribe power relations and control structures (p. 70). The authors argue that more adequate topologies are required that allow a way to rethink power relations 'diagrammatically' in a manner appropriate to networks and reflecting contemporary political dynamics: 'an approach to understanding networks that takes into account their ontological, technological, and political dimensions' (p. 58). This position is further and most significantly underpinned by an understanding of biopolitics in the work of Foucault and control in Deleuze, to the concept of the protocol as 'both an apparatus that facilitates networks and a logic that governs how things are done within that apparatus' (p.29). These issues converge around the issue of security in the challenge of managing the networked relations between technologies and biologies – in the curation of viruses (in the sense of caring and curing) and in the management of life itself (referring to Agamben's distinction between bare life and the political subject). Resistance in the context of biopolitics is an active part of dynamic living networks - as 'life-resistance' (p. 78) and as 'multitude' (p. 150). For the argument of the book, discussion hinges on the relations between the human and unhuman that constitutes the network. Networks involve shifts of scale such that action can no longer be attributed to individual agents but to distributed action throughout the network – more in terms of 'edges' than 'nodes' in their terms.
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The network has evidently become a manifestation of ideology in itself - and one in which connectivity remains a security threat beyond a purely technical form (in offering a platform for terrorism or counter-terrorism alike). This is the new 'network-network symmetry' of power that follows 'power laws' of variable, uneven and unequal distribution, and that has learned from history to use all varieties of authority and organization at its disposal. The authors even go as far to describe the dynamic as dialectical in as much as control is distributed relatively autonomously in horizontal organizational locales and at the same time into rigid vertical hierarchies or directed commands. This is a socio-technical truism of course, and one that supports the claim that networks and sovereignty are not incompatible. Indeed together they are 'exceptional' and are always related as 'sovereignty-in-networks'. For the authors, this is what makes the American regime so beguiling. Correspondingly, the recommendation to those seeking regime change, or developing oppositional tactics in general, is to take advantage of the vulnerabilities in networks (much like successful computer viruses do) – by exploiting power differentials that exist in the system, thereby uncovering new exploits.
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Leonardo Reviews 40:5
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Title: Organized Networks: Media Theory, Creative Labour, New Institutions
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by Ned Rossiter
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NAi, Rotterdam 2006
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In association with the Institute of Network Cultures, Hogeschool van Amsterdam
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250 pp., illus. 2x b/w. paper,
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ISBN 90-5662-526-8
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Reviewed by Geoff Cox
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University of Plymouth
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"Transformation is conditioned by a capacity to become organized." (p.215)
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_Organized Networks_ asserts that there is an urgent need for new institutional forms that reflect 'relational' processes that challenge existing systems of governance and representational structures. The argument arises from the apparent inadequacy of modern institutions to respond to the impact of socio-technical networks. Emergent forms are radically dissimilar to the ways in which social relations are organized under the 'moribund technics' of modern institutions (form the University to the State). These older forms, referred to as 'networked organizations', are hierarchical and centralizing despite the rhetoric of apparent inclusion. In contrast, emergent 'organized networks' are horizontal, collaborative and distributed in character offering a distinct social dynamic and transformational potential. The difference is how institutions have responded to developments in networked communications technology and the issue of intellectual property rights: on the one hand, networked organizations using this as a regulatory mechanism to enforce or extend existing power structures, and on the other, organized networks advocating open source culture. If all this sounds rather too neat, there is a recognition of contradictions here, and the book expands upon some of these added complexities, indeterminacy and uncertainties associated with sociality, labour and life in general.
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The book is split into three main sections, each with two chapters: the first, addressing the limits of democracy and organized networks; the second, tackling the creative industries, precarious labour and intellectual property; and the third, the virtuosity of 'general intellect' and 'processual democracy' to elaborate on the figure of 'organized networks'. Previous versions of many of the chapters have been published but together they make a powerful interlacing argument for criticism demonstrating a depth of research to highlight the key issues for political intervention in organized network culture (indeed, a companion volume might be Tiziana Terranova's _Network Culture_, Pluto 2004). Acknowledging the peer intellectual support of Nettime and Fiberculture mailing lists, it is perhaps not surprising that Rossiter demonstrates an impressive but familiar range of sources to subscribers (including immanent critique and negative dialectics of the Frankfurt School, the concepts of 'general intellect' and 'immaterial labour' in Autonomous Marxism, and the constitutive role of the outside and immanence in Deleuze's philosophy, amongst others) - taking a transdisciplinary approach that he likens to the collective ethos and protocols of the network itself. The sense of project is clear, passionate and hopeful:
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"It is about conditions of possibility, the immanent relation between theory and practice... and a resolute belief... in the concrete potential of transdisciplinary institutional forms that enlist the absolute force of labour and life" (p.17).
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The potential to transform social relations is somewhat demonstrated in the socio-technical dynamics of mailing lists, blogs, wikis, content management systems, and so on. But it is the institutional nature of this, as a description of the organization of social relations, that makes it thoroughly political. An example of this is the section on the creative industries where the instrumental ways in which creativity has been exploited in the realm of policy (pp. 98-132). For the argument of the book, the creative industries indicate two aspects: antagonism in the form of the exploitation of creative labour power underpinned by the increasing regulation of intellectual property as a consequence of the drive to commodify collective and communicative practices and knowledge (the appropriation of general intellect); and also, the affirmation of creative labour that holds potential for self-organisation through its networked capacity. By focussing on the exploitation of immaterial or what Rossiter refers to as 'disorganised labour-power', the underlying conditions are exposed but so are new forms of agency appropriate to organized networks. Organized networks represent relative institutional autonomy but not in isolation - they also need to operate tactically, engaging horizontal and vertical modes of interaction:
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"The tendency to describe networks in terms of horizontality results in the occlusion of the 'political', which consists of antagonisms that underpin sociality. It is technically and socially incorrect to assume that hierarchical and centralizing architectures and practices are absent from network cultures." (p.36)
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Networks are clearly not limitless or without borders, but (like the free market) the situation is far more complex:
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"... while networks in many ways are regulated indirectly by the sovereign interests of the state, they are also not reducible to institutional apparatuses of the state. And this is what makes possible the creation of new institutional forms as expressions of non-representational democracy." (p.39)
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This is one of the interventions of the book: far from arguing against institutions, the limits of democracy and the discourse of neo-liberalism in general is seen to be the available means to rethink politics within network cultures - and this is what is referred to as 'non-representational democracy' to describe democracy decoupled from sovereign power (citing Virno's _The Grammar of the Multitude_, New York: Semiotext(e) 2004,). For Rossiter, organized networks offer such an opportunity to develop strategies and techniques of better organization.
Binary file networks.pdf matches
.txt
newmediahistory-kimbell.txt
Lucy Kimbell, ed. (2004), New Media Art: Practice and Context in the UK 1994-2004, London: Arts Council of England with Cornerhouse.
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Geoffrey Batchen (2004), 'Electricity Made Visible', in Kimbell, 2004: 26-44.
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Manovich describes the language of new media in formalist terms as a set of conventions and forms, exemplified by five key differences that mark its distinction from old media: 'numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and cultural transcoding' (Batchen, in Kimbell, 2004: 27). Manovich argues that from the early 19th century, the history of photography and computing, although simultaneous, developed in parallel rather than in interaction until 1936 with the invention of Konrad Zuse's Z1 digital computer (incidentally Turing's abstract for the universal computing machine was in 1937). This suits Manovich's project well using the history of cinema as a central conceptual device, as Zuse's machine used 35mm film with punched holes to convey programming instructions. Manovitch sees this as the first merger of 'Daguerre's daguuerotype and Babbage's Analytical Engine, the Lumiere CinŽmatographie and Hollerith's tabulator' (Batchen, in Kimbell, 2004: 27). A history of new media here ironically begins at the time of the publication of Benjamin's artwork essay that also centrally uses cinema but precludes Benjamin's historical references that consider photography and early forms of technical reproducibility.
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Batchen adds to this some historical detail to this discourse in the form of a photogenic drawing of lace presented to Charles Babbage by William Fox Talbot in 1837. He sets about applying all the key differences of new media that Manovich proposes to the old media of photography a century earlier. For instance, the correspondence around an interest in mathematics and friendship between Babbage and Talbot disputes Manovich's thesis of a lack of interaction between these histories. In this way, Batchen describes photography in binary terms, of the presence and absence of light, and on/off tonal patterning - and as such representing numerical repetitions of units to make up a whole image (Batchen, in Kimbell, 2004: 29). Indeed, it involves 'a kind of abstraction of visual data; it's a fledgling form of information culture' made more explicit by his 1839 proposal to replace the use of sunlight by electricity: 'a making visible of electricity' (Batchen, in Kimbell, 2004: 31). Talbot proposed that rather than the long exposure times using sunlight, images would be instantaneous using the spark of electricity. Batchen sees this thinking as prefiguring the industrial production of lace by machines using Jacquard punch cards to send instructions to the loom, and replacing the hand-made market and further reflecting changing labour practices. Indeed the lace that Fox Talbot uses for his image has been proven to be machine-made (mentioned in Batchen, in Kimbell, 2004: 33). It is also well established that Babbage used Jacquard cards too in the development of his computing Analytical Engine. The presentation of the picture by Fox Talbot can thus be seen to be a knowing reference. Furthermore, Ada Lovelace describes the Analytical Engine in these terms: it 'weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves' (quoted in (Batchen, in Kimbell, 2004: 33), famously combining poetry and mathematics as befits her status as the daughter of Lord Byron and follower of Babbage.
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There is perhaps a more obvious oversight in the work of Manovich in disregarding the invention and widespread use of the electric telegraph simultaneous to the early computer and photo-media. In effect, early facsimile machines could make copies across vast distances using electricity by 1838. More famously, Samuel Morse declares: 'if... the presence of electricity can be made visible... I see no reason why intelligence might not be instantaneously transmitted by electricity to any distance' (quoted in Batchen, in Kimbell, 2004: 40). He achieved this by translating the code of the English alphabet into the numerical code of dots, dashes and spaces derived from breaks in the flow of electricity. By 1867, Jean Lenoir had achieved this with images by translating the presence and absence of light into binary data. These few examples simply prove the longer and more significant history of new media. Batchen sees this as emphasising not simply the language of new media but the reception and production of meanings derived from that language when deployed in a social and political context (in Kimbell, 2004: 44). He is deploying an 'archaeology' that is not linear, and drawing upon the work of Foucault, rejects any simple rendering of old and new media. Added to that are the dynamics of historical work itself that would do well to make reference to the historical materialist thinking of Benjamin.
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The complex geneology for the use of new technologies in arts practice is described by Charlie Gere in his 'When New Media was New' (in Kimbell, 2004: 46-63). In this he weaves together the parallels of information theory and artistic experimentation - from John Cage and Fluxus, to E.A.T. Experiments in Art & Technology and Jack Burnham's interest in Art, Technology and Science to Roy Ascott's futurism.
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nothing
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Like silence in John Cage's 'Lecture on Something': 'every something is an echo of nothing' (Dyson, 1992:131), a determinate negation is not simply negative. For instance in mathematics a zero is a definite negative number. In this way, it might be possible to extend the Hegelian logic of being as thesis and nothing as antithesis - to the binary structures of 1's and 0's - and end up with the synthesis of becoming - in other words, as the execution of computer code. In a sense, it is the inherent dialectic itself that sets its rhythm. Hegel would go further and claim that the dialectical method works because the world works dialectically. Here the distinction should be made between mere difference - something is not something else - and the more fundamental claim that something is not something else but depends on it to exist - this is contradiction (the Hegelian example of the relationship between Master and Slave is a good example). I am merely saying that it is an appropriate critical method for the study of computer functionality because at a fundamental level of operation, it works dialectically. It's difficult to say what something is until it turns into something else.
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Add notes from John D. Barlow's The Book of Nothing, London: Vintage 2001.
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If we add a zero to the right side of any number, it is multiplied by ten. In Indian mathematics, the zero symbol counts for absence as well as space making it a much more positive sense of absence (Barlow, 2001:35). In contrast, Leibnitz (working more in the Hebrew tradition of taking the void as the state from which the world was created) suggests:
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'It is true that as the empty voids and the dismal widerness belong to zero, so the spirit of God and His light belong to the all-powerful One.' (quoted in Barlow, 2001: 42)
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In this conception, nothing is taken to be in separation from God and with corresponding negative connotations. Although the christianity suggested that creation came from nothing (creatio ex nihilo), creation was created itself by something - God the creator. To dispute this was heresy, thus scientists had to develop theories to account for God as well as Nature. In this way, God was increasingly conceptualised in terms of space: the 'infinite void' according to Newton for instance (whereas philosophers such as Leibnitz refused to equate God and space). God was seen by de Cusa: 'an infinite sphere whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere' (quoted in Barlow, 2001: 81).
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Indian tradition accepted non-being and being as equals in much more fluid terms - with nothing as a state from which we came and may return. The relationship between being and non-being is famously addressed in Existentialism - especially in Sartre's Being and Nothingness in which he contests Hegel's idea of the dialectic. Hegel argued that Being and Nothingness were equal and opposite - one as empty as the other. Sartre argues this is not the case, that they are thoroughly different, in that their asymmetry is accounted for: 'emptiness is emptiness of something' (J-P Sartre, Being and Nothingness, London: Routledge, 1998: 15; quoted in Barlow, 2001: 58). In other words, the argument is whether nothing is the opposite of something, or whether it has nothing to do with something.
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In this regard, Barlow quotes Aldous Huxley and the example of 'God and the empty set':
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'You know the formula: m over nought equals infinity, m being any positive number? Well, why not reduce the equation to a simpler form by multiplying both sides by nought? In which case, you have m equals infinity times nought. That is to say that a positive number is the product of zero and infinity. Doesn't that demonstrate the creation of the universe by an infinite power out of nothing?'
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(2001: 171-2; quoting from Point Counter Point, London: Grafton (1928) p. 135) In other terms:
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m = ° x 0
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Paradox is now regarded as part of reality. For instance, Kurt Gšdel demonstrated that certain statements in arithmetic were impossible to prove as either true or false even when using the rules and symbols of arithmetic. For instance, paradoxes that were both true and false proved the limits of mathematical method. (see Hofstadter)
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Similarly, through quantum theory, matter was discovered to have 'complementary pairs of attributes of things which could not be measured simultaneously with arbitrary precision, even with perfect intruments' (Barlow, 2001: 215, describing the work of Werner Heisenberg). This became known as the 'Uncertainty Principle'. For instance, uncertainty arises in the way that the very act of measuring something disturbs the thing being measured in some way and hence makes the measurement unreliable. The measurer is part of the system as a whole and hence influences it in some way. The principle sets a limit to classical ideas of position and momentum in the description of a quatum state - both concepts cannot co-exist when one enters the quantum regime explains Barlow (2001: 215).
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note:
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Roy Varra - performer who simply stood in Tianneman Square as a provocative action - although doing nothing. He was arrested.
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Note:
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There's a Lacanian twist to this too, in the elaboration of Ernst Kris's case of the 'pathological' self-accusation of plagiarism, between 'stealing nothing (in the simple sense of "not stealing anything")' and 'stealing Nothingness itself'. Lacan emphasises that this should not be taken at face value but that 'the real plagiarism is in the form of the object itself' and is thus not innocent as such. The patient is actually stealing nothing like the anorexic is not simply eating nothing but 'eating Nothingness itself' (Zizek, 1999: 108-9).
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More notes on nothing:
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Georges Perec, famous for his novel A Void in which he writes a novel without any letter 'e' in it; with difficulty enough without then translation into english by Gilbert Adair, making a detective novel in which the search for a solution is paralleled by the missing letter. The underlying principle here and within the rest of the 'OULiPo' group was to investigate the creative possibilities offered by incorporating mathematical structures and other forms of artificial restriction into literature - rejecting structuralism for 'structurElism' as they put it.
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But what if the medium is the message and all that is left is the void?
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In Erased de Kooning Drawing, of 1953, Rauschenberg literally erased a drawing by the famed Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning, thereby removing its aesthetic content. He had considered using one of his own images but realised that in this case "the work would return to nothing" (Robert Rauschenberg, Smithsonian Institute catalogue, 1976). In other words, it was important that the drawing already had a commodity value and would be physically difficult to rub out such that the act of erasing it would be arduous and be a symbolic rejection of 'formalist commodity-making'.
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He said he was trying "... to purge myself of my teaching and at the same time exercise the possibilities - so I was doing monochrome no-image" (also in catalogue, p.75).
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Such an example of unmaking an artwork is rooted in zero-action events and auto-destructive art (and for that matter its inverse: the auto-generative art object as the object that makes itself automatically, cf. autonomy/autobiography). The most clear example of zero-action is perhaps the no performed sound or silence of John Cage's '4'33'. The performer, who simply sits quietly in front of the piano for four minutes and thirty-three seconds, merely opens and closes the piano lid to indicate the piece's three 'movements'.
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The performance, of course, clearly consists of something - ambient sound, the sounds of bodies and spaces, breathing, mumbling, just ordinary noise. The audience is encouraged to reflect upon the 'framing' devices of the work of art and consider the background more fully.
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Likewise, Merce Cunningham treated all movements of the body as potential dance movement - use of chance to determine choreography (now uses computers to generate choreography).
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Despite the critique of everyday life (cf. Society of the Spectacle and the Situationist international), Cage is a quietist - in that he did not demand political change, only against established value judgement.
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It might be concluded that in this kind of work 'Everything equals nothing and that art is equivalent to nothing'. On the contrary, the performance, of course, clearly consists of something. The audience is encouraged to reflect upon the 'mediating' devices of the work of art and consider the distinction between presentation and representation (and the noisiness of silence).
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This non-action emphasises that nothing is an echo of something, or in this case, as Cage put it: "Every something is an echo of Nothing" (from, John Cage, "Silence", from Lecture on Something, p.131, quoted in Frances Dyson, "The Ear That Would Hear Sounds In Themselves", in, Kahn & Whitehead, Wireless Imagination, p.383).
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The void of zero-action attempts to remove representation and signifying practices but is knowingly (or is it annoyingly) aware of its necessary failure. The point being that there is no emptiness as such, only context and the medium employed as the message and ultimately as the art object/event. Furthermore, as an object/event, its meaning is activated by the presence of a viewer through a 'making-event' (John Latham's phrase, from Dialogues with the Machine, ICA conference, June 1998 - although as he distinguishes between a 'making-event' and 'viewing -event'). The audience is encouraged to become the artist to fill the void (of meaning). The viewer makes the work through granting it meaning reinscribing it with detail.
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There are many examples of nothing as art, including Picabia and Duchamp of course, but also: John Baldessari cremated all his work from May 1953 to March 1966 to give himself a fresh start; Kozlov showed an empty film reel; Keith Arnatt titled a work 'Is it possible for me to do nothing as my contribution to this exhibition?'; Barry even closed the gallery for one of his shows; carnevale welcomed visitors to a totally empty room; and so on and so forth (all quoted in Lippard, 1997: xx).
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Sean Cubitt (1998), Digital Aesthetics, London: Sage.
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The work is more critical than theoretical in as much as it is a work in itself. (??)
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[add to section on formalism and/or nothing]
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In 'Reading the Interface' (1998), Sean Cubitt explains that there is a disjunction between the world and the text in as much as writers do not actually write books but they are manufactured by other workers and machines. The text, this text and his text, cannot be divorced from the materials and institutions that produce and disseminate it. Otherwise the text is 'idealised' and privileged over the cultural form of the book, separating it from the reality of its production: 'The text is the immaterial presence which re-presents the absent material' (1998: 21). In a sense, the computer assists in the dematerialisation of the text and at the same time marks the materiality of the production and dissemination of the text, its presence and absence.
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The story goes that John Cage, on visiting the anechoic chambers of Harvard University, heard two distinct sounds that turned out to be the sound of his blood and the central nervous system. He discovered that even when trying to artificially make silence, it was impossible task and one that indicates something of the silencing of works of art. Cubitt draws a parallel to the debates around the autonomy of the work of art such as in the work of Clement Greenberg (1992), and the relative silence in which aesthetic contemplation is encountered. Although on the one hand Greenberg contributed to an understanding of the medium, at the same time he contributed to a silencing of the artwork (Cubitt, 1998: 93). Cage's 4'33" is the clearest example of trying to explore the absented sound object. Cage sought to remove compositional control through the use of chance with a set of strict rules informed by his interest in the I Ching. What remains is a durational composition with no content. These ideas are further developed in his composition 0'00" in which the control of duration would also be removed. These examples paradoxically function as spectacle, making the compositions of silence:
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'not the unmediated sounds of the world, nor the liberation of music from its own autonomy, but a commodification of sound as music in the up-to-date form of the commodity without use-value, a pure display of taste.' (Cubitt, 1998: 97)
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It fails to engage with its apparatus sufficiently in other words - it is 'quietist'. It simply commodifies noise and strips it of its social character, making noise into music and erasing it simultaneously: 'producing a certain mode of subjectivity rather than an interpretation of hearer and heard' (Cubitt, 1998: 97). Perhaps this is something the Frank Zappa version attends to, as a recording registering the production and dissemination of the work (1993).
number-badiou.txt
Alain Badiou (2008) _Number + Numbers_, Cambridge: Polity.
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So why not use mathematics as the main metaphor for analysis given that numbers like behind the code at a fundamental level? Certainly there is a currency for this - expressed in the enthusiastic take up of the principle of topology across disciplines and the interest in the writings of Alain Badiou that align ontology with mathematics and the numerical understanding of politics (see for instance, his _Number + Numbers_, 2008). Badiou sets out his project in section 0 of the book: 'we live in the era of number's despotism... Number governs our conception of the political…', numbers govern science, history, cultural representations, the economy, our souls, 'But we don't know what number is, so we don't know what we are.' (2008: 1-4) Indeed the relation between the human and machine reader comes closer than ever to the operations of a calculating machine. Yet this is also an argument for a continued attention to speech, its fundamentally human (or animal) social characteristics, and its place within our understanding of politics, remains crucially important. Numbers may have been somewhat repressed in Continental Philosophy at the time of Badiou's writing (in french, 1990, following his _Being and Event_ in 1998) but the same cannot be said now. If anything speech continues to need a voice that exceeds number, and we might even begin to count a multiplicity of such voices.
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Matthew Fuller (2003), 'It Looks Like You're Writing a Letter', in Behind the Blip: essays on the Culture of Software, New York: Autonomedia, pp.137-165.
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Future patterns of work are made explicit in the availability and prevalence of 'Microsoft Office' in workplaces and universities across the world. In a business-like manner, it prescribes and universalises certain activities and even use of language as a blatantly imperialistic gesture (a neglected project comes to mind where none of the functions of a Word-like word-processing program work at all, and whatever key you press Mein Kampf begins to type). It is as if the user is designed as part of the package, or even more so disappear into it; that the 'disappearance of the worker is best achieved by the direct subsumption of all their potentiality within the apparatus of work' (Fuller, 2003: 139). This is designed predetermine work and to deny the user a sense of autonomy. The user simply becomes one of the objects of its object-orientated program, and this is hidden from the user by the user-(un)friendly graphical interface.
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In 'It Looks Like You're Writing a Letter,' Matthew Fuller tries to deconstruct one aspect of this office package, 'Microsoft Word', its word-processing program, by literally taking it apart (2003; although first written to accompany the installation 'A Song for Occupations' at the Lux gallery, London, in 2000). He is suggesting an imperative to 'make language, to cut the word up, open, and into process' (2003: 163). [I am currently typing these notes using Word to get a feeling for the critique. It is supplied by my university as standard issue as part of a suite of Microsoft products.] He begins by saying: 'All word-processing programs exist in part at the threshold between the public world of the document and those of the user, the writing and what lies behind it' (2003: 138). 'Word' is intentionally over-complicated given what it sets out to facilitate, providing a surplus of functionality and of course surplus value for Microsoft (not least in the way it necessarily interfaces with other Microsoft products).
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Of interest to Fuller is the array of programmed functions. The various forms of 'help' available, exemplified by the Disney-like Office assistant equipped with limited artificial intelligence to confront the user's stupidity. There are also a range of templates available too such as 'CV wizard', 'Envelope Wizard' and 'Letter Wizard' (and thus the title of the essay) but no Suicide Note Wizard (2003: 148; something later attended to Olga Goruninova's (or was it Rachel Baker?) 'I See You Are Writing a Suicide Note'). The underlying grammar conforms to the standardised form of proprietary software with an emphasis on tasks to be completed, such that as the user learns the language, 'the language installs the user into the system' (Fuller quoting Heim, 2003: 148). And as a result, and because of the overall context of Office: 'digital writing is not simply subsumed within an uninterrupted envelope for accessing various medial formations, but articulated, variegated, and positioned by the [...] culture of doing business.' (2003: 150) The preferences of the program are particularly evident in 'autocorrect' and its automated spelling and grammatical corrections reflected the hegemonic dominance of the English language as the globalised language of business, what Fuller calls the 'material-semiotic infrastructure of business' (2003: 160).
office-fuller.txt
The lesson to be learned for Fuller, in opposition to the authoritarian teachings of Microsoft, is that software might be produced that allows for 'autonomous work' in the sense that AndrŽ Gorz suggests (2003: 161; citing AndrŽ Gorz, 1985, Paths to Paradise - on the Liberation from Work), that allows for escape from the codifications and commodifications of Word. He insists that 'Culture is an engineering problem' (2003: 162), such as the use of viable alternatives such as open source software. The difficulty is when 'free software is too content with simply reverse-engineering or mimicking the cramped sensoriums of proprietary software, Copying Microspoft Word feature-by-feature and opening up its source code is not freedom. Mimesis is misery' (2003: 162). If the user is fully written into open source software so much the better for society.
orality-felderer.txt
Brigitte Felderer (2008) 'Orality', in _Zauberhafte Klangmaschinen: Von der Sprechmaschine bis zur Soundkarte_, Hainburg/IMA Institut für Medienarchäologie (Hg.), Schott Music, pp. 92-93.
orality-felderer.txt
Between 1783 and 1785, von Kempelen's speech machine was presented in public in Germany, Paris and London. The format invited the public to suggest some words to be repeated by the machine. At the end, the machine was explained in detail demonstrating that the aim was not spectacle, mystification or mere fascination, but to be of educational value and to give the deaf an instrument to produce speech. The idea was to generate a 'voice' in its fullest sense, as in free speech and expression, to give voice to those without a voice: following in the spirit of 'the basic tenets of society' as Kempelen put it (in Felderer 2008: 92).
orality-felderer.txt
The sounds were generated not with pipes but with levers, valves and flexible rubber horn to simulate human speech. Significant is that the machine does not simply reproduce the human speech organs but also attempts sound synthesis. Following closely the instructions for von Kempelen's speaking machine of 1791, Jakob Scheid designed his speaking machine in 2001-2. In the contemporary version part of the fascination lies in its use of traditional materials in contrast to digital computer methods. The machine has bellows for lungs, a rubber horn for a mouth, and a box as a windchest. It is manually operated to manipulate controls to produce its disembodied voice.
orality-ong.txt
Walter J. Ong (2002 [1982]) _Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word_, London: Routledge.
orality-ong.txt
The differences between orality and writing are investigated by Walter J. Ong in _Orality and Literacy_ (2002), arguing that the electronic age has sharpened our understanding - not least through the 'secondary orality' of media communications that all depend on writing in various ways (such as scripts for radio and television, and written programs for computing). Even if mathematics underlies these linguistic procedures, in terms of human communication, speech underlies that. Whereas Saussure takes writing to be a complement to speech, Ong takes the relation to be more complex and dynamic. More specifically, what distinguishes Ong's work is that he writes about 'primary orality'; attending to those speakers unfamiliar with writing rather than study those that can read and write.
orality-ong.txt
However some speech relies on writing. Rhetoric is a case in point, its Greek origins 'techne rhetorike' meaning 'speech art' referring to oral speaking. In Aristotle's _Art of Rhetoric_, rhetoric is taken to be the organised product of writing, revealing how orality has been enhanced by writing rather than simply representing it. In this sense, oral art-forms are literary, governed by carefully worked out rules and honed skills; what Ong calls 'Oral Literature' (2002: 10). (note: Greek 'rhetor' is linked to the same etymological root as the latin ''orator' meaning public speaker.)
orality-ong.txt
Written texts are related to the world of speech, either directly or indirectly, as is all language necessarily. The spoken word haunts all texts ('sound is the natural habitat of language', as Ong puts it (2002: 8)), and writing is spoken (if only silently) to reveal its meanings to the reader/listener. The irony, as Ong points out, is that in writing about orality and literacy, he relies on written literacy to deliver his argument and not an oral performance. Similarly with these words you are reading not listening to, although evidently we sound out the words directly or indirectly as we read.
orality-ong.txt
In speaking, the speaker imagines addressing someone before they speak (even when speaking to oneself). When a speaker addresses an audience, people tend towards a collective whole, but when reading tend towards private contemplation. Speech tends towards collective and public forms of address and action.
orality-ong.txt
In oral cultures, or primary orality as Ong puts it, words take on special (even magical) powers and agency. For example, the Hebrew term 'dobar' means 'word' and 'event', and referring to the work of Malinowski, Ong emphasies how amongst ('primitive') people unfamiliar with writing, language is a mode of action and not only a referent of thinking. Words are active. In the Bible, for instance, orality is maintained through its style of prose, and of course because it is taken from oral accounts - and through the authority of the word of God. The Bible although written by human authors is always the word of God. God is author like no other writing. Such myths emphasise how: 'The spoken word is always an event, a movement in time, completely lacking in the thing-like repose of the written or printed word.' (2002: 74). It follows that oral utterances, emanating from inside living beings, are thoroughly active. Spoken utterance is live and it comes from living beings to other living beings. More anthropologically:
orality-ong.txt
'Deeply typographic folk forget to think of words as primarily oral, as events, and hence as necessarily powered: for them, words tend rather to be assimilated to things, "out there" on a flat surface. Such "things" are not so readily associated with magic, for they are not actions, but are in a radical sense dead, though subject to dynamic resurrection.' (Ong 2002: 32-3)
orality-ong.txt
The power of these interconnections is what the technology of writing attempts to capture (although always incompletely), and in so doing it has transformed human consciousness. Rather than the Platonic idea that the technologies of writing or computing are artificial and weaken memory and consciousness (note: for instance, in Plato's _Phaedrus_), is a rather partial account of its effects. In contrast, Ong stresses that writing is the most radical of technologies, setting forth processes that computing plainly continues, 'the reduction of dynamic sound to quiescent space, the separation of the word from the living present, where alone spoken words can exist' (2002: 81). Although the argument _Coding Praxis_ is rather different in suggesting that the dynamic and real-time processes of program code are speech-like.
orality-ong.txt
Such processes affect consciousness and culture. The evidence of how writing has transformed human cultures is well documented, from the first written scripts developed by the Sumerians (in circa 3500 BC) to the printing press of the middle ages in Europe. This is writing in the sense that it stands for utterance, not simply representations of things in pictures or symbols but a representation of what is spoken. Chinese writing complicates this separation in that it is particularly complex in combining pictures and speech, through its vast number of characters (the K'anghsi dictionary of Chinese in AD 1716 contains 40,545 characters, taking about twenty years to learn, according to Ong 2002: 86, although the official language of Mandarin is replacing such richness, replacing its elitism with homogeneity).
orality-ong.txt
Chinese:
orality-ong.txt
Most work in this area contrasts orality and alphabetical written forms rather than other writing systems such as Chinese characters or indeed program code. But Ong's work is not concerned with computer languages that resemble human languages that for him remain unlike human languages in that they do not emanate from the unconscious but directly out of consciousness:
orality-ong.txt
'Computer language rules ('grammar') are stated first and thereafter used. The 'rules' of grammar in natural languages are used first and can be abstracted from usage and stated explicitly in words only with difficulty and never completely.' (2002: 7)
orality-ong.txt
Criticism (add to other sections):
orality-ong.txt
There is a tendency to associate the verbal art work with the visual object world, making a poem more an object than an event. But sounds resists its reduction to objectness, fixed in time and space, instead it is dynamic and context bound. In the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss, he focussed on oral narrative, taking it to be structured like the language system itself - through contrasting elements, such as phonemes and morphemes, in binaries such as the raw and the cooked. In Derrida's deconstructionism, writing is not taken as a supplement to the speech, but as a separate performance. So rather than the reader's commonly held assumption that there is necessarily a referent to the word in speech - what he calls 'logocentrism' - writing is seen as a break from speech. Therefore, to Derrida, language is is not representational or referential but means nothing. The paradox is unavoidable in that the writing is representational even when declaring it is not. Like Plato denouncing writing for orality, such views are expressed in writing (Ong 2002: 164).
orality-ong.txt
Speech-act theory:
orality-ong.txt
Austin and Searle are associated with speech-act theory. It distinguishes the 'locutionary' act (the act producing an utterance, a structuring of words, eg. 'hello world'), the 'illocutionary' act (an act expressing the interaction between utterer and recipient, eg. a greeting like 'hello' as opposed to another mode of address), and the 'perlocutionary' act (an act producing intended effects such as surprise). It underpins the cooperative aspect of conversation in a quite different way than writing. Ong thinks it lacks attention to oral and especially to written communication in what be referred to as a 'text-act' (2002: 167; the term is taken from Winifred B. Horner). In this context, the idea is to focus on the 'code-act' (not the 'code-object'). For instance, in examining the nineteenth century's fictional address to the reader (Dear Reader...) and imagining scenarios where 'Dear computer...' is enacted.
oulipo-motte.txt
Warren F. Motte Jr. ed., (1998) OuLiPo: a Primer of Potential Literature, trans. Warren F. Motte, Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press.
oulipo-motte.txt
Ouvroir de LittŽrature Potentielle can be defined more closely by drawing attention to the title itself. Firstly, the multiple meanings of 'ouvroir,' in French, include a place where people work together on a difficult task deriving new techniques, and more precisely a sewing circle that operates as a rich metaphor. Workroom is inadequate to describe this, from 'ouvrer' to work, as it does not amply describe the work, or indeed play, of literature as praxis. The word 'potential' too is suitably descriptive. Raymond Queneau describes this as:
oulipo-motte.txt
'less a question of literature strictly speaking than of supplying forms for the good use one can make of literature. We call potential literature the search for new forms and structures which may be used by writers in any way they see fit.' (Motte, 1998: 38)
oulipo-motte.txt
The concerns over form and structure were shared by structurAlism, although a clear distinction suggested by Francois Le Lionnais in the term 'structurElism' to emphasise the Oulipo's concerns over structures and the inevitable levels of constraints (over form and constraints of literary genre, etc). The concerns are syntactic rather than semantic in this sense: 'Indeed the creative effort in these works is principally brought to bear on the formal aspects of literature: alphabetical, consonantal, vocalic, syllabic, phonetic, graphic, prosodic, rhymic, rhythmic, and numerical constraints, structures, or programs.' (Le Lionnais, in Motte, 1998, 29) The 'virtualities of language are revealed by constraint' and the use of rules 'so cherished by the classics, were principally used as a means of channelling eventual overflowings of a poorly controlled verbal flood' (Marcel BŽnabou, in Motte, 1998: 43). Through structure, linguistic objects might be organised into new arrangements. An example of automatic transformation of text, alluding to cryptography, is Jean Lescure's S+7 method in which a text is taken and each word (s for substantive) is replaced by the seventh following it in a dictionary. Raymond Queneau, who proposed the 's-additive' series, points out that if a 2000 word dictionary is used, the S+2000 method would produce an exact copy of the original (Motte, 1998: 61). In this sense, and according to Perec, 'the Book is a cryptogram whose code is the Alphabet' (in Motte, 1998: 96),
oulipo-motte.txt
The legacy of semiotics, structuralism and formalism is clear - in Vladimir Propp's analysis of combinatory and permutational forms not least, or J. R. Pierce's semiotics. To the Oulipo, two general principles apply: the analysis and appropriation of historical experiments in form; and, the synthesis or elaboration of new forms. Le Lionnais summarises this as 'Anoulipism' (analytic mode) devoted to discovery and 'synthoulipism' (the synthetic mode) to invention (Motte, 1998: 2). Here we have the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns comparable to the 'laboratory synthesis of living matter' (Le Lionnais, in Motte, 1998: 30). When something thought new is unwittingly discovered to be invented in the past, as is often the case, Le Lionnais refers to this as 'plagiarisms by anticipation' (Motte, 1998: 31; referring to LautrŽamont's 'plagiarism is necessary'). In this way, Georges Perec's La Disparation (1969), in which a 300 page novel is written without using the letter E, can be seen as less a work of avant gardist experimentation and more a contemporary example of the literary tradition of the 'lipogram' traced back to the sixth century BC. Perec himself studied the 'History of the Lipogram,' (in Motte, 1998: 97-108) so was aware of the long tradition that includes, for instance, Lope de Vega who wrote five stories without each vowel in turn; and most tellingly Ernest Vincent Wright, who in 1939 wrote the novel Gadsby: A Story of Over 50,000 Words without Using the Letter E. (1998: 106)
oulipo-motte.txt
(Note: The reverse constraint of La Disparation is Les Revenentes (translated as The Exeter Text) that only uses the vowel E.)
oulipo-motte.txt
Queneau's Cent Mille Milliards de Poemes (one hundred thousand billion poems) (1961) is a classic example: ten sonnets that can be arranged according to formal rules. To each of the ten first lines, the reader can add any of ten different second lines, and so on. The sonnet has fourteen lines so the possibilities are of the order of 10 to the power of 14, or one hundred trillion sonnets. Le Lionnais, in the postface to the work, describes the 'technical superiority, the work you are holding in your hands represents, itself alone, a quantity of text far greater than everything man has written since the invention of writing' (Motte, 1998: 3). The potential writing in this sense implies its potential reading. It is exponential. This exemplifies the Oulipean project in both taking an analytic and synthetic approach: the traditional constraining form of the sonnet and imposing a multiplicity of constraints upon it 'arbitrary at the outset but [that] become highly codified through use (and it is precisely this "use" that separates the normative text from the experimental). (Motte, 1998: 4) The full potential of this work lies unrealised for practical reasons: literally existing in a potential state.
oulipo-motte.txt
In emphasising formal constraints, inspiration and other literary myths of creation and genius, are devalued. Constraint, in this sense, works on a number of general levels, suggested by Motte as: firstly, a minimal level of language itself; secondly, an intermediate level of genre and literary norms; finally and the one concerning the Oulipo, a maximal level 'of consciously preelaborated and voluntarily imposed systems of artifice' (1998: 11). This is clear when Le Lionnais states that: 'The efficacy of a structure - that is, the extent to which it helps a writer - depends primarily on the degree of difficulty imposed by rules that are more or less constraining' (1998: 11). In the Oulipean laboratory, a constraint is a formula that is 'proven' by the production of a text. In La Disparation, a simple constraint is imposed that causes immense difficulty on implementation. La Disparation is a good example of the use of constraint in a fuller reflexive sense as a novel about disappearance of the letter E, 'thus both the story of what it recounts and the story of the constraint that creates that which is recounted' (Roubaud, in Motte, 1998: 12). (Note: The idea of parody is evident here too - in 'heteroparody' in which others work is imitated or 'autoparody' where the author imitates their own work.)
oulipo-motte.txt
The central analogy is between mathematics and literature, itself invoking a long tradition (the influence of Nicolas Bourbaki being one notable influence - see notes elsewhere - and the game theory of von Neumann, and the literature of Lewis Carroll). The mathematician Queneau, probably the main protagonist here, has contributed significantly to this mix: for instance, in the proposition 'The Relation X Takes Y for Z,' other binary, ternary, and 'n-ary' relations are imagined (Motte, 1998: 153-5); or where algebraic hypotheses are turned into text, such as in his 1955 Meccano (Motte, 1998: 82). In 'cellular prosody,' Conway's 'Game of Life' is used as a rule base, in a similar way to Mozart's 'musical game', using a card index to compose 'recurrent, iterative or recursive' forms (Motte, 1998: 115). Creative endeavour is seen to be programmed, and is considered in terms of its execution. Thus, the potential for permutations or 'combinatorics,' what Le Lionnais calls a 'combinatory literature', is expanded greatly by the computer and its systematic compositional structure. As an aside, Permutations is a Web site by Florian Cramer, that reproduces combinatory text systems, such as those of Ramond Queneau, in digital form. This mechanistic approach is entirely in keeping with Oulipean 'anti-aleatoric' (anti-chance) procedures: 'Make no mistake about it: potentiality is uncertain, but not a matter of chance' (Bens, in Motte, 1998: 17). Rather, Oulipean texts are generated through the use of laws, through constraints. The ideas of chance, randomness and freedom of expression are all confined to the wastebasket in this sense.
oulipo-motte.txt
In a somewhat contradictory way, Le Lionnais argues that Queneau's interest in prime numbers was precisely because they 'imitate chance while obeying a law' (Motee, 1998: 18). Furthermore, what if the law itself is a random one, asks Motte, such that the system of constraint itself is generated in this way? This contradiction might open up new potentialities of course. What distinguishes the human use of constraints and the machine version is the error in the system. In 'Prose and Anticombinatorics,' Italo Calvino demonstrates the potential of the computer in serving this purpose, proposing that: 'the aid of the computer, far from replacing the creative act of the artist, permits the latter rather to liberate himself [sic] from the slavery of a combinatory search, allowing him also the best chance of concentrating on this 'clinamen' which, alone, can make of the text a true work of art.' (in Motte, 1998: 152; the 'clinamen' is the swerving of atoms from Epicurean atomic theory)
oulipo-motte.txt
Taking its inspiration from the bifurcating structure of computer program instructions, Queneau's 'A Story As You Like It,' (1998: 156-8) provides the reader with two choices of how to proceed at each stage of the story - towards a happy or unhappy ending perhaps. In an experiment to explicitly bring computer science and literary creation together, Paul Braffort was commissioned to program some of the Oulipo works such as Queneau's 'Cent Mille Milliards de Poemes' and 'A Story As You Like It.' (Motte, 1998: 140-2) In describing this enterprise of 'aided creation' or 'algorithmic literature', Paul Fournel argues that the machine allows the author top dominate the existing relations of computer, work and reader in new ways. Far from a deferral of authorship, the computer offers new potentialities for literary praxis.
oulipo-motte.txt
Alluding to dialectics, Perec proposes that introducing a flaw in the system breaks the symmetry: 'because when a system of constraints is established, there must also be anticonstraint within it. The system of constraints - and this is important - must be destroyed.' (Motte, 1998: 20) Citing Queneau's 'Cent Mille Milliards de Poemes', Harry Mathews describes the potential of the algorithm to compose and or decompose texts. The dialectical nature of this composition is even more evident his statement that:
oulipo-motte.txt
'Beyond the words being read, other lie in wait to subvert and perhaps surpass them. Nothing any longer can be taken for granted; every word has become a banana peel. The fine surface unity that a piece of writing proposes is belied and beleaguered; behind it, in the realm of potentiality, a dialectic has emerged.' (Motte, 1998: 126)
oulipo-motte.txt
For Mathews, this dialectic is virtually automatic.
perl-wall.txt
Larry Wall, ÔPerl, the first postmodern computer languageÕ, http://www.wall.org/~larry/pm.html
perl-wall.txt
Perl (an acronym for "Practical Extraction and Report Language") is a high-level programming language, first developed for Unix by Larry Wall in 1987, and developed as an open source project. The language uses highly flexible syntax and concise regular expression operators, making it particularly dense and difficult to read for the uninitiated. The syntax is, however, really relatively simple and powerful. Perl programs are generally stored as text source files, which are compiled into virtual machine code at run-time. Perl programs are usually called 'Perl scripts'. The program that interprets/compiles Perl code is called "perl", typically "/usr/local/bin/perl" or "/usr/bin/perl".
perl-wall.txt
Perl and Linux have something in common emerging out of Unix culture. Perl is, by and large, a digested and simplified version of Unix (and by extension Linux). Larry Wall sees a further connection to postmodernism, but his views are based upon a series of theoretical misconceptions. For instance, he is keen to point out that modernist culture was based on 'or' rather than 'and', something that postmodern culture reverses. Clearly he has not read Berman's argument that dialectical thinking asserts 'and-both' over 'either-or'. Disregarding the clumsy descriptions of postmodernism and deconstruction, Wall points out that in Perl 'AND has higher precedence than OR does'. Perhaps more usefully, he points to the eclecticism of Perl, combining and appropriating other languages, working against concepts like originality. Importantly, Perl like Linux is an open source project, emerging out of a culture of sharing.
perl-wall.txt
Wall claims that one of Perl's features is to focus attention not so much on the problem but on the person trying to solve the problem, on the creativity of the programmer: 'It doesn't try to tell the programmer how to program.'
political-schmitt.txt
Carl Schmitt (2007) _The Concept of the Political_ [_Der Begriff des Politischen_, 1932], trans. George Schwab, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
political-schmitt.txt
The renewed attention to Carl Schmitt's work revolves around his critique of liberalism. To Schmitt, the conjunction of liberalism and democracy (at the heart of modern politics) have obscured the political, and an associated conception of sovereign authority that has the ability to make singular, absolute and final decisions (the 'exception', in other words). In contrast, liberal politics is full of compromise. He asserts that politics can not be made safe and any attempts to make it safe result in undermining the state and leaving it to private interests (for Schmitt, the concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political, 2007: 19).
political-schmitt.txt
'Liberalism in one of its typical dimemmas of intellect and economics has attempted to transform the enemy from the viewpoint of economics into a competitor and from the intellectual point into a debating adversary.' (2007: 28)
political-schmitt.txt
The friend-enemy distinction takes this further to define the political in terms of subjectivity. By the distinction, the claim is made that each person takes responsibility for their existence to the point where they are willing to fight to preserve it through engaging with the reality of death and conflict. Adopting this argument, would suggest that many of the urgent political questions around democracy, the ethics of free software, and so on, can only be addressed antagonistically.
political-schmitt.txt
'The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism, and every concrete antagonism becomes that much more political the closer it approaches the most extreme point, that of the friend-enemy grouping.' (2007: 29)
political-schmitt.txt
And even more polemically expressed:
political-schmitt.txt
'It would be ludicrous to believe that a defenseless people has nothing but friends, and it would be a deranged calculation to suppose that the enemy could perhaps be touched by the absence of a resistance. [...] If a people no longer possesses the energy or the will to maintain itself in the sphere of politics, the latter will not thereby vanish from the world. Only a weak people will disappear.' (2007: 53)
political-schmitt.txt
Thus the antithesis of bourgeoisie and proletariat is evoked, where antagonism comes in a concentrated form but is necessary for survival.
politics-ranciere.txt
Jacques Rancière (2001) 'Ten Theses on Politics', Theory & Event 5:3, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v005/5.3ranciere.html
politics-ranciere.txt
'Politics is not the exercise of power. Politics ought to be defined in its own terms, as a mode of acting put into practice by a specific kind of subject and deriving from a particular form of reason. It is the political relationship that allows one to think the possibility of a political subject(ivity) [le sujet politique], not the other way around.'
politics-ranciere.txt
The return of the political in Rancière's theses, makes reference to Arendt and Aristotle to identify the common good as opposed to the sad reality of liberal participatory democracy. He defines politics as bound to relations but not as the relation between subjects but as the the contradictory relation through which the subject is defined. According to Aristotle, the subject (politès) is defined by 'part-taking' (metexis) in a form of action (archein - ruling) and in the undergoing that corresponds to this doing (archesthai - being ruled) (2001). The origin of the political lies in the properties of its subjects and in how they come together, how they 'part-take', or in other words how they participate in contradictory forms of action. 'Politics is a paradoxical form of action' according to Rancière, and hence can be defined in the contradictions at the heart of action - between acting and being acted upon.
politics-ranciere.txt
For Rancière, the classical opposition of 'poiesis' and 'praxis' do not help explain action. In saying this, he is making reference to Arendt's _The Human Condition_ in which praxis takes on the power to act (and speak) corresponding to the principles of freedom and good politics. The problem is that this presupposes a need to act rather than be acted upon, that leads Rancière to conclude that the opposition cannot be resolved and the logic need to be ruptured to identify politics. It is the very 'axioms of democracy' (of ruling and being ruled) that require rupture to open up discussion of the constitution of the subject and its relations (2001).
postmodernism-foster.txt
Whatever Happened to Postmodernism?
postmodernism-foster.txt
Foster begins: 'Not so long ago it seemed a grand notion' is an ironic description of Lyotard's idea of the end of grand narratives and modernity's fundamental link to ideas of progress (1995: 205). He characterises this as a halt to 'the march of reason, the accumulation of wealth, the advance of technology, the emancipation of oppressed workers, and so on' (1995: 205). The notion of postmodernism, he argues, has always been under dispute. But more particularly, he is making reference to his own earlier work around critical postmodernism: Postmodern Culture, (1993) first published as The Anti-Aesthetic. He advocated a critical practice that sought new forms for culture and politics. Since then the notion has become thoroughly incorporated, banal, empty and worse still - fashionable.
postmodernism-foster.txt
Foster is largely in sympathy with Jameson's 'long-wave' theory and defends its over-determined mechanical appearance as a more subtle 'palimpsest of emergent and residual forms' (1995: 207). Nevertheless he adds that it's too spatial and not sensitive enough to different speeds and to the idea of deferred action (he takes from Freud). By this, he points to Freud's view of subjectivity as structured through a 'relay of anticipations and reconstructions of events that may become traumatic through this relay'. He simply adopts this dialectical pattern by way of analogy in the relationship of modernism to postmodernism as a 'continual process of anticipated futures and reconstructed pasts' (207) and perhaps accounts for a present crisis of culture. Each period builds dialectically on the previous one and then releases new energies as a result of the contradictions that arise. This is evoked in Benjamin's poetic notion that 'every epoch dreams the next', emphasising that any conception of the present (now-time) is dynamic and nonsynchronous (207). To illustrate this line of thinking 'whatever happened to postmodernism?', he adopts a similar model of periodisations but of thirty years apart (not fifty like Mandel) - the 1930s of high modernism, 1960s that marks the advent of postmodernism, and 1990s, the time of now (or to be more accurate when it was written, then). He discusses the relationship of technology and culture but by employing psychoanalysis too, is keen to trace corresponding shifts in Western conceptions of subjectivity and its relationship to the cultural other. Through this model and by treating theory not merely as a critical instrument but as an object too, general shifts emerge according to Foster and certain anticipations and reconstructions are evident. For instance. Fanon's reworking of Hegel and Marx master-slave dialectic in The Wretched of the Earth (1961) that underpinned anti-colonial struggles appears now to be overshadowed by postcolonial fashion with little connection to the fundamental dialectical tensions of power (an argument more consistent with Jameson than Foster perhaps). For Foster, in the 1930s, Levi-Strauss and structural anthropology, Lacan and the structures of the unconscious, addressed the formations of subjectivity. This shifts to the 1960s, where Althusser, Foucault, Barthes, Deleuze and Guattari all addressed the death of the humanist subject, only to return in excessive identity formations, now split, fractured and in multiple forms (and offering multiple markets for capital). It is important not to mis-read the 'death of the author' thesis, however much a contradiction that might seem if meaning is produced in the act of reading. The author and therefore death is metaphorical. The argument does not simply take issue with individual cultural producers but with meaning production under certain conditions, and in particular within authoritarian communication models. The generality was strategic, and death-wish only wishful thinking.
postmodernism-foster.txt
In the 1930s too, Benjamin's 'The Artwork in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility' engaged with the relationship of authenticity to authority. Much of this discussion of culture and technology was recast in the 1960s in contrasting ways by McLuhan in Understanding Media (1964) on the body and by Debord as The Society of the Spectacle (1967) on the image - respectively endorsing technophilic and technophobic tendencies (1995: 209). More specifically, in support of this backwards and forwards dynamic, he continues: 'even as one moment leads to the next, this next comprehends the one before' (1995: 218). Thus he draws a line between Benjamin and the mechanical age of the 1930s transformed to Debord and the spectacle of the 1960s to cyberpunk that imagines the cybernetic extensions predicted by McLuhan in the 1960s, that cross reference back to Benjamin (1995: 218) and so on. This is confusing, but emphasises the complex referencing back and forwards through history.
postmodernism-foster.txt
Analogies and images appear and reappear in new guises. The body penetrated by technology in Benjamin (the magician and surgeon comparison where the surgeon-technologist penetrates deep into reality), is 'electronically' extended in McLuhan (to a global nervous system prefiguring the Internet) and in turn to Haraway's cyborg figure where technology is inseparable from the body (in 'The Cyborg Manifesto'). The image designed for reproducibility in Benjamin is spectacularised by Debord and loses its referent as the simulacra of Baudrillard. The point for Foster is not to judge the various merits of the various and competing positions, but to use these examples to indicate change in any present situation. This is what he points to as the deferred action or double movement of modernism and postmodernism. But why not judge the merits too, for we both lose and gain simultaneously.
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A winner's game requires losers. Foster's interest in the cultural other serves to stress the limits of the New World Order. He says: 'Thus, if we celebrate hybridity and heterogeneity, we must remember that they are also privileged terms of advance capitalism, that social multiculturalism coexists with economic multiculturalism' (1995: 212). Under this logic of expanding markets and consumer capitalism, like any other dominant system, even resistance is necessary for the system to reproduce itself afresh. Foster puts it like this: 'Such a vision does not totalise, for no order, capitalist or otherwise, can control all the forces that it releases. Rather, as Marx and Foucault variously suggest, a regime of power also prepares its resistance, calls it into being, in ways that cannot always be recouped.' (1995: 212)
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All these issues and the earlier critical theories and methodologies revolve around the idea of 'correct distance' for Foster (1995: 214). The question of how you adopt correct distance from something is easily connected to anthropology and psychoanalysis - through participant-observer relations and the like. He evokes Fanon again too, when the 'other' of European colonial history begins to reject colonial authority and re-establish autonomy in a colonial context - the paradox is exemplified by the Fanon's title Black Skin, White Faces (he makes reference to the work of Homi Bhabha too, eg. The Location of Culture). The examples stress the importance placed on spatial matters, not least in postmodernism itself, and all separations of the West and Rest, centre and periphery, culture and nature and so on. Certainly these distinctions appear less firm, even if power is distributed just as unevenly. Like Jameson, he is concerned that poststructuralism and its deconstruction of such binaries (Derrida is a case in point) has ultimately served to obscure their workings and ability to make strategic transformations. This is not to dismiss its critical ability at all but to question its own sense of authority - to turn it back on itself perhaps.
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The key issue for Foster is one of distance. In Benjamin, the eclipse of distance (welcomed in the loss of aura), allowed the potential for culture to become more democratic. This exists as potential and is just as likely to be mis-used by Fascism because of its reach (more on this in Benjamin notes - though Foster cites Adorno and Horkheimer in The Dialectics of Enlightenment, who drew the comparison between Nazi Germany and the culture industry of the United States; they had fled one to think it evident in the other in another guise). Distance under the influence and impact of new technology, already dialectical in Benjamin (add good quote), is further emphasised in Heidegger's quote: 'a uniformity in which everything is neither far nor near' (1947, quoted in Foster, 1995: 219). In the age of the internet, distance is key to understanding this paradox, and the feeling that Debord described as 'the lonely crowd'. Distance is dialectical in that it remains bound to this idea of being both critical and distracted. He explains the currency of this position: 'Is our media world one of a cyberspace that renders bodies immaterial, or one in which bodies, not transcended at all, are marked, often violently, according to racial, sexual, and social differences? Clearly it is both at once, and this new intensity of dis/connection is postmodern' (1995: 221 - his example is the anecdote of his fascinated/disgusted reaction to the CNN coverage of the Gulf War).
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The paradox is all the more pronounced in 'spatiotemporal splittings' described in various ways: 'disgust undercut by fascination; sympathy undercut by sadism; fantasy of disembodiment dispelled by adjection'(1995:222). The evocative idea of obscene proximity is a reference to Baudrillard's essay 'the ecstasy of communication' that renders things too close in a pornography of information. He sees the current tendency towards disavowal as part of this (I know but nevertheless... I will find excuses to not do anything about it). If things appear too far and too close, how then are we to operate with any sense of critical judgement, if critical distance is eroded? Foster offers the model of deferred action, of the relay of anticipation and reconstruction. Without saying it he is evoking the 'angel of history' capable to reconstructing past events to make them better (in 'Thesis on the Philosophy of History'. This, for Foster is one way out of a difficult situation (of being a cultural theorist), and is the proper function of critical history and theory.
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The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
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This is a lengthy text so my summary is suitably lengthy too I'm afraid.
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First published in New Left Review (no. 146, 1984: 59-92), this is a much-quoted essay, and was later published as part of Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). This later full title explains something about Jameson's intentions to investigate the condition of postmodernity - as he puts it 'to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place' (1991: ix). Rather like the distinction between analogue and digital processes, he makes apparent the varying conceptions of cultural change: within Modernism expressed as an interest in things 'new' (rather like 'time-lapse' photography) and with an outcome firmly in mind (utopian in that sense), whereas the Postmodernism looks for breaks, and what he calls 'the tell-tale instant' (what we might see as digitisation) to the point where culture (aesthetic production, innovation and experimentation too) has in itself become commodified. The period towards the end of the millennium is marked by 'introversion' and the sense of the 'end of this or that' rather than premonitions of the future. (1991: 1) Is the beginning of the next millennium any different?
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This leaves us in a distinctly uncertain and unstable time - unable to imagine or characterise an '"age" or zeitgeist or "system" or "current situation" any longer' (1991: xi). He claims it has the merit of being dialectical in so far as it makes claims to uncertainty (I was reminded here of Richard Wright's talk where he said that allegory is called for in times of instability). Jameson also points to the contradictory nature of some of postmodernism's claims: from Lyotard's notion of the end of grand narratives that is itself presented in narrative form, and that any so-called distinct break from what went before or an end of history, contains residual traces from modernism itself ('shreds of older avatars' xii - you could look at Habermas 'Modernity: an incomplete project' in the reading list for more on this if you like). He concludes that postmodernism is 'only a reflex and a concomitant of yet another systemic modification of capitalism itself' (1991: xii) - 'late capitalism' in other words (a term allegedly taken from Adorno and the Frankfurt School - and no doubt consistent with Marx's view of 'capitalism' as a world system, some time later, merely more pronounced).
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Its 'late-ness' (or its poor time-keeping) is opposed to any perceived breakdown or distinct end of any previous system - in turn, suggesting that things have changed, and that things are different, but only in relative terms. He thus talks of a 'return of narrative of the end of narratives, this return of history in the midst of the prognosis of the demise of historical telos... [and] the way in which virtually any observation about the present can be mobilised in the very search for the present itself and pressed into service as a system and an index of the deeper logic of the postmodern' (1991: xii). Of course, this is part of the cultural logic of the title of the essay itself.
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Elsewhere (in the book), he discusses the concept of utopia as 'the crucial test of what is left of our capacity to imagine change at all' and what he calls 'returns of the repressed of historicity' (drawing on the Freudian model of latent and manifest data - if you repress the existence of something it will return anyway at unexpected moments) (1991: xv-xvi). He sees video as emblematic of postmodernism's claim to be a new form but also reflects centrally on architecture because of its close links with the economy - indeed, you might find some useful references here on space for the notion of 'invisible architectures' - especially section V, pp. 38-45.) For our purposes, we would add certainly offer digital technology as demonstrating a more suitable correspondence because of its aesthetic mutability as well as economic determinacy. In fact, even Jameson acknowledges the allegorical power of network technologies (more on this later) despite the computer's dull outward appearance and lack of surface dynamism. He points to the comparison with the Futurists delight in speed and the workings of machines - clearly not evident at all in merely looking at the grey box and wires of the motion-less computer processing unit. Its outward appearance expresses nothing of its inward operations apart from a whirring noise.
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First, what is postmodernism? It is not an autonomous theory, but a self-conscious, contradictory and contested set of ideas and beliefs. It is over-used, mis-understood, yet despite the difficulty in defining it (itself a contradictory exercise), arguably revolves around the following issues: (1). That ideas of progress, rationality and scientific objectivity which legitimated western modernity are no longer acceptable in large part because they take no account of cultural differences; (2). that there is no longer any confidence that 'high' or avant-garde art and culture has more value than 'low' or popular; (3). and that it is no longer possible to securely separate the 'real' from the 'copy', 'fact' from 'fiction', or the 'natural' from the 'artificial', in a historical situation where (information and image) technologies have so much control and reach.
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Postmodernism, then allegedly emanates from the late 1950s or early 1960s and is generally understood as a break with modernist tradition. It is a neologism (a new phrase linked to new thinking), likened to a best-selling novel or to a corporate merger that became popular over alternative terms like post-structuralism, and late-modernism, in parallel to post-colonialism - precisely because of its lack of philosophic, political or economic focus perhaps. This might well be one of its unfortunate outcomes in serving to distract attention from economic issues whilst simultaneously supporting innovations in the field (whilst no one noticed). Evidently, it has an ideological or 'active function' (1991: xiv) in re-working, re-writing and re-defining existing structures of an older system to appear new and distinctly different; thus granting 'new' perspectives on the production of objects and the formation of subjectivity (think of virtual objects in a posthuman world). Jameson goes on to describe the dynamics of these new structures in terms of '"cultural revolution" on the scale of the mode of production itself' and explains that 'the interrelationship of culture and the economic here is not a one-way street but a continuous reciprocal interaction and feedback loop' (1991: xiv-xv) [By the way, the reference here between culture and economics is drawing upon the idea in Marxist theory that the superstructure (including culture) responds to changes in the (economic) base or infrastructure].
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Slightly differently, he is keen to emphasise that culture and economics are intricately linked as 'they collapse back on one another and say the same thing in an eclipse of the distinction between base and superstructure... [and further suggests] that the base, in the third stage of capitalism, generates its superstructures with a new kind of dynamic' (1991: xxi). This line of thinking appears to be validated by the Western governments belief in the importance of culture and the cultural industries - as for example, expressed in policy documents, lottery schemes and regeneration programmes. The relationship of economics to culture is in itself dialectical. Nevertheless like any good Marxist, Jameson is also keen to point out the danger of any 'disembodied cultural logic' (1991: xviii) that ignores human agency as the power to change things. Herein lies what he calls the 'Sartrean irony' wherein the totalising system is described so effectively that the subject feels powerless to effect any change (why bother voting when a single vote makes no difference and the whole system a charade!). Although currently out of favour, totalising thinking (any consensus but including class politics, for instance) is not all bad, and may simply be a strategic means of making a convincing enough case for change (rather like representational politics). On the other hand, the most obvious example of totalisation on a global scale is globalisation itself - and there is little evidence to suggest that this is of benefit on across the very globe it purports to serve. However the danger of dismissing big ideas, is that ideology is missed altogether. From time to time, thinking about issues at a general level is useful in leading to actions operating at a particular level. Totalisation, then, is 'most plausibly decoded as a systematic repudiation of notions and ideals of praxis as such, or of the collective project' (Jameson, 1991: 333). Postmodern theory serves to trap subjects into a similar feeling of hopeless impotency (evoking the image of a monkey chattering in icy water I have quoted previously). At the superstructural level of postmodernism itself, various dubious practices thrive in the name of progress as mere extensions of older systems of dominance. This serves to highlight the difficulty in identifying 'a new systematic cultural norm and its reproduction in order to reflect more adequately on the most effective forms of any radical cultural politics' (1991: 6). Any new critical analysis must take account of the need to render old theory obsolescent: 'As with any other economy or logic, to the mechanisms that drive the process forward must be added mechanisms that prevent it from slackening or lapsing back into habits or procedures of the past' (Jameson, 1991: 397), Newness of approach is presented here as a reworking.
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Rather than a distinct paradigm shift, Jameson argues for the use of the term 'late-capitalism' to counter the popular phrase that Daniel Bell called 'postindustrial society'. This serves to dispute that new social formations no longer obey the laws of industrial production and reiterates the importance of class relations (1991: 3). Here he is drawing upon the work of the economist Ernest Mandel in Late Capitalism (1978) who argued that in fact this third stage of capital was in fact capitalism in a purer form - usually described as Multinational Capitalism with its relentlessly expanding global markets and mobile to guarantee the cheapest work-force. Yet the visibility of 'totalising' global politics is increasingly invisible. Closely related to this, technology 'may well serve as a adequate shorthand to designate that enormous properly human and anti-natural [alienated] power of dead human labour stored up in our machinery' (1991: 35). I am reminded here of a quote I used in another essay: '[...] universal language operates, like universal space and time, by exclusion.... Ironically, it is the very people whose labour is so carefully hidden inside the hygienic white boxes on the desks on the wired world... who will be left outside in the world their work creates. In this way, the production of the material infrastructure for the internet is itself erased under the sign of the universality of its language, its claim to speak for all and with every voice.... representation, in both the democratic and the semiotic senses, is in question in cybernetic technologies of communication.' (Sean Cubitt, 'Orbis Tertius', in Third Text 47, Summer, 1999: 6). Importantly, technology does not determine change but reflects the development of capital still interested in profit above human suffrage.
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In terms of method, Jameson adopts Mandel's 'periodising hypothesis' of expanding and stagnating economic cycles. He quotes Mandel on the 'quantum leaps in the evolution of machinery under capital' directly:
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'The fundamental revolutions in power technology - the technology of the production of motive machines by machines - thus appears as the determinant moment in revolutions of technology as a whole. Machine production of steam-driven motors since 1848; machine production of electric and combustion motors since the 90s of the 19th century; machine production of electronic and nuclear-powered apparatuses since the 40s of the 20th century - these are the three general revolutions in technology engendered by the capitalist mode of production since the 'original' industrial revolution of the later 18th century.' (1991: 35; in Mandel 1978: 119).
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Thus, like cheese, capitalism is cast as early, mature, late or advanced - and one might presuppose that that the later stages contain elements of mould.
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These periods are dialectical in that their expansion is in parallel to the previous period's stagnation. Jameson describes them in other familiar terms as: (1) market capitalism; (2) monopoly capitalism, or the stage of imperialism; (3) multinational capitalism, or what some people wrongly call the postindustrial period (1991: 35). These periods expand capital's reach and further enhance commodification and cheap labour. Jameson relates these economic stages directly to cultural production, as follows: (1) realism - worldview of realist art; (2) modernism - abstraction of high modernist art; and (3) postmodernism - pastiche (as distinct from parody). [Note: There's often a confusion over parody and pastiche, as both involve imitation and mimickry. Parody mimicks style which mocks the original (as satire) to cast ridicule and is more associated with the modern period. Pastiche similarly imitates a particular style but does so without an ulterior motive. 'It is speech in a dead language', a neutral practice, 'amputated of the satiric impulse' (1991:17). Jameson, in another essay 'Postmodernism and Consumer Society', says 'Pastiche is blank parody, parody that has lost its sense of humour... blank irony']. Evidently, culture advances in loops or screw-turns, or in a spiral-like fashion through a combination of vertical and horizontal axes (both social-synchronic and historical-diachronic axes).
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These developments are uneven and layered, without clean breaks as such. Jameson is keen to stress that this is not a mechanistic model despite appearances, and is fully aware of the irony of the situation in using a model largely discredited by the concept of postmodernism itself. He remains confident that 'all isolated or discrete cultural analysis always involves a buried or repressed theory of historical periodisation' (1991: 3). What lies hidden or buried here is ideology perhaps (and even false consciousness) if the dialectical model of essence and appearance is acknowledged in the method. In recent cultural theory, Jameson argues that depth models such as this have been largely superceded by multiple surface models (as if the world was flat after all - I wonder whether networks are flat too, certainly computers appear to flatten experience to a screen - even VRML is flat, isn't it?).
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In this way, what was once theorised as the alienated subject is now the fragmented or decentred subject rather like a screen, viewed in parallel to networks, decentred narratives and non-linearity. Post-structualist theory has rendered the subject decentered, distributed and no longer autonomous (a classic example of this line of thinking would be Roland Barthes 'The Death of the Author', in Image-Music-Text, London: Fontana 1977 (first written 1968), pp. 142-148; whereas a more recent counter-argument would be Slavoj Zizek in The Ticklish Subject, 1999, arguing for a recentring of the subject under particular conditions - I think I mentioned this in an earlier summary). With the end of the belief in the autonomous subject, other ideas of originality, and individualism all similarly fragment. This is clearly no bad thing, but also threatened are shared political ideals and any sense of viable collective action against common power structures (the ruling class enemy, for instance), to be replaced by 'stylistic and discursive heterogeneity without a norm' (1991: 17) and this is what Zizek expand upon. Linked to this decentred condition is what Jameson refers to as the 'waning of affect' (1991: 16) - a certain lack of feeling but also of the linear logic of cause and effect, once conceived of as operating within established conventions of time. Now 'faceless masters' rule in ways that are harder to perceive, and therefore resist.
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In the age of postmodernism, 'parody finds itself without vocation' replaced by pastiche because parody is no longer possible (1991:17). Cultural production is left resigned to making empty reference to the past in a retro-culture or nostalgia of repackaged ideas and surface images - following Debord's description of 'the society of the spectacle' (1967) to its logical extreme in the 'simulacra' of Baudrillard. The past is reduced to a vast database of images without referents that can reassigned for commodification and indiscriminate use.
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Jameson says that the present is colonised by 'pastness' displacing 'real' history (1991: 20), and proceeds to cite many examples of the simulacra of history and this 'crisis of historicity'. Ultimately this leads to the diagnosis of a schizophrenic condition, where the loss of reality becomes a new aesthetic form. For example, Jameson describes David Bowie multi-tasking in The Man Who Fell To Earth watching fifty-seven television screens simultaneously (1991: 31) - a schizophrenic couch potato later entirely commodified as a url: www.davidbowie.com (even pop stars, these days, resort to spatial logic over temporality).
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Crucially for his purposes, he describes technology as 'a figure for something else' to legitimise his adoption of the three economic and cultural periodisations. Clearly technology in the third machine age can be said to indicate some of the same decentred and fragmented tendencies described (1991: 35). Machines are no longer machines for production but rather machines designed for reproducibility (using Benjamin's phrase) or even for transformation - evoking quite different set of processes and metaphors of fragmenting and distorting screens. Moreover, like cyberpunk fiction but without advocating it as particularly effective (William Gibson's Neuromancer etc), power is expressed as autonomous and conspiratorial systems, circuits and networks that are notoriously difficult to perceive. Whilst acknowledging quite different conditions for historical development and change, he says:
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'The technology of contemporary society is mesmerising and fascinating not so much in its own right but because it seems to offer some privileged representational shorthand for grasping a network of power and control even more difficult for our minds and imaginations to grasp: the whole new decentered global network of the third stage of capital itself' (1991: 37-8).
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Jameson is keen to map this (postmodern) space in which we drift, rather like Benjamin did for the experience of emerging modernism and technology at the turn of the last century in his work on Baudelaire and flanerie set against a increasingly automised street culture - put simply walking or travelling by car. Recent work around cyber-geography might attempt to map these spaces but usually does so without revealing the inherent contradictions and thus remains rather pedestrian. 'Critical distance' (1991: 48) is impossible in a situation where opposition is incorporated and commodified into the dominant system as a matter of course. Yet, distance remains a suitable dialectical concept for communications technology (as it did for Benjamin in the 1930s) as it remains impossible under a system that requires everything to be positioned too close and too far away simultaneously. For Jameson, spatial issues are of fundamental importance, leading him to suggest the 'aesthetic of cognitive mapping' (1991: 51). He proposes a situation and practice where people map in their minds their position or the urban totality in which they are positioned enabling an understanding of a seemingly un-representational social structure. Perhaps this accounts for the recent interest in cyber-geographies, as well as cartography as a whole. For Jameson, this is an answer to false-consciousness (as an imagined reality) and reveals ideological detail left off many maps whilst of course being implicitly embedded in the very practice of map-making. If you're not convinced, think of the very practice of translating a three-dimensional world into a flat surface - making it flat despite evidence to the contrary. I am left wondering if the writing of code could be thought of in a similar way, organised in such a fashion as to reveal its hidden processes and operations (this is my research interest if it wasn't already apparent). How could this begin to acknowledge multinational capital and new social formations?
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In conclusion, the dialectical imperative, according to Jameson, is to conceive of the present phase of capitalism like Marx did 150 years before as both the best and the worst thing that ever happened - to view it simultaneously in terms of catastrophe and progress (1991: 47) - evoking the angel of history. This means to inscribe the possibility of change into the very model of change offered up as unchangeable - or something suitably contradictory like that. This is (arguably) the purpose of cultural production and a project to which computers might be suitably deployed.
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Jerome Rothenberg & Pierre Joris (2002) eds. and trans. _Kurt Schwitters: pppppp (poems performance pieces proses plays poetics)_, Cambridge: Exact Change.
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In the Dadaist tradition of montage, Schwitters describes his method of combining diverse elements to undermine if not erase the boundaries between art forms:
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'I pasted words and sentences together into poems in such a way that their rhythmic composition created a kind of drawing. The other way around, I pasted together pictures and drawings containing sentences that demand to be read.' (2002: xv)
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The integration and equivalence of diverse elements seems in keeping with digitisation. This operates across art forms but also genres. For example, his text-based works include poems, plays, prose, and so on, across various languages (rather than simply in his native German). Connection is also made to the Wagnerian idea of 'Gesamtkunstwerk' (total work of art) in combining various elements from artistic genres synthesised through the technique of assemblage. As Schwitters explains:
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'These materials are not to be used logically in their objective relationships, but only within the logic of the work of art. The more intensively the work of art destroys rational objective logic, the greater the possibilities of artistic form. Just as in poetry word is played off against word, so in this instance one will play off factor against factor, material against material.' (2002: xvii)
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The materials derive from everyday life and politics, what he refers to as the 'banalities' of objects and language (in other words, 'dada' - or more accurately that banalities contain dadaistic nonsense). This underpins the language experiments with unusual combinations and lack of referentiality. 'Ur Sonata', for example, is a thirty five minute sound poem without words performed by Schwitters. The politics of this is covert in comparison to the overt politics of other dadaists, embedded in the times and life in general (and of course the rise to power of the Nazis). Schwitters contentiously claimed: 'Art is too precious to be misused as a tool' (2002: xxvi) but reveals the political dimension of speech, writing and coding.
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Henri Lefebvre (1968), 'The Marxian Concept of Praxis' in The Sociology of Marx, trans. Norbert Guterman, New York: Pantheon, pp. 25-58.
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Karl Marx (1980) 'Theses on Feuerbach' (first written 1845), in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Selected Works in One Volume, London: Lawrence and Wishart (first published in 1968, Moscow: Progress Publishers). pp.28-31.
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Karl Marx (1978) 'The German Ideology' in Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, New York: Norton, pp. 146-200.
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Despite Marx's claim that his use of the dialectic is the exact opposite to Hegel's, it is more productive to think of the relationship of Marx to Hegel as a dialectical one - one of conflict. Lefebvre says in one sense Marx continues Hegel, in another sense breaks with him (1968: 25). For example, the State for Hegel is that which holds society together, and is the culmination of human achievement. This follows the Hegelian approach to synthesis that eventually completes the dynamic relationship of thesis and antithesis. This is the infamous 'end of history' - a history that culminates in the present. Whereas in Marx's thinking, the State is also subject to historical conditions, hence is not complete and so requires continual dialectical analyses and action. It is the existing State that needs to be challenged. Marx simply insists that human consciousness is seen as a 'succession of changing stages and shifting moments' (becoming) and sees a contradiction in Hegel insisting on the end of history (1968: 28; privileging space over time). In Marx, both nature and history are conceived of historically (privileging time over space perhaps). Lefebvre explains that in Marx, time is both growth and development. In this sense, time is both quantitative in that it is continuous and predictable as well as qualitative in that it is discontinuous and proceeds in irregular leaps. This unpredictable element makes history full of the potential for fresh creation not simply a series of repetitive loops.
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Praxis is defined in opposition to philosophy and philosophical contemplation (rather like the way Arendt sees action as more productive than contemplation alone - see those notes). Unlike praxis, philosophy in itself has no value and cannot change the world. Lefebvre says: 'To rise above the world by pure reflection is in reality to remain imprisoned in pure reflection' (1968: 32. note: these are words of warning for the traditional form of a phd as privileged knowledge). The problem of knowledge that philosophy attends too (and doctors of philosophy), is an abstraction of little consequence in the social realm. To Marx, in Theses on Feuerbach, the human subject is social, and society is active and interactive. This is characterised by Marx as:
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'Social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which mislead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice. [...] The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.' (1980: 30)
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The much-quoted last sentence emphasises that praxis goes beyond philosophy (which is used by Lefebvre to justify the practical and applied nature of sociology - Marx is writing at a time when the sciences have not yet been compartmentalised). At its most extreme, this is a lame justification for positivism at the expense of speculation. According to Lefebvre, this is one criticism of Marxism in its tendency towards positivism at the expense of philosophical speculation - he accuses both Lucacs (his theory of class consciousness) and Gramsci (his theory of praxis as privileging the State) of conceiving of the end of philosophy (1968: 36-7; a reference to Hegel's end of history). Lurking in the background here is a more complex philosophical argument over the opposition of idealism and materialism (making reference to Marx's The German Ideology of 1845/6 and Manuscripts of 1844). Early Marx rejects both positions for revolutionary praxis - as it goes beyond idealist and materialist philosophy. Simply to privilege objective or subjective approaches, or truth and reality, does not take account of dialectical conflict that serves to explain praxis in more complex and productive terms.
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The concept of praxis is described by Lefebvre in more detail. Firstly, praxis can be understood as an extension of sensuous human subject, that enters into social relations, and as a result exercises subjective powers of 'activity, reflection, desire'. In this way, human creation can be explained as praxis in which humans transform nature through 'the unity of the sensuous and the intellectual, of nature and culture' (1968: 39). Secondly, human needs, both individual and social needs are satisfied by work, and in doing so 'controls nature and appropriates it in part', in turn transforming needs (1968: 41). In summary, praxis rests on 'the sensuous on the one hand, creative activity stimulated by a need it transforms on the other'. History proves this point. In 'The German Ideology', Marx states that humans 'must be a position to live in order to be able to "make history"' (1978: 155-6). It is a fundamental condition of history to be in position to satisfy the needs of life itself - both in terms of procreation and labour required for natural and social relations (note: it is in The German Ideology that he describes the 'latent slavery' within the family in deflecting the labour-power of others, and in turn indicative of society as a whole). Indeed, work is both productive, and is productive of 'new production needs and needs for production' (1968: 42). Lefebvre says: 'Work is part of a dialectical process "need-work-enjoyment," within which it is one practical and historical "moment" or stage' (1968: 43).
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There is a dynamic here in which new processes emerge and adapt previous processes and the existing social divisions of labour interact with new technologies to form new divisions. Lefebvre is keen to distinguish between two types of labour here - what he calls 'functions' and 'work'. He uses 'poiesis' to refer to labour that gives 'human form to the sensuous' such as the work of a farmer, craft-maker or artist. Praxis however, 'in a broad sense, subsumes poiesis; in the strict sense, it only designates the pragmata, the matters actually deliberated by the members of the society' (1968: 45). The point for Lefebvre is that both within and between poiesis and praxis, work is in conflict with itself (for instance, productive labour is devalued in relation to creative labour, as an individualised practice, within poiesis). Work to Lefebvre is described through a series of contradictions:
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'It is at once individual and social, differentiated and total, qualitative and quantitative, simple and complex, productive and unproductive, heterogeneous and homogeneous. It comes into conflict with nonwork (idleness, leisure). Work qua dialectical process and qua content gives rise to a specific form, the form assumed by the product of physical labor; the commodity.' (1968: 45)
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Praxis is thus understood as content (the labour) that creates new forms built on these contradictions. This is evident in the contradictions built into every commodity in terms of use-value and exchange-value - labour produces the commodity and becomes a commodity (more on this elsewhere). The trick of the capitalist, of course, is to hide the content under a deceptive form rather than to reveal the contradictions of value and hence divisions of labour involved.
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Praxis is an important concept as it helps to emphasise the point that human activity turns on these dialectical relations between living beings and their works. Lefebvre proposes three levels of praxis: the repetitive, the innovating, and the mimetic that lies between the two others (1968: 51). Repetitive praxis merely performs previous actions within determined cycles; mimetic praxis sometimes breaks out of this imitation but without clear purpose; however creative praxis reaches its highest level in revolutionary activity. This is thoroughly transformative of conservative praxis: 'Revolutionary praxis introduces discontinuities into the overall socio-historical process.' (1968: 52-3).
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In summary:
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'Every praxis has two coordinates: one denotes the past, that which has been accomplished, the other the future onto which praxis opens and which it will create.' (Lefebvre, 1968: 55)
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Notes (from entry on 'theory', taken from Raymond Williams, Keywords, 1988: 318 (first published 1976):
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By 'praxis', I refer to practice or action informed by theory. Praxis is derived from the Greek as simply practice or action but since the C16th in English has expressed the practice or exercise of an art or an idea, and in specialised contexts is used to express a sense related to theory (where theory is an active interrelation between explanation and things happening or made to happen in controlled situations). It complicated but most usage simply serves to object to the simplistic separation of practice and theory - clearly one informs the otrher and vice versa. Praxis is a systematic exercise in an understood and organised skill.
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Most significantly, in German (c. 1840), through Hegelian thinking and in turn Marxist, praxis is explicitly practice informed by theory (and theory informed by practice too). In this way, theory is made meaningful and tested by practice. Practice is action (made practical). The opposition of theory and practice is surpassed and privileges practice/action rather than theory (as opposed to theoretical practice or critical practice perhaps).
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Thus, I hope it is clear why I am using the term praxis in the context of a practice-based PhD project.
precarious-vishmidt.txt
Angela Mitropoulos (2005) 'Precari-us' & Marina Vishmidt 'Precarious Straits' in Mute issue 29, pp. 88-92 & 93-95.
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The phrase 'precarious labour' has become increasingly popular to describe intermittent and irregular work that 'teeters' on the edge of moral acceptability and the ability to generate a living wage. Flexibility in employment patterns necessitated by capitalist exploitation have created precarious conditions for workers, unions and hopefully capitalism. In scenarios that still take subjectivity as the key to political change, Mitropulos asks 'to what extent can an identity which is immanent to capitalism (whether 'working class' or 'multitude') be expected to abolish capitalism?' (2005: 91). In other words, does precarious labour fall into the same mindset? To her, the discussions around precarious conditions of arts practice or creative labour fall into a narrative of tragic drama. 'Precariousness' stands for the 'ideological poverty of capital's subjectification, and hopefully, the site for a broadly-based contestation of its effects' (Vishmidt 2005: 93). The immanence in capitalism is based on the connection between the production of new subjectivities, the refusal to work, and the recomposition of workers as a class - broadly referred to as 'immaterial labour'. In this scenario, the information worker is conflated with artist to performing 'creative labour'. To Vishmidt this raises problems not merely over the generality of the term 'immaterial labour' but also the dogma of art or creativity - excluding certain forms of labour from the analysis such as domestic work (2005: 94).
premediation-grusin.txt
Richard Grusin, _Premediation: Affect and Mediality after 9/11_ (draft manuscript, 2009) following with Jay Bolter (1999) _Remediation: Understanding New Media_ (MIT Press)
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'Premediation' reflects the current cultural moment and the logic of preemption - in extending 'remediation' that followed the double logic of the immediacy of the past combined with the remediation of the past - to inform not just the present and past but the future too. A shift has occurred in logic from mediating past forms to pre-mediating future events and media - rather like media's pre-emptive strike on the cultural imagination. In this sense premediation is an attempt to mediate potentialities.
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Niklas Luhmann views on temporality are important here in taking media to be a system operating on the binary code of information and non-information. In mass media, each programme holds the promise of another programme: 'The system takes it s time and forms every operation in the expectation that others will follow.' (The Reality of Mass Media, NY: Polity Press 2000: 11) This is the media's systemic requirement for new information, generating and reproducing future uncertainties (2000: 35). In formation and non-information codes relate to time: 'Information cannot be repeated; as soon as it becomes an event, it becomes non-information.' (Grusin 2009: 69) Luhman's argument is that observations about events happen almost simultaneously with the events themselves. Grusin extents this to argue that media logic conveys that something has just happened in the past and also something is just about to happen in the future - the 'liveness of futurity' (2009: 71). Media thus operates as an autopoietic system of the generation of objects for orientating society towards the future.
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Reader Report for Book Proposal
PREMEDIATION by Richard Grusin
The subject of the book is timely - in the light of culture's obsession with security, and the broader context of cognitive capitalism and affective dimension of communication technologies. At the heart of this is a post 9/11 reflection on mediality and how shock/terror is registered - extending the previous collaborative work 'Remediation' (1999). The distinction from this previous work is clearly expressed (if not overly) - that a shift has occurred in logic from mediating past forms to pre-mediating future events and media - rather like media's pre-emptive strike on the cultural imagination. The prehistory to this is Modernity and new modes of apperception. If, as the author argues, contemporary media prepares the public for shock/terror post 9/11, it is not simply a continuation of the project of modernity as earlier tactics associated with distraction are now tactics of anticipation.
It is a clear and well organised manuscript with a broad range of sources - from media and cultural studies laced with broader ideas from a variety of disciplines. The introduction begins with a very North American focus (although the logic of this is fine - after 9/11 and after Bush - it does give the impression that it is the centre of the world). The introduction emphasises the link to the 'double logic of remediation' - how technologies were classified according to how close they came to presenting an unmediated reality - to position the concept of premediation and its conditions. Premediation attempts to remediate the future before it settles into the present. In this sense one might expect it to invoke the dialectic of Benjamin's 'Thesis on the Philosophy of History' and I'm not sure the historical dimension is registered as it might be. On p.34 the argument seems rather superfluous - does anyone still take the term 'new media' seriously? However the book concentrates on mediality and argues that this has been lacking in analysis - the materiality of this is clearly important (dematerialising mediality as he puts it) but what about the materiality of history and the idea of rupture in this sense? I wonder if this is a conceptual oversight.
Three main concepts are introduced - premediation, mediality and affectivity - that form the theoretical and methodological framework for the book.
The first of these - chapter one - concentrates on premediation and how the future is pre-mediated (his examples are from science fiction films) and how it engenders a 'consensual hallucination' (as if a film). Post-Zizek and Baudrillard, the argument is well put if perhaps a little expected. I would repeat my comments about a more in depth analysis of historical processes here to situate the discussion of realtime, now-time and future time (no longer news but preemptive). Premediation remains a powerful conceptual tool but one to this point that is not analysed in depth – such as some commentators might suggest as the return of the repressed or the disavowal of the real. I do wonder whether the argument lacks verve, remaining in a rather straightforward mode of media analysis (ever more examples of films). Against this view, the section on autopoiesis is helpful in understanding the dynamics of premediation and adding some methodological detail on temporality and how disruption and surprise are always part of 'news'. Media logic conveys that something has just happened in the past and also something is just about to happen in the future - the 'liveness of futurity' (p. 71). I wonder whether something of the sophistication of this might have come earlier. The coda for this chapter is a clear summary all the same of the importance of the concept – no less than the attempt to mediate future possibilities and potentialities.
In chapter two – affect and mediality are examined in more depth with reference to the Abu Ghraib photographs. In keeping with materialist analysis, the interest is in not simply in what is represented but in the horror of representation more generally. Although referring to Zizek and Sontag, and excessive/obscene representational regimes such as pornography, the chapter is quite descriptive. Although the parallel to American popular culture and participatory media practices is endorsed, the violence of participation and democracy is underplayed (I say this as there has been considerable attention to these ideas recently). That the unconscious is evoked here also reminds the reader that this was underplayed in the previous chapter. Why here and not there? Later we are introduced to biopolitics, sovereignty and control societies (Foucault, Deleuze, Hardt, Negri, etc). The theoretical references are eclectic to say the least. I'm not sure how successful this is, even if the application is very clear in itself.
Chapter three 'Premediation and Securitization', extends some of these lines of discussion to security as the dominant paradigm of control (after Foucault and Agamben, and Amoore and de Goede in particular) to imagine future scenarios and threats – before it happens. That apparent mobility and freedom is an important part of this is well argued. Social networking (or 'distributed mediation' as he puts it, p. 139) is seen in the context of securitization – as a kind of self-policing, collection and monitoring of data. These connections and the importance of the affective/communicative dimension are convincingly made and are very topical. The discussion of 'affective feedback loops' (and games theory) adds detail to the concept of premediation here – and partly answers my earlier worries about the dynamics of the temporal processes at work - but I still feel the theoretical aspects are too wide here. They work fine chapter by chapter, and clearly it is meant to be interdisciplinary, but as a whole the argument on a theoretical level seems to lack coherence.
The last sections of the final chapter return to the central concept of premediation and I particularly welcome the critique of social networking, the internet of things, open web and cloud computing. This makes the book very current and helps to establish the central importance of the regime of securitization (and technological unconscious mentioned earlier in the book) and how this relates to preemption. The technologies can be seen to be based on affective states of anticipation and connectivity: 'commodified premediation technologies' (p. 181) – not surprise (or distraction) but the 'gesture of anticipation' that exemplifies premediation. The book ends on political agency through the idea of gesture (via Agamben and Benjamin) to characterise 'pure mediality'. This is a complex argument as far as I read it and the richness of the references are rather speedily covered (Benjamin's important essay 'Critique of Violence' for instance, not mentioned and the concept of 'pure means' brushed over). These sections are really important I think and the argument is rushed. The conclusions – where distance is maintained from ideological critique for a kind of relational model – are rushed too. I would have liked more clarity here as to how the political logic of premediation operates allowing for 'forethought' or premediated political possibilities.
In overall terms I think the book is well worth publishing. I have some reservations as indicated but think the topic and discussion extremely important. Although not particularly theoretical, it is very readable with lots of examples. It summarises existing work and introduces the concept of premediation that I think readers will find fruitful. Although at times, I would worry that it is overly North American in its focus, clearly there are wider resonances. I think this would make a useful text book for undergraduate readers particularly on media and cultural studies programmes. Although I feel that references to Remediation are overused at times – if its reception is anything to judge by, there will be considerable interest in the book.
programming-knuth.txt
Donald Knuth (1981) The Art of Computer Programming (1968)
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(Link to Matt Fuller's notes.)
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In the first of a seven volume set, Knuth begins:
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'The process of preparing computer programs for a digital computer is especially attractive, not only because it can be economically and scientifically rewarding, but also because it can be an aesthetic experience much like composing poetry or music.' (1981: v; extending an even earlier quote that strikes an analogy with recipes in a cookbook).
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The art of programming in his sense is somewhat close to the craft of programming (in line with current cultural policy in the UK at least). Perhaps the interest in aesthetics should be no surprise to someone such as Knuth as a mathematician, and the special relationship between computers and mathematics. Despite this co-dependence, he is keen to point to the 'interesting work' taking place in 'nonnumerical computer programming' in which translating languages and the 'development of "software" (programs to facilitate the writing of other programs), and the simulation of various processes from everyday life' as the subject of this volume (1981: vi). Knuth wishes to point out the depth of this relationship:
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'The construction of a computer program from a set of basic instructions is very similar to the constructions of a mathematical proof from a set of axioms.' (1981: ix) He quotes Ada Lovelace to prove the point:
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'Many persons who are not conversant with mathematical studies imagine that because the business of [Babbage's Analytical Engine] is to give results in numerical notation, the nature of the processes must consequently be arithmetical and numerical, rather than algebraical and analytical. This is an error. The engine can arrange and combine its numerical quantities exactly as if they were letters or any other general symbols; and in fact it might bring out its results in algebraical notation, were provisions made accordingly.' (1981: 1)
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Knuth's project is best described as the 'analysis of algorithms', and he playfully sets out the instructions for reading the book rather like an algorithm in itself in the section 'Procedures for Reading this set of Books', unwittingly evoking the work of OuLiPo, and perhaps particularly Calvino's 'How I Wrote One of My Books' (1995):
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'1. Begin reading this procedure, unless you have already begun to read it. Continue to follow the steps faithfully; [...] 3. Set N equal to 1; 4. Begin reading chapter N. Do not read the quotations which appear at the beginning of the chapter; 5. Is the subject of the chapter interesting you? If so, go to step 7; if not, go to step 6. 14. Are you tired? If not, go back to step 7; 15. Go to sleep. Then, wake up, and go back to step 7.' (1981: xv-xvi)
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Along similar lines, a series of codes are introduced to guide the reader through the exercises. Perhaps he is drawing an analogy here between the writing of the book and the programming of a computer - he points to a number of key issues: 'A programmer is greatly influenced by the language in which he writes his programs', and also points out that a machine will act idiosyncratically and become redundant over a relatively short time (1981: x & xi).
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The analogy to language goes further in terms of 'input-output (abbreviated to 'I/0') of data (note: data is the plural of datum), with the input often referred to as reading and output as writing.
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Subroutines are labour-saving devices for programming, introduced by Babbage for his Analytical Engine as a library of routines - later to be dynamically linked. Computers involve carefully structured relationships between data elements in storage systems, databases, libraries. A programmer needs to understand these dynamic relationships to be able to manipulate the system as a whole. For instance, Knuth makes an analogy in describing 'topological sorting' as requiring to find a way to arrange the glossary so that no term is used before it is defined' (1981: 260) rather like the Dewey system. In another set of dynamic structural relationships, 'trees' can be seen to grow in a 'bottom-up' or defy nature in a 'top-down' manner as ancestors and descendents accordingly (1981: 308-9) - more often cast in conventional terms as parents giving rise to children in the heterosexist breeding analogies. Dymanic storage algorithms can be used to manipulate the data.
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An algorithm is simply a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations or other problem-solving operations (especially by a computer). The term has a historical relation to 'algorism' as the process of doing arithmetic using Arabic numerals (originating from the title of the book Kitab al jabr w'al-muqabala (Rules of restoration and reduction) written by the Persian author Abu Ja'far Mohammed ibn Musa al-Khowarizmi, c. 825). In the eighteenth century, Leibnitz used the latin term algorithmus infinitesimalis to denote ways of calculation with infinitely small quantities. By 1950, Euclid's algorithm denoted the process to find the greatest common divisor of two numbers.
programming-napier.txt
Mark Napier (2000), interviewed by Andreas Broegger, ÔThe Aesthetics of ProgrammingÕ, in conjunction with the exhibition on/off, Copenhagen, http://www.afsnitp.dk/onoff/
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In discussing the aesthetics of programming, a deep understanding of code is required.In very general terms, code that the programmer works with, is compiled or interpreted so the machine can execute it. Mark Napier explains that with much proprietary software like Flash the source code is hidden because the software complies the code into binary. Property rights are thus an issue:
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'In the software industry the code is very valuable since it contains the
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knowledge, recipe or blueprint of how the software product is made. The
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binary "executable" is distributed to the world, but the source code is
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carefully guarded. As an artist I'm happy to share most of my source
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code with other artists. [...] Whoever owns the source code in effect 'owns' the artwork.' (2000)
programming-sorbonne.txt
Programmation OrientŽe Art, colloque organised by David-Olivier Lartigaud & Anne-Marie Duguet, CRECA (le Centre de Recherches d'EsthŽtique di CinŽma et des Arts Audiovisuals), UniversitŽ Paris, Sorbonne, 19/20 March 2004.
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David-Olivier Lartigaud, 'Introduction'
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Many comparisons are made between 'computer art' of the 1960-70s but clearly the conditions were very different - artists worked with programming out of necessity at that point in time. With today's 'software art' the emphasis is on programming in a quite different sense - to Lartigaud, it is 'a wish to go against standards and formats ever more massively spread'. This distinction is made explicit in Andreas Brogger's work in the comparison of the exhibition 'Software' and the contemporary term software art. He insists on the need to operate a 'more dialectical way of understanding the status of these objects' in whether to accept software art as art - however, if you applied the formulation of Benjamin here, you would simply conclude that whether it is art or not is the wrong question, as it changes the nature of art. For Lartigaud, it is a question of judgement and a term such as 'artistic programming' clearly means something different to the different constituencies of art and programming, but also probably makes little sense in itself. I would simply say look at a term like this dialectically - decidedly in terms of its contradictory nature. A similar mistake would be made in separating technical and artistic registers (note: in the case of ascii art, the programming itself has achieved an aesthetic dimension).
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'Programming' is defined as a 'set of utterances describing a forthcoming action [...] a set of operations to be implemented in order to get a result'. Computing programming clearly makes sense in relation to this. It etymology can be traced back to the Greek 'programma' as 'what is in advance written' - as set of instructions to be executed that are fixed beforehand. Unlike a score that is followed but interpreted, a computer follows the instructions without interpretation. Thus, is a different kind of criticism required - a 'hybrid criticism' necessitating expertise and critical understanding in art and programming. He thinks that 'open source' is a particularly interesting area for criticism in that it opens itself up for scrutiny whereas if a work is not open source how can anything other than its execution be appreciated. Here strategies like 'deprogramming' and 'dŽtournement' of technology are of relevance too in calling to attention the structures and standard formats of software.
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There is a confusion between art and aesthetics here - just because something, like programming, can be considered for its aesthetic qualities that does not necessarily make it art. Audience-address is part of this issue in how much a viewer understands the programme behind the work (this was the debate over the CODeDOC exhibition of course).
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Olga Goriunova, 'Runme.org Repository: What you believe is what you get'
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With a vested interest in the category 'software art', Olga Goruinova is unconvinced of the usefulness of debates over the terms themselves. She simply states that software art and criticism is justified in its usage; in the fact that people find it a useful focus for discussion and to grant exposure to particular practices. In the case of the Read_Me festival, the intention was to draw attention to works that lie outside the mainstream festival culture and thus build an alternative structure of power and alternative curatorial strategies - one in which people could submit works to an 'open' repository that was not selected or juried (this is the Run_Me.org site). This is essentially an open database based on a software repository model.
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This is not without its difficulties particularly around categorisation. However, the festival probably attracts a wider constituency that includes demo-coders for instance, but still suffers from a confusion of codes. For instance, anecdotally, in the case of a work exhibited at the 2003 festival, the programmer was not interested in attending, having any say in the works presentation or collecting an allocated fee. The clash of cultural registers is illustrated in this example where the expectations are built upon the conventions of the media art festival. Cramer puts it thus:
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'Another problem is the association of software art with the "media art" system, with the side effect that artistically interesting computer programs - like those which emerge in the field of GNU/Linux and Free Software, for example - do not reach the software art competations, festivals and exhibition' (Cramer, 2003 'ten theses') Software art is clearly not just media art (simply something between sender and receiver that is mediated) but is a process too.
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Artists and no-artists might be seen to make things that could be considered art, but whether software art is art or not is the wrong question as I have stated elsewhere.
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To Goruinova, an interest in code goes back to classical philosophy and the absolutist fantasy and belief that absolute truth might be discoverable using mathematical logic. Code is a leap of faith and an act of worship in such a scenario. She emphasises that software criticism uses theory not as an abstract system but as a tool kit (this is paraphrasing Foucault).
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Andreas Broeckmann, 'Questioning Software Art'
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Andreas suggests the term 'autistic computing' to describe work that is relatively autonomous and self-sufficient. In this case, reflexivity is embedded in issues of representation and he cites a number of examples that exemplify the issue of the 'narrativisation of the code' in some way: Rainer Mandl's work where the program executes the drama of Oedipus; Maurizio Bolognini's 'sealed computers' where the computers are processing data and sending it through a local network but we are denied access to the detail of this (the monitor connections are even sealed with wax); and, Harwood's 'london.pl', where the relationship of the code and its representation are somewhat intentionally confused. These examples are not autonomous but reveal machinic processes in relatively open systems. The question remains as to aesthetics - and Broeckmann suggests one possible way of assessing the value of this work in terms of aesthetics through a Kantian approach and the idea of the sublime (note: interestingly Fuller refers to the 'geek sublime' in his essay 'Freaks of Number').
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Inke Arns, 'Read_Me, Run_Me, Execute_Me: Software Art and its Discontents'
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The title taken from Freud's 'Civilisation and its Discontents' is a neat way of drawing attention to what lies hidden - although doesn't explicitly talk of the return of the repressed in relation to code. Using this analogy, open source might be advocated to avoid repression and to put the programmer in touch with the culture's sublimated desires to be open and free (repressed under capitalism).
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Arns is keen to compare and contrast the terms 'software art' with 'generative art'. Using Phillip Galanter's definition, she regards 'generative art' as far too general and inclusive (applied to music, architecture, design, etc), that tends towards a discussion around the negation of predictability and intentionality. It also tends towards a focus on end-products in her opinion as opposed to process. On the other hand, software art, for her, reveals hidden structures that are potentially political in nature. This is a spurious distinction for me as there is clearer a more developed critical discourse around software art (thanks to transmediale and the read_me festival).
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I would disagree strongly with this comparison. For me, generative art is more evocative of process as an adjective that describes an activity - it describes a performance and is perfomative. One might mention 'generative grammar' from Chomsky or 'generative matrix' from Zizek to describe ideology if one wanted to be more explicit about the potential for a political dimension. Its inclusivity also allows for a history to be registered and cultural practices that do not necessarily involve computation - which doesn't just made it open-ended but allows for broader cultural production to be seen as 'generative' - generative of change to my mind, even of social change. These terms are in flux all the same, and very open to debate and contestation.
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Florian Cramer, 'Ten Theses About Software Art' (2003)
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To Cramer, all digital art is software art in that it relies on or is assisted by other software to run (be it a browser, operating system, network protocols).
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[add to bit about the relationship of writing to the tool - in code notes]
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In 'Ten Theses About Software Art' (2003), Florian Cramer explains that artists make software in a way that writers use language: 'No literary writer can use language merely as a stopgap device with which to compose an artwork that is not in itself language - so, like in a recursive loop, literature writes its own instrumentation.'
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The connection between software art and conceptual art is made apparent in taking the concept like code as the material fro the artwork. In this, for Cramer, notation and execution of a concept or of code are collapsed into one piece (in Goruinova & Shulgin, 2003: 54) closest to our understanding of what consititutes language. His example is La Monte Young's 'Composition 1961', a piece of paper with the instruction: 'draw a straight line and follow it' (what might be considered as a precursor for socialfiction.org's '.walk'). However, software art is also not synonymous with conceptual art as dematerialised art in the sense that Lucy Lippard describes the privileging of concept or idea in her book Six Years. For software art is decidedly material, if not immaterial of course (this is a longer discussion). To illustrate his point, he points to a more recent history in describing the development of JODI's work from browser manipulations, to hacks of game engines, to current work that uses (retro) BASIC sourcecode. In this last example, minimalism is certainly evoked but any conclusion that this is simply conceptualist in the older sense should be avoided. However, JODI's work is indicative of a tendency in software art practice to reflect upon its conditions, its materiality and to reject the industrial gloss of work influenced by the aesthetic and technical determinants (and limits) of proprietary software (Lev Manovitch's discussion around 'flash aesthetics' is relevant here).
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Much of the discussion here revolves around the separation of user and programmer - with the development of so-called user-friendly interfaces closing off an understanding of the apparatus as a controlling strategy (Apple and Microsoft are part of this deskilling monopoly). The problem with the figure of the artist-programmer in this connection is that the processes of programming have correspondingly become closed off, mystified, based on elitist knowledge and hence contributes to the return of a romanticised myth of creative genius embodied in the programmer or hacker class. (link to Author as Producer notes) These tendencies once deconstructed by post-structuralist theory remain present in certain discourses and practices - therefore are ripe for software criticism.
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In the connection to algorithmic and generative art, Cramer is also keen to make a separation from software art. Here, it is claimed that the influence of cybernetic and systems theory informs the Galanter definition in emphasising the issue of autonomy. Again, I think Cramer confuses autonomy in terms of artistic practice and political discourse - ultimately the theorisation itself isn't inclusive enough. He tries to point to neglected human and social aspects but these issues are embedded in a discussion of autonomy in the work of the Frankfurt School or indeed in autonomous Marxism - to name but two obvious examples. The problem for Cramer in Galanter's definition is that the generative aspect is seen to result in a completed work of art rather than being a work of art in itself - execution is foregrounded (which is the legitimate criticism of our aesthetics essay in part). This is an important point and clearly reveals a limitation on the generative art definition itself but not the term that remains open to further and improved definition. Cramer would add that software art emphasises software as material for play: 'it no longer reads it - as in conceptual and generative art - as pure syntax, but as something semantic, something that is aesthetically, culturally and politically charged'.
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Software is clearly thoroughly political (think of patents, licenses, rights, monopolies, etc) but so is generative art - and generative art suggests, at east for me, the possibility of not just deconstruction but of an active involvement in transformation.
programming-sorbonne.txt
Matthew Fuller, 'Freaks of Number' (also posted to nettime, March 22, 2004).
programming-sorbonne.txt
Fuller is keen to historicise software art in terms of calculation, and sees Maurice d'Ocagne's 'Le Calcul SimplifiŽ par les ProcŽdŽs Mecaniques et graphiques' (1893) as an early example of computer criticism. The standardisation of objects for Fuller typical of industrial production follows this same numerical logic. Programmers are contemporary 'freaks' of numbers in this sense, as individuals able to assemble their thoughts in an appropriate way for the purposes of calculation. They have 'power lodged in their heads'. This is not hard it should be pointed out - he quotes Joseph Weizenbaum (programmer of Eliza) in this connection: 'Almost anyone with a reasonably orderly mind can become a good programmer with just a little instruction and practice.'
programming-sorbonne.txt
It is almost as if programmers exhibit a numerical disorder (that as an example he expressed in contrast to the numerical disease of being in a hetereosexual couple). In this way, there is a politics of numbers that is exemplified by Benjamin (quoted by Fuller):
programming-sorbonne.txt
'... the ability of machines to duplicate words and writing outstrips human needs. The energies that technology develops beyond this threshold are destructive. First of all, they advance the technology of war and its propagandist preparation' (note: from the essay 'Edward Fuchs, Collector and Historian' but the Artwork essay makes more of this connection of technology to war as a direct result of an aestheticisation of politics that might be extended perhaps, in this context, to an aestheticisation of code). Software art in this sense is a mechanism for a reverse tendency, a critical means for the exploration of how software propagates the standard object.
programming-sorbonne.txt
He says: 'On the scale of numbers, post-industrial society is perhaps something that occurs when the 'avalanche of numbers' of Hacking, an enormous and self-generating torrent of factualisation, tabulation and recording meshes with numericalised labour, mechanisation and product and informational standardisation and variation.'
programming-sorbonne.txt
Mainstream computing is locked into a neo-Platonism for Fuller that finds aesthetic value in the most simple, purely expressed of formal resolutions to a given problem.
programming-sorbonne.txt
In contrast is Harwood's London.pl (found on the run_me.org software repository) based on, or plagarising, William Blake's poem 'London' written in the last decade of the Eighteenth century. Here, in both works, statistics and the modulation of populations are used for social comment. In the Harwood version, arguably, the contemporary 'arithmetico-material' conditions are doubly registered both in content and form. For instance, one line of the program comments reads:
programming-sorbonne.txt
# Find and calculate the gross lung-capacity of the children screaming from 1792 to the present.
programming-sorbonne.txt
The issue is made public as well as actualised in the present to evoke contemporary suffrage.
programming-wright.txt
Richard Wright (1999), 'Programming with a Paintbrush: The Last Interactive Workstation', http://www.runme.org/project/+Painting/ (also in Filmworks, no.12, Autumn 2000)
programming-wright.txt
[add to Bowles notes on specialist training]
programming-wright.txt
In relation to the necessary high level skills involved in post production using the Quantel computer graphics system, Richard Wright describes the particularities of its production culture, its working methods, commercial and aesthetic values (1999). He is interested in the ways a system like Quantel presents itself as specialist with a particular aesthetic, when essentially it offers the same technical specification as much lower end desktop software systems - and approximately one hundred times more expensive. The mystique and the high price are maintained by a series of systematic marketing and design strategies that maintain the 'inevitable inaccessibility of the machine itself is paradoxically combined with an extremely high visibility of its end product' as well as 'the simulation of creative control' (1999). He is not simply saying there is no difference but pointing to the working methods that arise between a hardware system like Quantel and a software one like After Effects.
programming-wright.txt
The technical differences are of little consequence but different working methods contribute to a 'completely different artistic practice as well as defining how well they integrate into each level of commercial production practices'. Hence specialisation is maintained at both a technical and aesthetic level. Added to this, it is a complex operation so relations of production are somewhat different too in reinforcing a series of separations between technical operation and artistic prowess and traditional values around originality and authorship. Wright likens this to the traditions values of painting, and says that 'the user themselves who must supply the organisation - the data structure is not in the computer but in the user's head.' (1999) More importantly, for Wright is the imnfluence on the production culture as a whole:
programming-wright.txt
'By a careful analysis of a graphics system it is quite to possible to see how a manufacturers particular technological development can have an impact on moving image culture, both through particular aesthetic biases and through its relation to the values of the commercial environment it has been designed for - its production culture. [...] Technologies are now composed of both machines and people which work together in quite specific and complex ways.' (1999)
progress-benjamin.txt
Further notes on/in progress:
progress-benjamin.txt
Walter Benjamin, 'On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress' in The Arcades Project
progress-benjamin.txt
'This work has to develop to the highest degree the art of citing without quotation marks. Its theory is intimately related to that of montage.' (1999: 458)
progress-benjamin.txt
'How this work was written: rung by rung, according as chance would offer a narrow foothold, and always like someone who scales dangerous heights and never allows himself a moment to look around, for fear of becoming dizzy (but also because he would save for the end the full force of the panorama opening out to him).' (1999: 460)
progress-benjamin.txt
Benjamin's project is to carry over these principles of montage to history: 'That is, to assemble large-scale constructions out of the smallest and most precisely cut components. Indeed, to discover in the analysis of the small individual moment the crystal of the total event. And, therefore, to break with vulgar historical naturalism. To grasp the construction of history as such. (1999: 461)
progress-benjamin.txt
It is a catalogue of sketches and aphorisms - what Lev Manovitch would probably call 'Database writing' (reference to his term 'database movie' as a way of characterising the history of cinema with respect to editing and digital media).
progress-benjamin.txt
The representation of history was like a series of dream images to Benjamin. In the tradition of the Surrealists, hen sought to find a graphic form for the dialectical method in dream-work, wherein the contents can only be indirectly encoded - drawing dreams into the waking world. The quotes operate in this way, not only as montage, but as unprocessed images, sketches and 'convolutes' (complex arguments, stories). Tiedemann describes this: 'Under capitalist relationships of production, history could be likened to the unconscious actions of the dreaming individual, at least insofar as history is man-made, yet without consciousness or design, as if in a dream.' This dialectic of waking and sleeping is further evoked in Debord's The Society of the Spectacle in which the impulse is to wake the sleeping to political consciousness (find reference) - 'slumbering in the "once upon a time" of classical historical narrative' (Tiedemann, 1999: 933). Unlike the Surrealists, Benjamin added particular theological and mystical significance to the moment of awakening - that I won't go into in depth although it is crucial for an understanding of this work.
progress-benjamin.txt
My concern is more that capitalism can be seen to be a 'dream-filled sleep' and dialectics will awaken the dribbling masses. In this way:
progress-benjamin.txt
'For the historian [historical materialist], past objects and events would not then be fixed data, an unchangeable given, because dialectical thinking "ransacks them, revolutionizes them, turns them upside down"; this is what must be accomplished by awakening from the dream of the nineteenth century. That is why for Benjamin the "effort to awaken from a dream" represents "the best example of dialectical reversal"' (Tiedemann, 1999: 935)
progress-benjamin.txt
According to Tiedemann, Benjamin is using the work of Ernst Bloch as a model (for instance, Spirit of Utopia) by applying the 'theory of not-yet conscious knowing'; the ultimate test for dialectics in penetrating former contexts to realise present actions - in other words, in preparation for revolution (Tiedemann, 1999: 936).
progress-benjamin.txt
Benjamin elaborates on the cultural-historical dialectical methodology explaining that it is easy to oppose progressive (productive, forward-looking, lively, positive) and reactionary (abortive, retrograde, obsolescent) forces to any epoch in history. Each positive and negative force relies upon eachother to evoke value. He explains:
progress-benjamin.txt
'It is therefore of decisive importance that a new partition be applied to this initially excluded, negative component so that, by a displacement of the angle of vision (but not of the criteria!), a positive element emerges anew in it too - something different from that previously signified. And so on, ad infinitum, until the entire past is brought into the present in a historical apocatastasis'. (459 - note: I can't find 'apocatastasis' in the dictionary - presumably it combines apocalyptic and stasis - the damage to lack of change on a dramatic scale).
progress-benjamin.txt
The 'historical schematism' of the Passagen-Werk is clearly close to 'Ÿber den Begriff der Geschichte' (On the Concept of History). According to Adorno the theses, 'more or less summarize the epistemological considerations' (Tiedemann, 1999: 929). The arcades (what elsewhere Benjamin called the 'Dialectical Fairyland, in Tiedemann 1999: 932)
progress-benjamin.txt
More on the dialectical method:
progress-benjamin.txt
'The dialectical method is thus distinguished by the fact that, in leading to new objects, it develops new methods, just as form in art is distinguished by the fact that it develops new forms in delineating new contents. It is only from without that a work of art has one and only one form, that a dialectical treatise has one and only one method.' (1999: 474)
progress-benjamin.txt
This is no simple understanding of the present is somehow pregnant with the past. He explains this 'now-time' (using the phrase that Tiedemann takes as the title for his once introductory essay):
progress-benjamin.txt
'It's not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past [sic]; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent. - only dialectical images are genuine images (that is, not archaic); and the place one encounters them is language.' (1999: 462) And further emphasised:
progress-benjamin.txt
'Only dialectical images are genuinely historical - that is, not archaic - images. The image that is read - which is to say, the image in the now of its recognisability - bears to the highest degree the imprint of the perilous critical moment on which all reading is founded. (1999: 463)
progress-benjamin.txt
[note: this relates to my reading of 'dust' www.ordure.org]
progress-benjamin.txt
'How are we to understand the 'dialectical image' as a form of philosophical representation? Was 'dust' such an image?' (Buck-Morss 1991: 221)
progress-benjamin.txt
Benjamin presents the term 'dialectical images' to stand for images that encapsulate the dynamics of the 'then' and the 'now' - they represent 'dialectics at a standstill'. The definition of this concept, although central to the alleged working method, is rather difficult to decipher. In his ExposŽ of 1935, Benjamin defines it thus:
progress-benjamin.txt
'Ambiguity is the manifest imaging of dialectic, the law of dialectics at a standstill. This standstill is utopia, and the dialectical image, therefore, dream image.' (Tiedemann quoting Benjamin, 1999: 943). In Tiedemann's notes (1999: 1014), the idea of dialectical images to attributed to discussions with Adorno and yet they seem to disagree on its interpretation. For Adorno, dialectical images are allegorical and relate to the 'phantasmagoria' (of the arcade or collector) that Benjamin would add are only dialectical images in as much as the historical materialist alleges. For Benjamin, this interpretative process is not just political will but is only possible as a result of the messianic forces in history itself.
progress-benjamin.txt
The confusion here, for Tiedemann, relates to Benjamin's particular approach to dialectics where he tries to 'halt the flow of the movement, to grasp each becoming as being' - as opposed to the more classical Marxist one where all social forms remain 'in fluid movement' (1999: 943). Tiedemann explains that: 'Images became dialectical for this philosophy because of the historical index of every single image' and the 'standstill' thus rescues the image from the conservative historical continuum - indeed, 'blasts' it out of the continuum. In other words, 'Myth is liquidated in the dialectical image to make room for the "dream of a thing"' (Tiedemann, 1999: 944). Dialectical images, then for Benjamin, are redemptive. ' Benjamin devised his dialectic at a standstill in order to make such traces visible, to collect the "trash of history," and to "redeem" them for its end.' (Tiedemann, 1999: 945)
progress-benjamin.txt
This historical materialist method might be summarised thus:
progress-benjamin.txt
'The materialist presentation of history leads the past to bring the present into a critical state.' [...] 'It is the present that polarizes the event into fore- and after-history' (1999: 471)
progress-benjamin.txt
And for the angel of history:
progress-benjamin.txt
'The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are "status quo" is the catastrophe.' (1999: 473)
progress-benjamin.txt
'Historical materialism must renounce the epic element in history. It blasts the epoch out of the reified "continuity of history." But it also explodes the homogeneity of the epoch, interspersing it with ruins - that is, with the present.' (1999: 474)
progress-benjamin.txt
Benjamin defines his terms, in such a way as you can see a linear and schematic development:
progress-benjamin.txt
'Definitions of basic historical concepts: Catastrophe - to have missed the opportunity. Critical moment - the status quo threatens to be preserved. Progress - the first revolutionary measure is taken.' (1999: 474)
progress-benjamin.txt
He thus defines 'progress' in very particular terms - not simply from the inception of something to its end or as ever onward and upward - but that the course of history takes the form of spirals. Progress is uncritical when it speaks for historical process as a whole according to Benjamin. Benjamin quotes Lotze's Microkosmos of 1864 in this regard:
progress-benjamin.txt
'Or, to put it differently, the genuine conception of historical time rests entirely upon the image of redemption' (1999: 478). In this way, historical development is bound up with the possibility of preservation and restoration. This spiritual overtone is encapsulated in the following:
progress-benjamin.txt
'The authentic concept of universal history is a messianic concept. Universal history, as it is understood today, is an affair of obscurantists.' (1999: 485)
progress-benjamin.txt
He further explains his methodology for the Arcades project:
progress-benjamin.txt
'Marx lays bare the causal connection between economy and culture. For us, what matters is the thread of expression. It is not the economic origins of culture that will be presented, but the expression of the economy in its culture. At issue, in other words, is the attempt to grasp an economic process as perceptible Ur-phenomenon, from out of which proceed all manifestations of life in the arcades (and accordingly, in the nineteenth century.'
progress-benjamin.txt
And then continues: 'This research - which deals fundamentally with the expressive character of the earliest industrial products... thus become important for Marxism in two ways. First, it will demonstrate how the milieu in which Marx's doctrine arose affected that doctrine through its expressive character (which is to say, not only through causal connections); but, second, it will also show in what respects Marxism, too, shares the expressive character of the material products contemporary with it.' (Benjamin, 1999: 460)
progress-benjamin.txt
Hence, the Marxist conception of history changes with the times. The key concepts of Marxist analysis gain different meanings for the specific epoch. Benjamin quotes Korsch on this: 'As the material mode of production changes, so does the system of mediations existing between the material base and its political and juridicial superstructure, with the corresponding social forms of consciousness.' (1999: 483). - setting stage for Empire's analysis perhaps.
progress-benjamin.txt
'It is the particularity of technological forms of production (as opposed to art forms) that their progress and their success are proportionate to the transparency of their social content. (Hence glass architecture)' (1999: 465)
protest-terranova.txt
tiziana terranova
protest-terranova.txt
The degree zero of politics: virtual cultures and virtual social
protest-terranova.txt
movements.
protest-terranova.txt
In analysing the emergence of network-organised forms of political organisation, Tiziana Terranova sees mail lists as crucial to this development. They allow for connectivity and afford users the 'possibility to continuously formulate and reformulate the types of problems they wish to address on the basis of collectively produced information.' (2002) In this way, she argues that the Internet materialises 'general intellect': 'a collective assemblage of bodies and machines where connectivity implies the release of a surplus value of potential.' (2002)
protocol-galloway.txt
Alex R. Galloway (2004) _Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization_, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
protocol-galloway.txt
add to code:
protocol-galloway.txt
[done this bit]
protocol-galloway.txt
As much as code can be expressive, it also provides the textual link between computers and critical theory, according to Alex Galloway (2004) - through the combination of natural and artificial language and hence can be examined as part of a continued critical discourse that draws upon literary theory.
protocol-galloway.txt
[/to here]
protocol-galloway.txt
add to cybernetics section:
protocol-galloway.txt
There is a misconception that the Internet is somehow out of control or inherently anarchic. On the contrary, control is now expressed in terms of distributed networks, no longer centralised or decentralised - alluding to the three network models indicated by Paul Baran in 1964 (Barab‡si 2002: 145). Deleuze describes this period after the disciplinary societies as 'societies of control' modelled on the third wave of computerised machines (Galloway 2004: 3). Galloway aims to give detail to this by describing the development of networked computing, the Unix operating system and in turn TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol). In this way, he takes the concept of the protocol as 'a set of recommendations and rules that outline specific technical standards'. This is taken to be more than just a metaphor, although clearly it is a compelling one all the same, suggesting correct or proper behaviour or social practices. Similarly computers in a network agree technical standards of action such that the protocols 'govern' usage at the level of code: 'protocol is a technique for achieving voluntary regulation within a contingent environment' as Galloway puts it (2004: 7). Voluntary regulation is a particularly successful mode of control alluding to concepts like hegemony from critical theory. Protocols thus operate as a distributed management system coding packets of information, documents and communication. Extending this to curating, Kurator.org asks:
protocol-galloway.txt
'If the assumption is made that traditional curating follows a centralised network model, then what is the position of the curator within a distributed network model?' (Krysa & Sedek 2005)
protocol-galloway.txt
[note: This description of a distributed management system as curating lies behind the _Kurator.org_ project as a distributed curatorial system for open source code - using protocols for different ends than centralised/decentralised and proprietary interests. The artist-prgrammer characterisation is extended to that of the curator-programmer, and/or software art to software curation.]
protocol-galloway.txt
The crucial issue is how power is articulated in a distributed model and how this might be redistributed.
protocol-galloway.txt
This is not to say that control is bad of course and certainly protocols have no vested interest in themselves. The problem lies in the fact that standards are set according to certain ruling interests - it is a political issue. Peer to peer networks are one obvious example of principles based on a different set of social practices. This is largely nonhierarchical in structure conforming to the way TCP/IP connects one machine to others, but is also subject to DNS information stored in a decentralised databases but organised in hierarchical, inverted tree-structures. At the top of the tree are a relatively small number of 'root' servers, mostly in USA, Europe and Japan, that exert control over the lower branches. The technical detail reveals the operations of 'control societies' fraught with political contradictions (rather like the 'free market'). The potential remains to use protocols for resistance to certain forms of control evident in much cultural practice on the internet. The cracks are arguably more evident than in other systems of control. Forms of resistance were evident but in the current control society, Deleuze suggests that:
protocol-galloway.txt
'Computer piracy and viruses, for example, will replace strikes and what the nineteenth century called "sabotage" ("clogging" the machine).' (1990c; there is a note here to the understanding of 'sabot' in sabotage as a worker's wooden clog.]
protocol-galloway.txt
In this light, Galloway focusses attention on code in parallel to the way in which Marx focussed on the internal structure of the commodity in the context of industrial production (2004: 20). Whereas Galloway, following in the tradition of Deleuze and others emphases the paradigm shift, my aim is to draw these approaches somewhat closer in identifying the internal contradictions in code itself or at least to see the networked complexity in dialectical terms.
protocol-galloway.txt
Ironically, the (centralised) Unix command line shell might be a good way in to this resistant practice.
protocol-galloway.txt
periodisations (add to history section and Mandel's model or keep here and refer back):
protocol-galloway.txt
Deleuze also acknowledges distinct periodisations that relate to machines (in his 'Postscript on Control Societies', from _Negotiations_, referred to in Galloway 2004: 22). Clearly networked computers correspond to what Deleuze calls control societies. This also relates to Friedrich Kittler's comparison of 1800 and 1900 to reveal two contrasting regimes of knowledge or the ways in which data is selected, stored, and processed - from a 'kingdom of sense' based on understanding and meaning to one of pattern based on images and algorithms - what he calls 'discourse networks'. By way of contrast:
protocol-galloway.txt
'The discourse network of 1800 played the game of not being a discourse network and pretended to be the inwardness and voice of Man; in 1900 a type of writing assumes power that does not conform to traditional writing systems but rather radicalizes the technology of writing in general.' (Kittler 1990: 212)
protocol-galloway.txt
In Galloway's terms, the contemporary corollary for the internet and the society of control is exemplified by Hardt and Negri's _Empire_ that neatly was published in 2000. Clearly Paul Baran's three characterisations of centralised, decentralised and distributed networks offer a useful analogy for systems of control. In the context of my argument, these periodisations are not distinct but in dynamic relation (in the spirit of historical materialism). This is further evident from any close reading of the nonhierachical and hierarchical complex structures at work in the network society that demonstrate contradictions over control and feedback.
quine-anon.txt
Quine:
quine-anon.txt
A Quine is a program whose output is exactly the same as its complete source code. It's named in honour of Willard Van Orman Quine, an influential mathematician and philosopher who died in 2000.
quine-anon.txt
Some related reading:
quine-anon.txt
http://www.wvquine.org/
quine-anon.txt
http://www.nyx.net/~gthompso/quine.htm
quotation-benjamin.txt
'Method of this project: literary montage. I needn't say anything. Merely show. I shall appropriate no ingenious formulations, purloin no valuables. But the rags, the refuse - these I will not describe but put on display.' (Benjamin, 1999: 860)
quotation-benjamin.txt
'This work has to develop to the highest degree the art of citing without quotation marks. Its theory is intimately related to that of montage. (Benjamin 1999: 458)
relational-bourriaud.txt
Nicolas Bourriaud (2002), Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance & Fronza Woods, Dijon-Quetigny: Les Presses de RŽel.
relational-bourriaud.txt
Nicolas Bourriaud attempts to decode process-related or behavourial arts practice without recourse to what he calls sixties art theory. He is interested in practices that are broadly interactive, user-friendly and relational. He says: "The space of current relations is thus the space most severely affected by general reification. The relationship between people, as symbolised by goods or replaced by them, and signposted by logos, has to take on extreme and clandestine forms, if it is to dodge the empire of predictability. The social bond has turned into a standardised artefact.' (2002: 9)
relational-bourriaud.txt
For Bourriaud, this separation is across 'relational channels' is the final stage of Debord's 'spectacle' - what he calls the 'society of extras' (2002: 113). However there are other possibilities for arts practice that stresses human interactions, proximity and resisting standardisation and the illusion of interactivity.
relational-bourriaud.txt
Relational art is Bourriaud's way of describing practice that involves human interactions and social context and new aesthetic and cultural concerns that arise from this. This is not to be confused with Mannheim's 'relationism', to describe the location of ideas within the social system that gives rise through synthesising varying standpoints into a dynamic totality of thought (Eagleton, 1997: 193). In describing the place of artwork in the wider economic system, Bourriaud borrows the term 'interstice' from Marx as trade that eludes the law of profit (2002: 16). He sees contemporary art as engaging with politics in this way by operating in the relational realm. Who's he kidding? He further defines this practice as materialist by citing Althusser's 'materialism of encounter' where the purpose remains in question (2002: 18). Relational aesthetics then is not a theory but a study of form, 'spreading out from its material form: it is a linking element, a principle of dynamic agglutination.' (2002: 21) It consists of 'judging artworks on the basis of the inter-human relations which they represent, produce or prompt' (2002: 112). In this, form is a relational property that requires human interaction - what he subdivides in the categories: 'conviviality and encounters' (managing individuals and groups), 'collaboration and contracts' (moments or objects of sociability) and 'professional relation' (producing goods and services).
relational-bourriaud.txt
In the context of technology, he sees artwork not using the computer as having as much potential to make work about its effects. The image is now defined by its 'generative power' he claims, and is a programme and thus in active mode (2002: 70). Here he is partly referring to artwork that is a programme to be followed, a model to be reproduced, or an encouragement to do something. He points to the parallel activities of artists engaging in ideas of interaction and sociability set against the hype of interactive computer systems. Art can be seen to be a programme for the generation of forms and situations.
relational-bourriaud.txt
Bourriaud sees art as largely a semantic leftover from the accepted definition of art as a set of objects that are presented as part of the narrative called art history. Instead of course he defines it as an activity of producing relationships with signs, forms, actions and objects (2002: 107).
relational-bourriaud.txt
In this connection, it was Benjamin Buchloh who referred to the conceptual artist of the 1960s as a 'scholar/philosopher/craftsman' who hands society 'the objective results of his [sic] labour'. Bourriaud updates this to 'entrepreneur/politician/director' who shows something to society (2002: 108).
relational-bourriaud.txt
It makes us sick that: Gordon Matta-Clark opened his food restaurant in 1971; Angela Bulloch set up a cafe playing the music of Kraftwerk; Georgina Starr described how it felt to have supper on her own; Rirkrit Tiravanija set up itinerant cafeterias, and organised a dinner in a collector's home leaving the ingredients for Thai soup; Ben Kinmont randomly selected people and offered to do their washing-up; Phillipe Parreno organised a party; Miltos Manetas held discussions around a cafe table...
relational-bourriaud.txt
(all mentioned in Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics).
relational-bourriaud.txt
Kahve-Society simply wishes to run a cafe but doesn't have the resources to do so. The desire to do this, and the failure thus far, could be an artwork that expresses something far more poignant about social context.
revolution-castells.txt
The Rise of the Network Society
revolution-castells.txt
So what are the defining characteristics of the so-called information revolution - the lines of continuity and discontinuity from the industrial age?
revolution-castells.txt
[this needs to be integrated into the anti-/capitalism section]
revolution-castells.txt
The Information Technology Revolution
revolution-castells.txt
Castells tries to comprehend 'The Information Technology Revolution' (any revolution) as a rare interruption in the usual smooth chain of historical events (from, Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, Blackwell 1996). Many commentators have tried to characterise this current 'revolution', as a fundamental transformation and paradigm shift from the mode of production to the mode of information (Poster, 1995) likened to the momentous impact of the industrial revolution itself. Castells is sympathetic to this, describing it as 'a pattern of discontinuity in the material basis of economy, society and culture' (1996: 30) but is keen to emphasise that The Rise of the Network Society needs to be understood from a plural and global perspective to best reflect the multidimensionality of change (1996). Thus, he wishes to move beyond the distraction of 'prophetic hype and ideological manipulation' (1996:30) and continue a critical trajectory that does not wish to merely celebrate the diversity or scale of change, but to understand it - in order to be in a position to be able to effect change. Castells thinks that change is only possible if understood 'from a plural perspective that brings together cultural identity, global networking, and multidimensional politics' (1996:28).
revolution-castells.txt
Without question, networks are growing exponentially in ever increasing numbers and taking new forms. However, despite the temptation of think of these transformations in terms of a new age, for Castells, it is crucial to understand them through the dynamic intersection of technology, society and historical change. He is also careful to distance himself from the mistake of technological determinism. In a footnote, he explains the interaction between society and technology as dialectical: 'Technology does not determine society: it embodies it. But neither does society determine technological innovation: it uses it' (1996: 5). Instead, he describes the interaction in terms of complex patterns. Thus he accounts for the intervention of the state in both stagnating and accelerating technological change and development (historically, Japan is famously seen as a classic example of this; after the Meiji restoration of 1868 allowed a state-led modernisation programme and more significantly after the second World War, it moved from isolation to a position of highly developed technological advancement in a very short space of time - described in Castells, 1996: 11-12). This is one way of emphasising the role of the controlling institutions (state or otherwise) that organise the productive forces that shape the intersection of society and technology, under advanced global capitalism. To labour the point, this means that the technological revolution has both shaped and been shaped by the restructuring of capitalism on a global scale - 'globalisation'.
revolution-castells.txt
Hence capitalism has evolved into its more advanced form by embracing technological change, and done so whilst making sure it protects its own best interests. On the other hand, Castells argues that Statism (his term for the alternative system of social organisation to capitalism) unsuccessfully tried to adapt itself as it did not assimilate information technologies sufficiently well (he is describing Soviet statism and 'perestroyka'; he contrasts this with the more successful Chinese statism in which a form of state-led capitalism was adopted as its model, 1996: 13-14).
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If this sounds like a crude distinction, it should be explained that he is drawing upon the sociological theory that makes the distinction between pre-industrial, industrial and post-industrial periods. Furthermore, he points to the crucial analytical distinction between modes of production (capitalism and statism) and modes of development (industrialism and informationalism) (1996: 14); in other words, informationalism, as he calls it, is the result of the restructuring of capitalism's mode of production to a mode of information. (note: This presupposes that society is organised around production, human experience and power relations - and reveals Castells's project as broadly informed by Marxist thinking in trying to understand the logic of capital). This historical approach aptly describes the lines of continuity (capitalism) and the lines of discontinuity (informationalism) that characterise late-capitalism and the appropriateness of the terms with which to describe it such as techno-capitalism (Castells would say 'informational capitalism,' 1996: 18). This pinpoints the problem many commentators have with a too severe a model of change - from one mode to the other. This is too-often described as the distinction between industrial and post-industrial economies which is far too crude for our purposes. Rather, development is both discontinuous and continuous according to this model (make sure I am consistent with this argument as this is a key point for the thesis). The current technological mode is discontinuous from the industrial mode but the overall logic is continuous. With dialectical style, he says: 'The rise of the network society... cannot be understood without the interaction between these two relatively autonomous trends: development of new information technologies, and the old society's attempt to retool itself by using the power of technology to serve the technology of power.' (1996:52).
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The distinction (paradigm shift) that Castells points to is the change in the ways in which technological processes are organised; from a mode of development focussed on economic growth and surplus-value (industrialism) to one based on the pursuit of knowledge and increased levels of complexity of information (informationalism). New technologies have enhanced the effectiveness of global capitalism, enabling it to become more flexible, adaptable, faster, efficient and pervasive. 'Thus, informationalism is linked to the expansion and rejuvenation of capitalism, as industrialism was linked to its constitution as a mode of production' (1996: 19), although this has been expressed differently according to cultural and historical circumstance of course. Castells expands on the cross-cultural aspects crucial to an understanding of global capitalism (for instance in his analysis of the differences between the G-7 group; 1996: 208-216), but for my part, I am interested in the more general principles and tendencies of global networking and multidimensional politics.
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By placing technological developments in a social context, and recognising that much of these developments stem from the 1970s and the United States in particular, certain questions emerge about capitalism itself. Roger Bromley (in 'Radical Philosophy' no.97, Sept/Oct 1999) explains the political context of Castells' work in more detail: 'In the modern world there have been two major modes of production, capitalism and statism. Castells understands capitalism in broadly Marxist terms. Considered as a mode of production, capitalism is based on the commodification of labour power, the private ownership of the means of production and hence the private appropriation of the surplus, with production organized for exchange subject to the demands of accumulation. Statism (Castells's term for the mode of production dominant in the state socialist or communist bloc) is based on the partial decommodification of labour power and state control over the means of production and appropriation of the surplus, with production oriented towards maximizing the power of the state over society and the determination of social objectives by the state.' In the 1970s according to Castells, a major global economical crisis necessitated restructuring on a global scale. Capitalist restructuring attempted to escape the social and political restrictions imposed by state-controlled industrial forces, by going global. In this way, information technologies were utilised and expanded to facilitate this organisational and productivity growth through the development of multinational corporate activity.
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Ultimately only to dispute both versions of events as too straightforward, Castells asks: 'was the new technological paradigm a response by the capitalist system to overcome its internal contradictions? Or, alternatively, was it a way to ensure military superiority over the Soviet foe, responding to its technological challenge in the space race and nuclear weaponry?' (1996: 51). Not convinced with either account, he argues that the new technological system can be 'traced to the autonomous dynamics of technological discovery and diffusion, including synergistic effects between various key technologies' (1996: 51) and this is partly why the geographical and economic context is crucial (take the seedbed of Silicon Valley as one such location or the more dispersed networks of American research universities - and this is why the University of Plymouth is well and truly off the map). But it is also crucial to reiterate that 'the reproduction of such conditions is cultural and institutional, as much as economic and technological' (1996: 38). Metropolitan location or not, and levels of state or corporate investment are only important in as much as they allow the conditions for the creation of synergy. Hence newness in terms of cultural, institutional or ideological setting proves to be a distraction from far more determining factors. Moreover, the information technological revolution is contingent on specific cultural, historical, and spatial conditions that set and loop its future evolution. This continues to gravitate towards the States and results in an: 'acceleration of technological innovation and a faster diffusion of such innovation, as ingenious minds, driven by passion and greed, constantly scan the industry for market niches in products and processes. It is indeed by this interface between macro-research programs and large markets developed by the state, on the one hand, and decentralised innovation stimulated by a culture of technological creativity and role models of fast personal success, on the other hand, that new information technologies came to blossom.' (1996: 60)
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technology
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Castells defines technology fairly conventionally as 'the use of scientific knowledge to specify ways of doing things in a reproducible manner' (quoting Brooks, 1996:30). To the usual list of converging information technologies of computing, microelectronics and telecommunications, he further adds biology (1996: 30) - making a far broader definition of the term reproduction and leaving it as an effective metaphor for the regenerative processes of digital technologies. At the core of technological revolutions (as the predominant figure of change), changes are 'characterised by pervasiveness, that is by their penetration of all domains of human activity... [and] they are process-orientated, besides inducing new products... (quoting Kranzberg and Pursell, 1967, in Castells, 1996: 31).
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He proceeds to describe one important central feature of the current revolution in the phenomenon of feedback loops. 'What characterises the current technological revolution is not the centrality of knowledge and information, but the application of such knowledge and information to knowledge generation and information processing/communication devices, in a culmulative feedback loop between innovation and the uses of innovation' (1996:32). In this, he is emphasising the increased speed in which new technologies are introduced, then used, then used in new ways, which in turn leads to the development of new technologies. Thus 'users and doers may become the same' and more importantly, 'computers, communication systems, and genetic decoding and programming are all amplifiers and extensions of the human mind' (1996:32). However, although the mind and machines appear to be increasingly integrated, and despite the embedded logic of the technological system, they still interact within highly controlled cultural and social contexts (Note the keyword 'interact' here as something that illustrates the loop and the exchange of ideas, problems and solutions). For an example of this resistance to technological determinism, one only has to look at the highly selective zones that global communications actually reach to make apparent another form of logic of technological revolutions operating as much through exclusion as inclusion. The 'speed of technological diffusion is selective, both socially and functionally. Differential timing in access to the power of technology for people, countries, and regions is a critical source of inequality in our society' (1996: 33) as much evident at a local level as globally (and this local issue is easily overlooked). Despite these speedy but uneven changes across the last two decades, continued dominant groups and imperialist ambitions are maintained despite the undoubted revolutionary potential.
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Castells interest is in the nature of this revolution that he defines as 'accelerating and unprecedented technological change' (quoting Mokyr in Castells, 1996: 35). By this, he refers not just to the speed and transformative quality of change that constitutes a revolution, but also to the lasting influence of the industrial revolution in our institutions and consciousness - although he doesn't say as much, this is where another loop exists perhaps. He acknowledges previous industrial revolutions in the plural: the first in the last third of the eighteenth century with the steam engine and replacement of hand tools by machines, and secondly approximately one hundred years later with the introduction of electricity and the beginnings of communications technologies such as the telegraph and telephone. Crucial to both these revolutions is the generation and distribution of energy from steam power to combustion and electric engines (later nuclear and digital systems). Thus, for Castells, process is all important as the necessary means to produce, distribute and communicate within the economic system and social fabric (1996: 39).
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That fundamental changes in culture, communications, industry and human consciousness can be charted in the industrial revolutions is well established - not least by those with corresponding revolutionary ambitions on a social and political level (The Communist Manifesto is a case in point). The ascent to power of the so-called West (a handful of nations in Europe, and their North American and Australian illegitimate offspring) during these periods reflects the deployment of these new technologies, arising from scientific knowledge and circumstance. All this serves to emphasise that 'technological innovation is not an isolated instance' and '... reflects a given state of knowledge, a particular institutional and industrial environment, a certain availability of skills to define a technical problem and to solve it, an economic mentality... and a network of producers and users who can communicate their experiences cumulatively, learning by using and doing...' (1996: 37). These factors and exchanges are consistent with previous and current revolutions. Also indicated by historical research is the sluggishness between the revolution itself and positive effects on society. It seems that a considerable time-lag exists especially on those societies at a geographical or social distance from the site of innovation - no surprise there! In summary Castells says: 'Thus, specific social conditions foster technological innovation that itself feeds into the path of economic development and further innovation. Yet the reproduction of such conditions is cultural and institutional, as much as economic and technological' (1996: 38). Evidently any such changes require a material foundation.
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The parallel of this emphasis on the importance of energy and process in the information technology revolution is the generation, processing and transmission of data. The question remains of whether this constitutes a new paradigm - for Castells it does at the level of development. It does so in terms of process but not so convincingly in terms of effect - as it is tied to the capitalist mode of production.
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Castells charts 'The Historical Sequence of the Information Technology Revolution' (1996: pp.40-46) beginning with the invention of the telephone in 1876, and the invention of the first programmable computer after the Second World War, but only entering a significantly revolutionary phase by the 1970s in accordance with the definition of change that is significant-enough in terms of reach and speed (see earlier for the definition, and p.47 for the key technologies involved). He traces these developments through the interrelated fields of microelectronics, computers and telecommunications, and adds that biotechnology adds a further phase that might well constitute a revolution in itself (this remains to be seen in his view) or a revolution within a revolution. Also of particular note is the shift from single entities of computer processing units to systems and networks served by computers that form other complex and flexible networks.
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By the 1990s, networked, interactive computer power-sharing replaced centralised data storage and processing. In parallel to this, social and organisational structures and interactions changed to a network model, made possible by telecommunications technologies advances using new linkages for individual nodes, employing switches, routers, and fast fiber-optic and laser transmission lines making the interactive real-time broadband networks of the present Internet and mobile cellular technologies - what is often referred to as 'ubiquitous computing' (omnipresent, everywhere). Significant discoveries in biotechnology parallel the above trajectory. Although DNA's double helix, as the basic structure of life was identified in 1953 (by Crick and Watson), it was only by the 1970s that genetic engineering became widely practised. The first human gene was cloned in 1977 (1996: 48) and the idea of engineering life, and human life in particular, became big business (with resultant battles over property rights and who should own the copyright on gene research). This issue surfaced in 1988 when scientist entrepreneurs at Harvard challenged the moral and ethical agenda (of God and Nature) by patenting a genetically engineered mouse. By now, the human genome too has been thoroughly mapped and despite regulatory efforts and ethical debates, scientist-entrepreneurs have gained legal and economic control.
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Thus, humans themselves have been privatised in the ultimate perversion of nature. Like with many other fundamental services, the private interests and wants of the few appear to have triumphed over the public needs of the many. Like with other technological revolutions under present conditions, the imperialist impulse reproduces itself like a clone of its former glory - echoing Critical Art Ensemble's call to engage with the neo-fascism of the 'new frontier' of biotechnology (in Flesh Machine: Cyborgs, Designer Babies and New Eugenic Consciousness, Autonomedia 1998). Before I get too carried away in conspiratorial rhetoric, Castells more cautiously states that: 'The lesson for the sociologist of such business battles is not just another instance of human greed. It signals an accelerating tempo in the spread and deepening of the genetic revolution... All indications point towards the explosion of its applications at the turn of the millennium, thus triggering a most fundamental debate at the now blurred frontier between nature and society.' (1996: 50)
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This is what Castells sees as the new socio-technical paradigm, the features of which are the material foundation of the information society. These are as follows: (1) that information is the raw material - these are technologies to act on information, not just information to act on technology; (2) the pervasiveness of effects of new technologies - our experiences are shaped but not determined by new technologies because information is so integral to our lives; (3) networking logic of any system or set of relationships using these new information technologies - reflecting the increasing complexity of interactions and the unpredictable patterns of development arising from these interactions; (4) flexibility - processes are reversible, and organisations and institutions can be modified, reconfigured, fundamentally altered, by rearranging their components, they are fluid; (5) convergence of specific technologies into a highly integrated system - wherein on element cannot be separated from another. (1996: 61-2) Added to this last category is the growing convergence of biological and microelectronics revolutions: take for instance, the application of biological logic to auto-generative systems and the development of neural networks. The distinctive quality of the human species over animals is ironically expressed in the interaction of contemporary forms of capitalism and information technologies: in 'its superior capacity to process symbols' (1996: 92).
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Complexity/flows
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On this last issue, Castells makes a useful intervention. He characterises the recent interest in 'complexity theory' (arising in turn out of 'chaos theory') as setting itself the task of developing scientific thought out of this new paradigm; understanding the emergence of self-organising systems 'that create complexity out of simplicity and superior order out of chaos, through several orders of interactivity between the basic elements at the origin of the process' (1996: 64). By its nature, complexity theory has no organising structure, which is why it is largely dismissed by the scientific community as non-verifiable, but it serves to emphasise some important principles that encapsulate my interest in generative media:
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'Not that there are no rules, but that rules are created, and changed, in a relentless process of deliberate actions and unique interactions. 'The information technology paradigm does not evolve towards its closure as a system, but towards its openness as a multi-edged network. It is powerful and imposing in its materiality, but adaptive and open-ended in its historical development.' (1996:65)
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The 'Network Society' is a social order embodying a logic that Castells characterises as the 'space of flows' in contrast to the historically created institutions and organisations of the space of places that characterised industrial society. He recognises that many institutions are still operating according to old models, so even his approach needs to be acknowledged in an analysis of any new mode that is no doubt subject to contradictions at every level. However, he thinks there is a distinct organisational logic related to technological change that relates to networking and the form of information technology.
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The structural logic is evidently more complex than simply the relationship of supply and demand (as I was taught when I did economics at school). Castells points to Max Weber's classic text 'The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism' (first published in 1904-5) for some clues as to the 'spirit of informationalism' (1996: 195). In this, Weber sought to understand the roots of capitalism (embedded in the conjunction of religion and economics). Weber suggests that the order of capitalism can be traced back to the ethical foundations of the accumulation of surplus/profit and consumerism. It is argued that these forces are expressed in wider cultural institutions (such as the family unit, and nation-state) that legitimate the overriding ethos (we might call this cultural reproduction). In turn, Castells argues that this has been transformed from the unit of the individual and collective to that of the 'unit of the network' (1996: 198). The network extends and sustains its ethical logic.
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real virtuality
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This all sounds rather contradictory, as it is simultaneously a network and one expressed as a unit in terms of the wider culture. Castells describes this as a 'multi-faceted, virtual culture' (1996: 199) but crucially as a material force bound by information technology. Similarly contradictory is his characterisation of 'the culture of real virtuality' that attempts to oppose the ideological and commercial hype around information technologies, yet simultaneously point to its massive significance. He suggests that the integration of various modes of communication into an interactive network (what might be called a meta-language) is transformative: 'The potential integration of text, images, and sounds in the same system, interacting from multiple points, in chosen time (real or delayed) along a global network, in conditions of open and affordable access, does fundamentally change the character of communication. And communication decisively shapes culture...' (1996: 328).
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He traces these developments in McLuhanite terms: of new galaxies of communication, wherein all media are restructured around the new system (in McLuhan's time, television was the mass media). But McLuhan is often taken as prophetic and in Understanding Media (1964), describes technology as sensorial extensions of the body in space; as a central nervous system to epitomise the increased speed of action and reaction, and to suggest something of the universal communitarian potential (epitomised by his most quoted of aphorisms: 'the global village'). For McLuhan, 'the medium is the message' (in his book The Medium is the Massage), so what television represented was partly the end of communication dominated by the 'phonetic alphabet order' (the Gutenberg galaxy).
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Much has been made of the subsequent shift from a 'one to many' communication system (of mass media) to a 'many to many' communication of networked information technologies (what might be called segmented media). This however, often serves to neglect the complex patterns of communication between sender and receiver (Stuart Hall's essay 'Encoding and Decoding' complicates this issue in terms of cultural codes, and reminds us that miscommunication is most likely in most circumstances). These examples serve to illustrate how all communication is interactive, and that technology should not be falsely separately from its cultural frame. This much is clear.
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Castells explains through the dialectic of the virtually real: 'The social impact of television works in the binary mode: to be or not to be'... The media tend to work on consciousness and behaviour as real experience works on dreams... It is a system of feedbacks between distorting mirrors: the media are the expression of our culture, and our culture works primarily through the materials provided by the media' (1996: 336-7. My emphasis in bold).
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Further taking his cue from McLuhan, Castells suggests that in the new media system, it might be more appropriate to say 'the message is the medium. That is the characteristics of the message will shape the characteristics of the medium' (1996: 340) or even 'the message is the message' (1996: 368). Here he is describing the trend towards decentralisation, diversification and customisation of computer-mediated communication exemplified by the 'internet constellation' (he traces a history of MINITEL and ARPANET, 1996: 342-364). Furthermore, with the widespread practice of 'surfing' (simultaneous viewing) he thinks 'we are not living in a global village, but in customised cottages globally produced and locally distributed' (1996: 341, evoking the blandness of a Barratt home perhaps with a cottage-like theme, turned into an electronic cottage simply by having a satellite dish). The architecture of the network is open, with libertarian and utopian underpinnings, enabling widespread access (whilst at the same time being prone to social inequalities) and limited but increasing state and commercial intervention. All these opportunities are brought to you from the comfort of your home (if you are lucky enough to have one), although are increasingly portable. In fact 'home-centredness' is an important trend in the new society (Castells, 1996: 398).
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Research has tended to emphasise that computer mediated communications do not however form new networks but simply enhance existing social networks. In this scenario you are just as likely to ignore your neighbours and be suspicious of strangers accordingly, serving to emphasise individuality - 'staying home is the new going out' as the recent advert for television goes (2001). Remote control, for the most part, simply allows the user to stay one side of the living-(death)-room while controlling an electronic device at the other - hardly aiding mobility but the distinct lack of it. Castells thinks that increasingly, 'the multimedia world will be populated by two essentially distinct populations: the interacting and the interacted, meaning those who are able to select their multidirectional circuits of communication and those who are provided with a restricted number of prepackaged choices. And who is what will be largely determined by class, race, gender and country.' (1996: 371. I am reminded of Zizek's notion of interpassivity that would similarly describe this condition in contradistinction from interactivity). Again this all points to increasing social stratification. Despite this, multimedia does capture diversity in a new symbolic environment - what Castells thinks contributes to making 'virtuality our reality' (1996: 372).
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Perhaps this needs further explanation. Castells thinks that what is specific to new communications technology is not virtual reality but real virtuality. He defines his terms: '"virtual: being so in practice though not strictly or in name", and "real: actually existing". Thus reality, as experienced, has always been virtual because it is always perceived through symbols that frame practice with some meaning that escapes their strict semantic definition. It is precisely this ability of all forms of language to encode ambiguity and to open up a diversity of interpretations that makes cultural expressions distinct from formal/logical/mathematical reasoning.' (1996: 372) Thus complexity and contradiction are accounted for in communication (or miscommunication as Hall would have it). Any other unmediated notion of reality would be plain nonsense even if much new media commentaries express these views. What new media communication offers is an even clearer idea of cultural feedback. This evokes the earlier quote (that is worth repeating) but in heightened form:
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'It is a system of feedbacks between distorting mirrors: the media are the expression of our culture, and our culture works primarily through the materials provided by the media' (1996: 337)
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In other words, all messages of all kinds become part of the medium. Messages operate in binary mode according to Castells: presence/absence in the multimedia communication system, in other words the familiar cries of inclusion and exclusion, or domination and liberation. He asks who are 'interacting and who are interacted in this new system...?' (1996: 374). The new culture both 'transcends and includes the diversity of historically transmitted systems of representation: the culture of real virtuality where make-believe is belief in the making.' (1996: 375)
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The space of flows (add to labour and factory section in Marx section)
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Much is written about the changing relationship of space and time (much of it predicated on David Harvey's book The Condition of Postmodernity, 1990, in which he describes time/space compression under capitalism; or taking up the challenge of new scientific models like 'superstring' theory from Physics, advancing the idea of hyperspace). Nevertheless, space is a material product, both defined through social practices (in social theory) and through the dynamics of matter (in Physics). Castells adds that space is now constructed through flows - flows of capital, information and technology and data (1996: 412).
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Castells's hypothesis is that rather than thinking that time dominates space as is the orthodoxy in the social sciences, in the network society, space organises time. The usual (techno-determinist) argument is that telecommunications along with flexible and networking patterns will increasingly result in urban centres dispersing and offices relocating to places where property values are advantageous, whereas evidence suggests quite otherwise. Such scenarios deny the complexity of the interaction between technology, society and space - that Castells makes a synthesis of the emerging spatial logic through the dialectical oppositions of the 'space of flows' and the historically rooted 'space of places' (1996: 378). Various factors seem to characterise the current logic: globalisation, for instance, stimulates regionalisation. Global geography relies on concentrations and decentralisation simultaneously (rather like network communications technologies) - what matters is versatility. Castells says 'The global city is not a place, but a process' wherein its centres are connected in networks (1996: 386); and this is the case even if people still think they live in places. The dialectical style of argument works very well in this regard.
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This description similarly fits the new industrial space, in which technological and organisational factors combine to make production flexible, able to produce goods across different locations but unified through telecommunications linkages. This is the post-industrial factory, if you like, not defined by a fixed site but by flows. The separate units are defined by the processes and labour required for the component parts of the overall operation. Thus the logics of information-based production is combined with process-orientated products. Automation has crucially contributed to this in requiring a highly skilled technological labour force on the one hand and relatively unskilled assembly work on the other - deciders and participants as opposed to the mere executants perhaps (Castells terms). The geographies often literally reflect the crude terminology of the developed and developing world. But this is too crude a formulation. Nevertheless, this is an international spatial division of labour (Castells quoting Cooper, 1996: 387) based on cheap labour costs, tax waivers, lack of environmental constraints, under the ruling ideology of globalisation. These factors are articulated in networks that both bring things together and separates them.
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In the high technology industry, the crucial factor is that these elements interact so their spatiality is a fundamental material condition. Value is added not merely through their cumulative effect but through interaction leading to 'synergy' (a good fashionable term). Castells describes what he calls 'the milieu of innovation' (or 'technopoles') in which synergy is generated so that surplus value can be generated (1996: 390) - Silicon Valley, and so on. The new industrial system is articulated through local and global dynamics and flows (1996: 392).
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Everyday life is similarly spatially challenged, and cities are being transformed through the influence and interactions of changed social patterns and information technologies. The space of flows, for Castells, has no universal rules and is characterised differently in different locations according to historical and institutional factors (and he is particularly careful to define American cities and their frontier history as distinctly different as well as full of expected contradictions. 1996: 399). The industrial city is transforming itself and being transformed into an array of informational urban forms (one of which is the 'megacity'). In these spaces the global economy is articulated, linking information networks and concentrating world power and misery. Castells says: 'It is this distinctive feature of being globally connected and locally disconnected, physically and socially, that makes megacities a new urban form.... Megacities are discontinuous constellations of spatial fragments, functional pieces, and social segments.' (1996: 404-7)
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As Castells defines space through social and material practices, it is easy to recognise the new form of the space of flows in the network society (1996: 412). This might be indicated in architecture and urban design, as they negotiate the new spaces either resisting it or attempting to interpret its flows (1996: 423). Castells describes the material layers of the space of flows in more detail that allow the interaction between the electronic impulses, nodes and hubs, and the organisational and management structures; that together maintain the flows of power. The dialectical tension between the space of places and the space of flows, or put differently, between global and local dynamics, is not resolved through synthesis but one is suggested. This takes account of the tension between the two forms of space, the two spatial logics, and attempts not to see them as separated realms (or parallel universes) but in interaction, still perhaps defined through social action.
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The culture of real virtuality contributes to the transformation of the concept of time - making it both more simultaneous and timeless. The unfolding of history in another part of the world can be followed instantaneously. As a result beginnings and endings of communication become rather confused, as does an editorial policy, making culture 'at the same time of the eternal and ephemeral' (Castells, 1996: 462). The interest in New Ageism (or electronic spirtuality) perfectly summarises this condition for Castells, as both eternal and fleeting - a dialectical pendulum between the instantaneous and eternal perhaps.
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Society is still largely dominated by clock-time (machine-time). It has been argued by E.P Thompson and others his mechanism is fundamental to the development of industrial capitalism - setting the pace of mechanical time of industrial work. The 'Taylorist' (translated as Fordist or Leninist) production lines could make efficiency count for more surplus value (for corporate greed or social good accordingly) speeding production in the march of Imperialist Greenwich mean time. Despite this still dominant way of thinking, network technologies challenge this linear, measurable received sense of time in particular ways. Castells says:
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'But we are not witnessing a relativisation of time according to social contexts or alternatively the return of time reversability as if reality could become entirely captured in cyclical myths. The transformation is more profound: it is the mixing of tenses to create a forever universe, not self-expanding but self-maintaining, not cyclical but random, not recursive but incursive: timeless time, using technology to escape the contexts of its existence, and to appropriate selectively any value each context could offer to the ever-present.
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[...] Capital's freedom from time [something it has consistently strived for] and culture's escape from the clock are decisively facilitated by new information technologies, and embedded in the structure of the network society. (Castells, 1996: 433)
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[add somewhere: 'it is the mixing of tenses to create a forever universe, not self-expanding but self-maintaining, not cyclical but random, nor recursive but incursive: timeless time, using technology to escape the contexts of its existence, and to appropriate selectively any value each context could offer to the ever present (Castells, 2000: 464??) - here he emphasises the pre-eminence of social morphology over social action.
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He characterises the transformation of time with respect to: split-second capital transactions, flex-time enterprises, vaiarable life working time, the blurring of the life-cycle, the search for eternity through the denial of death, instant wars, and the culture of virtual time.]
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Prigogone and Stengers go further in explaining that a concept of the past and future is only possible when time is associated with randomness (Owens 1996: 92).
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The logic of this to explain contemporary capitalism is further emphasised by David Harvey's well publicised formula of 'space-time compression' (in his The Condition of Postmodernity, date). Thus he accounts for the negation of meaning and the predominance of irony as cultural responses to the fast turnover of production, consumption and the market. Global markets now tend to work in 'real time', wherein transaction are almost instantaneous, in what Castells describes as a 'Global Casino' of speculation and financial gambling - global financial flows in other words (1996: 434). Cultural production is similarly homogenised through space-time compression. Thus Capital not only compresses time but appears to absorb it. It works on a global scale in real time, mainly through computer-mediated financial flows.
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What has been thought of as the natural rhythm of the life cycle is similarly effected as longevity and reproduction are increasingly technologised. Even death is becoming deferred (even in the case of wars, Western countries think risking one's life for country is considered unreasonable - even for soldiers. As an aside this is why the suicide tactics of terrorists remain inconceivable to Americans. There is more elsewhere on this condition of war in the information age, and this is also currently undergoing further qualifications in the current so-called war on terrorism).
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What is a network?
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A network is a set of interconnected nodes. The distance between nodes depends on whether they are part of the same network or interconnected networks. The architecture of this is predicated on distances that might vary between zero and the infinite - thus they are dynamic, open-ended, multiple and without limits, yet still demonstrate processes of inclusion and exclusion. The switches connecting networks together is where power is demonstrated - where power is switched on or off. The networks combine communications technologies and social structures and thus are fundamental for a form of late capitalism based on flexibility and decentralisation - elsewhere called globalisation.
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Castells puts it like this:
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'The convergence of social evolution and information technologies has created a new material basis for the performance of activities throughout the social structure. This material basis, built in networks, earmarks dominant social processes, thus shaping social structure itself.' (1996: 471)
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Society increasingly appears like an automated, set of random elements controlled by the logic of markets and technology. Far from indicated an end of capitalism and its mode of production, capitalism has simply gone entirely global - in an age of networked capitalism or what is usually called globalisation. This is indeed capitalism in a complex but also purer form - a scenario in which faceless capital is accumulated almost at a level of virtuality (disconnected from real production by workers of goods - rather money begets money whilst never moving beyond a computer processing unit). Capitalist relations of production continue to exist, with resultant and ongoing antagonisms between the logic of capital accumulation and human experience (even if recoded for the information age) not into a new world order but a new world disorder.
revolution-castells.txt
However in dialectical style, this is an orderly disorder (link to chaos theory and dialectics).
revolution-trotsky.txt
'There is an irony deep laid in the very relations of life. It is the duty of the historian as of the artist to bring it to the surface.' (Trotsky, in Nicholas Mosley (1972), The Assassination of Trotsky, London: Abacus, p.11)
revolution-trotsky.txt
In 1938, Trotsky wrote of the inherent protest embedded in art, and of the necessity of art 'to remain true to itself'. He continued:
revolution-trotsky.txt
'Not a single progressive idea has begun with a "mass base". Otherwise it would not have been a progressive idea. It is only in the last stage that the idea finds its "masses" - it, of course, it answers the needs of progress. The more daring the pioneers show in their ideas and actions - the more bitterly they oppose themselves to established authority which rests on a conservative "mass base" - the more conventional souls, sceptics and snobs are inclined to see in the pioneers impotent eccentrics of "anemic splinters". But in the last analysis it is the conventional souls, sceptics and snobs who are wrong - and life passes them by.' (Trotsky, in Mosley, 1972: 180)
revolution-trotsky.txt
The implication here is that an effective politician needed something of the commitment of the artist - and vice-versa.
revolution-trotsky.txt
To Trotsky, dialectical materialism was scientific referring to the processes of change and of growth - of things seen in their context, not in absolute terms but in relative ones, in the play of opposites and contradictions of which an understanding is imperative to gain an insight into nature. Contradiction in this way is not cynical but paradoxical and perhaps ironic.
revolution-trotsky.txt
'Revolution is the inspired frenzy of history' (Trotsky, in Mosley, 1972: 64).
revolution-trotsky.txt
The idea of permanent revolution - each revolution part of a larger and continuing series of revolutions... This also needs to work on an international stage (hence the Fourth International).
revolution-trotsky.txt
The idea of permanent revolution relies on the impossibility of the perfect status quo, but a revolution of the mind - dialectics (Mosley, 1972: 106). The system becomes stale unless it is continuously challenged. In other words, this is the necessity of paradox, with the possibility of achieving synthesis (this is the split between Stalin and Trotsky even if both claimed to be working through a dialectical method). For Trotsky, effervescence would stop crystallisation from taking place - it is through recurring or permanent revolution that the burgeoning bureaucracy could be held in check - for otherwise, even in a socialist state, there would be ever widening differentiation in privileges (Mosley, 1972: 121).
science-latour.txt
Bruno Latour (1999) Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society, (1987) Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
science-latour.txt
The word 'black box' is used in cybernetics when a piece of machinery or a set of commands are too complex. Latour sees this as the Janus-face of science, on the one side lively and the other side severe: 'science in the making' in contrast to 'ready made science' (1999: 4). In the way, the seemingly impossible task of opening Pandora' black box is made possible by experiencing science and technology at work, not ready-made - in action, 'before the box closes and goes black' (1999: 21). The black box represents hard facts or indisputable evidence. But science has two faces, Latour explains, one that knows and one that does not yet know (1999: 7). He calls for a 'stereophonic rendering of fact-making instead of its monophonic predecessors' (1999: 100). Universal facts are held in contrast to speculations. The method of 'science in action' follows certain rules, for instance: 'we will enter facts and machines while they are in the making; we will carry with us no preconceptions of what constitutes knowledge; we will watch the closure of the black boxes and be careful to distinguish between two contradictory explanations of this closure, one uttered when it is finished, the other while it is being attempted' (1999: 13-5).
science-latour.txt
This method is what Latour calls penetrating the inner workings of science and technology from the outside, following controversies on how it works and is made. Thus science should be understood as a practice that is produced both in a social context and as a result of the technical and institutional apparatus. It is a 'disorderly mixture' revealed 'in action' rather than an 'orderly pattern of scientific method and rationality' (1999: 15). A cultural reading of scientific method is thus an interdisciplinary endeavour broadly characterised under the domain of 'science, technology and society' (at the time of writing, Latour worked as a professor in the sociology of innovation). The book charts a series of rules of method and working principles to explore these ideas around 'techno-science'. He says: 'To do such a study it is absolutely necessary never to grant to any fact, to any machine, the magical ability of leaving the narrow networks in which they are produced and along which they circulate.' (1999: 257)
science-latour.txt
First of all, the issue of rhetoric is used to demonstrate how certain statements are made more or less believable, whether the claims are considered subjective or objective. In the anatomy of scientific literature, he discovers that if something is controversial, the literature becomes technical: 'when we go from "daily life" to scientific activity, from the man in the street to the men [sic] in the laboratory, from politics to expert opinion, we do not go from noise to quiet, from passion to reason, from heat to cold. We go from controversies to fiercer controversies.[...] More noise, indeed, not less.' (1999: 30) As in legal disputes, he points out that often controversies end in 'technicalities', more dissent leads to more technical literature and scientific papers. Another strategy for veracity is to seek the opinions of experts in the field, those who hold authority neither in person nor by citing former texts or being cited - despite the orthodox view that science stands against rhetoric (1999: 32-3). Latour says 'The power of rhetoric lies in making the dissenter feel lonely' (1999: 44). Scientists employ style not strictly for aesthetic reasons but to demonstrate a logical argument - to make it seem rational often simply but the use the right kind of adjectives. This is fact-writing not fiction-writing (although admittedly the techniques have some similarities). Facts and truths, like the efficiency of machines, are constructed in such a way, not for their intrinsic qualities but for their transformative qualities in later usage (1999: 59). Technoscience is a weak rhetoric that becomes stronger through this fact-making process - this is how beliefs are turned into knowledge perhaps. In a manner of speaking, he is extending literary criticism to technical writing here in the tradition of structuralism and semiotics.
science-latour.txt
These texts and the rhetoric employed though are representation of what really took place in the laboratory. It is here that scientists do their work. They use instruments or what Latour calls 'inscription devices' (1999: 68) to provide visual data perhaps - and the implication is that this is instrumental in terms of providing pre-determined results. Scepticism is a useful critical response, as in the case of Cantor when he declared: 'I see it, but I don't believe it' (in Latour, 1999: 90). For the most part, the instrument that produces the visualisations is kept invisible. When the scientist attempts to prove something by saying 'see for yourself', the critical response should include an analysis of how the evidence has been obtained in terms of the mediating process. Latour asks who is speaking:
science-latour.txt
'When we are confronted with the instrument, we are attending an "audio-visual" spectacle. There is a visual set of inscriptions produced by the instrument and a verbal commentary uttered by the scientist. We get both together. The effect on conviction is striking, but its cause is mixed because we cannot differentiate what is coming from the thing inscribed, and what is coming from the author.' (1999: 71)
science-latour.txt
The response to these conditions should be to build better laboratories, what Latour calls 'counter-laboratories' to take account of this array of constraints (1999: 79).
science-latour.txt
Latour uses the example of the development of the diesel engine to make the point that it is collective action that transforms a good idea into a working product (the black box under the bonnet of the vehicle). Diesel, the engineer, was simply the inspiration - 'the motor behind the engine' so to speak (1999: 106) - the catalyst behind a complex process of interactions, itself inspired by earlier discoveries in thermodynamics. Latour explains this in terms of 'translation' to describe: 'the interpretation given by the fact-builders of their interests and that of the people they enrol' (1999: 108). Claims are transformed into facts through this process of translation, partly reinforced by collective action and shared interests (perhaps financial or ideological). The example of motor vehicles is a good one, and subsequent transport policies that serves the interests of the economy despite the environmental damage. Yet, there is nothing inherently meaningful about calling a claim 'absurd' or knowledge 'accurate' (Latour, 199: 205). It is the form of the claim or knowledge that require inspection.
science-latour.txt
For Latour, the term translation means simultaneously offering new interpretations of these interests and moving things from one place to another. This allows particular issues are tied to larger ones in such a way that 'threatening the former is tantamount to threatening the latter. Subtly woven and carefully thrown, this very fine net can be very useful at keeping groups in its meshes.' (1999: 117; for instance, more efficient transport threatens the economy). Enmeshed in this are issues of attribution of intellectual property (and social responsibility). This partly explains the difficulty of attributing particular discoveries to individual scientists, evident in many of the books I have come across on popular science, keen to elevate particular names into the romantic myth of genius. Deciding who was first to do something is simply explained by the analysis of these processes whereas the question itself is simply a naive question. These 'machiavellian' strategies are employed by scientists and technologists, but clearly by those in the cultural field too (in fact there is long established critical tradition in making these machinations transparent). Translations are used to keep the allies in line. These are interests are further tied together through a 'machine', not a tool, as an assembly of forces greater than that of the tool and independent of the human hand (Latour, 1999: 129). The machine is seen as a system of 'subtle and versatile alliances' acting in unison. It is almost as if a society is created for these ideas and machines: 'In this model, society is simply a medium for different resistances through which ideas and machines travel.' (Latour, 1999: 136) The machine only holds things and people together if the other strategies are in place, and exists in a social context of associations and linkages.
science-latour.txt
To guarantee success, the scientist is required to gather resources, talk with authority, convince others and equip laboratories. Success is measured by attention, money and confidence. All this explains how the domains of science, technology and society are kept apart. This is what Latour refers to as a model of 'diffusion' wherein the associations and translations are kept apart artificially. It is not simply that science is determined by technical or social factors but Latour recognises the significant influence of class, the economic infrastructure, capitalism, business, gender, culture (1999: 142). Instead, he proposes that science and society are tied together 'symmetrically', face to face presumably in a janus-like relation of human and non-human resources. This leads Latour to ask who is really doing science, as this is not confined to bearded men in white coats in laboratories. Clearly there is a complex institutional mesh around science, linked to funding structures of research and enterprise, with relations of production in place to protect some of the interests described. Statistics of money spend on research and development programmes as well as education provision are revealing in this connection. Latour explains this stratification of scientists across laboratories in the same country or between countries: 'This asymmetry modifies what is called the visibility of a scientist or a claim' (1999: 166). Success or failure rests on these factors of visibility. 'All laboratories are not equal' before God, says Latour (1999: 166). It is no surprise to learn that budgets remain proportional to amounts of interest generated. Latour concludes that success rests on the 'presence or absence of already aligned interest groups' (1999: 173).
scienceart-wilson.txt
Stephen Wilson (2002), 'Introduction, Methodology, Definitions, and Theoretical Overview', in _Information Arts: intersections of art, science and technology_, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
scienceart-wilson.txt
Following on from the inadequacy of 'media arts' as a term, Stephen Wilson offers 'information arts' as a way of addressing the 'intersections of art, science and technology'.
scienceart-wilson.txt
he asserts that research has become the centre of cultural innovation. But what of the differing agendas: how might the arts and science inform eachother?
scienceart-wilson.txt
Clearly scientific and technological research are cultural activities imbued with creativity and critical comment like any other cultural activity such as art. Art, like research, holds the potential to ask questions about the implications of technological and scientific developments; and crucially ask different sorts of questions: for instance, what agendas motivate innovation and research? Indeed: How might art and research mutually inform one another? How does research extend arts practice?
scienceart-wilson.txt
Before the Renaissance, Science and Art were both seen as sources of creativity. Science was called natural philosophy. Artistic expression was embedded in ritual and everyday life. The Renaissance represented the dawn of specialisation. Increasingly intellectual work was divided into 'two cultures' (cf. C.P. Snow) demonstrating 'mutual incomprehension'.
scienceart-wilson.txt
According to Wilson, 'several cultural forces combine to make a reexamination of the disconnection critical' (2002: 5). These are:
scienceart-wilson.txt
1. Influence on Life: Technological and scientific research spreading influence into Life.
scienceart-wilson.txt
2. Influence on Thought: Science and technology changing basic notions about the nature of the universe ad humanity.
scienceart-wilson.txt
3. Influence of Critical Theory: Challenging some of the truth and objectivity claims of Science.
scienceart-wilson.txt
4. Artistic Activity: Increased attention to science and technology and the pervasive use of computer technologies.
scienceart-wilson.txt
Wilson's book asks:
scienceart-wilson.txt
Where do researchers and artists get their ideas?
scienceart-wilson.txt
How do they explore these ideas?
scienceart-wilson.txt
How are techno-scientific research and art research different?
scienceart-wilson.txt
What happens to the explorations over time?
scienceart-wilson.txt
Does mainstream assimilation somehow destroy the validity of the work as art?
scienceart-wilson.txt
(2002: 11)
scienceart-wilson.txt
Add: What? How? and for Whom?
scienceart-wilson.txt
First, some more basic definitions:
scienceart-wilson.txt
*What is Science?*
scienceart-wilson.txt
Science is an attempt to understand how and why phenomena occur; a belief in empirical information; value placed on objectivity, sought through detailed specification of the operations that guide observation; codification into laws or principles (such as mathematics); continuous testing and refinement of hypotheses.
scienceart-wilson.txt
An underlying assumption is that the natural, observed world is real, and objectivity can be achieved through techniques such as the calibration of instruments, repeatability, and multi-observer verification. Some scientists stress induction built from observation (empiricists), others deduction drawn from theory (rationalists). Others again, see the possibility of objectivity as a delusion and focus attention on subjectivity, other social forces and metanarratives that shape the paradigms used in inquiry, as well as the interaction of the observer and observed phenomena. Radical constructivists doubt the ability to discover truths across history and cultural difference. A critique of science is commonplace in the humanities tradition influenced by the 'science as culture' discussions (Paul Feyerabend's _Against Method_, Thomas Kuhn's _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions_ and Donna Haraway's _Simians, Cyborgs and Women_, for instance). In Bruno Latour's _Science as Action_, persons, organisations, funders and materials are seen to combine to shape scientific theory (incidentally using ethnographic observation and recognising its problems of method).
scienceart-wilson.txt
*What is Technology?*
scienceart-wilson.txt
Often wrongly conflated with science, technology refers to making things or refining processes rather than understanding principles; more 'knowing how' rather than 'knowing why' as Wilson puts it. Some contemporary definitions see technology as 'applied science' - the application of scientific principles to solving problems - but these attempts to shape the physical world clearly predate science; and, one might make machines with little interest in understanding why or how they worked. (There are easy parallels to be made with arts practice with the applied use of knowledge and an uncritical stance.) It is less 'pure' and more 'applied'; as a consequence in Western cultures, along with other making activities (cf. craft), it is often regarded as less worthy. In general, science and technology work together and mutually inform each other, although the intentions may be different. Developers of technology focus on more utilitarian aspects, whilst scientists search for more abstract endeavour and more open-ended inquiry. In this respect, Wilson asks: what is the relationship between thinking and making?
scienceart-wilson.txt
*What is Art?*
scienceart-wilson.txt
Benjamin quote here.
scienceart-wilson.txt
Similarities and Differences between Art and Science, according to Wilson (2002: 18):
scienceart-wilson.txt
Differences:
scienceart-wilson.txt
Art seeks aesthetic response; emotion and intuition; idiosyncratic; visual or sonic communication; evocative; values break with tradition.
scienceart-wilson.txt
Science seeks knowledge and understanding; reason; normative; narrative text communication; explanatory; values systematic building on tradition and adherence to standards.
scienceart-wilson.txt
Similarities:
scienceart-wilson.txt
Both value the careful observation of their environments to gather information through the senses; both value creativity; both propose to introduce change, innovation, or improvement of what exists; both use abstract models to understand the world; both inspire to create works that have universal relevance.
scienceart-wilson.txt
In Feyerabend's 'Theoreticians, Artists, and Artisans', he concludes that science is in many ways very similar to art, in that researchers build research structures and operations to represent their thoughts; trying to to shape a world from a largely unknown material.
scienceart-wilson.txt
Wilson's _Information Arts_ presents research-inspired art - drawing upon and using digital technologies, new biology (biotechnology, bio-medicine), materials science (physics, nanotechnology), and space exploration. It asks:
scienceart-wilson.txt
Can the Arts offer alternatives in setting research agendas, interpreting results, and communicating findings? (beyond the influence of the marketplace or military complex)
scienceart-wilson.txt
What can researchers contribute to art and what can artists contribute to research?
scienceart-wilson.txt
What can high-tech companies gain from artists being involved? (choice of research agenda, definitions of research questions, and adoption of metaphors)
scienceart-wilson.txt
(2002: 35-37)
score-adorno.txt
At the time of writing, for Adorno, 'The change in the function of music involves the basic conditions of the relation between art and society.' (1991: 34) On popular music forms, Adorno is scathing: 'The familiarity of the piece is a surrogate for the quality ascribed to it. To like it is almost the same thing as to recognize it. An approach in terms of value judgements has become a fiction for the person who finds himself hemmed in by standardized musical goods.' (1991: 26)
score-adorno.txt
Adorno's 'On the Fetish Characer in Music and the Regression of Listening' (1991: 29-61) suggests that the score is the work of art and the music is a by-product, and suggests that the listener reassembles the score internally...
score-adorno.txt
'the essential function of conformist performance is no longer the performance of the "pure" work but the presentation of the vulgarized one with a gesture which emphatically but impotently tries to hold the vulgarization at a distance.
score-adorno.txt
'Vulgarization and enchantment, hostile sisters, dwell together in the arrangements which have colonized large areas of music. ' (1991: 36).
score-adorno.txt
The score is partly a purer form more closely associated with production that affirms use value over exchange value of the performance itself in which the listener is a consumer of the commodity form of music - the commodity fetishism of music in other words.
score-adorno.txt
The listener is removed, or alienated, from an engagement with the apparatus itself: 'The liquidation of the individual is the real signature of the new musical situation.' (1991: 31) Modern ways of music distribution, using this argument would be seen to be free, but on the other hand promote the sales of computer equipment. 'regressive listening is tied to production by the machinery of distribution'. (1991: 42)
search.cgi:#!/usr/bin/perl
.txt
search.cgi:use CGI qw/:standard/;
.txt
search.cgi:$word = param('word');
.txt
search.cgi:if ($word =~ m/;/)
.txt
search.cgi: print "Location: http://www.anti-thesis.net/anti-thesis.php?id=6\n\n";
.txt
search.cgi:elsif ($word =~ m/"/)
.txt
search.cgi: print "Location: http://www.anti-thesis.net/anti-thesis.php?id=6\n\n";
.txt
search.cgi: $word =~ s/ /_/sgi;
.txt
search.cgi: $word =~ s/\W//sgi;
.txt
search.cgi: $word =~ s/_/ /sgi;
.txt
search.cgi: @paras = `grep '$word' *`;
.txt
search.cgi: print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
.txt
search.cgi: for (@paras) {
.txt
search.cgi: ($file,$text) = split(/\.txt
/);
$file.txt
$text
$file.txt
$text
semiocapitalism-berardi.txt
Franco 'Bifo' Berardi (2009) _Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the pathologies of the post-alpha generation_. London: Minor Compositions.
semiocapitalism-berardi.txt
At this point in time, technical systems and scientific and creative activity are captured by semio-capital, leading to psychopathology. We have been learning words from the machine not by the mother says Barardi (in typically Italian style perhaps, although actually quoting Rose Golden from 1975) in situation where the learning of language and affectivity have been separated (2009: 9) - echoing Christian Marazzi's writing on the relations between economics, language and affect (a situation where people have become effectively dyslexic, 'incapable of reading a page from beginning to end according to sequential procedures, incapable of maintaining concentrated attention on the same object for a a long time', in Barardi 2009 40-1). Extended to intellectual and social behavior, Berardi calls this a catastrophe of modern humanism, where we no longer have sufficient attention spans for love, tenderness and compassion.
semiocapitalism-berardi.txt
Semio-capitalism is the term that Franco Beradi gives to the current system where informational capitalism incorporates linguistic labour (he is combining semiotics, the science of signs, and capitalism, the social system founded on the exploitation of labour and the accumulation of capital). This is where media meets capital, poetry meets advertising and scientific thought meets enterprise (2009: 18). The term emphasizes how language has become fully integrated into the valorization process effecting both the economic and linguistic fields thus contributing to the crisis of value. The Marxist theory of value is seen to be inadequate because of the difficulty in calculating working time related to signification as opposed the relative ease of calculating working time against making traditional material goods. Similarly there are effects on language production as it becomes increasingly economicised: supply and demand correspond to an excess of signs and levels of social attention (the so-called attention economy [cf. Davenport and Bleick who argue that under hyper-saturated informational capitalism we have no time left for attention]).
semiocapitalism-berardi.txt
'If we want to speak of demand and supply, we must reason in terms of fluxes of desire and semiotic attractors…' (2009: 38).
semiocapitalism-berardi.txt
Berardi sees added consequences in terms of the psyche, as language acts on the construction of subjectivity itself. He says, 'If we want to understand the contemporary economy we must concern ourselves with the psychopathology of relations.' (2009: 37) Indeed semio-capital (over) produces psychic stimulation (not material goods).
semiocapitalism-berardi.txt
The fundamental struggle, or 'bifurcation' for Berardi, is between machines for liberating desire and mechanisms of control over the imaginary. Thus, various liberatory strategies such as refusal of work, the invention of temporary autonomous zones, free software initiatives, and so on, offer 'dynamic recombination'; they offer progressive innovation not new forms of totality (2009: 72). Here, he is addressing problems of the Hegelian historical subject, and stressing processes of subjectivation (instead of the subject), taking the phrase from Guattari. The same might be said of code in that it is not simply deterministic or totalitarian (despite symbolizing the inhuman universality of the circulation of information and finance).
semiocapitalism-berardi.txt
Whereas, in general, unhappiness is encouraged to bolster consumption (so-called shopping therapy, and certainly this is also in the pharmaceutical industry's interests), this has to be carefully managed. 'The masters of the world do not want humanity to be happy, because a happy humanity would not let itself be caught up in productivity [...]. However, they try out useful techniques to make unhappiness moderate and tolerable, for postponing or preventing a suicidal explosion, for inducing consumption' (2009: 43) (not least of drugs).
semiocapitalism-berardi.txt
[After 9/11, 'suicide is the decisive political act of our times' says Beradi (2009: 55). Citing Stockhausen's comments, he thinks the history of the avant-garde culminates in 9/11, 'terrorizing suicide is the total work of art of the century with no future' (2009: 129). Moreover, he thinks this exemplified in the example of the Finnish youngster Pekka Auvinen, who turned up at school and shot eight people including himself, wearing a T-shirt with the sentence 'Humanity is overrated'. For Berardi, this typifies the communicative action of the arts and the pathology of the psycho-social system.]
semiocapitalism-berardi.txt
Only the autonomy of intellectual labour from economic rule can save us semio-capital. Indeed the refusal of work is closely associated with intellectual labour as a kind of freedom from labour in his terms rather than be bound to profit and power (his example is the merchant who robbed collective intelligence, Bill Gates, and the idiot warrior, George Bush, who together suffocated intelligence, 2009: 60). Berardi is invoking general intellect and the social function of intellectual (or cognitive) labour, charted historically through hegel's move from in-itself to for-itself (self-class-consciousness of conditions) and Gramsci's organic intellectual (intellectuals with the working class) to 'mass intellectuality' in the work of Virno et al where labour and language re no longer separated. The point is that intellectual and linguistic labour is no longer separated from general conditions of labour (or, to explain more fully, that there is no longer a separation between ordinary labouring and intellectual activity of what was once considered to be of a superior kind).
semiocapitalism-berardi.txt
Repression:
semiocapitalism-berardi.txt
In _Civilisation and its Discontents_, Freud asserts that capitalism is founded on the sublimation of the individual and collective libido. In Marxist thinking, something similar can be detected in the way that repression is socially determined and can only be released by freeing productive desire. In the 1970s, Herbert Marcuse's _Eros and Civilisation_ and more so Deleuze and Guattari's _Anti-Oedipus_ argue for the liberatory potential of desiring production. The influence of Freud is felt even in its rejection. In Berardi's schizo-analytic terms, 'A semiotic regime is repressive when one, and only one, signified is ascribed to each signifier.' (2009: 111). He is thinking of how interpretation has become schizophrenic (like fast speech), and how the relations between metaphors and things, representation and life, have become thoroughly confused, leading him to conclude that:
semiocapitalism-berardi.txt
'Whilst the prevailing epidemic pathology of modernity was the neurosis produced by repression, the pathologies spreading epidemically today manifest signs of psychosis and panic. A hyper-stimulation of attention reduces the ability to critically and sequentially interpret the speech of the other who tries and yet fails to be understood.' (2009: 113)
semiocapitalism-berardi.txt
Democracy:
semiocapitalism-berardi.txt
'Democracy is becoming more an empty ritual, devoid of the ability to deliver true alternatives and true choices.'
semiocapitalism-berardi.txt
'The marriage of the economy and techne has made democracy a dead word' (Berardi 2009: 28)
semiotics-hawkes.txt
Structuralism etc.
semiotics-hawkes.txt
In the context of writing about code, many commentators and much existing research concerns itself with programming in terms of linguistics. For instance, Florian Cramer, etc, list examples... and the work of OuLiPo etc (see my map).
semiotics-hawkes.txt
My work is part informed by this linguistic trajectory (Semiotics and Structuralism) but crucially different. See also Andreas's criticism (prompted by Jaromil's earlier one) of my (kind of) work as confusing two semiotic systems...
semiotics-hawkes.txt
[I don't understand this in the following terms: 'Not only all languages, but also all signifying systems conform to the same grammar. It is universal not only because it informs all the languages of the universe, but because it conforms with the structure of the universe itself' (Tzvetan Todorov, Grammaire du DŽcamŽron, quoted in Hawkes, 1986: 96). According to these 'formalist' principles, human language is the determining model of all over language systems.]
semiotics-hawkes.txt
Furthermore, humans retain the distinct capacity to 'structure': to generate myths and use language metaphorically - what Giambattista Vico, in The New Science (1725, quoted in Hawkes, 1986: 15) called 'sapienza poetica' (poetic wisdom). Jean Piaget tried to define structuralism as containing three key ideas (in Structuralism (1968), quoted in Hawkes 1986: 16): wholeness, transformation and self-regulation. Thus, a structure (think of language) must have internal coherence (only the sum of its parts), is not static or passive (as it endlessly transforms itself), and exists in relation to its own internal laws (as a closed system with no clear reference to reality). These rules might easily be extended to code of course, in that objects cannot be seen to exist independently. Moreover, objectivity is simply not possible as the subject necessarily becomes part of the system by which the object is being examined (as quantum mechanics also proves). Barthes comes to mind in stating that meaning is produced in the act of reading or viewing (from 'The Death of the Author'). Structuralism, as a body of thinking, reinforces the idea that reality does not lie in the thing itself but in the relationships between things in a relational system. Things can only be understood in terms of the organisational structure of which they are a part.
semiotics-hawkes.txt
By employing Saussure (in saying linguistics needs an abstract system [langue/competence] that generates the concrete event [parole/performance]), this means that (literary) 'criticism should attempt to account for a "poetics" of writing and reading, conceived as an abstract system of conventions, by whose means "poems", "novels" etc. are generated, and are perceived as such by members of the culture involved'. (Hawkes: 1986:158)
semiotics-hawkes.txt
**code version of this quote
semiotics-hawkes.txt
This logic is extended through Derrida to the text as being entirely autonomous from the act of writing - writing writes not writers.
semiotics-hawkes.txt
My research - although acknowledging some of these issues and informed by some of its critical tradition (ie. that meanings are produced in the act of reading, see my defence of the author as producer over the death of the author for more counter-argument on this issue) - is more concerned with materiality and the political economy. This line of thinking is exemplified by Fredric Jameson in his aptly titled book The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (1972, London: Princeton University Press) where he looks for the structures of consciousness itself, wherein meaning is organised out of elements that in themselves are meaningless (later in Marxism and Form, 1971, London: Princeton University Press, calling for a 'new' dialectical criticism that draws upon formalist/structuralist and Marxist traditions.
semiotics-hawkes.txt
However, the radicalism of any new criticism diminishes as it becomes a new orthodoxy. Although acknowledged (in its own critical lexicon), all criticism serves to deflect from its own ideological underpinnings. At this point in time, this seems all the more pressing in that structuralism's and post-structuralism's 'admiration of complexity, balance, poise and tension could be said to sustain the characteristic bourgeois concern for a "fixed" and established, unchanging reality, because it disparages forceful, consistent and direct action.' (Hawkes, 1986: 155)
semiotics-hawkes.txt
This familiar criticism stands for me (reiterated in Hawkes (1986) 'New "New Criticism" for Old "New Criticism"')... . Not the old criticism of focussing on the content at the expense of form, or details of the author's life or key dates - I hasten to add. But rather, that a work of art is relatively autonomous and should be viewed in terms of itself not outside the work. This As Jakobson puts it:
semiotics-hawkes.txt
'Every work, every novel, tells through its fabric of events the story of its own creation, its own history... the meaning of a work lies in its telling itself, its speaking of its own existence,' (from LittŽrature et signification, quoted in Hawkes, 1986: 100). However, this needs to contain a politics and a sense of its own making - poetics perhaps.
semiotics-hawkes.txt
'Poetics' indicates a concern for process rather than mere content, the process by which content is produced. Poetics is important concept as criticism is embedded in the process of making - a theory of practice, a critical practice...
semiotics-hawkes.txt
In the context of programming, my concern is with the production of code in terms of creative labour and the ways this relates to action. There has been a recent turn away from consumption back to production as the focus of critical work (Hardt and Negri), and a recentring of the subject (Zizek). Also issues around material/immaterial labour are of relevance...
shit-laporte.txt
Dominique Laporte (2000) _History of Shit_, trans. Nadia Benabid and Rodolphe el-Khoury [first published in French as _Histoire de la Merde_ in 1978], Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
shit-laporte.txt
Like Arendt, in which polis and the citizen-subjects are made active through speech - made politically active - animated through the act of narration. The traditional concept of the public sphere rests on this principle and exerts a symbolic violence on the aesthetics of speech (who speaks and on what). This is the organized violence of democracy (or violence of participation) founded on the opposition of taste and disgust.
shit-laporte.txt
The intervention of Dominique Laporte is to verify that modern power is founded on the aesthetics of the public sphere and in the agency of its citizen-subjects but that these are conditions of the management of human waste. He insists that in parallel to the cleansing of the streets of Paris from shit, the French language was similarly cleansed of Latin words (to establish official French, in an edict of 1539, without 'foreign leanings'). Both public space and language were cleaned and policed, as purification requires 'submission to the law'. As Laporte puts it: 'Without a master, one cannot be cleaned.' (2000: 2); and:
shit-laporte.txt
'If language is beautiful, it must be because a master bathes it - a master who cleans shit holes, sweeps offal, and expurgates city and speech to confer upon them order and beauty.' (2000: 7)
shit-laporte.txt
What is lost is what lies in excess of cleanliness, that which goes beyond articulation. Language was purged of its 'lingering stink' (although, Laporte quotes Barthes to clarify that it is not the word shit that smells, 2000: 10) to become purer and invested with authority:
shit-laporte.txt
'Purified, language becomes the crown jewels, the site of law, of the scared text, of translation and exchange. There the muddied voices and their dialects are expurgated of their dross, losing their pitiful "remnants of earth" and the vie fruits of their dirty commerce. Guttersnipes and merchants cannot sully the virginal emblem of power, for the King's language does not wash them of their sins. But neither does it abandon them to their sinful state. Rather, it cleanses the fruit of their common labor, elevating it to the divine place of power freed from odor.' (2000: 18)
shit-laporte.txt
The desire for clean language or code, as well as clean cities, sublimates shit and the management of human waste. But this cannot be simply wiped or flushed away and is crucial for a fuller understanding of aesthetic and political expression. Information not only wants to be free, it wants to be dirty.
social-latour.txt
group task - 3 or 4 people.
social-latour.txt
define social media, give examples.
social-latour.txt
"There is no such thing as Society"
social-latour.txt
Bruno Latour (2005) _Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory_, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
social-latour.txt
The use of the term 'social' has become commonplace and pejorative - somewhat emptied of meaning especially where communications technologies are concerned (eg. so-called 'social networking platforms'). It is only vaguely defined at best.
social-latour.txt
Although from a quite different starting point, Bruno Latour investigates the use of the adjective 'social'. He is thinking how, in social science, it is assumed to 'designate a stabilized state of affairs, a bundle of ties that, later, may be mobilized to account for some other phenomena' (2005: 1) - an 'assemblage' in other words.
social-latour.txt
By returning to the first principles of sociology (the science of living together, and its Latin etymological root 'socius' meaning 'someone following someone else', a 'follower', an 'associate', 2005: 108), Latour proposes to examine what is assembled within society (literally _Reassembling the Social_ as the book title confirms).
social-latour.txt
A problem arises, as a consequence of expansions in science and technology, such that the 'social seems to be diluted everywhere and yet nowhere in particular' (2005: 2). It is not that there is no such thing as society (as Thatcher famously put it) but there is a problem in regarding it as a given homogenous thing.
social-latour.txt
Rather, it is possible to designate it as a 'tracing of associations' of heterogeneous elements, according to Latour (2005: 5). It is not a thing but a type of connection, an assemblage. This come close to the position of Gabriel Tarde of maintaining that 'the social was not a special domain of reality but a principle of connections' (2005: 13).
social-latour.txt
In striving for a more 'relativist' definition of the social and drawing upon the 'uncertainty principle' (where the observer cannot be disentangled from the observed), Latour tries to develop 'uncertainties' over key concepts: the nature of group formations, actions by multiple agents, objects demonstrating agency, as well as ongoing disputes over the nature of facts and the truth claims of social science (2005: 22). The uncertainties do not represent confusion but an opening up of the performative dimension of the social.
social-latour.txt
This comes close to action in as much as action is understood as a coming together of complex, diverse, and interlinking agencies locked into uncertain relations. This is the 'actor-network' that describes not a source of action but a 'moving target of a vast array of entities swarming toward it'. He explains that it is never clear who is acting (like the actor on the stage who is never alone but part of a larger apparatus), like play-acting where it is unclear what is authentic, and 'dislocated' in the sense that it is 'borrowed, distributed, suggested, influenced, dominated, betrayed, translated' (2005: 46). It is forever unclear who and what is making the action (like a puppeteer who does not have, or does not believe they have, absolute control over the puppet, and it is unclear who is pulling the strings, 2005: 59). Indeed, other agencies are participants in action (participant-observers) that produce new fluid (liquid) associations that reflect networks (2005: 65).
social-latour.txt
By 'network', he is referring to the older ambiguous description of interconnected points informed both by a sociology of organisation but also information technology (as in the work of Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, 1996). The difficulty is, as with the term 'social', the term network has become so pervasive that it loses its meaning - that 'worknet' helps to resolve in identifying the 'work' involved in establishing 'net-works' (2005: 132). The term worknet helps to establish the action involved in the interconnections of 'net' and 'work' to stress the movement and flow between agencies. Thus, social action cannot be simply reduced to the material infrastructure that determines social relations (as with classical Marxism, 2005: 84) unless the action of objects is also part of a collective network-performance of connections.
social-latour.txt
marxist view: mode of production -> focus on social relations to highlight where exploitation takes place. social relations not stratightforward in the social factory and where agency is complex (machinic).
social-latour.txt
Objects have become things again, as Latour puts it: 'the disputed topic of a virtual assembly' (2005: 119; the principle that informed the exhibition _Making Things Public_, at ZKM in 2005, co-curated with Peter Weibel). Together, it is these interconnections of uncertainties that define the social.
social-latour.txt
politics:
social-latour.txt
But the social remains elusive. Confusion does not derive from ambiguity but a confusion at the heart of sociology, 'between assembling the body politic and assembling the collective' (2005: 161) - the former associated with the C19th century and the latter with the 21st. It is a well-assembled collective able to perform political functions that remains elusive. The social is reassembled, for Latour, in the possibility of a shared and common definition that renews what it means to be part of the same collective - 'where participants explicitly engage in the reassembling of the collective' (2005: 247) - based on an understanding of the assemblages themselves. This is important, because: 'If there is no society, _then no politics is possible_' (2005: 250).
social-latour.txt
Questions remain as to what to collect and the composition of the assembled collectives and this is fundamentally part of the reassembling of the social as an ongoing critical process enmeshed with politics.
software(radical)-ross.txt
David A. Ross (2003), 'Radical Software Redux', http:///e/ross.html
software(radical)-ross.txt
Key to a historical understanding of the term software art is the link to the Radical Software journal published by the Raindance collective in the late 1960s and early 1970s (available as PDF downloads from http://www.radicalsoftware.org). A statement from issue one gives some idea of its project: 'Power is no longer measured in land, labour or capital, but by access to information and the means to disseminate it.' (Ross, 2003) The belief was that the proliferation of video hardware in particular might contribute to social transformation but operated at the level of software - to represent the radical use of the hardware. The rise of civil rights movement and a general mistrust of the communications media on offer required more independent and alternative media and cultural practices. Those associated with this project 'imagined a world in which the contest of ideas and values could take place freely and openly, outside of the existing institutional framework and in active opposition to the worldview constructed and maintained by broadcast commercial TV. They proposed not only a re-ordered power structure, but also a new information order in which the very idea of hierarchical power structure might be transformed or even eliminated.' (Ross, 2003) The journal was produced with utopian zeal laced with ecological concerns. Its current availability on the internet as PDF download is thoroughly in keeping with its 'hippy' ethos and publishing enterprises in the context of the public sphere. It was a journal designed in the spirit of social sculpture in which new technologies might be used for revolutionary purpose (it is the availability of the video portapak that inspires this view). In this sense, what is radical about software is that it acts upon hardware, and it is our collective responsibility to take action in this way to transform hardware into something radical.
software-albert.txt
Saul Albert (2002), ÔUseless UtilitiesÕ, in, Signwave, Auto-Illustrator Users Guide, (first written 2001), Plymouth: i-DAT/Spacex, pp. 89-99.
software-albert.txt
Use-value is something Saul Albert discusses in his essay 'Useless Utilities' (2002), opposing the romantic notion that would define art in terms of its lack of utility. This is perhaps a key issue for the understanding of the aesthetic value of software. Albert sees this as 'In some ways, Albert suggests that at worse 'art for art's sake has been replaced by the idea of 'art for technology's sake' with software simply reduced to the role of tool. In much commercial software production there is a crude distinction made where content is seen to be supplied by the 'creatives'. Albert sees artistic software as undermining some of these distinctions as 'not just art' - with use value too. Perhaps this is better described as 'tactical software' as Matthew Fuller suggests to demonstrate added value. For instance, Albert cites Signwave's 'Auto-Illustrator' support list where collaborative and antagonistic attitudes are expressed towards the user, useful and useless responses accordingly. he sees this as extending ambiguities built into the software in general, and perhaps all software.
software-albertwright.txt
Saul Albert (2002), ÔUseless UtilitiesÕ, in, Signwave, Auto-Illustrator Users Guide, (first written 2001), Plymouth: i-DAT/Spacex, pp. 89-99.
software-albertwright.txt
Use-value is something Saul Albert discusses in his essay 'Useless Utilities' (2002), opposing the romantic notion that would define art in terms of its lack of utility. This is perhaps a key issue for the understanding of the aesthetic value of software. Albert sees this as 'In some ways, Albert suggests that at worse 'art for art's sake has been replaced by the idea of 'art for technology's sake' with software simply reduced to the role of tool. In much commercial software production there is a crude distinction made where content is seen to be supplied by the 'creatives'.
software-albertwright.txt
Richard Wright (2004), ÔSoftware Art After Programming,Õ Metamute, http://www.metamute.com/look/article.tpl?IdLanguage=1&IdPublication=1&NrIssue=28&NrSection=10&NrArticle=1397&ST_max=0, July.
software-albertwright.txt
Against the history of art and computing, Richard Wright traces 'divergence between programmers and program users' based around the question of whether a computer was a medium or a tool (2004). This was made complex when a gallery painter like Harold Cohen, in the early 1980s, shifts to developing software to automate his artwork. To Wright, Cohen's AARON program seems to represent the historical transition towards contemporary culture where the use of computers are pervasive. As a result the terms have fundamentally changed for the artist-programmer:
software-albertwright.txt
' In a world where artists use software to write software that will be seen by virtue of other software, questions about the Ôaesthetics of the codeÕ become a symptom of not being able to see the wood for the trees. Programming is not only the material of artistic creation, it is the context of artistic creation. Programming has become software.' (2004)
software-albertwright.txt
In a hierarchy of programming languages, Wright points out that not all programming practices are equal. He is thinking of the predominance of scripting languages such as Flash Actionscript or Director Lingo that use libraries of functions and a certain shared if not prescribed vocabulary of styles.
software-albertwright.txt
For Wright, and he is someone of an older generation associated with working with code as material, the terms change:
software-albertwright.txt
'The question of whether artists should learn to program is replaced by the question of what kind of programming. Which programming practice has the most Ôopen aestheticÕ, capable of envisaging software that is not just the product of an arbitrary confluence of techniques or a slavish mimicry but is aware of all its possible formative cultural and philosophical categories and values.' (2004)
software-albertwright.txt
To Wright, it is matter of asking the right questions. He quotes Cohen and then extends it: from - ÔDonÕt ask what you can do with the software, ask what the software can doÕ - to - ÔDonÕt ask what the software can do, ask what it can do to other software.Õ (2004)
software-albertwright.txt
Andreas Broeckmann (2003), Notes on the Politics of Software Culture
software-albertwright.txt
Clearly there is a politics to software culture. Andreas Broeckmann remarks that social processes increasingly rely on software for their execution (2003). through the transmediale festival not least, Broeckmann is concerned with the artistic, non-functionalist, reflexive and speculative practices that propose computer programming as the artistic material.
software-cramer.txt
Florian Cramer (2002), 'Concepts, Notations, Software, Art'
software-cramer.txt
In 'Concepts, Notations, Software, Art' (2002), Cramer laments the tendency in digital art to hide the code that lies behind the work. For instance, how in much interactive art, the impression is that the viewer makes the work somehow through 'interaction' rather than the complex interactions of processes and code running on the computer behind the scenes - demonstrating ignorance of programming and of course of programmers. He aligns this way of thinking with procedural and instruction-based artworks from a conceptual tradition. He sees this situation as deeply ironic given that programming in itself is a conceptual notation (2002: 102).
software-cramer.txt
With the computer, accepted media art definitions become problematic, and the idea of computers relating to a category like 'new media' is notoriously difficult when 'old media' are simulated in a way that limits the possibilities of what a computer really does (that's probably a bit obscure). Clearly, we have to be more precise with the terms, and discussing software is one focus of many where some history and technical understanding is necessary to add precision.
software-cramer.txt
Cramer defines software as a 'set of formal instructions, or, algorithms; it is a logical score put down in a code. It doesn't matter at all which particular sign system is used as long as it is a code, whether digital zeros and ones, the Latin alphabet... If a piece of software is a score, is it then by definition an outline, a blueprint of an executed work?' (2002: 102) A computer program is both a score and its execution at the same time, 'it uses the computer for computation. For Cramer, the fascination is that: 'Computer programming collapses, as it seems, the second and third of the three steps of concept, concept notation and execution' (2002: 105). In this way, also, it can be seen to be 'generative'. Underlying this, are programs and the programmers who make the programs - all relatively hidden from the mainstream discourse of interactive arts. [It is the labour of programmers that is stolen in other words]
software-cramer.txt
Executable formal instructions also exist outside of software as such. Programs can be executed without necessarily running them on a machine - the instructions merely need to be followed. Tristan Tzara's instructions for making a Dadaist poem is a classic example of software without a computer. Cramer traces the link with conceptual art too, particularly work that engaged with text, or the material of language - leading to the idea of software as potential literature or 'combinatory literature'. It is the concept that is really the material if operating in the conceptual tradition. Cramer's key example of this is wonderfully simple: La Monte Young's 'Composition 1961' - a piece of paper with the instruction 'Draw a straight line and follow it'. (2002: 108) Here is a useful example of 'jamming' and 'denial-of -service code' and also 'addresses the aesthetics and politics coded into instructions (2002: 109).
software-cramer.txt
It is in the distinction of aesthetics and politics that problems occur. Cramer contrasts 'software formalism' and 'software culturalism' to characterise what he sees as two distinct tendencies. He sees oppositional groups of practices exemplifying these tendencies (see more notes elsewhere on this - such as in my notes on 'Code') in order to recommend that:
software-cramer.txt
'If software art could be generally defined as an art; of which the material is formal instruction code, and/or; which addresses cultural concepts of software; then each of their positions sides with exactly one of the two aspects'. This would severely limit its speculative potential. Clearly, 'histories of instruction codes in art and investigations into the relationship of software, text and language still remain to be written'. (2002: 110)
software-cramergabriel.txt
Florian Cramer and Ulrike Gabriel (2001) jury statement and in 'Software Art and Writing' American Book Review, vol.22, no.6.]
software-cramergabriel.txt
The jury statement for artistic software of the transmediale.01 art festival in Berlin, has become a touchstone for defining software art. Florian Cramer and Ulrike Gabriel carefully historicise the terms for what was at that time a new category, drawing attention to the structures of programming that lies behind the new media work. They see this as part of a historical trajectory that has tended to overlook the material and aesthetic aspects of software, the programming code that is inevitably a part of all art that is digitally produced and reproduced. Their example of software practice is the Fluxus performance score of La Monte Young's Composition 1961 No. I, January I:
software-cramergabriel.txt
'Draw a straight line and follow it'.
software-cramergabriel.txt
The point for them is that 'the score is not aesthetically detached from its performance'. (2001)
software-cramergabriel.txt
This is explained as the collapse of 'concept notation and execution' (quoted in Johansson, in Goriunova & Shulgin, 2004: 156).
software-cramergabriel.txt
Micz Flor (2002), '"Hear me out" - Free Radio Linux', Nettime, May 12; written for r a d I o q u a l i a's "Free Radio Linux,"
software-cramergabriel.txt
http://radioqualia.va.com.au/freeradiolinux/
software-cramergabriel.txt
The aesthetic qualities of code at their extreme seem to be best exemplified by the alleged readings as if poetry. However, another highly conceptual example is radioqualia's 'free linux radio' (2001) in which the entire source code of the Linux kernel, the part of the operating software Linux on top of which
software-cramergabriel.txt
all other applications run, was webcast over the Internet using a speech synthesizer to convert the 4,141,432 lines of code into talk radio taking about 593.89 days to read. Cultural production in this scenario is literally reduced to code and the wider context of the open source movement, as language is necessarily context bound. Larry Wall explains this in the context of the programming language Perl:
software-cramergabriel.txt
'A language is not a set of syntax rules. It is not just a set of semantics.
software-cramergabriel.txt
It's the entire culture surrounding the language itself. So part of the
software-cramergabriel.txt
cultural context in which you analyze a language includes all the
software-cramergabriel.txt
personalities and people involved--how everybody sees the language, how they
software-cramergabriel.txt
propagate the language to other people, how it gets taught, the attitudes of
software-cramergabriel.txt
people who are helping each other learn the language--all of this goes into
software-cramergabriel.txt
the pot of context.' (Larry Wall, quoted in Flor, 2001)
software-fuller.txt
Matthew Fuller (2003), Behind the Blip: essays on the Culture of Software, New York: Autonomedia.
software-fuller.txt
First published on nettime (and later in Olga Goriunova & Alexei Shulgin (2002) eds., 'Software Art: Thoughts', Read_me festival 1.2, catalogue, Moscow: Rosizo, State Centre for Mudeums and Exhibitions, pp.35-43), this essay stresses the need for critical work in this area of software production that goes beyond treating software as merely a functional tool. The issue is simply that that there is more work to be done, old work to be rediscovered and new analogies to be struck. Moreover it needs to be emphasised that software is thoroughly a cultural phenomena. Andreas Broeckmann puts it this way:
software-fuller.txt
'Software has, over the last few years, increasingly come into view as
software-fuller.txt
a cultural technique whose social and political impact ought to be
software-fuller.txt
studied carefully. To the extent that social processes rely on
software-fuller.txt
software for their execution [...] it is necessary to understand the
software-fuller.txt
procedural specificities of the computer programmes employed, and the
software-fuller.txt
cultural and political 'rules' coded into them'
software-fuller.txt
[Andreas Broeckmann, 'Notes on the Politics of Software Culture' nettime, sept 4/2003, written for the upcoming Next5Minutes4 reader].
software-fuller.txt
Much conventional research in this area still relies on Human Computer Interface (HCI) and the (positivist) work of B. F. Skinner imposing a functionalist model appropriate to the tendency for a functionalist understanding of software itself. Clearly we need to develop more analytical approaches to the making of software that recognises its process of becoming - as for Fuller 'software is always an unsolved problem' (2003:15).
software-fuller.txt
Fuller explains that an understanding of 'software as culture' is nothing new. Programmers have provided accounts of their practice that articulate programming in relation to other social, cultural and aesthetic practices - he cites the work of Larry Wall 'Perl, the First Postmodern Computer Language' [http://www.wall.com/larry/] and Ellen Ullman Close to the Machine [San Francisco: City Lights 1997] as two notable examples [note: I might tentatively add our 'The Aesthetics of Generative Code' to this list]. He quotes Ullman:
software-fuller.txt
'I'd like to think that computers are neutral, a tool like any other, a hammer that can built a house or smash a skull. But there is something in the system itself, in the formal logic of programs and data, that recreates the world in its own image.' (2003: 29; in Ullman 1997: 89)
software-fuller.txt
In texts such as these, software is no mere tool but is 'composed' of cultural aspects that Fuller sees as in opposition to the idealist tendencies in computing that expresses a purity of form in numbers and the abstractions of 'pure' mathematics (2003:15).
software-fuller.txt
Any 'theory' software would require an understanding of the complex interactions of processes, undertaking theorisation 'able to operate on the level of a particular version of a program, a particular file-structure, protocol, sampling algorithm' and so on (2003: 17) - from the general to the particular in other words. In Feynman Lectures on Computation, written in 1984, the operating system of a computer is described as an assemblage of levels: 'This goes from level 1, that of electronic circuitry - registers, gates, buses - to number 13, the Operating System Shell, which manipulates the user programming environment. By a hierarchical compounding of instructions, basic transfers of 1's and 0's on level one are transformed, by the time we get to thirteen, into commands...' (quoted in Fuller, 2003: 21). Many more levels exist once the computer is interfaced and networked to other machines.
software-fuller.txt
Any criticism must address these levels and interactions as the 'unfolding of the particular' and emphasise that any one object operates in 'participial' terms - to describe something that is both a thing and a motion (Fuller, 2003: 18 - using a term from Elaine Scarey that describes a term that is both a verb and a noun). This is somewhat demonstrating in thinking of software as a form of digital subjectivity (drawing upon the work of Deleuze and Guattari) in the way that 'software constructs ways of seeing, knowing, and doing in the world that at once contain a model of the world it obstensibly pertains to and also shape it every time it is used' (2003:19). In this way, software (like other communications media) can be seen to interpellate us, call us to order through the workings of the 'ideological state apparatus' (using the formulation of Althusser). Fuller sees 'the task of such practical and critical work to open these layers up to the opportunity of further assemblage' (2003: 21). Although critical of the tendency to reduce human agency to the relays of a circuit board, Fuller draws an analogy here to the work of Deleuze and Guattari and their 'thought synthesiser' - 'the synthesiser makes conceptualisable the philosophical process, the production of that process itself, and puts us in contact with other elements of matter. In the machine composed by materiality and force, thought travels, becomes mobile, synthesises.' (Fuller 2003: 21-2; from A Thousand Plateaus, p. 343). For my work, I would describe a similar process in terms of generative processes wherein new formations are endlessly reproduced, and draw attention to the idea of synthesising in the dialectical critical tradition. In this model the human subject is dealt with more sympathetically as the potential agent of change, who assembles the apparatus (as much as is assembled by it). To quote Ullman, again from Fuller: 'We think we are creating the system but the system is also creating us. We build the system, we live in its midst, and we are changed.' (2003: 29; in Ullman 1997: 89)
software-fuller.txt
Importantly, Fuller calls for a criticism that does not operate at some distance from practice but that takes account of practice, and that is a practice in itself of course. He does this through presenting examples of practices and categories that are not exclusive but simply ideas in progress - here the subtitle of the essay in brackets helps our understanding of the status of the project: 'some routes into "software criticism," more ways out'. Any criticism of the categories themselves is thus a normal part of the expected critical work to be engaged. (As you might guess, I do not think the categories particularly productive).
software-fuller.txt
The first category is 'critical software' designed to undermine normalised understandings, operating through two key modes: firstly, 'by using evidence presented by normalised software to construct an arrangement of the objects, protocols, statements, dynamics, and sequences of interaction that allow its conditions of truth to become manifest,' and secondly, 'in the various instances of software that runs just like a normal application, but has been fundamentally twisted to reveal the underlying construction of the user, the way the program treats data, and the transduction and coding processes of the interface' or even by adapting or hacking into existing software (2003: 23). These approaches, for Fuller, move beyond institutional critique to a critical understanding of the operations of the software itself.
software-fuller.txt
The second category is 'social software' built by and for those excluded from mainstream software production, provided a subculture of software production with a different agenda. Related to this, is the software that is developed and changed through social networks of users and programmers, that emerges from a different set of social relations (2003: 24). The free and open-source software movements are examples of this approach, where developers form 'a socio-technical pact between users of certain forms of license, language, and environment' (2003: 24). In this, the relationship of open source software development and the relations of production open up new configurations and contradictions of labour-power and criticism. The labour invested in making the software is made visible and public unlike proprietary software but the control of the means of production is still managed according to capitalist principles. [see work on immaterial production also]. Also in this way, software is developed by a fairly closed community of 'co-producers', those actually using it and with the ability to make and change it - but do they mistakenly continue to exploit their own labour by not selling it? Clearly this is a much longer discussion about the politics of free software and its take-up by large corporations. For Fuller, the problem lies in the closed loop (what Fuller calls 'open-source internalism' 2003: 25) between developers and users - only when they are one and the same does this system actually work for mutual benefit - it needs to be expanded to be more widely available to other users. The same point could probably be made about the operating system Linux, that without adequate instruction, the benefits of free software simply cannot be entertained (note: some cultural activity addresses this by recycling redundant technology, installing linux and training users to run it - such as RTI - breaking down the 'culture of experts' as Fuller puts it, 2003: 26). This is where social software needs to make sure it operates inclusively and can rightly call itself 'open' and 'social'. To do this, a critical approach needs to be developed that takes account of the layers and processes involved.
software-fuller.txt
The third category is 'speculative software' that generally explores the potential for new forms of software, creating new connections between data, machines, and networks. Fuller takes this as the 'reinvention of software by its own means':
software-fuller.txt
'Software whose work is partly to reflexively investigate itself as software, Software as science fiction, as mutant epistemology.' (2003: 30).
software-fuller.txt
Antagonistic social relations between the different agencies involved in software can be made visible. Fuller describes these potential spaces as 'blips', spaces where politics lies behind the blip:
software-fuller.txt
'These blips, these events in software, these processes and regimes that data is subject to and manufactured by, provide flashpoints at which these interrelations, collaborations, and conflicts can be picked out and analysed for their valences of power, for their manifold capacities of control and production, disturbance and invention.' (2003: 30)
software-fuller.txt
To Fuller, speculative software skews and misreads surface appearances and makes visible the 'dynamics, structures, regimes, and drives of each of the little events which it connects to'. Firstly, speculative software 'operates reflexively upon itself and the condition of being software', secondly 'it is to subject these blips and what shapes and produces them to unnatural forms of connection between themselves' making them operate out of control, and thirdly, 'it is subject to the consequences of the first two stages to the havoc of invention' (2003: 32). It is speculative software that arguably comes closest to what can be understood as an artistic approach to software (this is the position of Andreas Broeckmann in his essay 'Notes on the Politics of Software Culture', nettime, sept 4/2003, written for the upcoming Next5Minutes4 reader].
software-goriunova.txt
Olga Goriunova & Alexei Shulgin (2002) 'Artistic Software for Dummies, and, by the way, Thoughts about the New World Order', in Goriunova & Shulgin, eds., Software Art: Thoughts, Read_me festival 1.2, catalogue, Moscow: Rosizo, State Centre for Museums and Exhibitions, pp. 6-9.
software-goriunova.txt
The Readme festival registers the emergence of software art as a phenomenon due to the overall spread of software, commercial proprietary as well as open source, to all spheres of human activity (Goriunova & Shulgin, 2002: 6). The title of their introductory text (in the accompanying catalogue to the 2002 first iteration in Moscow) is explicit in its reference to wider cultural and political issues beyond the stereotypes and false premises often associated with software production - 'Artistic Software for Dummies, and, by the way, Thoughts about the New World Order'. They reject the idea that software is somehow a transparent tool for creative endeavour and point to the subjectivity of the software producer and the power structures that determine this production. They further position this within larger ideological conflicts at a global level between the rationalised West and the metaphysical East that underpin the current world order. The current dominance of the rationalised and informational mode, places importance on art in as, what they call, 'the custodian of the non-rational' (2002: 8). They then make the statement that the 'Artist is not someone who creates images anymore; she rejects the idea of representation.' (2002: 8). The irony is that they are recommend the artistic deployment of rationalised algorithms to make non-rational software.
software-manovich.txt
Lev Manovich (----), 'Avant-garde as Software'
software-manovich.txt
New Media, in Lev Manovich's view, is a term that is usefully compared to earlier avant-garde movements, and particularly the avant-garde activities of the 1920s in Russia and Germany - the new media of that time and place. This allows him to assess the relative claims in terms of cultural impact and radicalization of forms. It appears that many of the claims of the avant-garde have become 'embedded in the commands and interface metaphors of computer software. In short, the avant-garde vision became materialized in a computer. All the strategies developed to awaken audiences from a dream-existence of bourgeois society [...] now define the basic routine of a post-industrial society: the interaction with a computer.' (----) For example, the radical technique of montage has become a commonplace. Manovich also thinks that many techniques now 'function as the strategies of computer-based labor, i.e. different ways we use to organize, access, analyze and manipulate digital data' (----).
software-manovich.txt
So on the surface it seems that what was once a radical aesthetic vision became a standardised form through the use of computer technology. Manovich says: 'The techniques which were harnessed to help the viewer to reveal the social structure behind the visible surfaces, to uncover the underlying struggle between the old and the new, to prepare for rebuilding a society from a ground, became the elemental work procedures of a computer age.' (----)
software-manovich.txt
This is a familiar story, how radical ideas become co-opted and incorporated in the service of capital based on the potentialities of new communications technologies. Radical techniques simply become fashionable style and good marketing. Surely what we need are new radical forms that are not fixed and transformative. Manovich discusses these perceptions of change, and the ways in which ideology naturalises these changes, making ideas like Schklovsky's 'defamiliarisation' thoroughly familiar and not at all made strange. In Manovich's terms, it is 'software that naturalizes the 1920s radical communication techniques of montage, collage, "defamiliarization," etc. [...] software does not simply adopt avant-garde techniques without changing them; on the contrary, these techniques are further developed, formalized in algorithms, codified in software, made more efficient and effective.' (----) Accordingly, this appears to be the site for radical enquiry and experimentation, if aware of the ideological dangers and processes of incorporation.
software-manovich.txt
For Manovich, new media does indeed introduce revolutionary techniques but the terms are different. Whereas the 'old media avant garde' was concerned with vision and representation, the 'new media avant garde' is concerned with the manipulation, generation and transformation of data. This is in keeping with the contemporary postmodern culture's rejection of originality and authorship for appropriation, wherein recycling, re-working, and re-combining media are the standard techniques (often made to look like old media). Manovich concludes:
software-manovich.txt
'In short, the avant-garde becomes software. This statement should be understood in two ways. On the one hand, software codifies and naturalizes the techniques of the old avant-garde. On the other hand, software's new techniques of working with media represent the new avant-garde of the meta-media society.' (----)
software-manovich.txt
[link to Batchen]
software-manovich.txt
The convergence of new media and old media was anticipated in the mid 1930s by Konrad Zuse who used 35mm film in order to control computer programs. The histories have tended to be separated so this detail serves Lev Manovich well in describing the merging of the computer and media: 'All existing media are translated into numerical data accessible for the computer. The results: graphics, moving images, sounds, shapes, spaces, and texts become computable, that is, simply sets of computer data. In short media become new media.' (2001: 25) This suits his argument but also draws attention to the problem with his analysis - in that he privileges cinema as the central analogy at the expense of other approaches. In reviewing Lev Manovich's The Language of New Media (2001), Inke Arns puts this more bluntly in saying that movies are seen to 'metonymically make up the language of new media'. Manovich is attempting to characterise what characterises digital images over analogue ones and draws attention to the numerical coding of media and the modular structure of a media object that leads to automation, variability and what he calls transcoding. This puts into question human intentionality and the object's autonomy as it is able to be transcoded into another format.
software-manovich.txt
Rather than try to strike an analogy with montage techniques of early cinema as might be expected, he emphasizes the difference and calls digital compositing 'anti-montage' (2001: 143). In this elements are blended into a whole rather than brought into collision (and therefore this is a radically different view than Richard Wright's thesis who wishes to argue that transformation can be seen to dialectical). For Manovich, it is the database that forms the 'new symbolic form of the computer age' (2001: 219). By this he is trying to describe a system where objects are brought together in no particular order in contrast to narrative. Manovich is arguing that traditional narrative cinema is simply one way of organizing elements within the database, hypertext is another method, and so on. In Manovich's view, new media reverses the logic of old media, privileging the paradigm (database) over the syntagm (narrative). There were exceptions, such as Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera that Manovich sees as a database movie. It is difficult not to simply see this in terms of formalism as is the tradition, but Maonivich's point is to argue that in much new media production, syntagm is granted too much importance. It emphasizes that new media follows the dominant cultural form of cinematic. Although this might be a convincing argument in relation to computer games and VR technologies, it simply doesn't hold for net.art or experimental software production. In these fields, much practice is literally bound to the database logic he describes.
software-readme04.txt
Matthew Fuller (2004) 'The Digital Object', in Olga Goriunova & Alexei Shulgin, eds., Read_Me: Software Art & Cultures - Edition 2004, Arhus: Digital Aesthetics Research Centre, University of Aarhus, pp. 26-41.
software-readme04.txt
Matthew Fuller reminds the enthusiast of software art what is missing from many debates: 'a thick, brilliant, absolutely enraged, vividly sexual and gregarious involvement with multiform life. Software is part of this, but not much.' (2004: 28). He is thinking of the work of David Wojnarowicz who died of an AIDS related illness in 1992, and his realisation that he'd not only contracted a virus but also the realisation that society was diseased too. Software has a politics but he is concerned to focus attention on the digital object itself. He partly does this by returning to Walter Benjamin's arcades work where ideas of the history and future are embedded in objects (even something as seemingly immaterial as dust). His historical materialism would invest objects with history and a sense of the future possible (2004: 29). Fuller sees certain software operating in this manner through an engagement with temporality and that an 'object is never in itself complete' (2004:30). The digital objects or software he chooses to illustrate his point are deceptively simple, but crucially are enlivened through participation and social context: 'combining the synthetic powers of software with those of the social.' (2004: 38) The definition of software is extended to include social interactions perhaps.
software-readme04.txt
Mirko Schaefer (2004), 'Made by Users: How Users Improve Things, Provide Innovation and Change our Idea of Culture - Problems and Perspectives,' in Olga Goriunova & Alexei Shulgin, eds., Read_Me: Software Art & Cultures - Edition 2004, Arhus: Digital Aesthetics Research Centre, University of Aarhus, pp. 62-77.
software-readme04.txt
Clearly users adapt and use consumer technologies in innovative ways. This unofficial development or hacking is increasingly recognised by manufacturers and corporate culture. Mirko Schaefer argues that software products are particularly prone to adaptation and further innovation by users with technical competence and by the use of network communications to share ideas under open source principles. His examples are turning the Microsoft Xbox into a Linux web server, a Nintendo Gameboy into a music editor, and Sony's AIBO robot pet dog into an electronic pit bull. (2004: 63). Is this an example of general intellect? Certainly modification or hacking of existing software and hardware demonstrates the creative and collective desire to adapt prescribed uses of technological goods and positions the consumer as producer too. The thesis of the Culture Industry appears to dissolve. Yet, the case of the AIBO is a particularly neat example of a subcultural activity being successfully recuperated. First introduced in 1999, and soon hacked and published on Slashdot for others to follow suit. At first this intervention was frowned upon by Sony but later regarded as contributing and supporting the development of their product (2004: 72). On the one hand this seems like Sony supporting the creative freedom of users, but of course it also provides excellent and cheap research and development for the company. Moreover, they have nothing to worry about from a few users, if threatened sufficiently from this activity, they have the legal apparatus to turn to.
software-readme04.txt
Jacob Lillemose (2004), 'A Re-Declaration of Dependence - Software Art in a Cultural Context It Can't Get Out Of,' in Olga Goriunova & Alexei Shulgin, eds., Read_Me: Software Art & Cultures - Edition 2004, Arhus: Digital Aesthetics Research Centre, University of Aarhus, pp. 136-149.
software-readme04.txt
It has become commonplace to examine software art in relation to the emergence of conceptual art practices from the mid 1960s as a continuation of the 'dematerialisation of art'. Jacob Lillemose relates the aesthetics of code and programming to two strands of conceptual art that are formal in character: 'linguistic conceptualism,' associated with Sol LeWitt, Art & language and Joseph Kosuth, that considers art as a 'self-reflexive logistic system composed by writing and ideas, and a language in which form and content tended to merge'; and secondly, the work of art as a set of instructions or composition, associated with La Monte Young and John Cage, 'as a purely mental, non-physical, phenomena.' (2004: 139) Added to this is a more cultural or political dimension associated with Hans Haacke, Victor Burgin, and Gordon Matta-Clark, and a more performative one associated with Vito acconci, Bruce Nauman and Chris Burden. These examples serve to emphasise that software art follows a similar trajectory in rejecting the notion of the autonomous work of art for praxis that takes account of wider issues such as communication, information systems and social processes. In recognition of the importance of context, Lillemose puts it this way: 'the contextual nature of conceptual art points towards an aesthetics based on the relationship between the internal structure of the work of art and external non-artistic structures.' (2004: 140: he is paraphrasing Sarah Charlesworth's 'A Declaration of Dependence' of 1975). So an artwork is not determined by context by works dynamically with its context as 'both a condition and a potential' as Lillemose puts it. This is overtly referred to as software in Burnham's Software exhibition of 1970 as a metaphor for conceptual art that goes beyond mere art.
software-readme04.txt
This is a neat chronology of conceptual art and positions software art as an activity both produced by and producing culture - the activity of 'programmers of programming possibilities (Lillemose, 2004: 143; quoting Thomas Dreher). Lillemose regards this activity as a 'fourth generation' of conceptual art in a rather teleological argument that places software art in an art historical continuum. Perhaps it is preferable to see the potential of software art to break this continuum - at least that's what a historical materialist would seek to do. Lillemose is avoiding what he sees as a trap of describing this emergent practice as avant-gardist, preferring to regard it as 'primarily conceptual and only secondly formalistic, and because it is conceptual it is contextual' (2004: 145) He is arguing for a contextual understanding of software art as 'software not-just art' (extending Matthew Fuller's phrase 'not-just art') but recognising this is one of many ways of conceptualising of its history and cultural understanding.
software-readme04.txt
In 'Anti-Capitalist Operating System/ Together we can defeat capitalism,' (http://runme.org/project/+ACOS/) it is made explicit that operating systems are the puppet masters of all other software and laden with political implications (Lillemose in Goriunova & Shulgin, 2004: 338).
software-readme04.txt
The false dichotomy of software formalism and culturalism is also raised by Troels Degn Johansson in 'Mise En Abyme in Software Art: A Comment to Florian Cramer' (in Goriunova & Shulgin, 2004).
software-readme04.txt
Inke Arns (2004), Read_Me, Run_Me, Execute_Me: Software and its Discontents, or: it's The Performativity of Code, Stupid,' in Olga Goriunova & Alexei Shulgin, eds., Read_Me: Software Art & Cultures - Edition 2004, Arhus: Digital Aesthetics Research Centre, University of Aarhus, pp. 176-193.
software-readme04.txt
What lies hidden behind the surface of software for Inke Arns, is not only the program code but its performativity and it is this she aims to emphasise through speech act theory referring to the ability to act and perform (2004: 177). The performativity of code is theoretically contextualised by reference to John Langshaw Austin's How To Do Things With Words: 'that language does not only have a descriptive, referential or constative function, but also possesses a performative dimension' (2004: 185: ironically this sounds like Chomsky's generative grammar!). The performative aspect of speech is social and semiotic and context-bound. Like a speech act, Arns sees this as analogous to program code in that it says something and does something with consequences. The action has effects. [Code animates the machine. Code is read by the machine operationally, and not culturally - but it is has cultural effects.] Using Saussure's terms, software art is more concerned with parole than langue. She continues: 'In our context, performance and parole mean the respective actualisations and concrete realisations and repercussions a certain priogram has on, let's say, social systems, and not only what it does or generates in the context of abstract-technical systems.' (2004: 186)
software-readme04.txt
She usefully cites Tilman BaumgŠrtel's article 'Experimental Software' (from 2001) describing the difference between early art work using computers from the 1960s and software art. BaumgŠrtel describes software as: 'not art that has been created with the help of a computer, but art that happens in the computer, software is not programmed by artists in order to produce autonomous artworks, but the software itself is the artwork. What is crucial here is not the result but the process triggered in the computer by the program code.' (Arns, 2004: 184-5) Like others, she quotes our earlier aesthetics paper in this connection: 'the aesthetic value of code lies in its execution, not simply its written form' but this was not meant in the way she describes as privileging the end product - the point was to emphasise the process of execution as part of the work, the end product remains a by-product of this process. It was just expressed poorly or at best ambiguously. Her contention is that this avoids 'code works' that are often not executable, or executable only on a conceptual level. She states the obvious to effect in that sometimes software is not necessarily generative. For her and she is thinking of the inadequate definitions, the problem lies in the fact that generative art does not engage sufficiently with the apparatus.
software-readme04.txt
The etymological root of program relates to mark-making, emphasising the material production of code as something before the act. Much software art expresses the raw materiality of code, especially work that uses simple programs and assembly languages. The significance is that low-level languages are seen to have a close proximity to the mechanics of the hardware (Simon Yuill, in Goriunova & Shulgin, 2004: 229). Simon Yuilll calls this 'code art brutalism' in recognition to his analogy to brutalist design aesthetics.
software-readme04.txt
note: on Sol Lewitt
software-readme04.txt
Casey Reas in 'Software Structures' explores the relations between software and the work of Sol Lewitt, playfully describing his work as 'paragraphs on Software Structures' (in Goriunova & Shulgin, 2004: 295). He describes approach to software production: 'I want programming to be as immediate and fluid as drawing and I work with software in a way that minimizes the technical aspects.' (in Goriunova & Shulgin, 2004: 277).
software-readme04.txt
note: software culture needs to take account of cultural difference.
software-rhizomethread.txt
software art thread notes:
software-rhizomethread.txt
definition of software art:
software-rhizomethread.txt
In a convoluted discussion on Rhizome, Antoine Schmitt argues for the separation of 'programmed art' from 'software art', referring to work that is programmed in a more general way and then software as the cultural form this sometimes takes. Interestingly, he wishes to emphasise action as in a programme of action and characterises himself as an artist-programmer consistent with this view. Antoine Schmitt calls the program 'prepared' in this sense. Programmed art in this sense holds a close (conceptual) connection with conceptual art and work that is conceived in advance of its execution.
software-rhizomethread.txt
(Antoine Schmitt (2003) 'software art vs. programmed art', Rhizome_Raw, Oct 4).
software-rhizomethread.txt
Software show:
software-rhizomethread.txt
Andreas Broegger (2003) takes a more historical approach by situated the term in the context of Radical Software magazine and Jack Burnham's exhibition Software held at the Jewish Museum, in 1970. Both he and Davidson Gigliotti describe the term software used as a metaphor for arts practice, mostly describing the transmission of information using video tapes and early computing arts as opposed to the hardware of object-based art - what Lippard elsewhere describes as dematerialised art.
software-rhizomethread.txt
(Andreas Broegger (2003), 'gigliotti on '(radical) software,' posting via Andreas Broeckmann, Oct 10)
software-shanken.txt
Edward A. Shanken (1998) 'The House That Jack Built: Jack Burnham's Concept of "Software" as a Metaphor for Art', in Leonardo Electronic Almanac 6:10 (November)
software-shanken.txt
'Software as a metaphor for art' was famously explored in Jack Burnham's 'software' show at the Jewish Museum in 1970 (Shanken 1998). The show can be seen as a product of its times with its structuralist and conceptualist concerns, and its aim to focus attention on the technical apparatus. It draws a parallel that has since become commonplace in looking to the dematerialisation of the conceptual arts tradition and the immaterialisation of information and communications technology. In his essay 'The House that Jack Built' (1998), Edward Shanken traces these concerns in the work of Burnham in his engagement with structuralism, art and technology to reveal its 'internal logic' (both in Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of Our Time, 1968, and the Structure of Art, 1971 written in parallel to curating the show - full title 'Software, Information Technology: Its Meaning for Art'). In other words, the show was an attempt to explain how software operates metaphorically in terms of concepts and ideas in distinction to the 'hardware' of the physical art object:
software-shanken.txt
'an attempt to produce aesthetic sensations without the intervening "object"; in fact, to exacerbate the conflict or sense of aesthetic tension by placing works in mundane, non-art formats.' (Shaken quoting Burnham from private correspondence, 1998).
software-shanken.txt
In this way, software stands for what Burnham calls 'post-formalist art' that would include performance, interactive art and conceptual art in general, and the show operated as a testing ground for public interaction with 'information processing systems and their devices' (Shaken quoting Burnham's catalogue, 1998).
software-shanken.txt
By analogy, the internal logic of art is thus seen to consist of the abstract logic of a program in dialogue with or receiving feedback from human subjects. To Burnham, art is premised on a mythic structure that tries to separate it from everyday life: or the false distinction between art and non-art. Structuralism is evoked by Shanken in pointing to the influence of Claude LŽvi-Strauss's structural anthropology and Thomas Kuhn's critique of scientific objectivity, and Barthes's distinction between readerly and writerly texts in a number of the contributions to the show (for instance, Hans Haacke's 'Visitor's Profile' where personal information is entered into a system; Sonia Sheridan's 'Interactive Paper Systems' where visitors were encouraged to engage with the artist and a photocopy machine). Shanken describes the critical impulse in these terms: 'Technology in art, for Burnham, was meaningful only to the extent it contributed to stripping away signifiers to reveal the mythic nature of art.' (1998)
software-shanken.txt
Software, then, attempted to reveal some of the contradictions in art's organisational logic between art and non-art, between object and non-object, between artist and non-artist.
soul-berardi.txt
Franco "Bifo" Berardi. 2009. The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy. Trans. Francesca Cadel & Giuseppina Mecchia. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
soul-berardi.txt
To Berardi, the immaterial forces of language and money are not simply metaphors but the viral forces of semiocapitalism: "They are the soul of Semiocapital." (2009: 22)
soul-berardi.txt
The soul is the vital breath that makes an animated body out of biological matter. In The Soul at Work, Berardi takes the concept (as metaphor and ironically) to examine contemporary forms of work and alienation. He insists on the shift of attention to the way that the contemporary mode of production converts mind, language and creativity into value. Therefore the examination of the combined territories of the intellect, language and imagination become core concerns to understand contemporary forms of alienation.
soul-berardi.txt
To understand alienation, he charts its passage from the Hegelian-Marxist tradition where it is measured between human essence and the perversion of this into work activity, the spilt between life and labour (close to Arendt's distinctions), to the Italian Workerist tradition where it is defined in relation to labour time and the creation of value, "the reification of body and soul" (22-3). The break that Workerism represents is in rejecting the passivity of the worker and insisting on the possibilities of active "refusal of work", its liberation from the capitalist valorization process (see Tronti). The genealogy of alienation demonstrates how antagonism in the refusal of work has moved to a situation where work ever more seems to defines who we are. Labour power has become human capital that integrates the intellect, language, and imagination, and produces new kinds of subjectivities.
soul-berardi.txt
The further addition, the soul, is to try to integrate the biopolitical dimension and what he refers to as the "psychopathologies of desire" (24). It is a useful addition to the understanding of desire too (inherited from Deleuze and Guattari), that lies not in opposition to domination but indicates a force-field of potential that is able to be captured as much by Disney or Microsoft as much as the social movements (117-8). The psychopathology of desire is in recognition of the ways in which the soul has been broken and subjectivity is effectively soul-less, desire and the soul have been colonized and cast into depressed states.
soul-berardi.txt
The management of happiness is key to this. Happiness is ideological. The situation in which the soul is put to work, Berardi calls the "factory of unhappiness" (90), where following a biopolitical line of argument, psychopathology has become a technique of control. It is not just value that is produced but subjectivity, and one that is not altogether happy. This leads to "prozac-economy" within which unhappiness is carefully managed. (see notes elsewhere for this).
soul-berardi.txt
What needs to be rediscovered is happiness tied to collective formations such as the commons and communism. "For Marx, the privileged example of really free working - happiness itself - is 'composition,' the construction of the communist score. […] communism whose song will free the space in which it resonates, and spreads." (Jason Smith, "Preface: Soul on Strike", in Berardi 2009: 19)
soul-berardi.txt
The speed of communications contributes to this as general intellect is no longer able to adequately process the complexity of information that is being generated. Alienation has become a kind of dyslexia.
soul-berardi.txt
The soul stands in for this additional aspect that has been further stolen from the human subject. Berardi uses the example of cellular phones to demonstrate the "network dependency" that underpins the social factory, such that info-workers continue to work even when not working. The digital network more generally facilitates the spatial and temporal globalization of labour but the cellular qualities of this recombine semiotic fragments endlessly to produce semiocapitalism (2009: 89). The most important commodity of late capitalism, the mobile phone, is the instrument of semiocapital, melting our brains both literally and metaphorically.
soul-berardi.txt
In other words, the soul has been put to work.
soul-berardi.txt
All is not lost. Berardi reads the present financial crisis as the "return of the soul", like the return of the repressed. If neoliberalism attempted to capture the soul, it failed, having wrongly assumed "that the soul can be reduced to mere rationality" (2009: 207). The soul is more unpredictable than the mind or body. For Beradi, the process of autonomy is part of therapy, and communism one of its possible forms, but not a totalisation (220-1). Again, this is why the soul makes a useful frame of reference as something nonknown and chaotic, its potentialities irreducible to the market or even language. In this sense it remains a vital breath and is close to voice.
soul-berardi.txt
general intellect:
soul-berardi.txt
Class antagonism was transformed into a broader dynamic, that recognized the "collapse of the distinction between conception and execution, between the managing of production and production itself" generalizing the site of conflict to society as a whole, the social factory. (Jason Smith, "Preface: Soul on Strike", in Berardi 2009)
soundbites-mcluhan.txt
Marshall McLuhan & Quentin Fiore (1967) The Medium is the Massage, New York: Bantam Books.
soundbites-mcluhan.txt
Paraphrasing Marx:
soundbites-mcluhan.txt
'Electric circuitry has overthrown the regime of "time" and "space" and pours upon us instantly and continuously the concerns of all other men. It has reconstituted dialogue on a global scale.' (McLuhan, 1967: 16)
soundbites-mcluhan.txt
'Ours is a brand-new world of allatonceness. "Time" has ceased, "space" has vanished. We now live in a global village... a simultaneous happening.' (McLuhan, 1967: 63)
soundbites-mcluhan.txt
medium is the massage:
soundbites-mcluhan.txt
'All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage.' (McLuhan, 1967: 26)
soundbites-mcluhan.txt
rear-view mirror:
soundbites-mcluhan.txt
'The past went that-a-way. [...] We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.' (McLuhan, 1967: 73-4)
speaking-searle.txt
John R. Searle (2002) 'Twenty-One Years in the Chinese Room', in John Preston and Mark Bishop, eds. (2002) _Views into the Chinese Room: New Essays on Searle and Artificial Intelligence_, Oxford : Clarendon Press, pp. 51-69.
speaking-searle.txt
John R. Searle (1980) 'Minds, Brains, and Programs', in _Behavioral and Brain Sciences_, vol. 3, pp. 417-424.
speaking-searle.txt
Diane Proudfoot (2002) 'Wittgenstein's Anticipation of the Chinese Room', in John Preston and Mark Bishop, eds. (2002) _Views into the Chinese Room: New Essays on Searle and Artificial Intelligence_, Oxford : Clarendon Press, pp. 167-180.
speaking-searle.txt
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953) _Philosophical Investigations_, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, Oxford: Blackwell.
speaking-searle.txt
That it is believed possible to make a machine pass the 'Turing Test' (in Turing's 1936 paper) - to respond to an input with an output similar to a human - does not mean that the computer and human are doing the same thing. John Searle's notorious 'Chinese Room argument' (in an essay 'Minds, Brains, and Programs', of 1980) refutes the 'test', by claiming that machines fall short in understanding the symbols they process. Expressed differently, the observation is that the syntactical, abstract or formal program of a computer program are not the same as semantic or mental content associated with the human mind. The cognitive processes of the human mind may be simulated but not duplicated as such. The thought-experiment proceeds, as follows:
speaking-searle.txt
'Suppose that I'm locked in a room and given a large batch of Chinese writing. Suppose furthermore (as is indeed the case) that I know no Chinese, either written or spoken [...] To me, Chinese is just so many meaningless squiggles.' (1980: 417)
speaking-searle.txt
Given linguistic instruction and rules, Searle imagines that he is able to answer questions that are indistinguishable from those of native Chinese speakers. But:
speaking-searle.txt
'... I produce the answers by manipulating uninterpreted formal symbols. As far as the Chinese is concerned, I simply behave like a computer; I perform computational operations on formally specified elements. For the purposes of the Chinese, I am simply an instantiation of the computer program.' (1980: 418)
speaking-searle.txt
Searle's position is based on the linguistic distinction between syntax and semantics as applied to the digital computer (Turing machine), as a 'symbol-manipulating device' where the units have no meaning in themselves. Even if it is argued that there is some sense of intentionality (or agency) in the program, it is not the same as that exhibited by humans (what Searle refers to as 'as-if intentionality'). Searle in the Chinese Room is an 'instantiation of a computer program' drawing on a database of symbols and arranging them according to program rules. But it can also be argued that the experiment is simply a description of the workings of the CPU (central processing unit) and not the computer system as a whole. This 'Systems Reply' to the Chinese Room argument claims 'that even though there is no semantic content in me alone, there s semantic content somewhere else - in the whole system of which I am part, or in some subsystem within me.' (2002: 53) All the same, the room itself or any other part of the wider system does not understand Chinese either. To think otherwise, is what Searle refers to as 'verificationist reductionist urge' like the Turing Test itself and 'Strong AI' in general (2002: 52). It would seem that no amount of simulation will duplicate the Chinese speaker.
speaking-searle.txt
To Searle, the distinction between humans and machines is 'obsolete': humans are already biological machines. An artificial machine can in principle think, but only in simulation; for it to duplicate it would also need to replicate causal powers - produce consciousness itself (2002: 56). This has proved impossible thus far. The problem for Searle lies 'not that computational processes are too machine-like to be conscious, it is rather that they are too little machine-like' (2002: 57). By this, he means that computation relies on an abstract mathematical process and not in terms of energy transfer like some other machines; energy transfer is not sufficiently part of computation. The Chinese Room argument is useful not least in disputing of the truth claims of computer science. The appearance of understanding Chinese is an illusion. Indeed it is a fantasy that is produced through a number of misreadings of scientific progress and dead metaphors. For instance, increased computational capacity ('Moore's Law' in action) does not necessarily mean that producing a conscious computer somehow is closer (2002: 68).
speaking-searle.txt
It remains a truism that a set of formal principles alone is not sufficient for the production of meaning. Computation cannot in itself be said to have access to or know or understand content. This is what Wittgenstein refers to as talking 'without thinking' (from 'Wittgenstein's Lectures on Philosophical Psychology 1946-47', 1989: 7). To Wittgenstein, the Chinese spoken by the 'living reading-machine' could not even be described as a genuine speech act, for 'a proposition isn't just a series of sounds, it is something more. [...] The sentence, as it were, plays a melody (the thought) on the instrument of the soul.' (in Proudfoot 2002: 168)
speaking-searle.txt
The reading-machine is simply manipulating symbols, that Wittgenstein likens to the workings of a pianola - that translates marks into sounds, merely following patterns. The lack of understanding is apparent:
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'The living reading machine produces as output solutions to arithmetical problems, texts spoken aloud, proofs of logical theorems, notes played on a piano, and suchlike. These 'machines' may be born, like an idiot savant, or trained.' (from _Philosophical Investigations_, 1953: 157; in Proudfoot 2002: 168-9)
speaking-searle.txt
In the Chinese Room, this is symbol-manipulation that is insufficient for understanding. Although there are similarities with Searle's position, Wittgenstein's arguments are rather different - for 'meaning-blindness is not a barrier to the use of language (Proudfoot 2002: 173); and furthermore, denying that understanding, thinking, intentionality, and meaning, are simply evident in the process of symbol manipulation (2002: 176; hence, to Diane Proudfoot, Wittgenstein prefigures a 'connectionist view of mind). To Wittgenstein, when we say a word we refer 'to the whole environment of the event of saying it. And this also applies to our saying that someone speaks like an automaton or parrot.' Understanding comes about through a particular history, and through participation in a particular social environment (Proudfoot 2002: 177-8).
spectres-derrida.txt
Specters of Marx:
spectres-derrida.txt
The first noun in the Manifesto is 'Spectre' and it is repeated: 'A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of communism' ('Ein Gespenst geht um in Europa - das Gespenst des Kommunismus', more accurately, from the German 'Gespenst' is Hobgoblin - source? However, this would rather spoil Derrida's neat analysis and clearly the 'spectre' has relevance). It has become a fashionable term for cultural analysis perhaps because of its ambiguous form (Mavor article? And the more overt references in Slavoj Zizek's writings) and the [Spectre] mailing list suggests a wider interpretation of this term, thus:
spectres-derrida.txt
[look it up at http://coredump.buug.de/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/spectre]
spectres-derrida.txt
For Derrida, the use of the term 'spectre' suggests a virtual, ineffective, insubstantial state of being, a simulacrum, a ghostly presence. He says:
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'This logic of haunting would not be merely larger and more powerful than an ontology or a thinking of Being in the "to be or not to be," but nothing is less certain' (1994: 10)
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The reference to Hamlet's ghost evokes this sense of the silent ghost, the apparition of the spirit of Marxism (perhaps more so than Marx's alleged favourite Shakespeare play Timon of Athens).
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Derrida continues: 'A traditional scholar does not believe in ghosts - nor in all that could be called the virtual space of spectrality. There has never been a scholar who, as such, does not believe in the sharp distinction between the real and the unreal, the actual and the inactual, the living and the non-living, being and non-being ("to be or not to be," in the conventional reading), in the opposition between what is present and what is not, for example in the form of objectivity.' (1994: 11)
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The Manifesto opens with this sense of indeterminancy (it is no 'dogma machine' as Derrida puts it, 1994: 13). The example of Marx confiding to Engels that: 'What is certain is that I am not a Marxist' disputes any sense of absolute form and points to the problem of (historical, political) translatability: 'How is one to receive, how is one to understand a speech, how is one to inherit it when it does not let itself be translated from itself into itself?' (1994: 34; even Derrida sees that in saying 'I am not a Marxist', Marxism is registered. And how could Marx be a Marxist? It is clear he could not both be a follower of his own thought without becoming a ghost of his former self).
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There is a certain ghostly quality to the manifesto itself and its relevance to the present historical moment. Marx and Engels point to the need for continual reassessment of their theses (Engels, in the 1888 preface explicitly talks of the 'aging' process of the text) in keeping with their view of historical processes. Derrida is impressed by this sense of self-critique:
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'What other thinker has ever issued a similar warning in such an explicit fashion? Who has ever called for the transformation to come of their own theses?... so as to take account there, another account, the effects of rupture and restructuration? And so as to incorporate in advance, beyond any possible programming, the unpredictability of new knowledge, new techniques, and new political givens.' (1994: 13).
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This is how the text remains both relevant and urgent in its response to global capital and technology. Even Derrida (a post-Marxist), agrees that:
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'At a time when a new world order is attempting to install its neo-capitalism and neo-liberalism, no disavowal has managed to rid itself of all Marx's ghosts.' (1994: 37)
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In a note to 'Marx's Three Voices', Blanchot emphasises similar qualities in Marx's use of language:
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'... it is the urgency of what it announces, bound to an impatient and always excessive demand, since excess is its only measure: thus calling to the struggle and even (which is what we hasten to forget) postulating "revolutionary terror," recommending "permanent revolution," and always designating the revolution not as a final necessity, but as imminence, since it is characteristic of the revolution, if it opens and traverses time, to offer no delay, giving itself to be lived as ever-present demand.' (1986: 19)
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This sense of inheritance is crucial - in tackling the idea of the 'the end of history', and whether this implies the end of Marxism and Marxist theory as Fukuyama insists. Benjamin, as historical materialist, would no doubt regard this with scepticism:
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'The past carries with it a secret index by which it is referred to redemption.... There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply. Historical materialists are aware of that.' ('Uber den Begriff der Geschicht' pp. 253-4, check this). Similarly, Shakespeare's Timon of Athens (Marx's alleged favourite play) is apt in this regard: 'How goes the world? - It wears, sir, as it grows'. Derrida sees this as the nature of growth, in the context of global expansion (1994: 78) and in turn proving that 'The time is out of joint'; Hamlet would do as well in describing how the world goes badly.
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In The End of History and the Last Man, Fukuyama's new 'gospel' (Derrida calls Fukuyama's work the new 'gospel', to refer to its Christian overtones) does indeed insist on the triumph of neo-liberalism over Marxist 'materialist economism' correcting its 'Hegelian-Christian "pillar" of recognition or that "thymotic" element of the soul' (note: 'thymotic' is the desire for recognition), and making 'the State of the end of history' now rest on the 'twin pillars of economics and recognition' (1994: 61). Fukuyama is drawing upon Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit here but also the earlier work of Kojve (Alexander Kojve (1947), Introduction ˆ la lecture de Hegel: Leons sur "La PhŽnomŽnologie de l'Esprit", Paris: Gallimard), and his 'postscript on post-history and post-historical animals' in looking at the post-war United States; thinking the United States, in 1947 (and later Japan), had reached the final stage of 'Marxist communism' (1994: 70 & 72). In The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel 'transfigures the individual into 'consciousness' and the world into 'object' - both life and history are thoroughly transfigured into 'relations of consciousness to the object' (Derrida, 1994: 123). For Fukuyama's concept of history, Hegel is preferred over Marx but both are key reference points, and neo-liberal democracy is now the actual reality and ideal.
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On the other hand, Marx looks to Hegel and adapts the famous remark on the repetition of history: 'Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.' (1968: 96) Is it simply that the Fukuyama thesis is farcical? Revolutions perhaps especially repeat themselves even if they appear as counter-revolutions - from generation to generation; they are generative in every sense of providing for new conditions. Marx concludes that men make their own history, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte:
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'Men make their own history but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted by the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionising themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language.' (Marx and Engels, Selected Works, 1968: 96)
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Thus the living borrow from the dead - so to speak. This is both the pulse of history and its revolutionary frequency. According to Marx, the more the present is in crisis, the more one has to borrow from the 'spirits of the past' (the spectre - 'gespenst') to evoke revolutionary crisis (the spirit of the revolution - 'geist'). This distinction between spirit and spectre is made clearly in The German Ideology (ref. here?): the spectre is of the spirit, and follows it like its ghostly 'other'.
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This sounds rather like the distinction between use-value and exchange value - one as a ghost of its former self. Evoking Benjamin's puppet and automaton figures in Theses on the Philosophy of History perhaps, Derrida stretches his poetic license in describing (actually referring to a wooden table), the Thing (life, beast, object, commodity - in other words, spectre):
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'which is no longer altogether a thing, here it goes and unfolds (entwickelt), it unfolds itself, it develops what it engenders through a quasi-spontaneous generation' and 'it is the contradiction of automatic autonomy, mechanical freedom, technical life. Like every thing, from the moment it comes onto the stage of the market, the table resembles a prosthesis of itself. Autonomy and automatism, but automatism of this wooden table that spontaneously puts itself into motion, to be sure, and seems thus to animate, animalize, spiritualize, spiritize itself, but while remaining an artifactual body, a sort of automaton, a puppet, a stiff and mechanical doll whose dance obeys the technical rigidity of a program. [...] Becoming like a living being, the table resembles a prophetic dog that gets up on its four paws, ready to face up to its fellow dogs: an idol would like to make the law. [...] The automaton mimes the living. The Thing is neither dead or alive but dead and alive at the same time.[...] The commodity table, the headstrong dog, the wooden head faces up, we recall, to all other commodities. The market is a front, a front among fronts, a confrontation. Commodities have business with other commodities, these hardheaded specters have commerce among themselves. [...] That is what makes them dance. So it appears.
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(194: 152-5)
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In this production of the commodity form, labour too becomes ghostly, workers become ghosts. Derrida explains 'this phastasmagoria of a commerce between market things':
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'when a piece of merchandise seems to enter into a relation, to converse, speak and negotiate with another, corresponds at the same time to a denaturing, a denaturalization, and a dematerialization of the thing become commodity, of the wooden table when it comes to stage as exchange-value and no longer use-value. For commodities, as Marx is going to point out, do not walk by themselves, they do not go to market on their own in order to meet other commodities. This commerce among things stems from this phantasmagoria. The autonomy lent to commodities corresponds to an anthropomorphic projection. The latter inspires the commodities, it breathes the spirit into them, a human spirit... (1994: 157)
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It is as if the life is sucked out of the worker by the commodity as a vampire. The commodity and correspondingly the worker are the living dead. It is only at this commodity stage that the spectre enters the scene.
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Can this be simply transferred to the idea of virtuality? That somehow virtual objects are ghostly commodity forms?
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Furthermore, how does this transfer to the idea of immaterial labour and the division of labour: distinction between intellectual and manual labour?
speech-butler.txt
Judith Butler (1997) _Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative_, New York/London: Routledge.
speech-butler.txt
If speaking is simultaneously acting something, then what follows? This is one of the main questions that Judith Butler's book _Excitable Speech_ addresses in investigating the relation between speech and action. Words evidently have agency; they do something, and can be hateful and violent. When we claim to be injured by language, we assert that language acts, and acts against us with such force that censorship cannot undo it (1997: 1). She refers to this as 'linguistic vulnerability', in that as linguistic beings we are bound to language as part of the constitution of subjectivity (as Althusser has described in his articulation of 'interpellation'). In other words, its formative power is expressed in its ability to insult us from our beginnings. The Althusserian call to order is an insult, and we enter into language as a violent act on the subject. Speech announces the action that will follow, and the threat of violence (although not violence per se) is violent all the same and can have violent effects. Yet, however hateful the speech it does not necessarily work as this depends on a number of other circumstances such as linguistic and social conventions (and that relate to power ultimately). Also counter-speech comes in returning (or resignifying) speech as an attempt to reverse its effects (the use of the term 'queer' is a good example of this strategy or indeed the reuse of certain terms in the playground), refusing to be positioned by the speech act as inferior and refusing to be constituted as a subordinate subject). A command might be given (like the general yelling advance to the troops) but is not necessarily effective (as the troops choose to comment upon the commanders beautiful voice). Silence too is a particular kind of speech act that is a powerful response to a given situation. Sometimes the speech act simply fails or is bounced back.
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To examine the performativity of the utterance more closely, Butler refers to Austin's idea of the 'total speech situation'. I have summarized this elsewhere, but in brief: 'illocutionary' speech acts do what they say at the moment of saying it; 'perlocutionary' speech acts say something that produce effects but these are not the same as the speech act itself. What distinguishes the illocutionary act is that it is the very action that it also effects. It says and does what it says at the same time. Such utterances are not conventional but performative (Austin thinks ritualistic and ceremonial). The force of the utterance is only understood in the context of its totality -- the total speech situation -- in as much as it exceeds itself. This is not simply a question of understanding the context of the speech but of excess (more a loss of context as Butler explains; in other words, the manner in which context is exceeded relates to the degree of injury inflicted (1997: 4).
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In terms of agency, spoken language clearly can be considered an action with effects, so in this sense it is more like program code than we might first think. Butler's intervention is to open up other possibilities of agency outside the 'sovereign autonomy of speech', and to examine 'excitable' states (referring to speeches that do not stand up in court as they were made under duress). Her assertion is that 'speech is always in some ways out of control' (1997: 15; making reference to Foucault's work around discourse). Again, if the subject is to some extent constituted in language, then to think that someone saying and doing something is a straightforward demonstration of agency misses the point:
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'Whereas some critics mistake the criticism of sovereignty for the demolition of agency, I propose that agency begins where sovereignty wanes. The one who acts (who is not the same as the sovereign subject) acts precisely to the extent that he or she is constituted as an actor and, hence, operating within a linguistic field of enabling constraints from the outset.' (1997: 16)
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Although program code operates in a similar manner and appears to demonstrate straightforward agency (emanating commands from the sovereign code), the argument holds in that it is also in certain ways out of control. Agency is expressed in similar terms.
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The logic of this in relation to speech can be understood both in Austin and Althusser in different ways. To Austin, the performative dimension of speech does not necessarily relate to intention and certainly not to some inner essence. Through interpellation, Althusser goes further in rejecting the preexisting subject altogether. To Althusser, the speech act constitutes the subject. When the policeman hails the passerby, it is through the act of recognition that the subject begins to exist in ideology - the so-called 'subject-constituting power of ideology' (it is only by saying hello world that the program code is brought into the world and can be seen to be in ideology). On the one hand, there is the subject that speaks and on the other the subject that is constituted through speech (and both involve bodies I should add). In neither case is this singular, for there is always an echo of others in the act of speech. Butler explains this combination 'how the subject is constituted through the address of the Other becomes then a subject capable of addressing others (2007: 26). Yet, the speaker whose speech interpellates also has been constituted in speech too so the sense of collectivity also reveals a paradoxical set of conditions bound by history. Although Althusser seems to suggest that ideology emanates from a single almost God-like voice, clearly power cannot be identified in such a way as it is far more dispersed. Speech is far more distributed and networked (and yet the network interpellates in other ways by hailing an IP number as Holmes suggested elsewhere) and social. To be interpellated and constituted as a subject is to be constituted as a social subject as part of shared normative language. Again, to talk back, speak differently, develop new ways of speaking and coding becomes all the more important politically. If subjects are constituted in language it follows that they also have the ability to reconstitute themselves through language, and even reconstitute the language itself.
speech-coleman.txt
Coleman, Gabriella. “Code is Speech: Legal Tinkering, Expertise, and Protest among Free and Open Source Software Developers.†In Cultural Anthropology, vol. 24, issue 3 (2009): 420–454. Available at http://gabriellacoleman.org/
speech-coleman.txt
According to Gabriella Coleman, the first widely circulated paper associating free speech and source code was "Freedom of Speech in Software" (1991) by the programmer Peter Salin, who characterized computer programs as "writings" (like Knuth in the Art of Programming) to argue that software was unfit for patents, although appropriate for copyrights and, thus, free-speech protections.(433-4). Following this, she further explains how an ethics emerged particularly among early USENET enthusiasts that the Internet should be a space for free speech, eventually cast in manifesto form for the Free Software Foundation. (434 & 448)
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Free software developers reconstruct legal frameworks "by crafting new free speech theories to defend the idea
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of software as speech," and open up the possibilities of modifying the law and technology.(p.421) Thus, the ethical principles of liberal freedom itself is challenged. In "“Code is Speech," Gabriella Coleman cites examples of programmers actually engaging deeply in political protest against the dominant regime of intellectual property, and in defending their sense of autonomy, "made more visible, and thus stabilized, a rival liberal legal regime intimately connecting source code to speech."(422)
speech-groys.txt
Boris Groys, The Communist Postscript, London Verso 2009.
speech-groys.txt
For Groys, politics operates with words, and the task (the communist project) is to transcribe the world from the medium of money to language so that politics can operate freely in relation to fate rather than being subordinate to the economy. Under the conditions of capitalism, human action is made economic not linguistic, its force is annulled, as it is "expressed not with words but with numbers." (xvi) Furthermore, "every protest is fundamentally senseless, for in capitalism language itself functions as a commodity, that is to say, it is inherently mute." (xvii) People remain mute however much they might appear to speak freely.
speech-groys.txt
In "The Linguistification of Society", Groys explains how speech can express force "to allow the speaker to rule over and through language." (2) He is referring to Plato's views on the power of language, and in turn to Socrates and the stress on the defining role of logic that relies on paradox. The importance of Socrates is to go beyond smooth speech (of the Sophists) to uncover the inherent paradoxes. Groys explains: "It emerges that such speech only superficially appears to be well-knit and coherent, In its internal structure, however, it is obscure and dark because it is paradoxical." (4) Furthermore, the smooth speeches of the Sophists were made speeches for cash, which is one of the paradoxes that Socrates reveals, further emphasizing the paradox as a commodity to Groys. The Sophists were entrepreneurs who deal with empty speech acts and empty commodity forms. So speech is evidently not pure, without contradiction, not free, however rhetorical, and this confusion continues to the present day. Evidently, "no one speaks under the condition of freedom of opinion knows what he actually means. Although most people believe that their ideas contradict other ideas, and are polemically directed against other ideas, these ideas in fact contradict only themselves. Every speaker says what he intends to mean, but he also says the opposite of this. All opinions that circulate in the free market of ideas are characterized equally by this state of internal contradiction, internal paradox." (Groys, 8) Indeed it is simply not possible to make contradiction-free speech, and no speech can avoid its internal contradictions. The rules of logic attempt to break this paradox, but even mathematics is ultimately paradoxical and incomplete (cf. Godel). But language is paradoxical and self-referential in the extreme, tied back into itself even when attempting to explain something entirely outside of language. Paradox is crucial for criticality in this sense, in the Platonic tradition as Groys asserts, but also as a consequence of its corporeality - in discourse and not simply in logical structure (19). In other words, contradiction runs through formal logic and reason but also desire and expression. Capitalism tries to render itself through smooth, coherent and contradiction-free speech but such speech is ultimately mute.
speech-hayles.txt
N. Katherine Hayles (2005) _My Mother was a Computer_, Chicago: University of Chicago Press
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The title of Hayles's book _My Mother was a Computer_ refers to the period of the 1930s and 1940s when people (mostly women) were employed to do calculations like computers - indeed they were referred to as 'computers' (2005: 1; and Anne Balsamo's mother was one of these - the phrase is appropriated from a chapter in her _Technologies of the Gendered Body_). Another key reference is how in Kittler's _Discourse Networks_ the mother's voice haunts reading - making reference to how in phonetics children are taught to sound out words, to voice them and it is the voice of the mother who taught them that is heard. Hayles speculates on how the 'voice' of the computer now connects the construction of subjectivity and contemporary reading practices that use computers (and in this sense she is building on her earlier _Writing Machines_ in which the complex materialities of electronic writing were explored). Readers 'hallunicate' imagined worlds in new ways, to paraphrase Kittler.
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It is the interactions of code and language that interest Hayles. As languages proliferate, and given the acknowledged cultural influence of human languages, she is concerned that programming languages are too easily dismissed as artificial and of lesser consequence - especially set against the claims of commentators associated with 'digital philosophy' who would argue for computation as underpinning nature itself (what she refers to as the 'regime of computation', 2005: 17-30). Despite skepticism that computation is a universal and fundamental process, it remains that in technologically advanced cultures, language and program code interact all the time in complex ways. Central to this approach is that an understanding of code (like speech and writing) is constituted ideologically (what Hayles calls a 'worldview').
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In charting the interactions of speech, writing and code (and borrowing from Grusin and Bolter, and the idea of 'remediation', if not Benjamin's 'translation'), Hayles explains that each 'successor regime reinterprets the system(s) that came before, reinscribing prior values into its own dynamics' (2005: 39). This is not a straightforward progression but one subject to overlaps and discontinuities with 'legacy systems' of speech and writing (like the processes of history itself). Speech and writing influence program code and are changed by program code, and even our understanding of signifying practices (such as speech and writing) are changed by our use of code. Taking inspiration from de Saussure (on speech) and Derrida (on writing), Hayles aims to examine the conceptual system in which code is embedded - concerning the metaphysical implications of the regime of computation and the activity of programming. Taking Derrida's notion that writing exceeds speech, she argues that code exceeds both speech and writing (2005: 40). The key difference between writing and speech for Derrida derives from the commonsensical notion that writing is not confined to the event of its making (note: I am not going into detail here of course; the argument in Derrida is complex and bound to his critique of the metaphysics of presence). To Hayles, code differ from both in that it addresses humans and machines. To Derrida complexity arises in Logos and not the thing-in-itself, whereas for Hayles 'complexity inheres neither in the origin nor in the operation of difference as such but in the labour of computation that again and again calculates differences to create complexity as an emergent property of computation' (2005: 41).
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In contrast to Derrida's insistence that speech is subordinate to writing (in as far as the sign is already written), de Saussure takes speech to contain the locus of language (la langue) and writing is derivative of this. Clearly code undermines such a distinctive as it is both as well as necessitates an engagement with material conditions of production (in a way that de Saussure arguable neglects in the insistence that meaning arises through relations and is ultimately arbitrary). By considering code the material constraints of language in general are highlighted and this is one of the ways that code exceeds speech and writing for Hayles (2005: 43). Code is important because it makes things happen.
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Whether to consider code in terms of signification is useful is another matter altogther. In Hayles's formulation (reliant on Kittler's observation that digital computing is reducible to changes in voltage), the signifiers might be considered voltages and the signifieds 'interpretations that other layers of code give these voltages' (2005: 45). It is through the further layers of translation from machine code to higher level languages that result in a chain of relations between signifier and signified based on the ability of the machine to recognise the difference between zero and one. When it comes to Derrida and his insistence that meanings are indeterminate and deferred, code tends to determine actions with little ambiguity - although noise is part of any information system and ambiguity does increase as higher level languages are invoked. But, in general, unless a change in voltage is interpreted relatively unambiguously it will not function. Hayles thus indicates difficulties for de Saussure's 'dematerialized view of speech' and Derrida's 'linguistic indeterminacy' (2005: 49).
speech-hayles.txt
When it comes to speech, Hayles identifies how syntagmatic and paradigmatic modes operate by drawing upon de Saussure's semiology; respectively, horizontally as part of a sentence or vertically in terms of synonyms for a given word, or between the actual and virtually present (2005: 53). Whether code does anything significantly different is in contention (Note: Hayles argues, like Manovich, that the paradigmatic is drawn from a database and is more actual than virtual, but I think this is simply convenient for the discussion of hypertext literature rather than code work). But, like speech, it is clear that there is a dynamic relation between what exists and what is possible, between past and present, between concealing and revealing possibilities corresponding to the layers within computation itself (what Hayles refers to as the 'regime of computation'). Part of this relates to digitalisation as opposed to analog systems in which elements are not continuous but discrete units. Hayles clarifies this: 'The act of making discrete extends through multiple levels of scale, from the physical process of forming bit patterns up through a complex hierarchy in which programs are written to compile other programs.' (2005: 56) The hierarchical aspect is important in understanding how code is organised, and thus can be theorised. Hayles explains how human speech is analog emanating from a continuous stream of breath that forms phonemes that are more discrete. Writing makes these units more discrete through inscription. Together they combine computational aspects related to error detection and pattern recognition.
speech-hayles.txt
Programmers oscillate between these modes at the level of the human-computer interface - and effective programming languages are structured to allow both the problem and solution to be conceptualised in equivalent terms (2005: 57; Hayles's example is C++). The programmer translates between machine behaviour and human perception, as Hayles puts it (2005: 58) - the human is computerised and computer anthropomorphised. Similarly, the computational object contains both characteristics and behaviours (once defined as a class) - for it is an object that contains not just data but functions that operate on the data. For Hayles, this provides a way of understanding how 'object-oriented programs achieve their usefulness principally through the ways they anatomize the problems they are created to solve - that is, in the way they cut up the world' (2005: 58). Like speech, program code is active in the world.
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Compiling and interpreting although similar are also distinctly different across human and machine platforms although somewhat conflated in the ambiguous term code. But to conflate natural language and human intelligence with program code and intelligent machines is clearly a problem. Code indicates something of the way the systems interconnect - with human language influencing our understanding of machine language and vice versa - a creole of both functionality and expression as befits the combination (and as exemplified by codework and its project to combine stylistic elegance and formal experimentation, rather like concrete poetry).
speech-hayles.txt
Note (add to Robert Luxembourg):
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Neal Stephenson's _Cryptonomicon_ (1999) is a really interesting case study, as it demonstrates the interactions of code and written language, written someone who is both a print author and a computer programmer, and where the text's construction oscillates between novel and program (see Hayles 2005: 117-142). In a sense machine translation s a problem of cryptography - referring to Warren Weaver's observation (in Hayles, 2005: 110) - and allows for the ability to communicate relatively freely in what Weaver referred to as the 'Tower of Anti-Babel'. This is perhaps why Stephenson also wrote the non-fiction work _In the Beginning Was the Command Line_ charting his migration from Macintosh to Unix-bsed operating systems (written 1995-98 simultaneous to _Cryptonomicon_ in which the operating system is called 'Finux', aka Linux).
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Note (add to Bowles):
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Wendy Hui Kyong Chun regognsies the ideological aspect of the GUI in as much as it creates an imaginary relationship to the core of the machine and somewhat determine the user's actions. This is an example of 'software as ideology' as she puts it (in 'On the Persistence of Visual Knowledge').
speech_adorno.txt
Theodor Adorno 1951
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Minima Moralia
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Translation: © 2005 Dennis Redmond
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http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1951/mm/ch02.htm
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In number 90, "Institute for deaf-mutes":
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"While the schools drill human beings in speech […], the schooled ones become ever more silent. They can give speeches, every sentence qualifies them for the microphone, before which they can be placed as representatives of the average, but the capacity to speak with each other is being suffocated. It presupposes an experience worthy of being communicated, freedom of expression, and independence as much as social relations. In the all-encompassing system conversation turns into ventriloquism."
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"The shadow of fear however falls ominously on the speech which remains."
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"Speaking is taking on a malign gesture."
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"The emotions generated by the subjects being discussed, in conversations worthy of human beings, attach themselves pigheadedly to the narrow issue of who is right, outside of any relationship to the relevance of the statement. As a pure means of power, however, the disenchanted word exerts a magical power over those who use it. It can be observed time and time again how something once uttered, no matter how absurd, accidental or incorrect, precisely because it was once said, tyrannizes the speaker like a possession they cannot break away from."
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- expresses the dumbness of social media.
subject-zizek.txt
A Spectre is haunting Multimedia
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Slavoj Zizek's recent parody of the Communist Manifesto (in his playful introduction to The Ticklish Subject, 1999) lends currency to what seems like outmoded sentiments. He persuasively demands a 'recentring' of political consciousness. He begins thus:
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'A spectre is haunting western academia, the spectre of the Cartesian subject. All academic powers have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: the New Age obscurantist... and the postmodern deconstructionist... the Habermasian theorist of communication... and the Heideggarian proponent of the thought of Being... the cognitive scientist... and the Deep Ecologist... the critical (post-) Marxist... and the feminist. Where is the academic orientation which has not been accused by its opponents of not yet properly disowning the Cartesian heritage?
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[...] The point, of course, is not to return to the cogito in the guise in which this notion has dominated modern thought (the self-transparent thinking subject), but to bring to light its forgotten obverse, the excessive, unacknowledged kernel of the cogito, which is far from the pacifying image of the transparent self.' (1999: 1-2)
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Zizek is concerned to address this 'absent centre' in the context of what he calls the 'post-political' stance, and is keen to address the apparent failure of 'identity politics' with its multiple forms of subjectivity that tends to obscure socio-economic forces. The problem for Zizek is: 'how we are to reformulate a leftist, anti-capitalist political project in our era of global capitalism and its ideological supplement, liberal-democratic multi-culturalism.' (1999: 4). By 'post-politics' he is referring to what he sees as a shift from 'repression to 'foreclosure'. Whereas the repressed would always return (in the Freudian model), the foreclosed returns in the 'Real'. Universal agreement is reached without any kind of traditional conflictual positions being registered (his example in 1999 is the 'radical centre of Blair's 'New Labour'), old ideological distinctions are simply bypassed: 'the political act (intervention) proper is not simply something that works well within the traditional framework of the existing relations, but something that changes the very framework that determines how things work'. In other words, an ideological strategy that pretends otherwise.
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Rather than politics being the 'art of the possible', post-politics has become the 'art of the impossible' - it has changed the parameters of possibility altogether (Zizek, 1999: 199). Zizek suggests the new world order (the logic of the post-political) is a form of post-political 'concrete universality' (see later section on universality) that accounts for everyone at a spurious level of inclusion (replacing outmoded descriptions of exclusion, 1999: 202). This multiculturalist vision of 'unity in difference' requires the construction of a more absolute (more extreme) 'Other' despite the rhetoric towards equality. This is a threat to the subject that must be destroyed evident in the form of Islamophobia for instance.
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The failure of identity politics is evident in new fundamentalisms and multiculturalist identity politics alike - both serving the supply of hybrid, fluid identifications against the backdrop of globalisation. The splittings are caused by globalisation and new identities emerge correspondingly - the resultant diversity of groups is ultimately remain linked by Capital (think of the 'pink pound', and the proliferation of 'world music' categories). Fundamentalisms and postmodern identities are not opposed but express the necessary corollary of 'Other' (for instance, leftists who require right wing bigots to imagine politics at all). He says multiculturalism is a 'disavowed, inverted, self-referential form of racism which empties itself of all positive content' (1999: 216) wherein the respect affording the Other is born out an assumed superiority (the 'privileged empty point of universality' in Zizek's terms), ultimately reinforcing a Eurocentrist viewpoint despite arguments to the contrary. In this way, the multiculturalist universality of globalisation can be revealed to be Eurocentrist in spirit.
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In general, cultural studies or cultural criticism similarly would tend towards a position where globalisation or capitalism as world system is regarded as essentialist, turning and depoliticising political struggle into cultural struggle for multiple subject positions (although a simple opposition of the cultural and political is very general - for instance, the work of Judith Butler would exemplify this position in seeing queer politics as a potential threat to normative capitalist production and corresponding practices of sexual reproduction - see Judith Butler ?? - yet, the counterargument is that these are easily incorporated as lifestyle choices and commodified accordingly, making being 'queer' almost fashionable and certainly tolerated. Zizek would argue that 'perverse' sexual practices as a symptom of capitalist diversification). This brand of tolerance (of difference) is really a tolerance of the Western capitalist world order in which all alleged differences are not differentiated but ultimately homogenised. Zizek expresses this paradox as:
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'The horror is not the (particular living) ghost in the (dead universal) machine, but the (dead universal) machine in the heart of each (particular living) ghost.' (1999: 218)
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Capitalism is the status quo. Everybody accepts this as unchangeable despite their embrace of change in almost every other field of practice. Zizek concludes that the predominance of cultural studies, multiple subject positions and deconstruction all share the disavowal of Cartesian subjectivity. Here, there is a reference to the wealth of material that explodes the idea of fixed identity and substitutes it for free-floating, rhizomic, nomadic, hybrid identities (such as the 'subversive desiring machine' in the work of Deleuze and Guattari). Zizek's view is that the Cartesian subject is decidedly not guilty as accused.
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This position is tricky to say the least, seemingly caught between reactionary conservatism, populism and nostalgia, where opposition to globalisation is conditioned by the forces of globalisation. Zizek asks: 'how are we to reinvent the political space in today's conditions of globalisation?' (1999: 222) Political struggle cannot simply mean struggles that leave the central process of capital intact; for Zizek this is the 'Real' that lurks in the background.
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on the proletariat:
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In Marxist terms, the proletariat stands for human universality partly because it is the lowest, most exploited class (Zizek calls this 'identifying universality with the point of exclusion' 1999: 224) but more importantly because it is a 'living contradiction', revealing the capitalist system as out of balance. This is important to Zizek as it emphasises the distinction between universality and globalisation: 'the universal dimension "shines through" the symptomatic displaced element which belongs to the Whole without being properly its part'. In this way he does not fall into the trap of the coherent fixed subject but sees the fractured subject or 'hybridity as the site of the Universal' (1999: 225). The working class as simply a social group become the proletariat, through class struggle, as they seek 'redemption through revolution' (Zizek, 1999: 227), Thus, Zizek sees universality and radical subjectivity as linked in this struggle (and departs from Althusser's ideas on the subject's misrecognition).
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Autonomous free subject/freedom of choice:
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The idea of the radical subject is clearly central to most criticism of Marxist theory that presupposes a centred subject that requires emancipation (long since disproved by cultural studies and the like) - the active free agent. He describes the illusion of free choice (or 'decision', perhaps appropriate to interactive systems) through the Althusserian notion of interpellation.
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Accordingly, Zizek calls the 'vulgar liberal notion' of freedom of choice as 'not a choice between a series of objects leaving my subject position intact, but the fundamental choice by means of which I "choose myself" [...] or, as Deleuze put it, we choose only when we are chosen: "Ne choisit bien, ne choisit effectivement que celui qui est choisi."' - and in the note to this 'Choice is always a meta-choice; it involves a choice to choose or not.' (1999: 18) 'Forced choice' on the other hand, is explained as the subject freely choosing the inevitable, such as the subject's recognition of revolutionary consciousness. The subject is interpellated and recognises itself as 'always-ready' for action, and supposes itself a free agent. In the case of revolution, the subject is called by history to act in the right way and make the right choice of action. In other words, this is not ideological manipulation but what is almost preordained - it exists outside the subject's knowledge of it but it is true all the same. Zizek quotes Bertrand Russell: 'I did not know I loved you till I heard myself telling you so...'; not that love existed without the subject's knowledge but that the subject was in love all along.(1999: 54) This 'retro-active' response often works with speech in this shift from a virtual language to actual language - it is speech-in-itself, or speech that pre-exists itself, 'speech before speech', 'speech avant la lettre'. Things are decided before they are enacted in actuality, like a secondary reflexive entry into revolutionary consciousness. Zizek links this state of being not-quite realised to Plato's 'matrix-receptacle of all determinable forms governed by its own contingent rules [chora]' (1999: 54). Is this useful for an analysis of the generative process? Does it operate at this level of speech-in-itself?
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Night of the world/fundamental background to the subject:
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Hegel's view of imagination is explained in his manuscripts on 'the night of the world' (in Janaer Realphilosophie; like a description of a David Lynch film to Zizek; and extending Kant's view that does not consider its negative expression) in its negative, disruptive mode:
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'The human being is this night, this empty nothing, that contains everything in its simplicity - an unending wealth of many representations, images, of which none belong to him - or which are not present. This night, the interior of nature, that exists here - pure self - in phantasmagorical representations, is night around it, in which here shoots a bloody head - there another white ghastly apparition, suddenly here before it, and just so disappears. One catches sight of this night when one looks at human beings in the eye - into a night that becomes awful.' (Zizek, 1999: 29-30)
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This 'night of the world' is the power of imagination that 'disperses continuous reality into a confused multitude of spectral 'partial objects', that forms part of the larger unified organism (like the primordial figures in Hieronymus Bosch's painting, The Garden of Earthly Delights). Thus, Hegel does not praises speculative reason as might be expected but understanding 'as the infinite power of falsity, of tearing apart and treating as separate what naturally belongs together'. Zizek calls this the basic negative gesture of 'pre-synthetic imagination' that tears apart sensible elements and experience. (1999: 31) He quotes from the Phenomenology:
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'It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. It is the power, not as something positive, which closes its eyes to the negative, as when we say of something that it is nothing or is false, and then, having done with it, turn away and pass on to something else; on the contrary, Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. This power is identical with what we earlier called the Subject...' (1999: 30-1)
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This excessive 'pre-ontological dimension' (of pre-speech) is an indication of the Hegelian dialectical vortex at work:
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'The innermost "motor" of the dialectical process is the interplay between epistemological obstacle and ontological deadlock. In the course of a dialectical reflexive turn, the subject is compelled to assume that the insufficiency of his knowledge with regard to reality signals the more radical insufficiency of his knowledge with regard to reality signals the more radical insufficiency of reality itself (see the standard Marxist notion of the 'critique of ideology', whose basic premiss is that the "inadequacy" of the ideologically distorted view of social reality is not a simple epistemological mistake, but simultaneously signals the much more troubling fact that something must be terribly wrong with social reality itself - only a society that is "wrong" in itself generates a "wrong" awareness of itself). Hegel's point here is very precise: not only do the inherent inconsistencies and contradictions of our knowledge not prevent it from functioning as "true" knowledge of reality, but there is "reality" (in the most usual sense of "hard external reality" as opposed to "mere notions") not only in so far as the domain of the Notion is alienated from itself, split, traversed by some radical deadlock, caught in some debilitating inconsistency.' (1999: 55-6).
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This goes some way to describe the gap between reality from the sense of reality (spectre) that precedes it (that Zizek would describe in Lacanian terms as 'fantasy' as an attempt to close the ontological gap in thinking that this spectral real is the real thing; 'the "murmur of the real" and from the fully constituted logos' 1999: 57). Similarly, this delay between an event in-self and for-itself can often lead to huge disappointment (the effect of the delay, as Zizek puts it: 'every birth of meaning is an abortion' 1999: 58).
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The paradox of dialectical materialism is evident in chaos theory in that:
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'a cursory approach ignorant of details reveals (or even generates) the features which remain out of reach to a detailed, exceedingly close approach. As is well known, chaos theory was born out of the imperfection of the measuring apparatus: when the same data, repetitively processed by the same computer program, led to radically different results, scientists became aware that a difference in data too small to be noted can produce a gargantuan difference in the final outcome.' (1999: 58)
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The gap between the event itself and its 'symbolic registration' (as this would be described in dialectical materialism) thus indicates the dialectical relationship between essence and appearance; and that one is bound in the other: '"false" appearance is comprised within the "thing itself"' (1999: 59). In other words, appearance is simply the emerging essence, and this is the only way it can be perceived in reality through its rejection of its false appearance.
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Does this mean we are free agents only in the sense that we do not recognise the determining factors that control us? Are we simply 'lifeless automata', turned into computers or 'thinking machines', Zizek asks? 'Is the status of consciousness basically that of freedom in a system of radical determinism? (1999: 60). This is where Hegel's usefulness arises for Zizek, in emphasising that Cartesian subjectivity arises in the tension between the moment of excess and attempts to normalise this excess (1999: 62). The human subject is clearly not an autonomous agent that simply processes information through the senses like a computer. This is not to be confused with conscious and unconscious states - both these would be included in the rational frame for Lacan, the background is something altogether more excessive. For Zizek, the Cartesian rational subject requires the unconscious to provide the necessary productive cracks that give rise to radical contradiction.
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Negation of negation:
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With dialectics, the movement is not from one extreme to the opposite extreme (yes to no) and from there to 'higher unity' but rather a 'radicalisation' of the first position.(Zizek, 1999: 71) Zizek quotes Wendy Brown's States of Inquiry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996: 36) to make this point more clearly of how dialectical arguments are posed. She describes how the oppressed imagine themselves in a future better world with the oppressor removed (women imagine a world without men, workers without capitalists, and so on). This logic fails to recognise how one identity position is infiltrated and mediated by the other (as a result of patriarchy, and the capitalist production process). In this way, the overall system is registered too.
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Zizek likens this to the misunderstandings at the root of the Hegelian idea of 'negation of negation'. He calls this the 'Hegelian triad':
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'its matrix is not that of a loss and its recuperation, but simply that of a process of passage from state A to state B: the first immediate 'negation' of A negates the position of A while remaining within its symbolic confines, so it must be followed by another negation, which then negates the very symbolic space common to A and its immediate negation.... Here the gap that separates the negated system's 'real' death from its 'symbolic' death is crucial: the system has to die twice.' (1999: 72; Zizek explains this through Marx's use of the phrase - producers take over the means of production, but at this first stage it remains within the confines of private ownership, this has to be further negated to abolish the whole principle of private ownership of the means of production). As Zizek puts it, negation of negation presupposes no magical reversal (1999: 77).
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The previous examples clearly stop short of the third stage and fail to activate the 'negation of negation'. Only at this stage, does form and content coincide satisfactorily. Can this apply to the production of generative artwork, an artwork that is critical of its subject matter but also the system within which the subject matter is presented reflexively? Zizek puts this better than me: 'its [referring to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit] fascination with the 'mad dance' of reflexivity, of dialectic reversals, as the (still) introductory prelude to the System proper, with its satisfied speculative self-deployment.' (1999: 85)
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Perhaps this principle is best understood in terms of language (even if it too is man-made) - in that we can think only in words. To explain further, inner experience can only express pure thought by shedding external senses and then being expressed again by becoming externalised in a meaningless sign (Zizek, 1999: 87; 'it posits its presupposition, its conditions of existence and it expresses itself in its bodily exterior'). In all this, an element of contingent externality persists as it is impossible to fully internalise into subjectivity.
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Hegel and universality
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This Hegelian logic is crucial for Zizek - to describe what he calls 'the passage from [natural] in-itself to for-itself' (1999: 75). The difference between the terms 'abstract' and 'concrete' universality in Hegel relates to this wherein secondary identification is the process of individualisation (for instance, by rejecting the family group in favour of a wider networks of friends and associates). Secondary identification remains 'abstract' in that it is opposed to the primary identification. It becomes 'concrete' when it reintegrates (negation of negation) with the primary identification transforming them into the modes of appearance of the secondary identification (Zizek, 1999: 90). This logic underpins the Hegelian principle that it is only through 'abstract negativity' that 'concrete universality' can be attained, and correspondingly why 'understanding' is privileged over 'reason'.
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Universality in itself is not without its problems of course - as an 'empty site' wherein 'multiple particulars' operate and fight for hegemonic control (Zizek cites the work of Ernesto Laclau in this connection, 1999: 101); one could think of universal humanity as not neutral but decidedly male (man) and once recognised as such, then changeable. Laclau thinks the struggle for content is the political struggle, or rather the gap between the 'ordinary signifiers and the empty Master-signifier of Universality, 1999: 177). Hence, because it is struggled for, it is inherently unstable and changeable. The particular content in a scenario like this is an ideological distortion, an exaggeration or stereotype. Note: Marx attempts to reconcile the Universal and Particular, I think, in stressing the gap 'within' the particular content of the universal not the gap 'between' the two. In classical Marxism, and in terms of ideology, the universal is rendered false. Furthermore, an understanding of the symptom is that it arises necessarily as product from ideological universality and also undermines it: Zizek explains 'the symptom is an example which subverts the Universal whose example it is' (1999: 180). Exploitation is the exception, not to the rule, but because of the rule, in Marxist terms. One can easily see how the relationship between the universal and the particular is an entirely political struggle, and as such the basis of representational democracy.
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Zizek expands on this idea of post-politics describing how the traditional relation between the particular and the universal that underpins politics (how a single issue becomes representative of a wider struggle) is foreclosed and kept in the realm of the particular. (1999: 204)
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Universality stands as something not given or natural at all, but subject to hegemonic and ideological struggle and expresses politics in all spheres of human activity. This is often not acknowledged and Zizek describes this in symptomatic terms in how 'this very exclusion of something from the political is a political gesture par excellence' (1999: 182). He says much the same about the denial of ideology elsewhere.
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Zizek is arguing for a reapprasial of Hegel in terms of politics enabled by his recourse to Lacan et al. He uses these examples to argue (against Althusser's anti-Hegelianism) that Hegel's conception of 'concrete universality', we never actually encounter the embodiment of universality as such. No figure could adequately match its notion of universality - as Hegel puts it 'the Universal genus is always one of its own species'; among the species of a genus, it is the universal one that is forever missing (Zizek, 1999: 103). Thus, Hegelian Universality can be seen to thoroughly paradoxical - it 'reflexively "includes out" the very excess and/or gap that forever spoils such a totality' (Zizek, 1999: 113). This contains huge importance for any understanding of politics in that 'any normative order, taken in itself, remains stuck in abstract formalism; it cannot bridge the gap that separates it from actual life' (1999: 114). There is no way of escaping this sense of order even in something that appears utterly disorderly.
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Zizek cites the famous passage from Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire to emphasise the point (1999: 88): in that men make their own history, not out of nothing or in the conditions they have chosen themselves - but that they create history in the conditions which were found and imposed on them (ref. Derrida and the idea of the Spectre).
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Any unity resulting from the dialectical movement is not simply a return to the lost sense of unity but a far more radical entity. In the 'newly reinstated 'mediated' totality, we are dealing with a substantially different Unity, a Unity grounded on the disruptive power of negativity, a Unity in which this negativity itself assumes positive existence.' (Zizek, 1999: 96)
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The difference between the terms 'abstract' and 'concrete' universality in Hegel relates to this wherein secondary identification is the process of individualisation (for instance, by rejecting the family group in favour of a wider networks of friends and associates). Secondary identification remains 'abstract' in that it is opposed to the primary identification. It becomes 'concrete' when it reintegrates (negation of negation) with the primary identification transforming them into the modes of appearance of the secondary identification (Zizek, 1999: 90).
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Political subjectivisation and its vissisitudes
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On theory/practice:
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'Any theoretical approach that endeavours to grasp and mirror adequately 'what is' (what Marx called the 'world-view') is denounced as something which, unbeknown to itself, relies on a contingent practical act - that is to say, the ultimate solution to philosophical problems is practice.' (Zizek, 1999: 174)
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Add to history section:
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Zizek explains how Heidegger extends this to the notion of authentic choice through repetition, somewhat in parallel to Benjamin's notion of revolution as repetition that realises the hidden possibility of past (repressed) revolutions (in his 'Theses on the Philosophy of History'; Zizek, 1999: 20). History is thus not closed down as a set of facts but opened up to emancipatory possibility - activated by the revolutionary subject.
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-and-
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The history of philosophy itself is a repetitive tracing of the relationship between materialism and idealism; '(in materialism, content generates and determines form, while idealism posits a formal a priori irreducible to the content it embraces.') (1999: 64)
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oder/disorder
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The Hegelian conclusion is that the very notion of politics stems from the conflict between the political and the apolitical - between order and disorder - politics, itself and its negation. Zizek sees this in Hegelese 'how positive Order is nothing but the positivisation of the radical negativity' (Zizek, 1999: 224).
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'Finally, we say: The authors disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions (whether hard or soft). Let the Multi-nationals and Multi-culturalists alike tremble. Multi-media users have nothing to lose but their chains (or the wires that bind them). They have real/virtual worlds to win. Users of all paradigms, ignite!'
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[This is the ending of a paper I jointly wrote with Tim Brennan that reflects upon a project 'Manifest' (produced with Adrian Ward),
subjectivity-notes.txt
notes on subjectivity, eugenics, cyborgs:
There are competing definitions of ÔsubjectivityÕ - the commonsense understanding of ÔsubjectÕ is in opposition to object, between self and other. There is an oft-repeated notion (especially when attempting critical work) that somehow each of you is a distinct individual - phrases like Òwell, itÕs just my opinionÓ, Òthis is what I thinkÓ as if these opinions are not the result of social and historical conditions; in the circumstances of time, place and structure.
Such an opinion assumes a fixed, stable identity, a rational, centred, individual subject. The ÔindividualismÕ of this philosophical position fails to account for the role played by social relations and language in determining, regulating and producing the Ôthinking subjectÕ.
need to see these definitions as colliding:
1. From political theory, the citizen is a subject of the state; subjected to power and lack of freedom.
2. From idealist philosophy, the thinking subject as the site of consciousness.
3. From grammar, the subject of a sentence, text, and discourse; that which the action is determined by.
To return to the student quotes: therefore, we are all subjects of various agencies (those of parents, legal apparatus, commerce, cultural characteristics) - a range of competing, multiple, decentred, unstable identities. Similarly, whatever the text is/has been about, the subject is always produced in the act of reading.
Subjectivity is therefore a way of conceptualising text/reader relations without taking either as fixed unitary definitions. It is also a way of recognising that cultural products employ strategies to try to fix subject positions (to persuade, to sell, etc). In some textual analysis this is taken to an extreme to suggest that texts produce our subjectivity (as false consciousness) - as subjects in ideology. perhpas this is too deterministic but it is a useful counterpoint to the student commonsensical anti-theoretical position Òin my opinionÓ.
decentred subjectivities
Some commentators think things have fundamentally changed. For Poster, decentralisation is at the very core of technology and in the ways in which subjectivity, and meaning are being produced in what he calls Ôthe mode of informationÕ (as opposed to the Ômode of productionÕ). He dismisses the critical tools inherited from the industrial age, as it Òpresupposes the fixed, stable identities of its members, the exact assumption the Internet puts into questionÓ (Poster, The Second Media Age, p.35). In this schema, the rational, centred, individual subject of modernism has been superseded by multiple, decentred, unstable identities. Poster claims emancipatory politics is based on the idea that autonomous agents can free themselves from externally imposed constraints, as if subjectivity itself was not the result of its own set of social and historical conditions. Rather Poster reckons:
Òthe issue now is that the machines enable new forms of decentralised dialogue and create new combinations of human-machine assemblages, new individual and collective ÔvoicesÕ, ÔspectresÕ, ÔinteractivitiesÕ, which are the new building blocks of political formations and groupingsÓ (Mark Poster, ÒCyberdemocracy: Internet and the Public SphereÓ, p.210).
cyborgs
NOTES on Donna Haraway, ÒA Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science. Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980sÓ, in, Linda Nicholson, Feminism/Postmodernism, Routledge 1990.
From/content of the essay Ò... is an effort to build an ironic political myth... Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humor and serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honored within socialist feminism. At the centre of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg.Ó (Haraway, pp.190-191)
why is the cyborg a good model?
ÒA cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction....
Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs - creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted. Modern medicine is also full of cyborgs, of couplings between organism and machine, each conceived as coded devices, in an intimacy and with a power that was not generated in the history of sexuality.Ó (Haraway, p.191)
For instance, she sees this working against heterosexism.
ÒCyborg replication is uncoupled from organic reproduction. Modern production seems like a dream of cyborg colonization at work... Modern war is a cyborg orgy... FoucaultÕs biopolitics is a flaccid premonition of cyborg politics...Ó (Haraway, p.191)
Foucault theorised the body and technology as bound together in the construction of power. Foucault maintains that there is no unitary human subject except that which is produced through discursive processes and forms of rationality that produce the subject as the object of knowledge -in the complex relationship of knowledge/power.
Throughout the nineteenth century, the body was continually made subject to medical and psychological examinations to render ruling capitalist and imperial ideology as ÔtrueÕ knowledge. This is the normalising power of the Ôcarceral networkÕ that did not exercise power directly on the body but on the body as the object of knowledge.
This imperialist/fascist impulse, employed new technologies for all the wrong reasons reversing its democratic potential. Elsewhere, it is argued that the fascist mentality of the Freikorps troops exhibits the armoured bodyÕs fear of erotic contact, preferring the totalitarian machinery of military technology to exert violence and excess on the bodies of others.
This image evokes many cyborg figures, such as the ÔTerminatorÕ, as well as NazismÕs death wish in the Ôfinal solutionÕ and drive towards self-destruction. (See, Justin Lorentzen, ÒReich Dreams: Ritual Horror and Armoured BodiesÓ, in, Chris Jenks, Visual Culture, op cit., p.166. He is referring to Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies).
New eugenics is just as obsessed with the cleansing of deviancy and the present assault on the (the poor, sick, foreign) body expressed in the deployment of biotechnologies in the service of the new world order. Critical Art Ensemble, in Flesh machine, describe this accordingly: ÒThe time is right for the second wave of eugenics because the economic foundation has been laid. Eugenic complements the grand pancapitalist principle of the total rationalisation of culture. [but] In order to truly accomplish the goal of making eugenic activity a part of everyday life, the public must be convinced that rationalised processes of reproduction are superior and more desirable than the non-rational means of reproductionÓ (Critical Art Ensemble, Flesh machine, Designer Babies, and New Eugenic Consciousness, Autonomedia 1998, pp.136-7). In other words, rationalised production needs to turn to rationalised consumption and desire to have its wicked way.
Haraway says:
ÒCommunications technologies and biotechnologies are the crucial tools recrafting our bodiesÓ (p.205)
She goes further in thinking we are cyborgs.
ÒThe cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two centers structuring any possibility of historical transformation. In the traditions of Western science and politics - the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other - the relation between organism and machine has been a border war. The stakes in the border war have been the territories of production, reproduction, and imagination.Ó (p.191)
For instance in the context of sexual politics, it operates:
Ò... in the utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender, which is perhaps a world without genesis... The cyborg is a creature in a postgender world; it has no truck with bisexuality...Ó (p.192)
It is also a break with Western humanist model of subjectivity (the plot of original unity that Marxism and Psychoanalysis is predicated on). Rather:
ÒThe cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence. No longer structured by the polarity of public and private... Nature and Culture are reworked; the one can no longer be a resource for appropriation and incorporation by the other. The relationships for forming wholes from parts, including those of polarity and hierarchical domination, are at issue in the cyborg world. Unlike the hopes of FrankensteinÕs monster, the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration of the garden, that is, through the fabrication of a heterosexual mate, through its completion in a finished whole, a city and the cosmos. The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognise the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot return to dust.Ó (p.192-193)
In this way, she is ÔblasphemousÕ of her project of socialist feminism and its methods as it is constructed on the foundations of that which it aims to question (this is the filter of postmodernism circa mid. 1980s).
ÒThe main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential.Ó (p.193)
ÒBut basically machines were not self-moving, self-designing, autonomous. They could not achieve manÕs dream, only mock it. They were not man, an author of himself, but only a caricature of that masculinist reproductive dream. To think they were otherwise was to be paranoid. Now we are not so sure... [now] Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.Ó (p.194)
She is keen to emphasise the Ôleaky distinctionsÕ between animal-human and machines and their associated ideological struggles - based on dualism and the revolutionary subject.
She imagines a cyborg world Òabout lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints. The political struggle is to see from both perspectives at once because each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point. Single vision [what she calls the Ôgod-trick of infinite visionÕ] produces worse illusions than double vision or many-headed monsters. Cyborg unities are monstrous and illegitimate; in our present circumstances, we could hardly hope for more potent myths for resistance and recoupling.Ó (p.196)
This is her version of Ôaffinity politicsÕ in recognition of fractured identities - affinity not identity, to counter endlessly splitting and searching for a new essential unity. Rather,
ÒI prefer a network ideological image, suggesting the profusion of spaces and identities and the permeability of boundaries in the personal body and the body politic. ÔNetworkingÕ is both a feminist practice and a multinational corporate strategy - weaving is for oppositional cyborgs.Ó (p.212)
ÒMicroelectronics is the technical basis of simulacra, that is, of copies without originals. Microelectronics mediates the translations of labor into robotics and word-processing, sex into genetic engineering and reproductive technologies, and mind into artificial intelligence and decision procedures... Communications sciences and biology are constructions of natural-technical objects of knowledge in which the difference between machine and organism is thoroughly blurred; mind, body, and tool are are very intimate terms. The ÔmultinationalÕ material organization of the production and reproduction of culture and imagination seem equally implicated.Ó (p.207)
In her questioning of the logics and practices of domination as expressed in dualisms (self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female, civilized/primitive, reality/appearance, whole/part, agent/resource, maker/made. active/passive, total/partial, God/man), she maintains:
ÒHigh tech culture challenges these dualisms in intriguing ways. It is not clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine. It is not clear what is mind and what is body in machines that resolve into coding practices.Ó (p.219)
There are many examples in science fiction and mythology - from Rachel in Bladerunner to AtwoodÕs The HandmaidÕs tale to hermaphrodite - and this essay itself is after all myth too. She concludes:
ÒCyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia... It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, spaces, stories. Although both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.Ó (Haraway, p.225)
syntax-chomsky.txt
Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures
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further reading on Chomsky's early work in generative processes,
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http://www.ifi.unizh.ch/groups/CL/volk/SyntaxVorl/Chomsky.html
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First published in 1957, Chomsky's linguistic work is often cited as the source of the concept 'generative grammar', sometimes referred to as 'transformational grammar'. Chomsky assumes that somehow grammar is given in advance, or that humans have innate grammatical competence. (1972: 85) In general, this view is characterised as language is 'hard-wired', that the agent of communication is pre-social (Cartesian linguistics - separating inner consciousness and the outside social world).
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The book is an investigation of syntax - the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages to understand the properties that underlie successful grammars. He says: 'Syntactic investigation of a given language has as its goal the construction of a grammar that can be viewed as a device of some sort for producing the sentences of the language under analysis' (1972: 11). This is an abstract endeavour to discover broad principles that can be applied to languages in general and to provide a method that can be applied to specific languages. This formal approach to the investigation of language, although concerned with syntax, has implications for semantic studies. Interesting, this is a distinction that Florian Cramer makes in associating generative art with syntax and software art with semantics (in 'Ten Theses', 2003). In this connection, I will briefly clarify the terms: syntax is conventionally defined as the arrangement of words and phrases to create sentences, a set of rules for the analysis of this, and the structure of statement in a computer language. Whereas, semantics is the branch of linguistics and logic concerned with meaning (from the Oxford English Dictionary, 2002 edition - which is clearly only one dubious semantic source). The relationship between syntax and semantics is a point of considerable confusion. Chomsky says the questions should simply be: 'How are the syntactic devices available in a given language put to work in the actual use of this language?' and not 'how can you construct a grammar with no appeal to meaning?' (1972: 93). Grammar is not based on meaning - it is formal and non-semantic.
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Here, by extension, the question of the formal qualities of code are evoked - and a possible synthesis of Cramer's distinction in that we require a thorough understanding of syntax in order to understand the implications in terms of semantics. What might be produced are vague clues of meaning: 'The fact that the correspondences are so inexact suggests that meaning will be relatively useless as a basis for grammatical description. Careful analysis of each proposal for reliance on meaning confirms this, and shows, in fact, that important insights and generalizations about linguistic structure may be missed if vague semantic clues are followed too closely.' (1972: 101). This is not to say that similarities between formal and semantic features should be ignored but the correlations understood in an overall theory of language (not linguistics). Syntactic structures provide for expression of content. To simply say the medium is the message is far too simplistic (and incorrect even) in this connection. For Chomsky, 'the motivation for this self-imposed formality requirement for grammars is quite simple - there seems to be no other basis that will yield a rigorous, effective, and "revealing" theory of linguistic structure. The requirement that this theory shall be a completely formal discipline is perfectly compatible with the desire to formulate it in such a way as to have suggestive and significant interconnections with a parallel semantic theory. A verb means something specific in relation to the subject and object of the sentence it is part of - and they require description in terms of grammars. In summary: 'one result of the formal study of grammatical structure is that a syntactic framework is brought to light which can support semantic analysis' and hence grammatical devices can be seen to be used systematically for the production of meaning.
syntax-chomsky.txt
Languages are inherently rule-based drawing upon a finite number of elements. In natural languages, this is limited by the numbers of phonemes (letters of the alphabet), arranged in strings (which may be a sentence) or finite sequences with sentences - although the sentences are infinite. In mathematics and other formalised systems, the logic adheres to this same language rules. To all intensive purposes it can be considered a language like other artificial languages.
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Any particular grammar generates its grammatical sequences. The effectiveness of the grammar can be judged on whether the sequences it generates are grammatical but not necessarily semantic (this is important because it is the rules that are of interest not what sense is derived which can be equally well taken from non-grammatical sequences). The conclusion of this is that grammar is autonomous and independent of meaning - and the separation essential to the study of syntactic structure. 'Syntactic Structures' is/are complex and the detailed formulae are not of particular use for my purposes- however some of the underlying principles are, in that clearly the structures are analogous to programming syntax.
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Chomsky's work describes three components: the phrase-structure component, the transformational component, and the morphophonemic component. Each component consists of rules that operate on a given input to yield an output. The transformational component is further described in terms of passive or active transformation, for instance:
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'The ball will be hit by the man'
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'The man will hit the ball'
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The transformational rules operate at the level of grammar not in terms of the sentence itself.
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Transformational grammar extends the simple model of language as 'finite state Markov process that produces sentences from left to right' (1972: 106). Chomsky describes this as follows:
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'A grammatical transformation [...] operates on a given string [...] with a given constituent structure and converts it into a new string with a new derived constituent structure. To show exactly how this operation is performed requires a rather elaborate study which would go far beyond the scope of these remarks, but we can in fact develop a certain fairly complex but reasonably natural algebra of transformations having the properties that we apparently require for grammatical description.' (1972: 44)
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Transformation in this sense, describes a change to the structure so requires a description of 'the strings to which it applies and the structural change it effects on these strings' (1972: 61). An example, and one useful for my purpose, is the introduction of 'not' to a sentence. The negation can be described simply in terms of transformation - and clearly it is a simple transformation in itself - but subject to grammatical rules (for instance, in making 'John doesn't read books' rather than 'John readsn't books' (1972: 67).
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It is the transformation itself, its behaviour, that partly reveals the structure.
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Furthermore, he describes a misunderstanding in that grammars are simply devices for generating sentences - and does not take a point of view of either speaker of listener: 'Actually, grammars of the form we have been discussing are quite neutral as between speaker and hearer, between synthesis and analysis of utterances. [...] Each such grammar is simply a description of a certain set of utterances, namely, those which it generates. From this grammar we can reconstruct the formal relations that hold among these utterances in terms of the notions of phrase structure, transformational structure, etc.' (1972: 48) In other words, a grammar generates all grammatically 'possible' utterances.
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Chomsky's purpose is neatly summarised as:
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'Any scientific theory is based on a finite number of observations, and it seeks to relate the observed phenomena and to predict new phenomena by constructing general laws in terms of hypothetical constructs [...]. Similarly, a grammar of English is based on a finite corpus of utterances (observations), and it will contain certain grammatical rules (laws) stated in terms of the particular phonemes, phrases, etc., of English (hypothetical constructs). The rules express structural relations among the sentences of the corpus and the indefinite number of sentences generated by the grammar beyond the corpus (predictions).' (1972: 49)
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As in science (and linguistics is a science of course), the point of all this is to develop a theory (of language) accordingly. Furthermore, the theory should provide criteria for 'better grammar' as well as a 'decision procedure' for grammars (1972: 51).
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In doing so it is crucial to recognise that language is a complex system. Chomsky puts it this way:
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'But only the development of the still more abstract level of transformations can prepare the way for the development of a simpler and more adequate technique of constituent analysis with narrower limits. The grammar of a language is a complex system with many and varied interconnections between its parts. In order to develop one part of grammar thoroughly, it is often useful, if not necessary, to have some picture of the character of the completed system.' (1972: 60)
systems-cramer.txt
Florian Cramer (2001), 'On Literature and Systems Theory', lecture notes, from Tate Modern, April 8.
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Systems Theory, as a broader category than Cybernetics, derives from the Aristotelean idea that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Florian Cramer gives this a particular focus in a very brief history. Firstly he cites the work of the biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy and his 'General Systems Theory' to describe any phenomena in terms of its organisational structure across the sciences and humanities (2001). Whereas closed systems are subject to entropy, Bertalanffy argues that open systems compensate for this tendency. In this way, and since closed systems did not really exist according to Bertalanffy, the theory is a positive one born of a humanist impulse. However, in the 1970s, biologists Humberto Muturana and Francisco Varela contended that partially closed systems do exist and associated with this 'autopoesis' (self-generation) in that living systems could be seen to be recursive or self-referential. Niklas Luhmann, is important in extending these ideas to the broader field of humanities, applying autopoesis to social systems and concluding that these systems perpetuate or reproduce themselves through this process.
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This is an ideological shift from the earlier thinking and a description of ideology in itself. It unfortunately leaves little scope for social change derived from human agency and has been criticised for its biological determinism, along with systems theory in general. However in general, through Luhmann it is possible to think of art and literature as social systems (rather like Bourdieu would call fields). These ideas lead Cramer to suggest that the notable exception to this might be artworks that are autopoetic in themselves. There are many examples from permutational poetry to software art. He likens autopoesis to infinite loops in computer programming and comments that systems theory offers a way of examining the properties of reflexivity at both at the level of object code and meta narrative (narrative recursion, such as in the work of Borges). In this connection he cites John Barth's 'The Literature of Exhaustion', concluding that code recursion is 'an exhausted mode of modernism exactly because [it places] recursion into the object code instead of the meta narrative' (2004).
systems-wujie.txt
Wu Jie (1996), Systems Dialectics, Beijing: Foreign Languages Press.
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Just as the industrial revolution required the philosophy of dialectical materialism, so the new 'technological revolution' requires systems dialectics, argues Wu Jie: 'It has a historical summons, just as was that which led to the birth of classical Marxism.' (1996: 368)
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In Systems Dialectics (1996), Wu Jie attempts to upgrade combine dialectical materialist thinking with systems theory, citing Ludwig von Bertalanffy's General Theory of Systems (1968) as a catalyst for this approach. In general, both systems and dialectics have a common interest in conceptualising the material world in terms of processes, as the interaction between parts of the system and the development of the whole system that expresses dynamic interactions, order and a common purpose. The Russian scholar Ilichev, in Philosophy and Advances in Science (1982) also claims: 'Systems method is nothing more than an organic component, an aspect, of materialist dialectics' (in Wu Jie, 1996: 289). For Wu Jie, systems dialectics represents an epistemological shift from a general material view to a systems material view, combining scientific theory with philosophy to 'deepen' materialist dialectics. He explains:
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'The theory of self-organization, which mainly consists of a dissipative structure and synergetics, primarily discloses the general mechanism and regularity of systems evolution from disorder to order or from lower to higher orders. It pushes dialectics from being a philosophical theory of general development (evolution) to a new stage, thus providing ample social, economic and scientific evidence for the creation of a new philosophy - systems dialectics.' (1996: 26)
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He argues that systems theory extends and develops Marxist thinking already based on systems principles - contradiction and matter - and confirms the 'unity of the material world system, and its wholeness and systematicness more accurately' (1996: 38). This has some precedence in that Bertalanffy also considers the resemblance between the general systems principles and dialectical materialism (Wu Jie, 1996: 6).
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Like scientific work in general, there is an ideological element to this with scholars from the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and China extending Western science to their own purpose; and in the case of Wu Jie and China, there is also a cultural connection to concepts such as Yin and Yang, as well as Taoism. Despite this, he mainly traces the lineage here through Western philosophy: from mechanistic systems thinking that places the sun at the centre of a spatial solar system, to a theory of the biological organism as a system in turn developed by Darwinian evolutionary theory. Wu Jie recognises that systems theory reflects new pluralistic structures that have replaced the post-cold war period of bipolar antagonisms. As social practices change so too systems dialectical thinking in keeping with the principle that Marxist philosophy must be reformed and developed to avoid stagnation (perhaps this was something Wu Jie expressed during the 'cultural revolution' that left him imprisoned for 4 years).
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Any other fixed view would simply be non-dynamical and non-dialectical. This is an important principle that systems are necessarily in motion too, always in a state of change and process. Wu Jie quotes Engels's 'Dialectics of Nature' in this regard: 'The whole of nature accessible to us forms a system, an interconnected totality of bodies... These bodies are interconnected, that is to say, they react on one another; it is precisely this mutual reaction that constitutes motion.' (1996: 49) Thus he can assert that all natural and social systems, the whole material world exists in motion. Development or transformation of a system relies on process, and so process can be seen in dialectical relation to motion to Wu Jie. Here again, he is relying on Engels: 'Processes of thought are similar to those of nature and history, and vice versa; and similar laws apply to all these processes' (1996: 51). Hence dialectical materialist philosophy is necessary for the understanding of the transformation of systems, but it requires an upgrade from 'material object-centered theory' to 'contradiction-centered theory' to system-centred theory' (1996: 51-2).
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Clearly this is no simple matter as systems express self-organisation and nonlinear interactions. These are forces of differences to Wu Jie that operate inside and outside the whole system as an emergent behaviour. These processes exhibit properties of order and disorder. Wu Jie explains these interactions in the following terms:
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'The birth of a system is a negation of nature disorder. The orderly system again contains disorderly factors, and the development of an orderly system with disorderly factors again leads the system into disorder, thereby a new orderly system is produced. [...] Without orderliness, there would be no processes, without the nature of disorder, there would be no development of processes. [...] The rule is that order conquers disorder, and disorder negates order, thus reaching a new orderly process. [...] The motional process of the whole world of systems is exactly the dialectical unity of order and disorder.' (1996: 53-4) Accordingly, Wu Jie asserts that the multistage nature of this process is relative, but its continuity is absolute. History is a good example. Society continues to develop in this way as a process and in terms of historical development. Classical Marxist philosophy would go further and assert that truth is a process following these laws. Wu Jie quotes Lenin: 'Truth is a process. From subjective idea, man advances toward objective truth through "practice" (and technique)' (1996: 57). Truth, along with value, can be understood as a process through practice, for 'truth and value are important contents of epistemology and are powerful weapons with which to understand and change the world' (Wu Jie, 1996: 328).
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'The dialectical method requires us to regard society as a living organism in its functions and development.' (Lenin, in Wu Jie, 1996: 231)
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In systems dialectics, the central law is the 'synergism of differences' (Wu Jie, 1996: 69) and it is only in this way, through the synergism of differences and contradiction, that transformation can take place. Whereas materialist dialectics takes the world to be a unity of infinitely interconnected and interacting things, systems dialectics adds that this based on the systemic self-organisation of differences. The principle of 'synergism', from the physicist Haken, is used to account for the laws that produce a stable ordered structure in an unbalanced open system (Wu Jie, 1996: 134).
systems-wujie.txt
In general (Aristotlean) terms, the system can be said to be whole and is more than the sum of its interconnecting parts. Wu Jie quotes Hegel on this principle - 'a severed hand is no longer a hand' - to emphasise that a part is only a part in terms of its overall relation to the larger whole system, organic system in this case (1996: 77). This applies to matter, but also in the case of energy and information. The interactions are also expressed inside and outside the system in relation to environment, towards the optimisation of the whole system. Wu Jie explains:
systems-wujie.txt
'So when the system is under self-organization, self-reproduction and self-catalysis, and is receiving feedback and exchanging mass, energy and information with its environment it may move and develop toward decreasing entropy and increasing order. In the end, it will gradually arrive at the optimum state of the whole system. This is what Hegel and Aristotle meant when they talked about "thesis, antithesis and synthesis" and "movement of the whole." In Hegel's view, the third category, synthesis, is the truth of the two former categories.' (1996: 81)
systems-wujie.txt
As old unities are replaced, new ones are generated.
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Systems are predicated on the dialectical relationship between structure and function. Darwinian evolution can be seen in this way as the natural replacement of unstable elements in the system, and therefore as the optimisation of the system of nature. The development of human societies works in this way too, but is distinguished by the added element of subjective critical reflection in the optimisation process. The transformation of hierarchies, stressed by Bertalanffy in his General Theory of Systems, is brought about by either 'natural transformation' or 'dynamic transformation' in the case of the social realm. The law of optimisation, according to Wu Jie, is characterised by the self-perfecting process of negation of negation, part of the movement form disorder towards order and improved organisation, but in 'disequilibrium' laying open the nature of hierarchy and diversity. He explains:
systems-wujie.txt
'This upgrades the law of negation of negation to the domain of the disordered - ordered - newly disordered - newly ordered, which is a more extensive and penetrating domain than the former.' (1996: 88) This is a quantitative shift but also a qualitative change of the system and method for understanding that system. As Engels puts it in Dialectics of Nature: 'The indestructibility of motion cannot be conceived merely quantitively; it must also be achieved qualitatively' (in Wu Jie, 1996: 109)
systems-wujie.txt
There are a series of dialectical relationships that characterise the material world, such as between structure, fluctuation and function; attraction, energy and repulsion; control, information, and feedback; state, process and change; subject, practice and object. Wu Jie refers to these as 'category chains,' principles of methodology with which to understand the systems material world. For instance, fluctuations in phenomena lend scientific insights into quantitative and qualitative change. Sudden and gradual changes occur and affect equilibrium of the system, partly explaining the shift to what Wu Jie calls 'synergetic equilibrium' where 'the whole system comes into a stable state in the ordered structure' (1996: 172). Here he is drawing upon Prigogine's theory of dissipative structure, and explains this is more common in systems that are complicated and express 'advanced motion forms'. In dialectical terms, systems express a cyclical development of equilibrium to disequilibrium to new equilibrium.
systems-wujie.txt
Order-disorder:
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Of particular relevance to this (my) study is the relationship between order, the degree of orderliness and disorder. Wu Jie explains that the category of order indicates the order property of structure and the order property of motion. Accordingly, 'disorder means that the structure of a material system and the structure of a motion state are not fixed or regular' (1996: 186). No system can be in absolute order or disorder and inevitably expresses permutations, fluctuations, disturbances and noise. Clearly they are relative states, transformative and can even interchange (Wu Jie's example is that disordered light can change into a laser, 1996: 188). Order and disorder are intimately connected: 'There are a large number of examples of disorder developing into order in the production system in which human beings participate.' (Wu Jie, 1996: 189) There can be symmetry here expressed in order and disorder, with chaos expressing the highest state of disorderly symmetry, and transformation takes place when the symmetry is broken. Clearly this is Wu Jie's interest, in how an understanding of the dialectical relationship of order and disorder can help in social transformation:
systems-wujie.txt
'The history of the development of both the natural world and human society is the history of evolution and development from order to disorder and from disorder to order. [...] Coming into being and developing is a process from disorder to order. Dying out and declining is a process from order to disorder. [...] But the two kinds of processes cannot be separated. At the same time, in the same subject, there are both growing and developing factors and dying factors. The two kinds of factors, as two sides of discrepancy, contradict each other, change into each other and coordinate with each other.' (1996: 190-1)
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Through scientific understanding, this verifies Marx and Engels's instinctive rejection of entropy.
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Feedback:
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Systems dialectics clearly is an attempt to theorise Marxist thinking in the light of technological and scientific advances at this point in time (undeniably there is a consistency here). Wu Jie recognises this shift from industrialism to 'information society' and sees an understanding of feedback as central to this (1996: 200). I have discussed this elsewhere in detail, but for Wu Jie, systems express a dialectical relation of control and feedback where the objective world is seen to be universally connected through information. The importance of this lies in the recognition of the relationship between action and counteraction in the development of systems: 'For any relatively independent system, the analysis of the dialectical relationship of its special control and feedback can reveal, in one respect, its dynamic structure and property, and reveal its causality and laws, so that it is possible to reform it and utilize it for a given purpose, according to its properties and laws.' (1996: 208)
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Labour:
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In applying systems dialectics directly to human society, labour becomes crucial to an understanding of historical development. Classical Marxism would maintain that the production of material goods is fundamental to human society. The relations of production constitute the base from which the superstructure is derived at any point in human history. All social relationships for Marx lie in social production and relationships between people in production. These ideas are predicated on the understanding that there is a dialectical relationship between nature and human society integrated through labour. Human production emerges from nature, utilises it, and abuses it. For ecological equilibrium, human society and nature exchange matter, energy and information according to Wu Jie (1996: 216). The requirement to make a new equilibrium is self-evident from environmental pollution and over-production. This is achieved through labour according to 'historical systems dialectics': 'the answer lies in the motive force system of social development, that is, the product og propulsion by labor force, productive force and social development force' (1996: 217). His argument is that modern technology and scientific developments invigorate the labour force, productive force and hence social development force. Human society is one system and its essential elements are people working individually and collectively. The individual, the collective and society operate dialectically. Ultimately it is people who make history.
tacticalmedia-raley.txt
Title: Tactical Media
tacticalmedia-raley.txt
by Rita Raley
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Electronic Mediations, volume 28
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University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis/London 2009
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196 pp., paper,
tacticalmedia-raley.txt
ISBN 978-0-8166-5151-1
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The term 'Tactical Media' derives from independent media activism and radical pragmatism. It draws on methods informed by network and information theory, as well as radical re-uses or reverse engineering of mass culture (and to some extent is a further elaboration of Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life, and Hakim Bey’s T.A.Z., in the 1980s). Emerging in the 1990s, it refers to contemporary forms of dissent somewhere between creative experimentation and a reflexive engagement with social change, recognizing shifting identifications, temporary alliances and strategic affinities according to the requirements of context. It is variously defined but particularly important are the collaborative writings of Geert Lovink: 'The ABC of Tactical Media', 1997 (with David Garcia), and 'New Rules for the New Actonomy', 2001 (with Florian Schneider); and the Next Five Minutes conferences, held in Amsterdam from 1993.
tacticalmedia-raley.txt
Against the extensive backdrop of references, and critiques of neo-liberal ideology in general, the book Tactical Media draws together many of the key examples of interventionist practice as case studies and continues discussion around the currency for the term. It is structured in four chapters: ‘Introduction: Tactical Media as Virtuosic Performance’, ‘1. Border Hacks: Electronic Civil Disobedience and the Politics of Immigration’, ‘2. Virtual War: Information Visualization and Persuasive Gaming’, and ‘3. Speculative Capital: Black Shoals and the Visualizing of Finance’.
tacticalmedia-raley.txt
What makes the book perhaps distinctive is its focus on ‘virtuosity’, drawing on Paolo Virno's work (such as in Grammar of the Multitude, 2004). Without this connection, the book would seem to operate more like a reference book for some of the most interesting media activist practices over recent years (including Critical Art Ensemble, Electronic Disturbance Theatre, Bureau of Inverse Technology, Carbon Defense League, The Yes Men, Etoy and Ubermorgen, amongst others). By no means a mere catalogue of works, it is a thoroughly researched, and there are examples of key players broadly associated with ‘activism, hacktivism, artivism’, but in general the analysis seems less sharp. For instance, despite the stated importance of the concept, the references to virtuosity are not entered into in depth. Although there is passing reference to how Virno draws on Hannah Arendt’s work to articulate virtuosity through performance – making the connection between performance and politics (p. 29) – there is scant detail here. Missing are the complex connections and prehistory, not least in Virno’s earlier work (such as his essay ‘Virtuosity and Revolution’, in Radical Thought in Italy, 1996) as well as that both Virno and Arendt are making explicit reference to Aristotle. Thus the closing statement – that ‘Tactical media contests the future terrain of the political, but it does so via virtuosic performances deployed and experienced in the present’ (p. 151) – remains rather unsubstantiated.
tacticalmedia-raley.txt
Nevertheless, and importantly, the issue of currency is apposite in as much as tactics are developed as a direct response to processes of recuperation. All this makes it an important subject for ongoing discussion and publication, even if through publication there is a running paradox of ‘bringing tactics into visibility, in making stable that which maintains a kind of power by being unstable?’ (p.13) Indeed, Raley quotes Lovink from 2005 on this key concern:
tacticalmedia-raley.txt
‘There is a paradox at work here. Disruptive as their actions may often be, tactical media corroborate the temporal mode of post-Fordist capital: short-termism… This is why tactical media are treated with a kind of benign tolerance. […] The ideal is to be little more than a temporary glitch, a brief instance of noise or interference. Tactical media set themselves up for exploitation in the same manner that “modders†do in the game industry: both dispense with their knowledge of loop holes in the system for free. They point out the problem, and then run away. Capital is delighted, and thanks the tactical media outfit or nerd-modder for the home improvement.’ (p. 28)
tacticalmedia-raley.txt
According to the book, whether tactical media works or not is the wrong question to ask. Instead it is claimed that what should be asked is how it strengthens social relations and to what extent its activities are virtuosic. The various positions call out for ongoing reappraisal of recuperative processes and interventionist responses (what elsewhere would be referred to as the ‘cycles of struggle’). Evidently, both the tactics of media activism, and books about it, are never perfect and always in process.
taz-bey.txt
Hakim Bey, The Temporary Autonomous Zone
taz-bey.txt
In the preface to the second edition (written on May Day 2003), Hakim Bey looks back on the history of the infamous text written at the time of what he calls the dialectic of the cold war: the 'tweedledum/tweedledee clash of Capitalism and Stalinism' (2003: xi). This is 1985, and TAZ was naively seen to be a third way, a 'hippy/punk anarchism' alternative to this dialectic. He is somewhat embarrassed by the media reception of the essay and its imposed visionary status - for instance, the Net was envisioned as an adjunct to TAZ to help facilitate its emergence but ended up as an adjunct to Global Capital. In the essay TAZ, he says:
taz-bey.txt
'Thus within the Net there has begun to emerge a shadowy sort of counter-Net, which we will call the Web [...] to refer to the alternate horizontal open structure of info-exchange, the non-hierarchic network, and reserve the term counter-Net to indicate clandestine illegal and rebellious use of the Web, including actual data-piracy and other forms of leeching off the Net itself' (2003: 106).
taz-bey.txt
In this scenario, the net is imagined as a mixed reality space of 'real world' and 'information-space'. Sadly, its anarchic potential, what he calls 'reality-hacking', has all but disappeared into an image of recuperation.
taz-bey.txt
He provides examples: 'Nevertheless, certain doctrines of "Futurology" remain problematic. For example, even if we accept the liberatory potential of such new technologies as TV, computers, robotics, Space exploration, etc., we still see a gap between potentiality & actualization. The banalization of TV, the yuppification of computers & the militarization of Space suggest that these technologies in themselves provide no "determined" guarantee of their liberatory use.' He sees two options available to the 'Ontological Anarchist' - the weapon of sabotage or of seizing the means of production or communication, reminding the reader that: 'there is no humanity without techne - but there is no techne worth more than my humanity. [...] What is "natural" is what we imagine & create.' (2003: 44)
taz-bey.txt
Even resistance is recuperated. In the essay 'Chaos: the Broadsheets of Ontological Anarachism', Hakim Bey suspects that: 'Even the guerrilla Situationist tactics of street theatre are perhaps too well known & expected now.' (2003: 5) Perhaps rather: 'Is it possible to create a SECRET THEATER in which both artist & audience have completely disappeared - only to reappear on another plane, where life & art have become the same thing, the pure giving of gifts?' (2003: 40; art that is open source, free software theatre such as the Electronic Disturbance Theatre' perhaps) The 'derive' was conceived as an exercise in the revolution of everyday life, as unmediated perception. Bey takes this further in his conception of the 'Temporary Autonomous Zone' within invisible networks - a territory without the usual mechanisms of control - also referred to as a 'tactic of disappearance' (2003: 126; evoking more contemporary theorists such as Baudrillard and his essay 'Simulations' where the map is the territory; or even Virilio's 'The Aesthetics of Disappearance'). For Bey, the Nation/States have 'hogged the entire map. Who can invent for us a cartography of autonomy, who can draw a map that includes our desires?' (2003: 63). The problem is that if power has disappeared how do you resist it?
taz-bey.txt
In this connection, here are positive examples of 'tactical media' such as the Electronic Disturbance Theatre's 'Floodnet' tool for 'electronic civil disobedience enabled protestors to effectively shut down web servers of target institutions through simply flooding it with requests. This 'distributed-denial-of-service' was used by the Zapatistas against the Mexican government and against the WTO at the time of Seattle in 1999 (Medosch, 2003: 17). Here the 'situationist-like' theatre extends not merely to the streets but to the electronic networks, and further evoking Artaud's theatre of cruelty - and somewhat reclaims it as public space.
taz-bey.txt
In the essay 'The Temporary Autonomous Zone', first published in 1985, Hakim Bey makes a link to what he calls 'pirate utopias' as a way of introducing the fanciful concept. Significantly, the text is published as anti-copyright, and 'may be freely pirated and quoted' combining the historical understanding of piracy as an 'information network'. Bey refrains from defining the term, preferring instead that the meaning is understood through action (2003: 97).
taz-bey.txt
'The Kingdom of Piracy' was a project conceived by Armin Medosch, Shu Lea Cheang and Yukiko Shikata to explore the world of free software and copyleft culture. The term and metaphor 'piracy' is used, not to characterise illegal activity on the high seas, but in opposition to 'hegemonic power that asserts itself by establishing a trade monopoly' (2003: 9). The historical parallel to the days of early capitalism is a useful one (where slave ships also sailed), and points to some of the underlying antagonisms that open code and free culture present.
taz-bey.txt
The copyright industries or 'data lords', protected by the legal apparatus are opposed to 'piracy' on an industrial scale but also anyone using a peer-to-peer file-sharing network on an individual basis. Property in this sense is both material and intellectual. As Benjamin pointed out, technical reproducibility threatens property rights and the logic of digital technology is inherently reproducible and distributable over decentralised networks. Vested interests around property are made evident in the operations of big business and the legal apparatus in attempting to police these operations.
taz-bey.txt
[look up notes on property and copyright here - 'all property is theft']
taz-bey.txt
Certainly there is now a critical mass around the open source and free software movements (together often called open code) that challenge the hegemonic power of proprietary software - many high quality applications, operating systems and platforms have been developed utilising collaborative programming and development environments. Medosch points out that this extends to principles of 'openness' in the wider culture: from training to activism; and to the development of alternative licenses such as the creative commons initiative providing different models over rights for creative work in the public domain; to 'commons-based peer production,' the 'production of goods and services based on resources that are held in a commons and organised by peers'. Referring to Felix Stalder's 'Culture without Commodities: From Dada to open Source and Beyond', this challenge is significant in that it comes from within the system, as a hybrid of the 'gift-based and service economy' and within the most advanced areas of production. It is therefore distinctly unlike past underground or avant-garde activities (Medosch 2003: 15). Whether this is tied to the project of social transformation remains in question.
taz-bey.txt
The pirate metaphor works well for Bey in that the idea of an uprising or insurrection is seen not as a failed revolution but as something outside of the oppressive State under whatever ideological description and Hegelian dialectics. For him:
taz-bey.txt
'If History IS "Time," as it claims to be, then the uprising is a moment that springs up and out of Time, violates the "law" of History'. If the State IS History, as it claims to be, then the insurrection is the forbidden moment, an unforgivable denial of the dialectic[...] History says the Revolution attains "permanence," or at least duration, while the uprising is "temporary." [...] What of the anarchist dream, the Stateless state, the Commune, the autonomous zone with duration, a free society, a free culture.' (2003: 98).
taz-bey.txt
This is Bey's answer at that time to the seemingly inevitability of recuperation. TAZs resist the spectacle by their relative invisibility, also by their agility and ability to 'be an uprising which does that engage directly with the State, a guerrilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen, before the State can crush it.' (2003: 99) Here 'tactical media' and many other contemporary forms of resistance are evoked. A TAZ must not be named or mediated, and in itself is a 'poetic fancy'.
taz-bey.txt
Here all permanent solutions are rejected but what about a concept like permanent revolution - that itself rejects the Hegelian trajectory that Bey seems to focus on? For him, revolutions and dialectics bring closure. This articulation of dialectics is a rather limited and limiting one. Instead, Bey is drawing upon tribal myths, cyberpunk fiction as well as Deleuze and Guattari's concept 'nomadology', what he calls 'rootless cosmopolitanism' or 'psychic nomadism' (2003: 104). He sees pirates, gypsies, refugees, the homeless and other mobile groups as disloyal to centralised and fixed loyalties to the dogmas of Capitalism, Fascism and Communism (furthermore the 'no borders' movement is evoked too). Unfortunately, the theory has become well publicised and quoted much against its basic principles and proved to be not-so temporary or autonomous after all. In fact, one could go further and say that its definition has become substantially recuperated into the project of globalisalised capital - described in terms of free, multiple, temporary, mobile networks. Clearly it has to be read in the context of the time in which it was written and in recognition of its anarchist tendencies.
taz-bey.txt
Chaos:
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Drawing upon Taoist thinking, Hakim Bey resists the negativity associated with Chaos theory, or its link to new ageism or science that sees it as a force of destruction or for enforcing order. He sees in TAZ something in common with 'strange attractors' and 'creative evolution' using Prigogine's term (2003: 110), insisting:
taz-bey.txt
'The battle lines are drawn. Chaos is not entropy, Chaos is not death, Chaos is not a commodity. Chaos is continual creation. Chaos never died.' (2003: 60)
taz-bey.txt
Here the historical link of Chaos to Anarchist principles is evident as a 'political system' that is neither political nor systemic. He is advocating a critique from within, and to 'experiment with new tactics to replace the outdated baggage of leftism' in 'radical networking' - 'The Art World in particular deserves a dose of "Poetic Terrorism".' (2003 63) To Bey, anarchy is chaos, and chaos is the principle of continual creation, of 'all-potentiality' (2003: 70). It is both play and poesis (2003: 80). In Bey's imagination:
taz-bey.txt
'Whether through simple data-piracy, or else by a more complex development of actual rapport with chaos, the Web-hacker, the cybernetician of the TAZ, will find ways to take advantage of perturbations, crashes, and breakdowns in the Net (ways to make information out of "entropy"). As a bricoleur, a scavenger of information shards, smuggler, blackmailer, perhaps even cyberterrorist, the TAZ-hacker will work for the evolution of clandestine fractal connections. These connections, and the different information that flows among and between them, will form "power outlets" for the coming-into-being of the TAZ itself - as if one were to steal electricity from the energy-monopoly to light an abandoned house for squatters.' (2003: 111)
taz-bey.txt
He defines his 'post-anarchism anarchy' more closely in terms of the general understanding of anarchism (as traditionally the struggle against crown and state):
taz-bey.txt
'Our brand of anti-authoritarianism, however, thrives on baroque paradox; it favors states of consciousness, emotion & aesthetics over all petrified ideologies & dogma; it embraces multitudes & relishes contradictions. Ontological Anarchy is a hobgoblin for BIG minds' (2003: 67; as opposed to the 'hobgoblin' of communism - the opening line of the communist manifesto, usually translated as 'spectre'. This outmoded approach, he would see as 'ideological purity', and the preserve of 'horrible old men' rather than the 'wild children' of ontological anarchism. There is a hilarious list of recommendations on pages 62-3). He says he defines his terms by making them more vague, to avoid 'ideologico-semantic traps', 'broken-down language machines' instead proposing to ravage them for parts as 'an act of cultural bricolage' (2003: 80).
taz-bey.txt
This is all very contradictory and many of the examples seem to make reference to dialectical principles - for instance, in the refusal to work (without making explicit reference to Negri) in contrast to the general strike and the refusal to make art (dismissing the 'silly nihilism' of the artstrike for a more positive sense of refusal). The point is to reject negative refusal for positive refusal but again the dialectical play is not explained in any detail. His suggestion is that work and art should disappear, not altogether but from the spheres of representation and mediation (2003: 130). It is very contradictory: 'As power "disappears," our will to power must be disappearance' (2003: 131). It is a full of positive energy and hopelessly 'utopian', as he says: 'a suggestion, almost a poetic fancy' (2003: 97) an invitation to: 'study invisibility, webworking, psychic nomadism - and who knows what we might attain' (2003: 132) and 'if we're dreaming, why not dream big?' (2003: xii).
technolib-lovinck.txt
Geert Lovink and Florian Schneider (2003), 'Reverse Engineering Freedom', nettime, 24/09/03.
technolib-lovinck.txt
'We've transcended the impasse of postmodernist identity politics and academe's game of culture wars [...] We don't believe in the postmodern 'death of the author' or the techno-libertarian 'giving-it-all-away
technolib-lovinck.txt
for free.' [...]
telekommunisten-kleiner.txt
Kleiner, Dmytri. 2010. The Telekommunist Manifesto. Network Notebooks 03, Geert Lovink & Sabine Niederer, eds.. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures.
telekommunisten-kleiner.txt
'Venture communism' is a term intended to evoke workers' self-organisation, to address the way that class conflict is conceived across telecommunications networks where monoliths have privatizing communication and reap surplus profit (2010: 5). As the terms suggest, the manifesto explores class conflict and property relations in an unreconstructed manner of the political economy critique for informational conditions. Although rooted in free software development, Kleiner maintains: "The communization of immaterial property alone cannot change the distribution of material productive assets, and therefore cannot eliminate exploitation; only the self-organization of production by workers can." (2010: 7)
telekommunisten-kleiner.txt
A critique of the claims of free culture is developed and so too the analogies between technical and social systems of organization in a section called "Peer-to-Peer Communism vs The Client-Server Capitalist State". This maybe a familiar characterization of social-technical dynamics but the (over) simplicity of the formulation is a powerful critique rooted in an understanding of the political economy and the ways that social relations are determined. (It is parody, but as with all parody, serious too.)
telekommunisten-kleiner.txt
Class in this sense can be seen to be engineered partly through network topologies of centralised Statist forms, and distributed forms like the commons that is equated to worker self-organisation and the central importance of property. One of the central issues here is the contradiction at the core of the term 'free market', that is clearly not free but a description of the market economy that in itself follows 'unfree' principles of 'economic rent' (2010: 10-12). Referring to David Ricardo's writing (_On Principles of Political Economy and Taxation_, of 1817), the concept rent is used here to indicate the income that owners earn simply from the act of ownership itself, like the earnings derived by letting private property by landlords (named literally after the enclosure of common land). Both capitalist and landlord expropriate. Property remains a core issue and it is enshrined in the legal apparatus to protect class divisions (it protects bourgeois property in other words). It is in this sense that Pierre-Joseph Proudhon famously stated that "all property is theft" (in Kleiner 2010: 30).
telekommunisten-kleiner.txt
(see Wark also, and 'rent' in Pasquinelli).
telekommunisten-kleiner.txt
This theoretical foundation is useful for Kleiner as he wishes to develop a critique of the rise of social media as a project of venture capitalism, that expropriates developments in the free software movement and the radical potential of peer to peer technologies (2010: 15). His example of the ways that the Internet has always been social is UseNet, the distributed messaging system, operating ing since 1979 (although now subsumed by the Google monopoly). The point is that ownership and property are core issues in these platforms and they are organized in ways that follow the logic of rent. The owners derive profit even as they lie idle, through effective marketing and the generation of hype, through 'venture capital' investment and centralized control. Whereas P2P systems are owned by commons. "From this perspective, it can be said that Web 2.0 is capitalism's pre-emptive attack against peer-to-peer systems." (2010: 19)
telekommunisten-kleiner.txt
The Thimbl project is a socio-technical critique rooted in this principle. The distinctiveness of peer production lies in the relative independence of workers to control common productive assets and share the benefits. This is 'venture communism' to Kleiner, opposed to capitalist and socialist Statist forms where the control over immaterial assets extends to the whole of society (2010: 23-25). Under venture communism, ownership applies to labour not property, property is held in common and labour guarantees a share of the rent so to speak. It is taking control of the productive process.
telekommunisten-kleiner.txt
Copyleft:
telekommunisten-kleiner.txt
Copyleft is not the answer at all. It is a mechanism for critique of copyright but following the logic of negation of negation, it the whole system of property that is the problem.
telekommunisten-kleiner.txt
"While copyleft is very effective in creating a commons of software, to achieve a commons of cultural works requires copyfarleft, a form of free licensing that denies free to organizations that hold their own assets outside the commons." (2010: 28) The radical position around copyright is to reject it altogether. Any forms of property rights over the commons is unethical. In this sense the 'creative commons' project is ill-named. copyleft may go further but still holds reinforces the system of copyright through its critique in the way that all critique is also productive for the thing it critiques. This is the position of Piratbyran for instance, the founders of the P2P bittorrent site Pirate Bay, rejecting copyright in its entirety: "No copyright. No license" (in Kleiner 2010: 43, whereas Kleiners position is this is only possible once a class-less society has been achieved).
telekommunisten-kleiner.txt
(where does anarchism fit?).
telematics-ascott.txt
Roy Ascott (2004), 'Orai, or How the Text Got Pleated: A Genealogy of La Plissure du Texte: A Planetary Fairytale,' in Leonardo, vol. 37, no. 3, pp. 195-200.
telematics-ascott.txt
La Plissure du Texte was one of Ascott's first distributed authorship artworks that used telecommunications networks - or what he calls 'telematic art' (as opposed to being dubbed 'terminal art' by the British press) (2004: 197). The project extended his interest in cybernetics to the use of emerging pre-internet network technologies that seemed to exemplify 'connectivist' thinking mixed with post-structuralist references. In this context, connectionism stands for 'order-emerging-out-of massive-connections,' an approach to artificial intelligence that became known as neural networks. (Kelly, 2003: 360-1) The key cultural reference for the work is of course Roland Barthes's The Pleasure of the Text (1975) in which text is taken as tissue behind which lies the realm of meaning. Ascott quotes Barthes: 'the generative idea that the text is made, is worked out in a perpetual interweaving; lost in the tissue - this texture - the subject unmakes himself, like a spider dissolving in the constructive secretions of its web.' (2004: 198)
telematics-ascott.txt
In the case of La Plissure (1983), Ascott presented a distributed nonlinear narrative or improvised 'planetary fairy tale' as the first large-scale telematic artwork. Meanings were generated over the network in the manner of weaving a textile with multiple authors. To many, this is the beginnings of interactive art.
terrorism-zizek.txt
Slavoj Zizek (2003), 'A Holiday from History,' (first published in Janus #9/2001) in, Johan Grimonprez, dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz.
terrorism-zizek.txt
Zizek would see fundamentalist terrorism in terms of the 'passion for the real', citing the Red Army Faction in Germany in the 1970s (the Baader-Meinhof gang) in their attempts to shake the masses out of their apolitical slumber through acts of violence, to 'shatter their ideological numbness' (2003). Here he is drawing upon Lacan's definition of the Real as the void, to explain the spectacle of terrorism as a fake (just as modern warfare has been described as war with no human casualties to paraphrase Colin Powell). Images of the planes flying into the world trade centre then are to most observers simply reminders of spectacular Hollywood disaster movies (he must be thinking of The Towering Inferno). It was the unlikely figure of Karl-Heinz Stockhausen, rather than Baudrillard, who pointed this out in his statement that the event was the ultimate work of art. Zizek explains the after effect in terms of 'de-realisation' where the scenes are presented without gruesome close-ups unlike the coverage of events elsewhere that confirms that real horror happens over there too, and confirms the home as safe. For Zizek, America simply 'got what it fantasized about' and the Real violently entered everyday reality (2003).
terrorism-zizek.txt
This simply reflects the vision of catastrophe that occupies the smug safety of the powerful few and that which knowing revolutionaries exploit. More overtly, the link to catastrophe is established through the story that Hollywood film directors who specialised in disasters films had been called upon by the Pentagon to help imagine possible scenarios of further terrorist attacks. To Zizek, this acts as empirical evidence that Hollywood acts as the 'ideological state apparatus' (self confessed 'dream factory') and prepares the wider population for the spectacle in which reality is served as fantasy or the real is kept virtual. In psychoanalytic terms, historical traumas that we cannot remember haunt us all the more forcibly, and paradoxically to really forget something you need to remember it fully. Therefore, his reading of the fear of Osama Bin Laden (apart from that he is a typical anti-hero from Hollywood) relies on the history of his emergence from the CIA-supported anti-Soviet activity in Afghanistan. There are countless other examples around the world of figures of evil that have been formed through close association with those now in fear. Zizek calls this 'the U.S. fighting its own excess' (2003). In this way, the outside always contains our own essence in Hegelian terms. This can be further extended to the logic of master and slave, wherein the oppressed realise that it is only they who can be free so even suicide might express this logic. (note: I am reminded of the non-Hollywood film The Battle of Algiers where one of the captured freedom fighters (or terrorists) is asked why they insist on blowing up cafes with bombs hidden in baskets carried by women volunteers. He replies "I would gladly swap our baskets for your planes".)
terrorism-zizek.txt
Zizek's essay title refers to the right wing American commentator George F. Will who proclaimed the end of the 'holiday from history'. For Zizek, it is the end of the holiday from the reality of brutal global policies and the lack of engagement with the political economy: 'the impact of reality is shattering the isolated tower of liberal tolerant attitude and the Cultural Studies focus on textuality' (2003). In this the 'war of terror' is both enacted through the computer-aided bombing and the computer-aided financial policies of global capitalism. There is more than a structural link between these weapons of mass destruction through systematic policies of terror. As Peter Fend puts it, the weapons of mass destruction were there all along plainly for all to see - he means oil, Zizek would see this in more general terms as the horror of global capitalism. Capitalism's other struck back because it had not remembered its own history sufficiently. This can be explained as its own internal struggle. In relating to others, it has to relate to itself: 'One should apply Hegel's well-known dictum that the Evil resides also in the innocent gaze perceiving Evil all around itself' (in Zizek, 2003).
text-diderot.txt
reflexive text:
text-diderot.txt
Denis Diderot's This is Not a Story (1770) begins:
text-diderot.txt
'When one tells a story, there has to be someone to listen; and if the story runs to any length, it is rare for the storyteller not sometimes to be interrupted by his listener. That is why (if you were wondering) in the story which you are about to read (which is not a story, or if it is, then a bad one) I have introduced a personage who plays as it were the role of listener. I will begin.'
text-diderot.txt
(cf. Tristram Shandy)
text-diderot.txt
In "The Garden of Forking Paths", 1958, from Labyrinths, 1964 (see also "The Library of Babel"), Borges "imagines a novel in which the path of the story splits, where all things are conceivable, and all things take place. The author of this story within a story is judged insane and commits suicide, and Borges' narrator is arrested and condemned to death - thus the fate of the narrator and of the author in the interactive era is prefigured. It is not hard to see how the task of writing interactively might drive an author to insanity and suicide. Interactivity implies forking paths and each pathway must be written and fitted together. The greater the number of pathways, the greater the sense of textual play for the reader, and the greater the amount of work for the writer. The volume of story web increases exponentially with additional points of interaction."
text-diderot.txt
(Richard Barbrook, http://mahrc.ac.uk/kids/MA.theory.3.2.db)
theatre-artaud.txt
Antonin Artaud (2001), The Theatre and its Double, trans. Victor Corti, (first published in 1964, as Antonin Artaud: Oeuvres Completes. Tome IV) London: Calder.
theatre-artaud.txt
In 'Theatre and the Plague', Artaud describes the plague as a form of disorder (as a kind of virus perhaps):
theatre-artaud.txt
'The plague takes dormant images, latent disorder and suddenly carries them to the point of the most extreme gestures. Theatre also takes gestures and develops them to the limit. Just like the plague, it reforges the links between what does and what does not exist in material nature. [...] It restores all our dormant conflicts and their powers, giving these powers names we acknowledge as signs. Here a bitter clash of symbols takes place before us, hurled one against the other in an inconceivable riot.' (Artaud, 2001: 18)
theatre-artaud.txt
For Artaud, theatre like the plague unravels conflicts and releases potential. The plague disrupts human progress (order) and encourages irrationality (disorder), unleashing the potential for radical change. Here the more well-known connection between 'Theatre and Cruelty' is fully evoked:
theatre-artaud.txt
'Everything that acts is cruelty. Theatre must rebuild itself on a concept of this drastic action pushed to the limit.' (Artaud, 2001: 65) Thus a non-virtual but real language of theatre transgresses the ordinary limits of technique, engaging with the complex and dangerous world.
theory-bhabha.txt
Note on theory: I wonder if I might say that the writing around the software code is in a kind of parenthesis (define parenthesis) - or that theory is in parenthesis to practice.
theory-bhabha.txt
Homi Bhabha 'The Commitment to Theory', in, The Location of Culture, London: Routledge 1994.
theory-bhabha.txt
Bhabha's work explores the interstices - the space of overlaps and displacement of difference - the '"in between", or in excess of, the sum of the parts of difference' as he puts it (1994: 2). Remember, Bhabha was important in 1994, not least, for stressing the politics of cultural difference not cultural diversity - one that requires a process of identification over one that is simply comparative and categorised; hence antagonism over reconcilation perhaps. He draws both upon Benjamin in stressing that the 'borderline work of culture demands an encounter with "newness" that is not part of the continuum of past and present' (1994: 7). He is trying to characterise strategies for acting in the present (agency) that take account of things that appear to be out of control (that seem to be beyond agency). This is equated to the idea that an author can try to take control of social action and meanings through intention, but can never take control over the eventual meanings and range of possible outcomes. His critique clearly has implications for binary divisions but in concentrating on the 'in between' reality and the 'interstitual intimacy' between, is he not merely recasting dialectics? (He is, of course, but trying to stop short of synthesis in the Hegelian sense). In concentrating on ambiguities and ambivalences, this evokes the productive use of contradiction. Bhabha quotes Benjamin on the disrupted dialectic of modernity:
theory-bhabha.txt
'Ambiguity is the figurative appearance of the dialectic, the law of dialectic at a standstill.' (1994: 18, quoting Benjamin's 'On Baudelaire').
theory-bhabha.txt
In the chapter 'The Commitment to Theory', he examines the interstices between theory and politics (praxis?), and rejects the commonly held idea that somehow theory is the realm of cultural and social privilege. Clearly this impoverished position would simply keep theory and politics separate - a self-defeating strategy. The politics of cultural production wrests this from an impasse, through a more informed sense of what 'critical theory' implies (as well as we might be reminded of its historical roots in the work of the Frankfurt School). In this way, culture and economics too cannot be separated as if either operates in its own autonomous social void. Yet this sense of pluralism certainly does not imply that Western theory should not be examined for its hegemonic resonance. Bhabha asks an important question:
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'Are the interests of 'Western' theory necessarily collusive with the hegemonic role of the West as a power bloc? Is the language of theory merely another power ploy
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of the culturally privileged Western elite to produce a discourse of the Other that reinforces its own power-knowledge equation?' (1994: 20-21) The incorporation of so-called post-colonial theory itself is perhaps a particularly relevant case in point.
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Bhabha's use of the term 'commitment' again draws upon Benjamin (in 'The Author as Producer' although this is not explicitly acknowledged); commitment implies commitment to what and who? A simplistic separation of 'activist' and 'theorist' (and we might add 'artist') makes no sense in an overall discourse of cultural production (wherein different forms and different registers are viable in the overall context of politics. The concept of 'cultural capital' is of relevance here too). More specifically, Bhabha is drawing upon Stuart Hall's use of the notion of hegemony (from Gramsci) that uses the idea of identification, wherein different political positions are negotiated - not negated as such. In this way, positions are not simply progressive or reactionary, but subject to the conditions in which they arise and are negotiated as part of discourse. As a result, Bhabha says this:
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'"What is to be done?" must acknowledge the force of writing, its metaphoricity and its rhetorical discourse, as a productive matrix which defines the "social" and makes it available as an objective of and for, action.' (1994: 23). If that sounds confusing, remember it can be reflexively qualified by a close reading of the quote itself. Herein lies a politics of address that lies at the heart of political action.
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He continues:
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'The language of critique is effective not because it keeps forever separate the terms of the master and the slave, the mercantilist and the Marxist, but to the extent to which it overcomes the given grounds of opposition and opens up a space of translation: a place of hybridity, figuratively speaking, where the construction of a political object that is new, neither the one nor the other, properly alienates our political expectations, and changes, as it must, the very forms of our recognition of the moment of politics. The challenge lies in conceiving of the time of political action and understanding as opening up a space that can accept and regulate the differential moment of intervention without rushing to produce a unity of the social antagonism or contradiction. This is a sign that history is happening - within the pages of theory, within the systems and structures we construct to figure the passage of the historical.' (1994: 25)
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In other words, he is keen to articulate contradictory forces as dialectical (perhaps more accurately hybrid or in Derridean 'diffŽrance') but 'without the emergence of a teleological or transcendent History' or redemption (or an essentialist reading of Hegel and Marx). For Bhabha, there can be no closure on theory. In this way, he rejects simplistic oppositions between subject and object, but also between the 'essentialist opposition between ideological miscognition and revolutionary truth'. This could only be fully comprehended within an overall understanding of the discourse of Marxism, which is subject to the conditions of its own production as theory and practice. For Bhabha, this is a continual negotiation of the processes of translation. Commitment can only ever be seen in this way too, as a contradictory and complex operation, where a position is argued in relation to an other through translation and displacement (or 'erasure' as Derrida would have it). This is the politics of the representation of theory - both the representation of politics and the politics of representation as applied to theory.
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Politics, then, for Bhabha, is thoroughly hybrid and cannot be fought on separatist terms, nor without communities of interest. However, strategic alliances are another thing altogether to retain a sense of agency; Stuart Halls's version of this was 'symbolic identification' (1994: 28). The problem is how to force a sense a commitment from what is a symbolic identification and whether an sense of integrity can remain (New Labour is a case in point - the only way to make it electable was to transform its policies to such an extent that it became a lie. This is a good example of hegemony and counter-hegemony at work). To Bhabha, Frantz Fanon expresses this hybrid state in his description of:
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'the liberatory people who initiate the productive instability of revolutionary cultural change are themselves the bearers of this hybrid identity. They are caught in the discontinuous time of translation and negotiation...' (1994: 38)
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as they can neither rely on any sense of precolonial sense of cultural purity nor ignore that all spaces and systems are constructed 'in this contradictory and ambivalent space of enunciation'. The liberated people cannot settle on any simple sense of culture but express 'dialectical reorganisation' of what Bhabha calls 'the third space' within which 'we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of our selves' (1994: 39).
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It was a commonly held view to stress this enunciatory 'present' to liberate the discourse of emancipation from binary closures (1994: 185).
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The problem is embedded in the idea of the subject as agent. Bhabha stresses the contigent conditions of agency and cites the work of Hannah Arendt. He describes how Arendt thought that uncertainty in political matters arose from
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'the disclosure of who - the agent as individuation - is contiguous with the what of the intersubjective realm. This contiguous relation between who and what cannot be transcended but must be accepted as a form of indeterminism and doubling...
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"The perplexity is that in any series of events that together form a story with a unique meaning we can at best isolate the agent who set the whole process into motion; and although this agent frequently remains the subject, the 'hero' of the story, we can never point equivocably to him as the author of its outcome."
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'This is the structure of the intersubjective space between agents, what Arendt terms human 'inter-est'.' (Bhabha, 1994: 189; quoting Arendt's The Human Condition, of 1958).
toys-turkle.txt
'Making a Pass at a Robot' in Life on the Screen
toys-turkle.txt
This essay investigates computer culture and children's experience of interactive toys and 'smart machines'. It's an interesting area - connecting child development to artificial intelligence and one often thought about in very simplistic terms. To really make sense of this it's probably important to recognise that childhood itself is an invention. I'll summarise this very quickly and try to add a few ideas that might stimulate some projects before going back to the Sherry Turkle essay itself.
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As I said the first principle is that the child is an invention largely of the industrial revolution, previously (and this is evidenced in historical representations - for more on this, read Phillipe Aries 'Centuries of Childhood') they were merely small adults who went out to work and were not subject to the ideology of the bourgeois family (this is where the myth of innocence is perpetuated). Neil Postman's thesis is really useful too (in 'The Disappearance of Childhood'); he argues that the child is distinguished from the adult through literacy (Freud would have it as sexuality) and that therefore the child was invented at the time of the printing press. He concludes that the child has disappeared (the end of childhood) with digital reproduction as literacy is reconfigured. You could say: that in the dialectic of nature-nurture, the child turns out to be a machine. When it comes to play, clearly the child is the plaything of the adult as well as play in general is used to condition the child for adulthood (although there is plenty of room for resistance here). Largely, toys are meant to teach acceptable adult behaviours under advanced capitalism - gender, sexuality and power roles as well as importantly to reinforce desire and consumption. Toys are part of capital's machinery and this is evident in the proliferation of new toys - from tamagotchi to interactive telly-tubbies (Zizek's essay 'Is it Possible to Traverse the Fantasy in Cyberspace?' is really good on Tamogotchi encouraging children to be murderers). Play is an interesting area in the world of interactive media and should not be dismissed as mere play (not serious work). For instance Winnacott discusses play as essential for development in terms of the transitional object - doll or blanket is an 'in-between' the child's feelings about their parents and the adult world. Winnacott used the transitional object as a metaphor with which to make interpretations during child & parent psychoanalysis.
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He discovered that children in play are capable of using anything at all as successful transitional objects, including even (perhaps especially) very low technology toys such as a piece of string, a cardboard box, sand, water, earth. The child invests objects with human attributes (such as invented friends) - in this sense the teddy bear or whatever is intelligent already. Clearly most toys would pass the Turing test if the child (and probably adults too) were conducting it. Under present conditions, it might be possible to take this further and argue that if the child is the adult plaything, then it appears increasingly likely that the child is a kind of robot. It is the child that is programmable and would probably pass the Turing (or SATS) test. This isn't necessarily negative (if we apply Haraway), as the cyborg might offer a way out of the heterosexist dead-end in the context of biotechnology. A playful use of irony in all this seems essential, and the example of E-Toys comes to mind (Jago - got anything to add on this?).
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Turkle claims we tend to look at children to see what we think ourselves, added to this we project onto children our anxieties about what we don't understand (look at the many moral outrages of recent times). She confronts the reductive idea that computers are merely machines and suggests that children's capacity to recognise life in inanimate objects makes the computer especially evocative to them (she cites Piaget's work on child development as a case in point). Children are often fascinated by how things work, by breaking down systems into their constituent parts, by constructing theories. Turkle describes this as 'transparency' - in her words, 'an object is transparent if it lets the way it works be seen through its physical structure' (1997: 79). She asks if it is possible to understand complex computational objects in the same way that people have tried to understand mechanical ones. For the most part, computers remain fairly opaque revealing little on the outside of what goes on inside. She claims children begin to tackle this problem through treating them as psychological objects - as if they were alive (or had a consciousness). This is where Piaget provides useful information on the connection between the concept of life and physical activity. To the young child, any activity suggests that it is alive, later through 'motion theory' making the distinction between animate and inanimate objects. Drawing on this, Turkle's past research confronted the difficulty for children in identifying whether interactive computer objects were alive or not, and deciding where the boundaries lay between people, animals and machines. She concludes that although children do not worry that inanimate objects might think and have personality, they mostly realise the machine is not alive. They are able to theorise interactivity at a sophisticated level, rejecting Piaget and other established conceptions of child development that police childhood. She characterises this as a synthesis of advanced artificial intelligence and everyday personal computing, in which technology has become 'naturalised', and the computer 'more like a demi-person' than a machine as such (1997:85).
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If the computer has developed an 'intellectual personality... an almost-physical access to the world of formal systems' (1997: 52) of code, icons, rules, then how do we make sense of this? One obvious test of the difference between humans and machines has been the Turing Test (or Imitation game); wherein an average questioner poses questions to an interlocutor whose identity is kept secret. If the questioner believes the answers are from a human when in fact it is a machine, it passes the test and the machine is said to be intelligent - it is ''real' artificial intelligence' (1997: 86). Turkle describes the criticisms of the test by Searle, who in his 'thought experiments' shifts the emphasis from 'what computers could do to focus on what they are' (1997: 87). In this way, a machine might seem intelligent but this was simply a matter of appearances and it was simply behaving as if intelligent and/or alive. She discusses the increased sophistication of these 'intelligent' machines through the example of a text-based online program called 'Julia'. She is coded for personality, can display wit, admit ignorance and even produce typing errors - all serving the appearance of authentic human characteristics. Another example would be 'Eliza' of course (this is the infamous Artificial Intelligence 'natural language communication' programme that simulates a therapist; furthermore, for a fairly crude example you could look at the chat engine of Donald Rodney: Autoicon at http://www.iniva,org/autoicon).
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Turkle further traces the 'alternative AI' (1997: 97-102), from robots with insect-like behaviour to organisms made of computer code, and the central issue of believability accounted for the most part by the desire and projection of the user. In this way, it becomes possible to account for artificiality in terms of otherness (through the language of psychology for her purposes). In this connection, when we rely increasingly on machines (and artificial agents) to do things for us, an artificial computer object is believable only in that we bring meaning to it. Or as Turkle reckons, it becomes an extension of the self (1997: 109) - not that a programme is lifelike but that we wish it to be (much the same as most human interaction in other words). But it seems too easy to say that machines and humans are more or less programmed, and she warns against a too-easy assumption that the computer is analogous to the mind (this is why I think an understanding of subjectivity is essential in all this, see the first posting on authorship).
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In general, the debate over what constitutes a human or machine has shifted away from the issue of artificial intelligence to the issue of artificial life - as biotechnology takes centre stage (more on this later in Turkle's chapter 'Artificial Life as the New Frontier', in Life on the Screen). For me, the point is not to build artificial intelligence or life but to question the artificiality of its deployment in creative endeavours (or something along those lines).
transparency-vattimo.txt
Add to progress discusssion:
transparency-vattimo.txt
Gianni Vattimo, The Transparent Society, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992
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In Vattimo's The Transparent Society, there's an implied question mark at the end, throwing serious doubt on previous philosophical certainties. For instance, he points to the ideological character of unilinear history and Benjamin's 'theses' that history is a representation of the past constructed for the benefit of the dominant class - in other words, that History is presented as unilinear and unilateral, but is made by and involves directly, only the select few. To Vattimo, to dispute this suggests something of the complexity and multiplicity of societies, as opposed to the enlightenment idea of progress leading towards a more transparent society. This corresponding crisis or impossibility of the idea of history and progress ('Only if there is History can one speak of progress'. (Vattimo, 1992:2)) is one characterisation of postmodern thinking of course, and throws many theoretical and philosophical ideas into relief - Hegel and Marx not least, in their belief in emancipation, and a better society as well as the centrality of the human subject. There are no surprises here - this is standard critical philosophy of its time - however, Vattimo doesn't reject the idea of emancipation altogether but maintains that emancipatory potential lies in the 'relative chaos' of a 'society of communication'. There are sharp contrasts here in terms of the effects of communication technologies - on the one hand, contributing to the dissolution of certainty and centrality, to the extreme opposite view of an increased homogenisation of society.
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The latter position is exemplified by Adorno and Horkheimer's The Dialectic of Enlightenment (first published in 1944) drawing upon their experience of the mass media in the United States (resulting in a 'fascism' of the single voice of radio and television, in undemocratic one-to-many communication). One might add that the belief in the increased pluralisation of society is a necessary precondition for the latter - at least this is the thinking of the anti-globalisation movement that appears to express the spirit of Adorno, and makes Vattimo's position appear a little dated. It is also important to note that what appears such a pessimistic view of the intensification of ideology (such as Adorno's) is in keeping with the Hegelian and Marxist utopian tradition in the belief of a more enlightened and better society. Except in this case, development has gone badly wrong, and thus society is expressed in a perverse form (through the influence of market forces and ideological motives). Maybe this is a little unfair on Vattimo though, as what he wishes to express, drawing more on Nietzsche and Heidegger, is that the ideal of emancipation needs remodelling to accommodate 'oscillation, plurality and, ultimately... the erosion of the very "principle of reality"' under techno-science (techno-science as the 'world of the "real", according to metaphysics' ) (1992: 7). As opposed to any (metaphysical) notion of a fixed and stable reality, he adds that Heidegger 'showed that to think of being as foundation, and reality as a rational system of causes and effects, is simply to extend the model of "scientific" objectivity to the totality of being. All things are reduced to the level of pure essences that can be measured, manipulated, replaced and therefore easily dominated and organised - and in the end man, his interiority and historicity are all reduced to the same level.' (1992: 8) Thus there is no great loss here except the myth of reality itself as an empty promise. For Vattimo, 'Emancipation, here, consists in disorientation, which is at the same time also the liberation of differences, of local elements, of what could generally be called dialect. [and as a result:] If, in a world of dialectics, I speak my own dialect, I shall be conscious that it is not the only "language", but it is precisely one amongst many.' To put it more poetically, quoting Nietzsche from The Gay Science, thus: 'continuing to dream knowing one is dreaming' (1997: 8-9) and that 'there are no facts, only interpretations... the true world has in the end become a fable' (1992: 25) (Note: Nietzsche, perhaps unfairly, has been crucial to the development of postmodernism and national socialism). In this way, contingency is apparent in all these communication/language systems as the dialectical oscillation between deluded (positivist) certainty and unashamed (relativist) open-endedness.
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The dialectical logic (admittedly based on the idea of the centralised subject) describes the problem of technological progress, in that with it comes the possibility of increased emancipation and transparency, which is also why it simultaneously becomes an impossibility. Vattimo explains: 'As the self-transparency of society becomes possible from a purely technical point of view, this self-transparency is shown to be an ideal of domination and not emancipation...' further exaggerated by the impossibility of the idea of self-transparency in the first place as it assumes the centralised human subject (1992: 23). Therefore any critical methodology is required to recognise the ideological character of self-transparency in the same way that history cannot be assumed to be simply authentic experience. This has since become the orthodoxy of critical theory in building a critique of the subjective processes into 'scientific' analysis as contingent 'objectivity' - I like the idea of affinity methodology, in recognising the contingent nature of theory but employing it strategically all the same - it is not truth-seeking but more a critical allegory. (Note: Even subject positions can only be faced with the same level of contingency - as affinities rather than essentialist descriptions of race, class, gender, sexuality and so on). In this way, evoking the Nietzsche quote once more, cultural commentators, scientists, and scientific method can continue to dream of its viability and usefulness.
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What is wrong with the assumption of dialectical reversal anyway? In Marx, of course, it is premised on the assumption that the oppressed have nothing to lose but their chains, and the symbolic violence of historical processes and the social relations of domination. Both Hegel and Marx in turn, situate (techno)science within the dialectical and historical trajectory towards an emancipatory 'telos'. The problems with this position have been outlined - centrality of human subjectivity, linear progress, etc. Furthermore, the distinction between developed and under-developed countries is now allegedly recast in terms of information and communication. However, in global terms, computers and the networks that connect them, are still employed in the rationalisation of mechanical and materialist industry. Emancipation of the human subject has never been more urgent than in the global sweatshops of multinational corporations. Generalised communication does not advent the dissolution of subject-object relations nor the project of emancipation except as further violence - they continue to serve strategic materialist not merely symbolic ends (here, surely, even the dodgy idea of 'telos' seems useful).
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On Utopia:
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Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment, relates strongly to the idea of counter-utopia (or dystopia) or the emergence of the 'counter-finality of reason'. Technical advances always bring the possibility of their negative application, and it is with this general negativity in mind that progress turns against itself and the potential fulfilment of emancipation towards catastrophic consequences. Vattimo explains this 'counter-finality of reason' as 'the rationalisation of the world turns against reason and its ends of perfection and emancipation, and does so not by error, accident or a chance distortion, but precisely to the extent that it is more and more perfectly accomplished.' (1992: 78). This is in stark contrast to the concept of utopia described by Thomas More or indeed that of technological utopia described by Francis Bacon in New Atlantis (published in 1627, in Vattimo, 1992: 79), where the known machines of the time open up new possibilities to serve humanity and reduce human suffrage. The (utopian) ideal is central to these ideas, either through some imagined possibility or in modernity through the operation of technology. There is the same assumption here that 'the true remains the whole' as Vattimo puts it, either already formed or at least anticipated, and that even 'in its most radically negative form, namely Adorno's, utopia still maintains a link with the totality that one could never imagine realised' (1992: 80). When progress no longer makes any sense, it is no surprise that counter-utopia is the norm. The counter-finality of reason is the horrible realisation that even when 'correctly' motivated, that it will turn against itself and the ends of emanicipation (Notoriously for Adorno, Auschwitz was a case in point, after which poetry and humanity would never be the same). It is the mechanism itself that is corrupt, addressed through 'a critique of instrumental reason' for Adorno and Horkheimer (add more on this). According to them, reason has been corrupted because of its reliance on scientific, objectifying, instrumental models, in tune with the capitalist system. Although of course it is possible to overturn this system, in the meantime, it may be affirmed only in negative terms. In fact it must be addressed as a faulty system, otherwise we remain stuck in useless self-contradiction - what might be described in terms of useless pastiche as opposed to useful parody (the endless dystopian works of science fiction say something of this sense of important purpose - social critique maybe, but served up in marketable form). Vattimo suggests that 'The ironic-nostalgic inventory of the talismans of progress is perhaps the only "utopia" still possible. It is perhaps the only future condition of humanity that can be imagined and, up to a point, described in later modernity, after the hopes humanity placed in the rationalisation and progressive enlightenment of the world have work thin before its very eyes.' (1992: 85). Wishful thinking is fine as long as it does not fall into teleological finality, and that contingency is kept in place as part of the system - in other words, that it is recognised as strategic.
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In this regard, it is important to trace the transformation of the dialectic in its Hegelian form to the idea of the 'negative dialectic' of Adorno (Theodor Adorno (2000), Negative Dialectics (Negative Dialektik, 1966), trans. E.B. Ashton (1973), London: Routledge.). The dialectical logic is retained but adjusted, not rejected, in the light of the total organisation and instrumental reason of the system. In contrast to the Hegelian idea of the whole will be eventually conceived of as the truth, Adorno sees this as largely realised in negative terms, and therefore that the whole must be conceived of as false. Rather than see this as simply completed and unchangeable (and as is perpetuated by dominant ideology and the rhetoric of the free market), Adorno insists this can be corrected through 'a critique of instrumental reason'. Vattimo further explains '... via a comprehensive transformation of society, rationalisation could know a new emancipatory destiny,' and that this might also point to alternative positive conceptions of utopia and history: 'in the idea that the whole is false precisely to the extent that it is realised there lies a new philosophy of history in embryonic form. This would be characterised by the replacement of the linear (ascending, descending, progressive or regressive) and the cyclic models, pertaining respectively to the Hebraic-Christian vision of history and the classical model of time, with one that could only be defined as ironic and distortive...Historical occurrence, in other words, would be neither progress nor regress nor the return of the same, but an "interpretation" in which the past and the principles we inherit always become in some degree false.' (1992: 87) (Note: Here is both affirming and rejecting Benjamin's 'Theses on the Philosophy of History'). Is it possible or useful to conceive of history as neither linear or circular? What about simply thinking of history as simply dialectical - and if so, isn't this reiterating what others have done before and using history to throw the present into perspective.
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Add to Marcuse bit:
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Following Adorno's positive reception of the avant-garde, Marcuse attempted to provide a synthesis of important aspects of the avant-garde - the transformation of relations between aesthetic experience and the everyday such as suggested by surrealism and situationism. (is this at all useful?)
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On reproduction (WB):
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Adorno objected to Benjamin's idea that art should or could lose its aura that separates it from the everyday. This locates Adorno's criticism as locked into the tradition of aesthetics and Western metyaphysics, where art is a utopian place of harmony and perfection. His criticism of Benjamin's thesis lies in the detail of the change of essence (creativity, originality, harmony, etc) - is art's essence actually changed or merely unsettled? - or indeed, whether it is possible to conceive of a new kind of essence under the conditions of art's technical reproducibility. Whereas Adorno's problem arises from the distinction of the work of art's ideal use value (cult value in Benjamin's essay) and its exchange value (exhibition value) sullied by the market and fashion (Vattimo, 1992: 48). Adorno clearly does not see these changes as positive whereas Benjamin collapses the separation under aesthetic theory of its ideal state and that of wider cultural value. Furthermore, in late-modernity, it might be argued that objects no longer can be distinguished in terms of use value as they operate more on a symbolic level - as pure exchange value. This is where Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital might be useful.
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In The Transparent Society (1992), Vattimo develops Benjamin's idea of the significance of the dadaist aesthetics of shock with reference to Heidegger's essay of the same year 'Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes' ('The Origin of the Work of Art') as a further disruption of the preconceptions of ideal work of art: 'A stability and permanence in the work, a depth and authenticity in the aesthetic experience of creation and appreciation are things we can no longer expect from late-modern aesthetic experience, dominated as it is by the power (and impotence) of the media. In opposition to the nostalgia for eternity (in the work) and authenticity (in experience), it must be clearly recognised that shock is all that remains of the creativity of art in the age of generalised communication' (1992: 57-8). Whether shock is still shocking is highly debatable, and my argument would suggest that a more appropriate analogy is autonomy in the context of generative systems - where essence is disrupted in ways that are more appropriate to the technological and cultural conditions of late capitalism (Note: I need to think through value here. How does shock translate to the computer environment - Richard Wright thinks the aesthetics of montage has been usurped by the aesthetics of transformation for instance (his PhD thesis). I would like to argue that montage, because of its dialectical oscillation, is still appropriate if defined more closely). It is important not to simply use Benjamin (as is often the case) as a way of glossing over the alienating effects of new technology - remember, he argued for the positive potential only. Vattimo adds: 'art is constituted as much by the experience of ambiguity as it is by oscillation and disorientation. In the world of generalised communication, these are the only ways that art can (not still, but perhaps finally) take the form of creativity and freedom (1992: 60). Ambiguity is seen in this way as a useful and playful positive force in resisting dry technicist automation.
turingtest-hofstadtler.txt
Douglas Hofstadter (1985), 'A Coffee House Conversation on the Turing Test', in Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern, (first written in 1981), New York: Basic Books, pp. 492-525.
turingtest-hofstadtler.txt
Hofstadter's 'A Coffee House Conversation on the Turing Test' (1985) is one text amongst many that is skeptical about the claims of artificial intelligence. In conversational form, it describes the richness of human imagination and emotions against the mechanicist promises of AI. In this way, the Turing Test would seem to prove that machines could do a very good job of simulating thinking but not do thinking as such. The two protagonists of the conversation argue about these ideas and generally agree that our received view of computing is far too fixed and needs to be messier - to include the mechanisms of DNA and enzymes - from the 'mechanical level of molecules to the living level of cells'. Indeed, 'There are so many complexities and rich modes of behavior that all that mechanicalness adds up to something very fluid' (1985). This is when, at some point in the future, 'real artificial intelligence' might emerge.
unix-raymond.txt
Eric S. Raymond (2004) _The Art of UNIX Programming_, Boston: Addison-Wesley.
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maybe add to software culture section - or introduction:
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Developed through an engineering tradition, Unix undoubtedly has a culture - a technical culture but also a conceptual and political culture. Eric S. Raymond's book _The Art of UNIX Programming_ (2004; making explicit reference to Donald Knuth's _The Art Computer Programming_, 1981 [1968]) is testament to this and the principle that a better cultural understanding of technology or indeed software will lead to better implementation. Fundamental to this of course is the Unix tradition of open source as a development method based on a belief in 'shared culture' (exemplified by the 'success' of Linux).
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[note: 'Unix' is a trademark of The Open Group, but in general refers to 'any operating system that is either genetically descended from Bell Labs's ancestral Unix code (of 1969) or written in close imitation of its descendants' (Raymond 2004: xxix).]
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The history of Unix reveals a pattern of positive development when tied to open source principles whereas 'attempts to proprietarize it have invariably resulted in stagnation and decline' (Raymond 2004: 51).
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Open source or 'peer-review-intensive development' underpins the Unix approach but it is also open in the sense that its API (application programming interface) works across different computer platforms. It is the 'closest thing to a hardware-independent standard for writing truly portable software' (Raymond 2004: 8). In addition, it underpins the internet protocol of TCP/IP and most servers rely on Unix, as well as underpinning the production of free software. In supporting multiple program interfaces and flexibility, it does not obfuscate but on the contrary it provides access to the hidden depths of code behind GUIs. Furthermore it follows a folk tradition in being developed 'bottom-up' in that 'expertise' comes from the culture itself exemplified in transparency and discoverability; the engineer's philosophy of 'keep it simple, stupid!' (Raymond 2004: 25; alluding to Einstein's soundbite: 'Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler', in Raymond 2004: 295). Re-using existing code is part of this working principle - avoiding unnecessary work and taking an economic even ecological approach. Raymond describes this in the following terms:
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'This attitude gives the best return both in the "soft" terms of developing human capital and in the "hard" terms of economic return on development investment.' (2004: 375)
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Clearly this underpins the open source impulse in the most general economic sense regardless of ideological position - which is its strength and part of the problem in as much as it contests and affirms capital investment on human and economic levels.
unpredictability-partridge.txt
Derek Partridge (2005) 'Computation without Representation', Faculty of Technology research seminar, University of Plymouth, 03.02.05.
unpredictability-partridge.txt
unpredictability-partridge.txt
Computational logic doesn't apply in quite the same way in the case of neural networks - they are 'black boxes' in this sense. Much software could be described in this way as 'black box software'. Rather than following the historical model that follows the computer science logic of correct or incorrect, Partridge suggests a more measured 'accurate approximation' (2005). This is messy but robust as opposed to the elegant, but fragile precision of correct/incorrect. This seems obvious outside the confines of computer science wherein certainty is ideologically bound. In this sense, 'accurate approximation' appears to follow a dialectical impulse in taking approximation as a temporary synthesis to be further tested in the dialectical chain.
usage-decerteau.txt
Michel de Certeau (1984), ÔGeneral IntroductionÕ, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans.Steven F. Rendail, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. xi-xxiv.
usage-decerteau.txt
In examining how individuals can reclaim a sense of autonomy from the forces of commerce and politics, de Certeau asserts that users operate opposing established rules in the most ordinary of circumstances (1984). The concern are the modes of operation, not human subjects as such but their actions, that together form a culture wherein models of action are characterised by users in ways that resist the idea of passive usage or consumption. In this way, the focus is what is made or produced through consumption, what is produced - that de Certeau calls 'poiesis' (from the Greek meaning to create, invent, generate) - examining what is made through using products imposed by a dominant economic order. In his terms, consumers negotiate discipline and power exerted on them by tactical forms and makeshift creativity; through what de Certeau calls 'antidiscipline' (1984: xv; referring both to Foucault and in turn Lefebvre).
usage-decerteau.txt
The tension here is between common use and the imposition of order by a dominant elite. Or rather, the relations between consumers and the mechanism of production is made complex - like that between reading (consuming) and speaking (making). In linguistics, this is analogous to the distinction between 'competence' and 'performance'; between the act of speaking and the established rules of that language. In other words, the speech act is privileged in de Certeau's work. Thus,
usage-decerteau.txt
'speaking operates within the field of a linguistic system; it effects an appropriation, or reappropriation, of language by its speakers; it establishes a present relative to a time and place; and it posits a contract with the other (the interlocator) in a network of places and relations.' (1984: xiii)
usage-decerteau.txt
The speech act, and ordinary language in particular, thus presents characteristics that are found in other social practices - his examples are walking or cooking (but we might add hacking). These are creative practices, ways of making associated with arts practice in the broadest sense - constituting what has become known as popular culture (the art of walking or the art of cooking, for instance) in which social relations are reconstituted or hacked. Thus, there is self-evidently a political dimension to everyday practices. Everyday practices, such as talking, walking, shopping, cooking, are potentially 'tactical in character' offering new and strategic ways of operating (1984: xix; in the manner of 'rhetoric' as the science of ways of speaking). Hacking might be usefully described in these terms, as as a form of 'bricolage' or a tactical re-using supplied materials and structures (programmes, rules); like speech transforming 'another person's property into a space borrowed' (1984: xxi). He continues:
usage-decerteau.txt
'These ways of reappropriating the product-system, ways created by consumers, have as their goal a therapeutics for deteriorating social relations and make use of techniques for re-employment in which we can recognize the procedures of everyday practices. A politics of such ploys should be developed.'
usage-decerteau.txt
This would be a politics that engages with 'social activity at play with the order that contains it'. (1984: xxiv)
utopia-levitas.txt
utopia
utopia-levitas.txt
In 'The future of thinking about the future', Ruth Levitas concludes that utopia is necessary however difficult it is to locate (as a real or imagined perfect or ideal society or place, but literally is 'no place' from 'ou' not and topos a place - negative dialectics? in that by finding fault with society and then by imagining a perfect society, some improvement is made possible). This is quite unfashionable in some circles - not least because of its relationship to Marxism. She cites Karl Popper (a well known critic of Marxism) who is sceptical of all blueprints for a better future as they inevitably lead to totalitarianism in his view (Marxism leads to Stalinism for instance). Levitas proceeds to define utopia more carefully using old distinctions of form, content and function.
utopia-levitas.txt
Utopia is broadly understood as 'the desire for a better way of life expressed in the description of a different kind of society' that makes this possible (1995: 257); the political significance of which is that the vision of a better society may itself act as an agent of change. In this way, it seems a useful concept in the digital realm - what is virtual in a sense is a prediction of what reality might become, or at least a blueprint. This is the intention of much science fiction of course (and there are plenty of examples of this in the essay). Although she doesn't go on to discuss technology in detail, this is more our concern: How is technology used as an agent of change? What is its role in social transformation (but be careful not to simply think that technology can determine this). Although we might be sceptical of some of its claims of social transformation, following the argument of Levitas, we would still probably see it as important and necessary because of the possibility of better change and agency - the idea of progress. The alternative is conservatism to the point of stasis. Here lies the politics in the idea of transformation and on a fundamental level, digital technology appears to hold all sorts of possibilities for transformation.
utopia-levitas.txt
The problem and hence the title of the essay has been identified through that body of thinking that people call 'postmodernism' (and a shift from temporal to spatial conditions). Levitas argues that since utopias are necessarily ideological, postmodern thinking in itself is a product of late-capitalism (that despite its marketing sound-bites) obscures reality and ultimately sustains the status quo. This leads to the paradoxical idea of needing to examine examples of previous utopian visions - the history of thinking about the future in order to understand the future of thinking about the future.
utopia-levitas.txt
Clearly, we need to continue to think in terms of time and history. The following quote emphasises the importance of this: 'Utopia changes its form and function, and indeed its location, with the context in which it arises' (1995: 258). Levitas provides many examples, including art as offering glimpses of utopia (citing Adorno, 1995: 262) or that art might not only be critical of reality, but also 'posits an alternative and can act at least indirectly as an agent of transformation' (citing Marcuse, 1995: 263). The work of Henri Marcuse is a useful example perhaps as he sees a problem in the Marxist idea of social agency in the proletariat as they have been incorporated into consumer-capitalism, and suggests that art is part of the idea of the 'Great Refusal' - as an expression of agency, opposition and new social movements as collective agents. Postmodernism has tended to interprete this in terms of the rejection of meta-narratives (like history and progress) and the rise of identity politics - and for a while this seemed useful but these groups have been aggressively incorporated into consumer-capitalism too (think of the 'pink-pound' for instance). In other words: 'The personal ceases to be political if and when we take away the capacity to think time and history' (1995:262).
utopia-levitas.txt
It would seem that the diversification of constituencies of oppression (even evident in the fragmentation of the self) works against the idea of agency. Slavoj Zizek sees this as the failure of identity politics, whereas Levitas quotes Stuart Hall: 'The multiplication of new points of antagonism... further fragments the political field, dispersing, rather than unifying the different social constituencies' (1995: 264). The recent protests against globalisation and the W.T.O. (Seattle, London, Prague, etc) might figure here - though they tend to only highlight opposition, and unfortunately tend not to suggest any kind of working alternative. Or think of the empty politics (and tanks) or the so-called petrol crisis - collective action (great) but to what purpose (a utopia in which petrol is cheaper)? I prefer to see the proletariat as a useful metaphor (actually metonym?) for social agency and transformation that now operates under global conditions (similar to Jameson's 'international proletariat' and 'cognitive mapping' which is probably just class consciousness recoded). Did anyone see that TV programme the other night about contemporary forms of Slavery ('Slavery', C4, 28 Sept) - there's a good example of history's reverse ideological function to convince us that this is only a thing of the past? Slavery remains a working part of the global economy.
utopia-levitas.txt
Levitas concludes:
utopia-levitas.txt
'The main reason why it has become so difficult to locate utopia in a future credibly linked to the present by a feasible transformation is that our images of the present do not identify agencies and processes of change. The result is that utopia moves further into the realms of fantasy. Although this has the advantage of liberating the imagination from the constraints of what it is possible to imagine as possible - and encouraging utopia to demand the impossible - it has the disadvantage of severing utopia from the process of social change...' (1995:265)
utopia-levitas.txt
But what about examples of utopias that relate to technology? Can anyone think of good examples? How might agency be enhanced by technology? Or does technology merely enhance fantasy and hence fall into the problem that Levitas identifies above? Do you have any thoughts on thinking about the future in this way?
utopia-levitas.txt
Yet, Utopia as the place of reconciliation of conflicts (in the Hegelian sense as mentioned earlier) is often seen as a dull simplified model of sameness where difference and conflicts have been resolved. This is why the reconciliatory view of dialectics is rejected for one that strives for betterment but reinvents dialectic play at the point of synthesis - in this sense, it remains generative, and describes no simple operation but one made more complex and unfinished - perhaps in a series of anti-utopian revolutions. For Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment, any reference to an essential 'golden age' beginning (or end) is also examined as 'an always-ready process whose structure lies very precisely in its generation of the illusion' (Jameson, 1991: 337). For Adorno, utopia remained impossible (and all the more so for witnessing the utopian shopping mall of the United States - the 'technocratisation of society').
violence-benjamin.txt
Giorgio Agamben (2005) _State of Exception_, trans. Kevin Attell, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
violence-benjamin.txt
Walter Benjamin (1996 [1921]) 'Critique of Violence', in Marcus Bullock & Michael W. Jennings, eds. _Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913-1926_, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, pp. 236-252.
violence-benjamin.txt
Susan Buck-Morss (2003) _Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left_, London: Verso.
violence-benjamin.txt
Leon Trotsky (1987 [1911]) 'Terrorism', in 'What do we mean...?', _Education for Socialists No. 6_, March, Socialist Worker's Party.
violence-benjamin.txt
Slavoj Zizek (2008) _Violence_, London: Profile Books.
violence-benjamin.txt
The task of the critique of violence is a moral question in as much as it is defined by law and justice. But for Benjamin, the issue is not whether violence is a means to a just or unjust end (a critique of 'just ends') but whether violence can be a moral means in itself. As he puts it, 'a more exact criterion is needed, which would discriminate within the sphere of means themselves, without regard for the ends they serve' (1996: 236). This is important as otherwise violence operates as if by natural law, in a Darwinian fashion as 'the only original means, besides natural selection, appropriate to all the vital ends of nature' (1996: 237). (This is also how ideology operates effectively through appearing natural and involved in the production of natural ends through natural means). In contrast to natural law that takes violence to be a product of nature, positive law takes violence as a product of history. The problem is that 'positive law is blind to the absoluteness of ends, natural law is equally so to the contingency of means' (1996: 237). Whereas natural law seeks to justify means, positive law tries to guarantee ends. Rather than simply reconciling just ends by a justification of the means, or vice versa, the 'Critique of Violence' essay focusses on the realm of means, or more precisely: 'the question of the justification of certain means that constitute violence' (1996: 237).
violence-benjamin.txt
As far as the State is concerned, violence exercised by individuals, or its legal subjects, is a threat to the legal system that serves to justify its own use of violence. Legal ends appear to be only achievable by legal power. As Benjamin, says: 'Lawmaking is powermaking, assumption of power, and to that extent an immediate manifestation of violence.' (1996: 248) This indicates the law's 'monopoly on violence' as Benjamin puts it, in not simply preserving legal ends but more importantly in preserving the law itself. It also affirms the threat of actions that are outside of the law, to the law itself.
violence-benjamin.txt
An exception to this is the right to strike that remains conceded by the State. But then To strike is an active refusal to work, the withdrawal of actions, a non-action, is not necessarily violent. Where violence is more easily discernible is that to strike is to escape from the violence imposed on the worker by the employer. The right to strike translates as the right to use violence to attain certain ends, and the State reserves the right to counter this with violence. This is in keeping with the position of Trotsky, in his essay 'Terrorism' of 1911, who considers the argument against the use of violence to be a hypocrisy in that the entire state apparatus and its laws, police, and army nothing but an apparatus for capitalist terror in itself:
violence-benjamin.txt
'Our class enemies are in the habit of complaining about our terrorism. What they mean by this is rather unclear. They would like to label all the activities of the proletariat directed against the class enemy's interests as terrorism. The strike, in their eyes, is the principal method of terrorism. The threat of a strike, the organisation of strike pickets, an economic boycott of a slave driving boss, a moral boycott of a traitor from our ranks - all this and much more they call terrorism. If terrorism is understood in this way as any action inspiring fear in, or doing harm to, the enemy - then of course the entire class struggle is nothing but terrorism.' (1987)
violence-benjamin.txt
What is important in Trotsky's formulation is not individual terrorist acts, but collective acts against the system: 'In our eyes, individual terror is inadmissible precisely because it _belittles the role of the masses in their own consciousness_, reconciles them to their powerlessness...' (1987). Capitalist society recognises this and allows strikes on the basis that it requires an 'active, mobile, intelligent proletariat'. It is the recognition of this, that is revolutionary in Trotsky's view to consolidate self-organisation, the 'alignment of class forces, the proletariat's social weight'. Against the argument of the 'absolute value of human life', Trotsky points to the paradoxical value system that allows for millions of people to be sacrificed in the hell of war. In the contemporary setting, much the same applies as the 'war on terror' and the 'state of emergency' become the justification for the erosion of citizen's rights and freedoms. The duplicity is contingent and skewed according to state/power interests.
violence-benjamin.txt
(Note: Susan Buck-Morss points to the flagrant opportunism of the US in this respect, and the West in general in how it approaches 'democracy' with double standards, quoting Samuel Huntington: 'Democracy is promoted but not if it brings Islamic fundamentalism to power; nonproliferation is preached for Iran and Iraq but not for Israel... human rights are an issue with China but not with Saudi Arabia' (2003: 32).
violence-benjamin.txt
Similarly, on the one hand violence is seen to be inadmissible, and yet on the other, in exceptional circumstances is seen to be necessary - in a 'shift from the moral high ground to raw self-interest' (Buck-Morss 2003: 33).
violence-benjamin.txt
(--> example from the film 'Battle of Algiers' and the speech where the captured guerrilla leader is asked by journalists, referring to the practice of leaving bombs in cafes, how he can justify the death of innocent victims. His reply is that he would gladly swap their baskets for French aeroplanes...)
violence-benjamin.txt
Benjamin too points to how military violence uses this exception clause to the ends of the State despite active contradiction with its own legal and natural laws. This capacity for State power to withdraw its guarantee of protection and legal entitlement is precisely what Giorgio Agamben's _State of Exception_ discusses in depth (2005). In such cases, the law uses violence for legal ends that itself has decided. As an agent of State authority, police violence is similarly legitimated as both law-making and law-preserving - and all violence as a means is law-making and law-preserving, according to Benjamin. When the ends cannot be guaranteed by the legal system alone, the police and military further intervene 'for security reasons' (1996: 243). Security marks the exception in other words. For instance, the US national security state is a war machine that requires 'a localizable enemy for its powers to appear legitimate; its biggest threat is that the enemy disappears' (Buck-Morss 2003: 30). Power continues to produce its own vulnerability, dialectically.
violence-benjamin.txt
On the relation between violence and revolution, Benjamin also refers to Georges Sorel's essay 'Reflections on Violence' (1915) (196: 245-6). Sorel points to the failure of parliamentary democracy to deliver its promises and to the principle of counter-violence, not only through strikes but through proletarian revolution based on a distinction between violence and force (Note: the German word 'Gewalt' means both violence and force). The point is that under certain conditions violence becomes force, as pure means.
violence-benjamin.txt
There remains the potential for 'pure immediate violence' - human action that neither makes nor preserves law, that is outside of the law.
violence-benjamin.txt
Agamben draws upon Benjamin's essay to add detail to the idea of 'pure violence' ('reine gewalt') quoting a letter to Ernst Schoen of 1919:
violence-benjamin.txt
'It is a mistake to postulate anywhere a purity that exists in itself and needs only to be preserved.... The purity of a being is _never_ unconditional or absolute; it is always subject to a condition. This condition varies according to the being whose purity is at issue; but this condition _never_ inheres in the being itself.' (in Agamben 2005: 61)
violence-benjamin.txt
Following this, the sense of 'purity' (Reinheit) does not apply to any violent action in itself, but in its relation to external conditions. The paradox of Benjamin's position is in drawing together proletarian violence informed by Marxism with the theology of divine violence represented by Judaic Messianism - where redemption is provided by 'pure divine violence'. So rather than promote terrorist violence, or as necessary means justified by ends, he calls for: 'collective political action that is lethal not to human beings, but to the humanly created mythic powers that reign over them' (Buck-Morss 2003: 33). The concept of pure, divine violence is a violence that appears to come from nowhere - from beyond the law - in which 'killing is neither a crime nor a sacrifice' because law applies only to the living according to Zizek. He continues:
violence-benjamin.txt
'Divine violence is an expression of pure drive, of the undeadness, the excess of life, which strikes the "bare life" regulated by law.' (2008: 168). For Benjamin, revolution requires this sense of excess. To Zizek, divine violence is a sign without meaning, it serves no means (2008: 169, 171).
violence-benjamin.txt
It is a means without end.
violence-benjamin.txt
(--> violence of language/code)
violence-benjamin.txt
In addition to the 'systemic violence' described above, there is a symbolic violence embodied in language itself - not simply in a called incitement to a violent action or in the ways that language reflects social domination more generally but - in the way that it produces meaning more fundamentally. Instead of direct violence, language is used in peaceful debate and at the same time how it is also used to argue tat violence is inadmissable. Although it is often argued that this is what distinguishes humans from other animals, Zizek asks: 'what if humans exceed animals in their capacity for violence precisely because they _speak_? (2008: 52) He is making reference to Hegel's observation that there is something inherently violent in the capacity of language to represent a thing, which is equivalent to its symbolic death: 'it dismembers the thing, destroying its organic unity, treating its parts and properties as autonomous. it inserts the thing into a field of meaning that is external to it' (2008: 52). This happens with source code too but goes further. It says something and does something at the same time - it symbolises and enacts a violence on the thing. This is similar to what Zizek refers to when he claims:
violence-benjamin.txt
'A fundamental violence exists in this "essencing" ability of language: our world is given a partial twist, it loses its balanced innocence, one partial colour gives the tome of the whole.' (2008: 58)
violence-benjamin.txt
(Note: Zizek refers to Laclau and Heidegger respectively in understanding language as demonstrating hegemonic operations and ontological violence.)
violence-benjamin.txt
(--> contracts and licenses associated with software)
violence-benjamin.txt
The moral ambiguities and duplicities of the law are clear, and at the heart of all contractual agreements. To break a contract is to legitimate the use of violence against the guilty party and the law rests on this potential threat.
virtue-aristotle.txt
Aristotle (1996) 'Nicomachean Ethics', in John Cottingham, ed. _Western Philosophy: An Anthology_ [Ethika Nikomacheia, c. 325 BC] trans. John Cottingham, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 326-370.
virtue-aristotle.txt
'Virtue is of two kinds, intellectual and ethical.' (Aristotle 1996: 367) Ethical virtue for Aristotle is more than simply an intellectual decision on how to best act in a given situation but also relies on ingrained habits of action, as a 'disposition of character' (indeed the greek noun 'ethos' stands for habits or customs). Actions are negotiated through excess and deficiency, making virtue a 'mean' of these two 'vices'; a disposition concerned with choice. In this way, Aristotle connects the attainment of virtue to be something similar to musical skill, that is improved with practice. His example is the playing of a musical instrument, not just playing something but playing it well, in parallel to a virtuous human agent not just acting in the world but doing this well: 'each function being discharged well when performed in accordance with its special virtue' (1996: 367). [example: Cory Arcangel's Glenn Gould work]
virtue-aristotle.txt
It is learnt by doing it: 'The causes and means whereby every virtue is cultivated or destroyed are the same, just as in the case of all the arts. [...] If this were not the case there would be no need for teachers and everyone would be born good or bad. It is just like this with the virtues.' (1996: 368)
virus-nori.txt
[add to auto-destructive art]
virus-nori.txt
Franziska Nori (2002), ed., I Love You: Computer, Viren, Hacker, Kultur, exhibition catalogue, Museum FŸr Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt am Main, http://digitalcraft.org
virus-nori.txt
The I Love You virus (2000) spread through the communities of the Internet, declaring love but bringing destruction. The analogy to love is a mean one (like HIV) but also the analogy of the virus is not without its problems of description. When the phrase virus was coined in 1983 by Fred Cohen, it was used generally to describe the self-reproducing activities of a program that could spread and effect other programs (Ferronato, in Nori, 2002: 22) - and thereby with ideological reach ('packet sniffers' might be a good example as programs that read data sent by users, recognise passwords and collect them). Viruses themselves can arguably be traced further back to 1945 and von Neumann's theory of self-reproducing automata (Burj‡n, in Nori, 2002: 84). There is the process itself rather like virtual graffiti or aspects of artificial life, but also the metaphor of cultural infection to consider. They are not simply one and the same, but one evokes the other in that foreign systems can be invaded and altered from within. The potential use of this is quite another matter of ethical and political dimensions.
virus-nori.txt
The work of the techno-art collective Etoy is a good example in the ways their 'cultural viruses' have invaded the systems of commerce and finance (Ludovico, in Nori, 2002: 38). Others use viruses for productive purposes in the service of capital. Another prime example of a virus literally entering the art world is the 'biennale.py' virus that contaminated the Venice Biennale's web site (produced by 0100101110101101.org with epidemiC, for the Slovenian pavilion, 2000; the source code is available in spoken form from http://www.epidemiC.ws/love.mp3). In this way, the aesthetic considerations of programming wherein the elegance of the code and the results it produces might be extended to the destruction it induces. Here a further parallel is evoked to auto-destructive art.
virus-nori.txt
The virus appears to be the paradigmatic form for the structural properties of the computer and the Internet. This might well be extended to arts practice of course, and this is what the exhibition I Love You: Computer, Viren, Hacker, Kultur attempted (held at the Museum FŸr Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, 2002). According to Alessandro Ludovico, this is an incitement to 'compare viruses and their ways of collecting and generating information to the way we produce language.' (Nori, 2002: 42) The epidemic crew make this more explicit when they claim: 'Form and function coincide and reach the heights of poetry itself, in the case of viruses, with all the foundational potential of a language which was born for the net and developed on it.' (in Nori, 2002: 54) For them, the value of the art object lies not in the object but in the exchange itself; in file sharing, and the propagation of peer to peer networks. For Jaromil (part of epidemiC), the source code of a virus is potential lyrical poetry appropriate to the chaos and permeability of the environment it operates through. For him, 'viruses are spontaneous compositions which are like lyrical poems in causing imperfections in machines "made to work"' and inciting rebellion (in Nori, 2002: 64).
virus-nori.txt
That a virus might be regarded as a work of art has a history. Florian Cramer, citing Tilman BaumgŠrtel, describes the work of Artemus Barnoz, in 1988, secretly installing a systems extension that produced a new age peace message on every system startup (in Nori, 2002: 76; a fuller description is in Robert Slade's 'History of Computer Viruses'; Cramer also explains that Artemus Barnoz was a pseudonym for Richard Brandow and Boris Wanovitch who were intricately linked to the Neoist project and the virus can thereby be seen as demonstrating Neoist purpose). Cramer is anxious to reclaim the history of the virus as art in terms of language and demonstrates his point with a range of examples including the cut-up technique of William Burroughs. Indeed language itself is a virus according to Burroughs, who speaks of: 'word and image as viruses or as acting as viruses, and this is not an allegorical comparison' (Cramer, in Nori, 2002: 78; there are complex connections to be made here, including to the Kabbalah, Aleister Crowley's Magick, and Ron Hubbard's 'Dianetics' in turn influencing John Cage and Burroughs himself).
voice-couldry.txt
Nick Couldry (2010) Why Voice Matters: Culture and Politics After Neoliberalism, London: Sage.
voice-couldry.txt
[for beginning of social media section]
voice-couldry.txt
Voice stands for the human capacity to exert agency. But this is never enough or something that requires effort. But voice is ignoring and marginalized: "We are experiencing a contemporary _crisis_ of the voice…" as Couldry puts it (2010, 1). The ability to voice things is offered but is rendered illusionary by the forces of neoliberalism that doesn't care about voice as it is lies outside the interests of the market.
voice-couldry.txt
It can broadly agreed that there are two kinds of voices: the obvious sound of someone speaking but beyond this there is the sense in which voice without sound can also communicate; and secondly in the sphere of politics there is the voice that stands for an expression of opinion as part of a politics of representation. In addition, Couldry identifies two levels: voice as _process_ and voice as _value_ to point to the "frameworks for organizing human life and resources" that devalue voice (2010, 2). In other words, attention is paid to the conditions under which voice is undermined as political process or force. Couldry's concern is to foreground a politics of the voice that recognizes the capacity for social cooperation in this way rooted in the human condition. After all, "Voice is socially grounded" (2010, 7). This is a material precondition both through language acquisition and other processes of recognition but also through embodiment rooted in the relation between voice and action. Couldry cites Arendt to confirm how actions disclose us as subjects (2010, 8) and through the voice particularly so. Voice can thus be understood as a form of agency not mere babble. In this sense it goes beyond speech or discourse, something that will be returned to in relation to Kelty's concept of a 'recursive public'. But rather than recursively, Couldry talks about reflexivity, and how the voice allows the speaker to reflect upon their use of their voice in saying something and doing something.
voice-couldry.txt
[intro?]
voice-couldry.txt
The relationship to politics is crucial for the argument as the voice operates within and beyond politics (2010, 3). Thus he challenges Aristotle's distinction between voice (phoné) and speech (logos) where speech is take to be the privileged site of political action whereas voice is simply an animal-like capacity to utter sound (from _Politics_). Voice re-enters the discussion on account of the need to focus on the biopolitical preconditions (in the way that Agamben argues in relation to 'bare life') and to focus on the most basic and fundamental aspect of expression goes to the root of the problem. This allows for an opening up the conditions of possibility for change in the face of overpowering forces close and oversimplify discussion. "Voice is undermined by rationalities which take no account of voice and by practices that exclude voice or forms of its expression." (2010, 10) From this, Couldry asks, "Is neoliberalism perhaps a voice-denying rationality in this different but important sense?" (11). The rationality of markets do not offer voices but an empty individuation through processes of governmentality. For Couldry, the difference is that markets do not require "reflexive embodied agents; but the voice does" (2010, 11). Voice points to the limitations of the organizational model and the freedoms it purports to offer. Indeed the forces of globalization tend towards homogenization, yet the voice emphasizes the plurality of human forms.
voice-dolar.txt
Mladen Dolar (2006) _A Voice and Nothing More_, Cambridge mass.: MIT Press.
voice-dolar.txt
Mladen Dolar's A Voice and Nothing More, begins with a short story about the failure of the voice to interpellate (2006: 3). A command is given loud and clear by a commander of an army to attack its enemy, but nobody moves. The command is repeated twice more to no effect, at which point a voice says 'What a beautiful voice!'. The soldiers refuse to execute the command and instead contemplate the aesthetic properties of the expression. Certain codeworks and non-executable code operates in a similar realm.
voice-dolar.txt
The book develops the idea of three voices: one that carries meaning; one that elicits aesthetic appreciation; and thirdly, the one that Dollar invests in, an object voice that 'functions as a blind spot in the call and as a disturbance of aesthetic appreciation' (2006: 4). This is the voice that similarly comes close, not to instruction or expression, but to something that does not entirely compute.
voice-dolar.txt
Speaking machine (cf. history/action):
voice-dolar.txt
Reference is also made, rather apologetically (given its common interpretation and canonical status), to the opening passage of Benjamin's 'Theses on the Philosophy of History' and its use of von Kempelen's chess playing automaton. The ghost in the machine turns out to be dwarf chess player. The operator appears to be pulling the strings of the puppet but the allegory suggests that it is the puppet is endowed with agency. In Benjamin this confirms that historical materialism 'wins'. In Dolar's interpretation, the voice connects to this through reference to a history of speaking machines. The problem of how to invent a machine that could replicate the complexities of the human mouth and vocal chords, attests to the power of speech and its cultural significance but also to its impossibility.
voice-dolar.txt
In 1780, the Royal Academy of Science in St. Petersburg offered a prize to construct such a machine that could reproduce vowel sounds and explain their properties (Dolar 2006: 7). Von Kempelen's 'die Sprech-Maschine' (still be be seen in the Deutsches Museum, Munich) was one such entry, a wooden box connected to bellows that operated as lungs, and a rubber funnel that operated as a mouth> The mouth was modified by hand to produce speech in combination with a series of valves - a fuller description is offered by on Kempelen in his _Mechanismus de menschlichen Srache nebst Beschreibung eider sprechenden Maschine_ [The mechanism of the human speech with the description of a speaking machine]. To Dollar, there exists a ghost in the machine, necessarily so for any effect that has an unexplainable cause bound up in the mysteries of the voice itself and the way it is tied to individual subjectivity (and to the unconscious in Dollars work, as if the machine itself could be said to possess consciousness). Part of the mass appeal of von Kempelen's machine was this link between subjectivity and voice, or in the chess playing machine between subjectivity and the ability to think (consciousness) - 'phone' and 'logos'. Yet, whereas the chess playing automaton was anthropomorphic, the speaking machine was not. The attraction of the speaking machine was partly that something so nonhuman could replicate human qualities and effects (Dollar 2006: 9; the invention of the telephone emerges from this fascination). Dolar develops the relation between the two machines in Hegelian terms: from 'in-itself' in the case of the speaking machine to 'for-itself' in the thinking machine (2006: 9). The idea here is to suggest that speech is the hidden mechanism behind thought, like the puppet in the chess playing automaton - or in this case is the hidden puppet within the hidden puppet (the Lacanian 'object-cause' in Dolar's thesis). What is proposed is that Benjamin's conclusion be modified such that 'if the puppet called historical materialism is to win, it should enlist the services of the voice' (Dollar 2006: 11).
voice-dolar.txt
[ADD: actor-network theory use of puppet figure.]
voice-dolar.txt
Note:
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Gadgets, especially perhaps those connected to the mobile phone could be understood as substituting for this hidden mechanism of the voice. that this is locked down in the case of the iPhone makes transparency an urgent issue and underlines how subjectivity in the form of the voice is somehow captured in the use of these devices.
voice-dolar.txt
Ethics/Politics:
voice-dolar.txt
Ethics is bound to the voice (as the voice of conscience) so much so that it has become a guided concept for ethical issues. Socrates talks about as a child: 'It is a voice, and whenever it speaks it turns me away from something I am about to do, but it never encourages me to do anything.' (quoted in Plato's _Apology_, in Dolar, 2006: 84) To Socrates, who did not write his philosophy but speak it, the voice is the 'unwritten law' pertaining to the moral law in contrast to the written law. It takes on a kind of authority in this way and carries the inner voice of moral integrity. It is the voice of reason in so much as the source is from the depths of human consciousness (or 'being'). It is easy to see how the idea of silencing the voice is a powerful image linked to first principles of freedom of speech. It is almost unbearable to think of silencing speech. It is clearly more than a metaphor. In democratic societies and totalitarian regimes alike (its social dimension and its authority), the voice is fundamental.
voice-dolar.txt
In Aristotle's _Politics_, he defines the political in terms of the distinction between mere voice and speech, the intelligible voice - 'phone' and 'logos' - the former common to all animals including the human animal, but the latter distinguishing humans over other animals and their ability to articulate judgements in association with others. The distinction of two forms of life is what Agamben is also referring to in his work on 'bare life' - on the one hand there is 'zoe', bare life, life in common with animals, and on the other 'bios', life in the community, the commons, political life. Agamben makes an analogy of the distinction between voice and speech with bare life and politics (in Dolar 2006: 106). But these are not oppositions but ways of understanding that one in embedded in the other and not simply external to it (informed by topology): in other words, that bare life is a paradoxical concept that is both included and excluded from politics (this is 'biopolitics' in Foucault). Agamben explains: 'Let us call the _relation of exception_ the extreme form of relation which includes something by its exclusion' (1997: 26; cf. the state of exception). To Dolar, this is an invitation to examine the analogy and think of the inclusion/exclusion of the voice in speech. Both bare life and the voice are included/excluded in the political realm. One can see examples of the 'bare voice' in legal proceedings, in political representation, and in the examination of doctoral degrees, where the voice is what is counted. The Latin phrase _viva voce_ encapsulates this, meaning 'with living voice', or commonly understood as 'by word of mouth'. To give voice to something is to believe it wholeheartedly as if life depended on it and this demonstrates the biopolitical dimension succinctly.
voice-fuller.txt
Matthew Fuller (2005) _Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture_, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
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The energies that Matthew Fuller identifies lie outside of the regimes of music, harmony and voice, and more in the realm of noise. His discussion emerges in the context of radio communication and the use of other recording devices. Responding to the characterization of a communication model that oversimplifies the relation of transmitter to receiver, he examines the question: "How do you make a voice?" (2005, 25). He charts how technologies have attempted to simulate "the language of the soul" (the "ohs" and "ahs", the use of the open throat and gaping mouth, citing Kittler's Discourse Networks, but in Fuller 2005, 26). and how the first automata attempted to capture these strange sounds and noises that lay at the root of language. Contemporary speech recognition software similarly interprets the electromagnetic input from the built in microphone, further interpreted by a series of logical operations built into the computer, and its complexities. The apparent rationality lies in contrast to noise but more importantly mutated forms such hip-hop that voices itself. It "states its claim to attention in spatiotemporal terms", the body identified in terms of particularities of class and race (2005: 28). This is a voice that makes strange, that challenges normative communication and synthetic technologies.
voice-ree.txt
Jonathan Rée (1999) _I See A Voice: language, Deafness & the Senses - A Philosophical History_, London: HarperCollins.
voice-ree.txt
[For notes from Rée on aesthetics, see 'The Aesthetics of Generative Code']
voice-ree.txt
In the beginning was the 'voice'. Jonathan Rée's _I See A Voice_ begins with some fundamental observations on the intimacy of the voice (1999). Shyness about speaking in public demonstrates how the voice is linked to self-consciousness and privacy. Yet the voice is 'destined for other people: you speak, primarily, to be heard' (1999: 1). Hence it is inextricably linked to civil rights - to have a voice like a vote in civil society - voices and politics go together. On a more metaphysical level, the voice, not least because of its connection to breath, seems to demonstrate the very stuff of living being: a messenger of the soul and the breath of life. In summary, Rée's book attempts to undermine a series of false presumptions on the voice, what he calls 'shadowy metaphysical prejudices': including that the voice is connected to the soul or inward subjectivity; and that language takes two distinct forms - audible speech that occupies time not space, and visible writing that occupies space but not time (1999: 6). The voice occupies the dual territory of inward subjectivity and outward sociality, and despite all attempts to understand its vagaries is ultimately characterised by its indeterminacy.
voice-ree.txt
The idea that speech is a precondition of consciousness pervades thinking. It was Johann Gottfried Herder writing at the end of the eighteenth century that helped establish that voice and speech were distinct. Whereas the voice is simply animal exuberance to Herder, speech happens when the voice takes on the inflection of the human institution of language, in turn marking a shift from unreason to reason (Rée 1999: 67). Thus the human voice 'speaks' - and is understood as the source of human society through communication - traveling from the inner _natural_ realm of expression and sound to the outer world of _artifice_ and signification. (Note: Such logic informs the historical maltreatment of those that cannot speak (the 'deaf and dumb') as animals outside the human world of normal language.)
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Babble: In the Bible, and following the word of God, the world contained one language - the single language of Adam who first named objects in the world. The Tower of Babel, designed to reach into heaven, displeased God such that 'he' decided to confound the language so that people would not understand each other's speech. According to _Genesis_ (2:19 & 11:1-9), 'therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did thee confound the language of all the earth' (in Rée 1999: 75-6). Subsequently everyone is left to babble, in a diversity of languages and confusion of tongues. In this way, the original sounds are also associated with God-like creative virtue. The soul is the source of speech perverted through metaphors evident in spoken language.
voice-ree.txt
The relationship between speech and writing remains unstable. Historically writing taken to be a picture of speaking, with many fascinating attempts to capture this and move beyond the limitations of the Latin alphabet. For instance (in 1775), Jonathan Steele proposed using five line musical notation for speech rather than standard alphabetic script. Phonography, developed in the early 19th century was another technique, where each language sound was given a shorthand mark, Isaac Pitman even claiming (in 1854) his phonetic shorthand to be an 'exact picture of speech itself'. In parallel, others concentrated on the physiology of speech such as Alexander Melville Bell (in 1849) describing the 'actual movements of the organs of speech' - calling this 'visible speech' (in Rée 1999: 255, 258). Visible speech was based on a universal notation system able to reproduce every dialect and language. Its symbols were not alphabetical but 'physiological, and therefore musical and arithmetical too' (Rée 1999: 258). It was algorithmic.
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Amongst an even earlier history of speech synthesis and the many attempts to reproduce human speech by machines in the 18th century, Wolfgang Von Kempelen's 'machine parlante' was the first that allowed to produce not only some speech sounds, but also whole words and short sentences. In his book _Mechanismus der menschlichen Sprache nebst Beschreibung einer sprechenden Maschine_ (1791) he described the speaking machine so that others might reconstruct and improve it. It comprised of bellows to pump air into the voice box, where a reed controlled the release of air alongside movable parts corresponding to lips, palate, tongue and nostrils. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_von_Kempelen%27s_Speaking_Machine)
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Note: Given the use of his chess-playing machine by Benjamin, it is interesting to speculate on the role of artificial speech in terms of its relation to speech as the source of human society and human history. There would be an interesting project of media archaeology to be undertaken here. It is also worth noting that the analysis of speech and associated facial movements informed the development of cinema through what was called 'speech photography' or 'photography of the voice' (Rée 1999: 253-4).
voice-ree.txt
But such examples also served to emphasise the inadequacies of the latin alphabet to capture dialects and phonetic diversity: making 'the art of recording speech almost impossible' according to George Bernard Shaw; later to write _Pygmalion_ that privileges phonetics (Rée 1999: 262). By the twentieth century, there was a general recognition that speech was not a continuous stream of sound but a series of discreet abstract sound-types, a phoneme: 'not an actual noise in the mouth or ear; rather it was its "mental equivalent" in the mind of a speaker or listener' (Rée 1999: 266; referring to the work of Baudouin de Courtenay in 1894). As part of this, speech could not be considered simply a natural and physical phenomena but was thoroughly cultural. It is these principles that Ferdinand de Saussure developed in his lectures, later published as _Course in General Linguistics_ (1916) to establish that a language is a 'system' based on differences between elements. The many phonetic systems that went before (including the few mentioned thus far) simply served to demonstrate their limitations. Writing systems are simply 'theoretical conjectures about the structures of languages they apply to, rather than mechanical records of their audible features' (Rée 1999: 269).
voice-ree.txt
To de Saussure, 'every element of language was "auditory in character" and therefore "unfolds in time alone"' (Rée 1999: 320) But it is indeed possible to pronounce two things at the same time according to Roman Jakobson, who describes 'simultaneous bundles of distinctive features' (in Rée 1999: 321). To Jacques Derrida, the mistake stems from a problem in the conceptualisation of the relation between speech and writing, based on a false assumption that vocality and time lie in contrast to writing and space, and in turn that writing corrupts the purity of language as 'a kind of pollution and above all a sin' - the 'phoncentrism' of Western culture (in Rée 1999: 322; however, Rée argues there is no real evidence for the claim against de Saussure). Together, and in general terms, the principle is set that languages are systematic but nondeterministic. Meanings are produced through the relations amongst the signs and is hence a situation full of misunderstandings.
voice-ree.txt
All the same, the reader still yearns for the authentic and legitimising voice behind the text, even if, or perhaps especially because it doesn't exist. In oral story-telling, Rée explains that the teller uses many voices and character whether telling a traditional story or simply in casual chatter (1999: 369). Once written the fullness is somewhat lost but for rudimentary techniques like punctuation and quotations. Quoting is particularly interesting in this connection, what became the common practice of using 'inverted commas', distinguishing the voice of the character in the text from that of the writer (or in code commenting out is used to distinguish the voice of the program from the voice of the programmer). The practice of attribution in this sense runs in parallel to the 'enclosure of common lands', and the idea that writers might try to 'reclaim some of the freedom of the oral teller'; 'sometimes theorized as "Free Indirect Speech"' (Rée 1999: 371). But in a general sense all writing is an invitation for speech - a script to be executed as vocal performance. Whether it is free is another problem of course.
will-gramsci.txt
'pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will'
will-gramsci.txt
attributed to Gramsci but actually a varaiation of Romain Rolland's phrase 'pessimism of the intelligence, optimism of the will' in Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971: 174 (footnote).
words-austin.txt
John L. Austin (1975) _ How to do Things with Words_ [1955], Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
words-austin.txt
Delivered as a series of lectures (the William James Lectures at Harvard University in 1955, themselves based on lectures at Oxford 'Words and Deeds', 1952-4, and prefiguring the BBC lecture 'Performative Utterances' in 1959, amongst others; it's interesting in this context that the book is a transcript of speeches and thereby losing some of its performative qualities), Austin examines ordinary linguistic usage, and the contrast between performative and constative utterances. In the first lecture, he establishes that as well as providing descriptions, questions and commands, sentences are performative in that do something as opposed to just saying something. The performative statement does not simply correspond to facts but at a level of abstraction from the facts, not based on whether it is a true or false statement (but what Austin refers to as happy or unhappy, 1975: 133). To utter a sentence is not simply to: '_describe_ my doing of what I should be said in so uttering to be doing or to state that I am doing it: it is to do it' (1975: 6). A sentence or utterance of this type, he calls a 'performative' to indicate 'how the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action - it is not normally thought of as just saying something' (1975: 6-7).
words-austin.txt
In general terms, in saying something we are doing something - a 'speech-act'. Austin introduces the term 'operative' [note: Benjamin's operative writer which suggests a particular kind of doing or producing based on political action] to indicate how an utterance serves to make an effect (he is thinking of law where a statement is instrumental) for his interest is how much saying something can make something happen. The concern is in what ways to say something is to do something, or how in saying something we do something, or even _by_ saying something we do something. He identifies that in saying something, we perform 'locutionary acts' (the meaning of something; that makes a certain reference to something), 'illocutionary acts' (the force in saying something; such as informing, ordering, warning), and 'perlocutionary act' (the achievement of certain effects by saying something; such as persuading someone of something), amongst other types (1975: 109). These interconnected types of actions are all examples of how utterances are the performative issuing of 'doing an action'. The perlocutionary act marks a distinction between the action and its consequences, and in this sense, the consequences almost become the act itself.
words-austin.txt
Any spoken utterance is always locutionary in that it is an act of saying certain words, and of making movements with vocal chords and breath. So there is necessarily a connection between saying something and physical action but actions do not simply happen a a consequence of locution or simply produce effects - it takes effect in certain ways depending on the securing uptake, taking effect and inviting responses (1975: 121); depending on the purpose and the context.
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Clearly performative utterances are linked to actions by the speaker in a general sense, but Austin is interested how utterances are an outward expression of an internal act: 'the outward appearance is a description, _true or false_, of the occurrence of the inward performance'. He quotes Hippolytus: 'my tongue swore to, but my heart did not' (1975: 9-10). Indeed saying words is not enough in itself, it is its relation to ethical action that is important.
work-negri.txt
Antonio Negri (1999), Back to the Future: A Portable Document' (trans..Michael Hardt) (first written 1998) in, Josephine Bosma, et al, eds., Readme! Filtered by Nettime. ASCII Culture and the Revenge of Knowledge. New York: Autonomedia, pp. 181-186.
work-negri.txt
For Antonio Negri, labour has been stripped of its political power. Its power lay its collective form in the factory, and its political forms such as trade unions. His view of proletarians are a 'mass of people that seem formless - proletarians who work on the social terrain, ants that produce wealth through collaboration and continuous cooperation. Really, if we look at things from below, from the world of ants where our lives unfold, we can recognise the incredible productive capacity that these new workers have already acquired.' (1999: 181)
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Today the labour force is often an unemployed one; flexible and mobile, sometimes illegal and in a sense 'free' in that labour has been emancipated from the discipline of the factory. Now it is largely immaterial and intellectual labour. Negri argues that the working tool is now one that is embodied, and it is this that creates wealth (1999: 182). Therefore it is life itself that creates wealth and constitutes the tool.
writing-hayles.txt
N. Katherine Hayles (2002), Writing Machines, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
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N. Katherine Hayles, in Writing Machines (2002), stresses the materiality of simulation: 'The engineers who design these machines, the factory workers who build them, the software designers who write programs for them, and the technicians who install and maintain them...' (2002: 6).
writing-hayles.txt
All these players are situated in the material world and the social relations that arise from this. Media exists in an overall ecology of inter-relationships in which media exist like organisms (2002: 5; Hayles draws upon Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin's idea of 'remediation' (1999) to describe the ways in which media are recycled into other media; for instance, the ways in which new media are made to look like old media, or vice versa). Writing machines operate in this interplay of representational and simulated realities, or printed and electronic texts, that are grounded in the materiality of the literary object. The tension is exacerbated by the mixed (semiotic) reality that literature engenders - between the reality literally at hand, the one evoked through imagination and the situation to which it applies - a play of signification in other terms. Interestingly, the book Writing Machines is 'attentive to its own material properties' through its form (a format partly autobiographical and composed in close collaboration with a graphic designer). Materiality expressed in this way follows a critical Modernist tradition as well as an engagement with cybernetics, both engaged with the technical apparatus - familiar to an analysis focussed on cultural production such as literary criticism or textual analysis. Hayles goes further than this, and adds the materiality of the text itself to the analysis in a similar way to those in the software critical community who consider code to be material (in addition to hardware). In this way, it is the materiality of writing itself that is expressed through the relationship between natural language and code - one tended towards control and precision, the other towards free form and expression (See Florian Cramer for more on this relation). Literature is both material and immaterial in other words.
writing-hayles.txt
It s the interplay that is of concern for Hayles materialist position. The physical form of the work necessarily affects the production of meaning in the way that context does in general. When this is overt, she calls this as a 'technotext':
writing-hayles.txt
'When a literary work interrogates the inscription technology that produces it, it mobilizes reflexive lops between its imaginative world and the material apparatus embodying that creation as a physical presence.' (2002: 25; clearly this is close to other terms such as 'code literature'). A technotext brings into view the technical apparatus or writing machine that produces it. The materiality of text or code is verified by the property rights exerted on it - intellectual property would even cast ideas as material objects in this respect. For Hayles, this is synonymous with hypertext, and certainly there are strains of code literature' and literary non-executable code that come close to this association, but working with code goes further than this. The execution of code engages materiality and imagination through the possible and often unpredictable actions that result. If the code could be seen to be potential literature, this is enacted too. Perhaps in the terms of remediation, the code is remediated as running software and the text should be read as an interplay between these states. The materiality therefore requires attention to the technical apparatus, but also to the program - the activity of programming and the activity of the program once executed.
writing-hayles.txt
The programmer or writer is intimately connected to the body of the writing machine - be it book or computer. Hayles is also interested in how the body in the narrative (she cites Mary Shelley's Frankenstein) or narrator's body (such as in Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy or Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller) is connected to the body of the author and reader, and speculates on how this operates in electronic texts (her example is Talan Memmott's Lexia to Perplexia, 2002: 38, 49; a more literal example is the way that html language uses
writing-hayles.txt
note: a 'creole' is a new language, not an amalgam like 'pidgin', formed where two existing languages come into contact - clearly it is possible to imagine a creole consisting of natural language and code - imagine english and machine instructions (Hayles 2002: 50).