=============== 7. *references* =============== ------------- 7.1 end notes ------------- CHAPTER 1: [1] This is a reference to Kittler's 'There is no Software' (1996) in which he apologises for his use of proprietary software and hardware to produce a 'critical' text. [2] 'Perl' is an acronym for 'Practical Extraction and Report Language', a high-level programming language, first developed for Unix by Larry Wall in 1987, and developed as an open source project. Perl programs are usually called 'Perl scripts' and are particularly useful for mixed-language script programming. '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 (developed by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson in 1969) or written in close imitation of its descendants (Raymond 2004: xxix). A longer description of Perl (written with Adrian Ward, and to be published as part of _Software Studies_ edited by Matthew Fuller) is available online (http://www.softwarestudies.org/) and in section 8 (Cox & Ward 2007). [3] To execute the Perl script, please type the following into a Unix command line shell. To run it once, type: perl antiTHESIS.txt To run repeatedly, type: perl -e 'while(1){do "antiTHESIS.txt"}' To run it 60,000 times, type: perl -e 'for(1..60000){do "antiTHESIS.txt"}' The perl script has been written with the help of Adrian Ward. [4] When the text reaches a critical point of disorder, it will be published at: http://thesis.anti-thesis.net/~antithesis/ Any subsequent published version of the text will be licensed under the Libre Commons Res Communes License (http://www.libresociety.org/library/libre.pl/Libre_Commons) to express a cultural politics outside of the legal apparatus. It thereby rejects the recommended copyright statement for PhD submission. The program itself is distributed as free software, meaning you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself (http://www.perl.com/perl/misc/Artistic.html). [5] The use of the term 'anticonstraint' makes reference to the OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle) group that is discussed in more detail in chapter 2. CHAPTER 2: [1] However, many relevant histories of media arts exist, for instance: Paul (2003a), Rush (1999), Schwarz (1997), to name a few recent anthologies. Paul's _Digital Art_ refers to software art as a category in itself (2003a: 124-5). Stephen Wilson's _Information Arts_ (2002) offers an alternative category, one that applies information theory to arts practice, but this also remains far too broad a description for the purpose of this thesis. [2] _Generator_ was curated by myself and Tom Trevor. See section 9.1 for more detailed information on this exhibition and the accompanying DVD for video documentation of the installation in Liverpool. Since, there have been a number of shows that take a historical perspective on software art: _Abstraction Now_ at the Künsterhaus Wien in 2003 and _White Noise_ at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in 2005 are two examples. [3] The issue of autonomy in critical theory will be referred to in more detail later in this thesis, making reference to the work of Autonomia in particular. [4] Generative art was also practised among others by Eduardo McEntyre and Miguel Ángel Vidal (1928-) in Argentina, according to Osbourne (1988). Max Bense's theory of 'generative aesthetics' (1971) which drew together Charles S. Pierce's semiotics with Claude Shannon's information theory, is another reference in this connection. [5] This is sometimes called 'Cartesian linguistics' to describe the separation of inner consciousness and the outside social world. Perhaps this is what Galanter means when he states that generative art is not ideological. [6] A concern with grammar has been particularly influential in generative music and composition, such as in the generative music of Brian Eno (using Sseyo's _Koan_ software), and in key texts such as Lerdahl and Jackendoff's _A Generative Theory of Tonal Music_ (1983) that combines the formal methodology and psychological concerns of Chomskian linguistics with Schenkerian music theory. [7] Bourdieu's concept of 'habitus' has relevance in this connection. It might be compared 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. A good example is language, and the ways in which certain forms of language bind people together in groups. Thus habitus is the 'principle that regulates the act' (Bourdieu, in Jenks 1993: 14). One might extend this to include the use of programming languages and the social formations they elicit. The important point is that agents, knowingly or not, generate practices in this way, and they do so within a broader set of social relations. [8] The 'clinamen' refers to the swerving of atoms in Epicurean atomic theory. [9] Calvino's title was plagarised for the subtitle of the essay 'how I wrote one of my perl scripts' - see section 8 (Cox, McLean & Ward 2001). [10] This evokes what Manovich refers to as the 'Flash generation'. However, his is a very general position emphasised by the loose statement that: 'Programming liberates art from being secondary to commercial media' (2002). This is what Wright is addressing, and more detail is required to make clearer the distinctions over proprietary issues and social relations engaged to uphold this view. [11] Brown represents an older generation of artists associated with this field and has been involved in the research project _Cache_ (from 2002), aiming to 'recover computer arts history' (http://www.bbk.ac.uk/hosted/cache/). Gere's forthcoming edited collection _White Heat, Cold Logic_, draws on this research. [12] To 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 a statement in a computer language. Semantics is the branch of linguistics and logic concerned with meaning. [13] Williams, in _Keywords_ (1988) stresses the term culture's complex historical development and the ways in which it has become important in several distinct intellectual disciplines, and in several seemingly competing systems of thought. [14] This was further developed by Eco into a parody for generating movie scripts in 1972, preempting the commercial software _Plots Unlimited_ (1994) that exemplifies the standardisation of form in contemporary movie-making (in Cramer 2005: 81). [15] The 'death' was intended to shift emphasis onto the words on the page, or the nature of the surrounding language and discourse - and away from associated myths of originality and genius, what Barthes refers to as 'the "message" of the Author-God' (1977: 146). The death of the programmer would be welcome in the sense that the programmer or software artist is often associated with myths of originality and genius. [16] This is further explained in response to Foucault's question 'Who is speaking?' from 'What is an Author?' (1991): 'Mallarmé replies... the word itself... in a pure ceremony of the Book in which the discourse would compose itself' (in Burke 1992: 9). There is a pressing need to examine new demarcations, and the functions released by the alleged disappearance of the author. [17] Hayles's book follows a format partly autobiographical and composed in close collaboration with a graphic designer. The results are mannered and awkward but the point is clearly made. The materiality of text or code is further verified by the property rights exerted on it - intellectual property would even cast (tangible) ideas as material objects in this respect (and this is an important issue that will be returned to in chapter 5). [18] A 'Quine' is named in honour of Willard Van Orman Quine, an influential mathematician and philosopher who died in 2000. See Gary P. Thompson’s ‘The Quine Page’ (http://www.nyx.net/%7Egthompso/quine.htm). [19] Recent attention to Greenberg's work has tended to concentrate on this formalist position and what he calls the 'irreducible essence' of pictorial art, in his 1965 essay 'Modernist Painting' (1992). Drawing upon Kant's idea of 'self-definition', he stresses the flatness of the picture plane as a distinguishing characteristic of Modernist painting - even Jackson Pollock's work demonstrates a tension inherent in the constructed flatness of the surface, acccording to Greenberg. In many accounts, his work on abstract expressionism implies an endorsement of neo-liberal ideology and American individualism. [20] Elsewhere this is sometimes called 'code slang' and more generally 'code narrativity'. Clearly it is possible to imagine a 'creole' consisting of natural language and code such as Mez's work (a creole is a new language - not an amalgam like 'pidgin' - formed where two existing languages come into contact. A further example would be Antiorp/Netochka Nezvanova's semi-legible creoles, in which meaning and authorship are held in question. [21] 'Laying bare the device' is a phrase associated more precisely with Victor Shklovsky's study of Laurence Sterne's _Tristram Shandy_ (of 1759). [22] In a similar way, Wark’s _The Hacker Manifesto_ requires that hackers take control 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 (2004). [23] This was a project by myself, Tim Brennan and Adrian Ward, exhibited online and as part of exhibitions: _Manifest: Library_ (1999) as part of HUB, Bishopsgate Goodsyard, London (commissioned by Cityside & University of East London); and as part of _A Timely Place, or, Getting Back to Somewhere_, London Print Studio (2000). The paper 'Manifest: Reframing False Consciousness' was presented as part of _Consciousness Reframed_, University College Newport, Wales, & _Phenomenology_ conference, University College, Cork, Eire (both 2000). The User's guide is called _Manifest_, published by Working Press 1999. [24] It is tempting to playfully claim that 'software art has no history' - making reference to John Roberts's _Art has no History!_ (1994) examining the ideological construction of art history. This in turn is a reference to Althusser's statement that 'Ideology has no History' (1997), that referred to Marx's _The German Ideology_ (1978 [1845/6]) 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' (in Althusser 1997: 121). The idea that ideology has no history is thereby 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). If the same can be said of art history, can the same be said of software art history, to reveal that the power relations that it expresses are illusory in the same way? [25] Use-value is something Saul Albert discusses in his essay 'Useless Utilities' (2002), opposing the romantic notion that defines art in terms of its lack of utility. In a worse case scenario Albert suggests that '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 (2002). [26] There are key examples in a history of art and technology that might be mentioned in this connection, such as the 'sci-art' work of Leonardo da Vinci and the 'experiments in art and technology' (EAT) involving the engineer Billy Klüver working with John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg amongst others. Of particular interest is Klüver's collaboration with Rauschenberg _9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering_ (1960), which incorporated new technology developed by 10 artists, working with more than 30 Bell Labs engineers. [27] This is the position taken by Habermas in 'Modernity - An Incomplete Project' (1991 [1980]) opposing emergent notions of post-modernity and post-history at that time. Modernity describes a transition state between the old and the new. New technology stands as an exemplar for the wanton post-modern consumerist condition of newness never being allowed to settle in the present - a paradoxical combination of an obsession with nostalgia and at the same time with the idea of almost instantaneous obsolescence. [28] It should be mentioned that the 'Manifesto of the Futurists' is often cast as proto-fascist. 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, in an appropriate ironic twist, where the leading figures of futurism were killed by the very machines they valorised. Benjamin makes a dialectical opposition of the aesthetics of politics and the politics of aesthetics: 'This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.' (1999b: 235) [29] Pedagogy considered as an art form is exemplified by the issues of communication and distribution that conceptual art posed. Joseph Beuys coined the term 'social sculpture' with this in mind: '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) [30] In this context, 'connectionism' stands for 'order-emerging-out-of massive-connections', an approach to artificial intelligence that later became known as neural networks (Kelly 2003: 360-1). [31] A further link can be drawn to the Planetary Collegium (http://www.planetary-collegium.net/) of which Ascott is Director, and the research context from which this submission for PhD derives. [32] It should be said that the _Software_ show builds upon a range of other influences, such as _The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age_ at the Museum of Modern Art (1968), and _Art by Telephone_ at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (1969), as well as _Cybernetic Serendipity_ at the ICA in London (1968). [33] This quote could easily have been taken from Wark's _The Hacker Manifesto_ that also argues for a politics based on an engagement with property that has shifted from land, to industrial production, to information (2004). The _Radical Software_ journal's current availability on the Internet as free PDF downloads is therefore thoroughly in keeping with the ethos of open content publishing initiatives (from http://www.radicalsoftware.org). [34] Another key reference is Burnham's 'Systems Esthetics' (1968b) that informs his _Beyond Modern Sculpture_. Gere's essay 'Jack Burnham and the Work of Art in the Age of Real Time Systems' (as the title suggests) makes the following claim: 'that Burnham is to art in the age of real time systems what Walter Benjamin was to art in the age of its mechanical reproducibility' (2005: 149). [35] It was the Fluxus artist Henry Flynt who allegedly coined the term 'concept art'. Other influences include Alan Kaprow's 'happenings', as well as concrete poetry, mail art, performances, body and street works. [36] This is a statement from 1967. For the _Generator_ show, which used the quote in publicity, LeWitt presented a 'serial variation' (or algorithm) using found postcards of Chicago in which they become increasingly layered. [37] Somewhat similar in spirit, but with added irony, is Cornelia Sollfrank's statement on her web site, made with reference to her net.art generators: 'A smart artist makes the machine do the work!' [38] Kluitenberg writes: 'In this paradoxical environment [of the Internet], 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) [39] This is perhaps a reference to Tristan Tzara's statement of 1918: 'There is a great negative work of destruction to be accomplished.' (in Harrison & Wood 1998: 252) This further relates to the 'negative dialectics' of Adorno that will be introduced in the following chapter. [40] For instance, see the project _Gustav Metzger is My Dad_ (1998) that Camerawork organised on the occasion of its funding cut, where much of the paperwork associated with funding was shredded (http://www.anti-thesis.net/projects/shredding/images.html). In parallel, a digital version shredded the html of web pages (http://www.anti-thesis.net/projects/shredding/source.txt). I was co-producer of these works. [41] The source code of _biennale.py_ is available in spoken form (http://www.epidemiC.ws/love.mp3). That a virus might be regarded as a work of art has a history too. Citing Baumgärtel, Cramer 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). [42] It reads: ':(){ :|:& };:}'. To explain, ':()' defines a function named ':', run a copy of itself if the function is called '{:|:&};', execute the function ':'. [43] The false declaration of love is a particularly cruel one in a world that lacks love. The analogy of the virus is not without its problems of description either. Fuller makes reference to 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 (2004: 28). [44] That new media looks ostensibly like old media is a similar observation to Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin's idea of 'remediation' (1999) to describe the ways in which media are recycled into other media. [45] Allegory is explained: '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.[...] Allegory is a technical means to retransmit discontinuity, fragmentation and a catastrophic structure of history.' (Leslie 2000: 199). [46] The description of _The Bank of Time_ is taken from the _Runme_ feature that I previously wrote in 2004 (http://runme.org/project/+BoT/). [47] Reflecting on his _Passagen-Werk_ (what elsewhere he called the 'Dialectical Fairyland', in Tiedemann 1999: 932), Benjamin further explains his method: '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.' (1999a: 461) More detail on this is included in chapter 3. CHAPTER 3: [1] The Klee painting was bought by Benjamin in 1921. [2] Leslie's translation differs from the commonly distributed Harry Zohn translation (Benjamin 1999c: 249). It also prefigures Marshall McLuhan's statement that: 'We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.' (1967: 74) [3] This is a quite different sense of catastrophe than recent events that occupy the minds of those who fear terrorism. Slavoj Žižek would see fundamentalist terrorism in terms of the 'passion for the real' - in the case of 9/11, America simply 'got what it fantasized about' and the 'Real' violently entered everyday reality (2003). It was the unlikely figure of Karl-Heinz Stockhausen who pointed this out in his statement that 9/11 was the ultimate work of art. [4] The passage is an intriguing one with many further references. For instance, the spiritual overtones are important for an understanding of Benjamin's work. His interest in Messianism and the Kabbalah clearly has a bearing on his views of historical progress and redemption. To elaborate on this would be too much of a tangent in this connection, as would an exploration of the figure known as the 'Turk' that engages Orientalist fantasies of the time. [5] This is also an unwitting reference to Duchamp's _The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)_ (1915-23). Duchamp is an especially suitable reference in this connection as he was a keen chess-player, interested in the automated aspects of the game itself. [6] Bateson's concept 'metalogue' (1972) suggests a similar reflexive logic in describing a conversation in which the form of discussion embodies the subject being discussed. This thesis operates in a similar manner by embodying the subject of software as software. [7] There is nothing but this determining contradiction of matter in motion, explains Mao in his 'On Contradiction'. It is through this that different forms can be identified such as: '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). [8] 'Apocatastasis' does not appear in the dictionary - I assume it combines apocalyptic and stasis in describing damage due to lack of change on a dramatic scale. [9] The quote continues: '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 1980: 96) According to Marx, the more the present is in crisis, the more one has to borrow from the 'spirits of the past'. Thus the living borrow from the dead - to stress the emphasis that Derrida grants it in _Spectres of Marx_ (1994). [10] Fukayama's argument is that American Empire brings an end to European history. Derrida calls Fukuyama's work the new 'gospel', to refer to its Christian overtones. Fukuyama is explicitly drawing upon Hegel's _Phenomenology of Spirit_ (sometimes called _Phenomenology of Mind_) but also this is a reference to the work of Alexander Kojève of 1947, and his 'postscript on post-history and post-historical animals' (1994: 70). [11] Ironically the same criticism has been levelled at Marx for his mystification of the dialectical method - amongst others, by Popper, in _The Open Society and its Enemies_ (2003 [1945]). Popper is concerned to assess the contributions of Hegel and Marx on an understanding of history: '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) [12] Ideology describes how ideas reproduce themselves. The history of the term ideology itself reveals a further connection to software in describing a genetic theory of ideas - and Žižek's term for ideology 'generative matrix' perhaps derives from this. [13] Lefebvre, referring to Hegel's 'end of history', accuses Lukács of conceiving of the 'end of philosophy' through his theory of class consciousness (1968: 36-7). 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 idealist and materialist philosophy for revolutionary praxis. [14] Terry Eagleton explains that in effect, Lukács has adopted Hegel's 'absolute idea' for the proletariat and that through the dialectical method, truth can eventually be found in the whole through overcoming 'reification'. To explain reification briefly: it 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. [15] Althusser is stressing the importance of the 'ideological State apparatuses' (including the family, schools, church, legal apparatus, political system, trade unions, communications media, arts and culture, etc.) that operates more covertly than the overt violence of the 'repressive State apparatuses' (including the government, army, police, courts, prisons, etc.) (1997: 110). This is not a new phenomena. In pre-industrial times, the ideological state apparatus worked through religion predominantly, controlling other apparatuses like education, communications and culture. He thinks this central position has now been taken by the education apparatus in capitalist social formations (1997: 116), and the contemporary conception of the importance of the 'knowledge economy' would appear to continue his emphasis. [16] 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 [as] no theory escapes the marketplace' (Adorno 2000: 3, 4). [17] The integrative power and levelling tendencies of mass culture is what Adorno and Horkheimer's essay 'The Culture Industry' addresses directly (1997 [1944]). The edited collection _Economising Culture_ aimed to address this in the light of current conditions, see chapter 8 (Cox, Krysa, Lewin 2004). [18] The Frankfurt Institut for Social Research developed Marxist social theory, influenced by Freud and Max Weber in particular. It is often charactised as 'critical theory' and is associated with Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Marcuse, Habermas, Arendt, amongst others. The work of Susan Buck-Morss (such as _The Dialectics of Seeing_), also quoted in this thesis, draws from this tradition. Jay's _The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923-1950_ (1996 [1973]) contains an extensive history. [19] The idea of awakening contained a particular theological and mystical significance for Benjamin. The dialectic of waking and sleeping is further described in Guy Debord's _The Society of the Spectacle_ (1998 [1967]) in which the impulse is also to awaken from the bad dream of capitalism, to shake the sleeping political consciousness out of its slumber. [20] 'The Spectre is Still Roaming Around!' as Žižek puts it elsewhere (1998). Indeed, the first noun in _The Communist Manifesto_ is 'spectre' and it immediately returns (like the repressed): 'A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of communism' ['Ein Gespenst geht um in Europa - das Gespenst des Kommunismus']. Žižek used the phrase 'The Spectre is Still Roaming Around!' for the title of his introduction to the 150th anniversary of _The Communist Manifesto_ published as a separate volume (1998). Elsewhere, in _The Ticklish Subject_, Zizek parodies _The Communist Manifesto_, and playfully begins: '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 [...] (1999b: 1). [21] This thesis supports this view, not least in its use of the programming language Perl, in which 'AND has higher precedence than OR does', according to its creator Wall (1999). See the entry to _Software Studies_ on Perl for more on this online (http://www.softwarestudies.org/) and in section 8 (Cox & Ward 2007). [22] Popper is also a well-known critic of Marxism. In _The Open Society and its Enemies_ (2003 [1945]), he accuses Marx of overstressing economism in what he calls 'economic historicism' (2003: 110). [23] Bhaskar's critique also casts Darwinian evolution as teleological and hence closed. It is important not to conflate this critique with the reactionary creationism of fundamentalist Christians, whose sophistication stopped with the first chapter of _Genesis_ according to Bateson (2000: 434). 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 the inevitability and naturalness of free trade, open competition and market forces, where the rich get richer and so on. Engels summarises this problem as follows: '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) [24] Prigogine and Stengers cite Ludwig 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) CHAPTER 4: [1] Following the economic crisis in the 1970s, Castells describes the conditions for the change in the evolution of capitalism 'to overcome its own contradictions', and to escape delimiting restrictions imposed by state-controlled industrial forces (1996: 51). Thus, reform sought to deepen the capitalist logic of profit-seeking and enhance productivity by globalising production, circulation and markets, whilst establishing state support for these policies, often to the detriment of social and public interests (Castells 1996: 19). [2] Jameson relates these economic stages directly to cultural production as follows: realism (worldview of realist art), modernism (abstraction of high modernist art) and postmodernism (pastiche) (1991). [3] There are further links here that acknowledge relatively distinct periodisations that relate to machines and capitalist restructuring: this sense of pervasiveness enabled by networked computers corresponds to what Gilles Deleuze calls a 'society of control' modelled on the 'third wave' of computerised machines (in his 'Postscript on Control Societies', from _Negotiations_, in Galloway 2004: 3). [4] Incidentally, although humans have named ants in pejorative terms, the 'queen' is not an authority or camp figure, merely an egg-laying ant and does not direct or exploit the workers as such. [5] Although DNA's double helix, as the basic structure of life was identified in 1953 (by Francis Crick and James Watson), it was only by the 1970s that genetic engineering became widely practised with the cloning of the first human gene in 1977 (Castells 1996: 48) and subsequently the idea of engineering life has become big business (with resultant battles over property rights and who should own the copyright on gene research). The ethical issue came to public attention in 1988 when scientist entrepreneurs at Harvard University challenged the moral and ethical agenda of God and Nature by patenting a genetically engineered mouse. By now, the human genome has been extensively mapped and despite the best efforts of those who would consider life to be in the public domain, scientist-entrepreneurs have gained legal and economic control. Thus, humans themselves are becoming increasingly privatised in a perversion of nature. Some artists are working in this area but tend to employ crude analogies or simply illustrate the issues. Eduardo Kac's 'transgenic' rabbit _Alba_ is one provocative exception that engages with the discourse and ethics of genetics (http://www.ekac.org/gfpbunny.html). [6] Biology, like technology, is clearly caught up in complex cultural narratives of power, knowledge and subjectivity. This is reminiscent of the ways in which Foucault theorised the body and technology as bound together in the construction of power. The human genome project is an obvious example of the ways in which knowledge and power serve the interests of institutions over individuals (Kember 2000: 157). 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. For instance, research in this area promises: '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). To the artist/activist collective Critical Art Ensemble, this is ostensibly an eugenics programme. [7] In the industrial period, 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). This is perhaps more a question of disaffection as the worker is no more stupid than the system they labour for: '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). To be fair, Smith's argument is intended to suggest that education is necessary for these very reasons, although he does not extend this to an understanding of how the education system itself 'reproduces' capitalist interests - something Althusser and Bourdieu describe in more detail (see chapter 3). [8] Despite this tendency to imagine the worker-less factory, the process of production evidently still rests on living labour but it is organised in network forms. Marx puts it like this: 'A machine which is not active in the labour process is useless[...]'. (1990: 289). Even a so-called autonomous system cannot produce value in itself. [9] Klein says much the same in her observations on the way that labour is subordinated by the machine: '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".' (2001: xvii) In the chapter 'The Discarded Factory', Klein describes appalling exploitation that is the reality of globalisation, paying particular attention to violence and corruption within free trade zones. [10] By referring to both system and hierarchy, Hardt and Negri aim to make a hybrid of Niklas Luhmann's systems theory (in which society is described in terms of autopoesis rather than made by humans as such) and John Rawls's theory of justice. By 'governance without government', they are referring to the title of a book by James Rosenau and Ernst-Otto Czempiel (1992). Elsewhere, this myth of a democratic, nonhierarchical, noncentred network structure is what Deleuze and Guattari describe as the 'rhizome' (1987: 3-25). [11] This description of a distributed management system 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. Kurator.org asks: '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) The suggestion of the project is that the artist-programmer characterisation is extended to that of the curator-programmer, and software art to software curation. [12] This can be traced earlier to Leibniz in the seventeenth century, who thought that clockwork automata could express perfection when constructed by God, but not when constructed by mere humans. According to Cartesian logic at this time, mind 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 to Wiener (2000: 41). [13] For a thorough technical history, see Paul E. Ceruzzi's _A History of Modern Computing_ (2003 [1998]). The book covers the development of the electronic digital computer in the 1940s to the spread of networking after 1985, and in the second edition through to the development of open source software after 1995. In any given history, there are vested interests in which history is preferred. For instance, in _The Language of New Media_, Manovich cites Konrad Zuse to situate the beginnings of 'new media' in keeping with his central analogy to the history of cinema (2001: 25). In contrast, Geoffrey Batchen, a historian of photography, disputes this version of events and proceeds to describe photography in binary terms: the presence and absence of light, and on/off tonal patterning representing numerical repetitions of units to make up a whole image (Batchen, in Kimbell 2004: 29). Indeed, he claims it is 'a fledgling form of information culture' made more explicit by Fox Talbot's 1839 proposal to replace the use of sunlight by the spark of electricity: 'a making visible of electricity' (in Kimbell 2004: 31). Batchen refers to a Fox Talbot image _Lace_ (of 1845) to make the link to a longer history of lace-making and computation. [14] In describing the factory as a 'self-regulating system in embryonic form', Marx, using bio-technological metaphors claimed: '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) Is the achievement of technology simply to fulfill this nightmarish vision of automation? [15] Workers as 'second-order robots' refers to a history of the term 'robot' itself. It was allegedly first used by Karel Capek in his play 'Rossum's Universal Robots', in Prague in 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. [16] This is also a reference to Benoit Mandelbrot's _The Fractal Geometry of Nature_, 1883, and his question: '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 becomes infinite. [17] An infinite loop is a sequence of instructions in a computer program which loop endlessly. [18] Boolean logic has many applications in electronics, computer hardware and software. In _Zeros + Ones_ (1997), Sadie Plant relates this logic to sexual politics. She explains with irony how ones and zeros, male and female, penis and vagina, all make 'lovely couples' (1997: 35). In this sense, 'It takes two to make a binary' and set up the heterosexual paradigm. Taking the analogy to sex further, artificial life can be understood as a heterosexist discourse, with its emphasis on the desire for reproduction as one of the definitions of life (Kember 2003). [19] The idea that a machine might demonstrate intelligence is derived from Alan Turing's paper 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence' of 1950, hence the so-called 'Turing Test' to measure whether a machine might pass for a human. Hofstadter's 'A Coffee House Conversation on the Turing Test' (1985 [1981]) is sceptical about the claims of artificial intelligence, setting the richness of human imagination and emotions against the mechanicist promises of artificial intelligence in the form of a conversation. [20] In Heim's view, class conflict is a thing of the past, which says something about the commodification of dialectics by academics and publishers alike, keen to appear radical to satisfy the market but not upset it. [21] Gotthard Günther, in 'Grundzüge einer neuen Theorie des Denkens in Hegel's Logik' ['Main Features of a New Thinking in Hegel's Logic'], situates classical binary logic as part of a more general and comprehensive multivalued or many systems logic (Paul 2000). What further captures the imagination is that Günther planned to build a 'transputer', a machine based on 'polycontextural logic' (how he perceived human consciousness). There is some contemporary interest in this logic in as far as it relates to networked technology, in that it arguably reflects Günther's polycontextural logic. [22] Owens is partly concerned to distance herself from what she sees as the mistaken (postmodern) view of complexity as proof of uncertainty, virtuality and scientific myth-making (1996). She is particularly thinking of Kuhn's _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions_ (1970), and Paul Feyerabend's _Against Method_ (1975). Owens suggests that scientific method has always embraced a strategic sense of uncertainty, not just the arts and humanities (as indicated in chapter 3 when discussing reflexivity and recursion). Similarly Brian Goodwin (in his _How the Leopard Changed Its Spots_, 1994) too easily equates this sense of uncertainty to a critique of modernity (1997: 114). He is assuming modernism to affirm determinism, whereas critical modernity has always embraced uncertainty and its own critique, and should therefore not necessarily be seen as deterministic but able to embrace its contradictions (as described in section 3.2, with reference to Berman in particular). [23] The strange attractor demonstrates 'infinite regress', an inexhaustible sequence of folding and stretching a line. 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 (paraphrased from Gleick 1998: 150-1). [24] Lukács in _History and Class Consciousness_ would de-emphasise the application of dialectics to nature, in favour of the social and conceptual realms only (1976). Whereas Jay describes Marcuse's position as: '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"' (1996: 73). Antonio Gramsci also shifts the dialectic away from the contradiction inherent in nature and emphasises the contradiction between reality and the will of the subject, in calling for a 'pessimism of the intellect, [but] optimism of the will'. This is usually attributed to Gramsci but is a variation of Romain Rolland's phrase 'pessimism of the intelligence, optimism of the will' (footnote, in Hoare & Nowell-Smith 1971: 174). [25] More detail on this issue of incomplete synthesis was introduced in chapter 3. Otherwise, false totalities emerge. For example, Stalinism is accounted for its lack of open-endedness, as it wrongly assumed the dialectical process to have ended, and closed it down to drastic effect. [26] An English translation and hypertext version of Queneau's 'A Story as You Like It' ['Un conte à votre façon'] is available online (http://www.thing.de/projekte/7:9%23/queneau_1.html). [27] Prigogine and Stengers state: '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) [28] For instance, and according to Owens, a theory like deconstruction is 'trapped in the very dualism it seeks to circumvent' (1996: 91). Other examples were mentioned earlier in this connection (see note 22). [29] Alternatively, there could be a forceful logic in making a historical link to Anarchist principles in describing a 'political system' that emphasises disorder and chaos. This is what Bey does in _T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism_ (2003 [1985]), describing anarchy as chaos, and chaos as the principle of continual creation, of 'all-potentiality' (2003: 70). He is making reference to what Prigogine calls 'creative evolution' to account for the creative potential of 'perturbations, crashes, and breakdowns in the Net' (2003: 111). By drawing upon Taoist thinking, Bey resists what he sees as the negativity associated with chaos theory, or its link to new ageism or science that sees it as a negative force of destruction or for enforcing order. [30] There are a number of examples of the ways in which in practice, Marxism has sought to separate dialectics from materialism: otherwise remaining in impoverished form under Stalinism, or by focusing almost exclusively on contradiction through Maoism (Owens cites Mao's _On Contradiction_). According to Mao, there is nothing but contradiction of matter in motion, following in the tradition of Engels in this respect (see note 9 to chapter 3). CHAPTER 5: [1] Like Žižek, Guattari sees the reorganisation of better social relations as no more difficult to imagine than other scientific or aesthetic endeavours - no more difficult to 'solve than questions of quantum physics or the manipulation of genes' (1995: 46). [2] Guattari refers to an 'intradisciplinary' approach, as the capacity to traverse different fields, in contrast to an interdisciplinary approach that would tend to make the mistake of making a synthesis of heterogenous positions. [3] To state the obvious, the antithetical title of their _Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia_ (1990 [1972]) explicitly negates the oedipal drama; the subtitle indicates the 'intradisciplinary' principle (described in the previous note) of drawing together capitalism and schizophrenia. [4] To Marcuse, so-called 'perversions' such as homosexuality operate as a potential challenge to the exploitative organisation of labour, as expressed in procreative social reproduction (Geoghegan 1981: 53-4). Deleuze and Guattari also cite Wilhelm Reich in this connection to understand the mechanics of fascism. Their emphasis on 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. Deleuze and Guattari would have us re-read Marx, but also Adolf Hitler, to understand how the desiring-machine operates (in Guattari 1995: 248). Similarly, in the work of the Frankfurt School, Oedipal resistance to the father lent itself to the study of authority (and by extension the relationship of the individual to society) in as much as they were trying to understand the psycho-social conditions in which workers rejected their historical role within Marxism to accept Nazism. [5] Freud would advise that if you repress the existence of something, even repression itself, it will return anyway at unexpected moments, often as trauma. This Freudian model of latency is what Jameson calls the 'returns of the repressed of historicity' (1991: xvi). [6] The surrealist Francis Picabia describes the machine as 'the daughter born without a mother' (in Guattari 1995: 125). [7] Indicating his intellectual preferences, Leclaire would like to reintroduce some dualisms such as the real and the symbolic (Lacan), or the base and the superstructure (Marx). [8] Negri also co-wrote _Communists Like Us_ with Deleuze (1990). As part of the Italian group 'autonomia' founded in the 1970s, Negri and others tried to open up new possibilities for the theory and practice of class struggle. Many of the ideas associated with autonomia were developed through the journal _Futur Antérior_ [future perfect], and the contributions of Hardt, Lazzarato, Negri, Virno, mentioned later in this chapter. [9] It represents 'simultaneous separation and coherence', according to Jim Fleming in the 'Editor's Preface' (1991: vii) in words that echo the process of connections and rupture described in the work of Deleuze and Guattari (in Guattari 1995: 126-7). To add more detail and theoretical connections, Negri's _Marx after Marx_ results from a series of lectures at the Université Paris in 1978 at the invitation of Althusser. [10] 'Subsumption' indicates the ways that one thing is absorbed into another. In this context, class exploitation is subsumed into broader social forms and life in general. [11] The 'multitude' (taken from Benedict de Spinoza's phrase 'democracy of the multitude'), expresses the 'coexistence of the positive and the negative on the terrain of immanence' according to Hardt and Negri in _Empire_ (2000: 374). Their _Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire_ adds more detail on the possibility for a revolutionary democracy, as does Virno's _A Grammar of the Multitude_ (2004), drawing particularly on the contrasting views of Thomas Hobbes and Spinoza to develop an understanding that is derived from Marx's idea of general or mass intellect. [12] Hardt and Negri say: 'The proletariat is not what it used to be, but that does not mean it has vanished' (2000: 53). A broader definition of proletarians would include the 'marginalised proletariat' of students, the unemployed and unpaid house workers. Even technologies that have changed the nature of work might also be described as somewhat 'proletarianised' according to John Armitage (2002). Some commentators, in what Armitage calls the 'neoliberal discourse of technology' (2002), would go further and suggest that not only is human labour no longer at the centre of production but technology is instead. For more on this, see Jeremy Rifkin's _The End of Work_ (1995) - although this is not a view this thesis supports. [13] This understanding builds upon the work of Habermas in his _Theory of Communicative Action_ (1984), that updates the concept of historical materialism to take account of communicative action. [14] The free distribution of source code is free only in the sense that it can be further adapted and changed (under certain conditions of course). This is what Stallman refers to as 'copyleft' protected by the GNU public license agreement for future free provision and distribution under the same conditions. See http://www.opensource.org/ and then http://www.fsf.org/ for more detail on the distinction between this and open source. [15] The distribution of new knowledge associated with a PhD thesis is similarly revealing. This explains the purpose of the manner in which this thesis is distributed. It is first copyrighted in the standard way, but at a point in its future development the text will be published on the web and licensed under the Libre Commons Res Communes License. See chapter 1 (introduction) for further explanation of this. [16] See the web site (http://twenteenthcentury.com/uo/index.php), and for its Faculty of Unix, running since 2002 (http://darq.org.uk/FacultyUnix). [17] For more on the Libre Commons License, see the web site (http://www.libresociety.org/library/libre.pl/Libre_Commons/). In a recent posting to the _nettime_ mail list, Cramer is scathing of this approach: 'This is a romantic apolitical position because such a space "outside of all legal jurisdictions" does not exist. Wake up and get a life.' Berry counters this with the following: 'Incidentally, you may be interested to know that law requires a state to enforce it, and, to the best of my knowledge, we do not *yet* have a global state, and consequently the spaces between nation states (such as the high seas) are not subject to law as such (rather international treaties which attempt to govern these ungovernable spaces).' (2005) [18] It was le Comte de Lautréamont, who in 1870 claimed: 'Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author's phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea.' This was later plagiarised by Guy Debord as follows: 'Plagiarism is necessary. Progress demands it. Staying close to the author's phrasing, plagiarism exploits his expressions, erases false ideas, replaces them with correct ideas.' (from 'Negation and Consumption', in _The Society of the Spectacle_, 1998: 145). Stewart Home further claims that this was wrongly attributed and Lautréamont plagarised the quote: 'Old discoveries belong to those who put them to use'. Home has reworked it too as: 'Progress is necessary. Plagiarism demands it' (these quotes are left unreferenced in the spirit of their contents). [19] Chainworkers.org's slogan is 'Chain and brainworkers unite' (http://www.chainworkers.org/) referred to by Lazzarato (2003). [20] This also accounts for further misconceptions such as Lunenfeld's term 'dialectical immaterialism' (2002), to contribute to critical discussions about 'technology untethered to the constraints of production'. As much as the phrase is evocative of the approach this thesis takes, Lunenfeld's statement is a severe misunderstanding of the ways in which production has expanded to the whole of society, with cultural work thoroughly integrated in the social factory. [21] However, Barbrook's position should not be dismissed out of hand, as it is also one that responds critically to what he calls 'the Californian ideology' that typifies the combination of technological determinism and free market principles. The example is _Wired_ magazine, that reproduces an ideology based upon 'Darwinian thinking and techno-mysticism' according to Stallabrass (2003: 149). [22] For example, Mauss refers to 'potlatch', a ceremonial feast at which possessions are give away or destroyed to display wealth or enhance status (1970: 5). [23] The first Apple Macintosh and its 'desktop' graphical user interface was introduced in 1984. Bowles is referring to the Apple II. Apple remains the machine of choice in most 'creative' contexts. In the most recent reprint of his essay, Bowles adds some more recent reflection but in general finds its general argument holds (2005). [24] In a similar way, Latour describes a situation where the seemingly impossible task of opening Pandora's black box is made possible by experiencing technology at work, not ready-made - but 'in action' and 'before the box closes and goes black' (1999: 21). 'Black box' is a phrase from cybernetics, applied when a piece of machinery or a set of commands are too complex to be easily understood. This applies almost by default to software where the complex processes and actions are obscured. [25] The online description reads: 'Suicide Letter Wizard for Microsoft Word helps you to create a suicide letter according to your preferences. Use professional design. Choose from a variety of styles. Make your letter look great.' (http://www.dxlab.org/slw/). [26] OpenOffice.org is a multiplatform and multilingual office suite and an open-source project. Compatible with all other major office suites, the product is free to download, use, and distribute (http://www.openoffice.org/). [27] This would be in keeping with the position of de Certeau, who asserted that users oppose established rules in the most ordinary of circumstances (1984). Through what he calls 'antidiscipline', consumers negotiate discipline and power exerted on them. By employing what he calls 'tactical' forms and 'makeshift creativity', consumers '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' (1984: xxiv). [28] The term 'tactical media' is variously defined, but emerges from a group of media activists in Rome in 1996. Lovink's involvement in tactical media emerges from the _Next 5 Minutes_ festival (which began in 1993) and other collaborative writings; for instance 'The ABC of Tactical Media' (1997) with David Garcia, and 'New Rules for the New Actonomy' (2001) with Schneider. For Critical Art Ensemble, the concept is a way of avoiding the 'dense arcane style of the Frankfurt Institut' (2002: 27), and a way of asserting difference from avant-garde practices for 'electronic civil disobedience' (2002: 13). [29] For example, 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). [30] Or, as Eben Moglen puts it: 'A spectre is haunting multinational capitalism - the spectre of free information.' (2003: 216) Moglen is a lawyer who has contributed to the development of the General Public License (GPL) with Stallman. His full parody continues: 'All the powers of "globalism" have entered into an unholy alliance to exorcize this spectre: Microsoft and Disney, the World Trade Organization, the United States Congress and the European Commission. 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, whose 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 Spectre of Free Information with a Manifesto of our own.' (2003: 216) Also making explicit reference to the _The Communist Manifesto_, Wark claims that what now haunts the world is the spectre of 'hacking'. However, he claims his manifesto is neither an orthodox Marxist tract nor post-Marxist repudiation, but a 'crypto-Marxist reimagining of the materialist method for practising theory within history' (2004: 024). [31] The phrase 'precarious labour' has become increasingly popular in the activist community to describe the material reality of intermittent and irregular work that 'teeters' on the edge of moral acceptability and the ability to generate a living wage, although it should be noted that it is not labour in itself that is precarious but the 'technical and cultural conditions in which info-labour' finds itself (Beradi 2005). [32] Negri's position on Spinoza is developed in his essay 'The Savage Anomaly' of 1980. [33] For more on this, see Reiner Schürmann, _Des hégémonies brisées_, Mouvezin: T.E.R., 1996 (in Hardt & Negri 2000: 389). The term 'corruption' is borrowed from Aristotle's _De generatione et corruptione_ (1982), again cited in _Empire_. [34] The dialectical operation between states of order and disorder also underpins Signwave's _Anagrammar_ (2001), an unruly version of Microsoft Powerpoint or Apple Keynote (produced to accompany the essay 'The Aesthetics of Generative Code' for conference presentation, Cox, McLean & Ward 2001 - see section 8). Whilst presenting text slides on screen, it 'listens' to the current sound input source, and when a sound occurs, starts to jumble up the letters of the current slide. When the sound falls below an ambient level, the letters are rearranged back into their original order. Both examples demonstrate a dialectical play between two interconnected states of order and disorder, between generation and corruption, suggesting the potential for transformation. In the context of this thesis, the examples offer a dialectical approach that responds to an understanding of complexity theory (as argued at the end of chapter 4). [35] Negri's negative view of socialism is perhaps informed by the various failed examples of 'real existing socialism' observed at the time of writing in 1985. With Hardt, he charts the tragic irony in that nationalist socialism comes to resemble national socialism, because the same machine of national sovereignty lies behind the logic of both. As a result, they maintain '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 made labour as a whole capable of constituting itself as a government' (2000: 350). [36] Pasquinelli identifies action related to labour, politics and art, as integrated into each other, making everyone 'workers-artists-activists' (2005: 2). [37] The Situationist International also made much of this strategy of refusal in the May '68 uprisings in announcing 'Don't Work!' and 'Never Work!' (Ford 2005: 119 & 123). The Situationist refusal to work is paralleled by the Neoist 'artstrike' calling on cultural workers to stop making or discussing their work from 1990 to 1993 - although this is simply plagiarising Metzger's 1974 proposal for an Art Strike, according to Home (1993). In the context of performance art, refusing to work can be a provocative action, such as the example of Roy Varra who simply stood in Tianneman Square, and although doing nothing, was arrested. [38] Deleuze explains that a sabot was a worker's wooden clog. In the context of programming, 'deprogramming' is one example of calling to attention the structures and standard formats of software. This strategy makes reference to the Situationist 'détournement' of technology. CHAPTER 6: [1] Lévi Strauss's _The Raw and the Cooked_ (1970) provides a further reference in which the 'raw' associated with nature is opposed to the 'cooked' associated with culture. His approach is structuralist anthropology drawing upon semiotics, where the raw 'signifier' enters into the realm of the 'signified' when cooked. The analogy between recipes and source code is further explored in the barszcz source code repository that includes Jaromil's string based cooking (http://www.barszcz.net/). [2] To Adorno and Horkheimer, the analogy to the production of food also reveals that: 'the culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises[...] that the diner must be satisfied with the menu' (1997: 139). What is on offer is bad for the digestion. [3] The artist-programmer Mark Napier says much the same: 'In the software industry the code is very valuable since it contains the knowledge, recipe or blueprint of how the software product is made. The binary "executable" is distributed to the world, but the source code is carefully guarded. As an artist I'm happy to share most of my source code with other artists.[...] Whoever owns the source code in effect "owns" the artwork.' (2000) [4] Socialfiction.org's _.walk_ won the first prize in the software art category at transmediale in 2004 (see section 8, Cox, Reas & Rich 2003). A simple stroll algorithm follows: '// Classic.walk; Repeat { 1st street left; 2nd street right; 2nd street left }'. This is both clearly understandable even to the non-specialist and wildly unpredictable in its outcomes. [5] Unix is open in the broadest sense in that its API (application programming interface) works across different computer platforms. Most servers rely on Unix, and it underpins the Internet protocol of TCP/IP. [6] Elsewhere 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. 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 puts 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). This also emphasises Virno's point referred to in the previous chapter in relation to general intellect - and the importance of the public sphere in generating positive potential. [7] This description is adapted from the previous collaborative paper 'Coding Praxis' (see section 8, Cox, McLean & Ward 2004). [8] For instance, the work of toplap (http://www.toplap.org/) who perform music using live coding and display their desktop screens in the spirit of transparency of process (Collins et al 2003). This is not intentionally a politicised practice at all (and consequently suffers from the problem of virtuosity as an individualised display of skill), but holds the potential to be a critical practice in the sense this section describes. [9] Or, actions and events determine words. This is the irony of Bruno's _Human Browser_ (2006) mentioned previously in this thesis. [10] Although it should be noted that Virno argues the opposite to Arns, in claiming that it is not the parole but the langue which is mobilised (2004: 91). [11] The distinction between work and labour is hard to fathom, as both words broadly refer to the same thing. Arendt quotes John Locke: 'the labor of our body and the work of our hands' (2000: 170). She adds 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 more closely to the cycles of life itself, as it 'corresponds to the condition of life itself' and lasting happiness and contentment lies in 'painful exhaustion and pleasurable regeneration' (Arendt 2000: 172). [12] This position is developed in Virno's 'Virtuosity and Revolution: The Political Theory of Exodus' (1996: 188). [13] Praxis is clearly an important issue in Marxist philosophy. Lefebvre explains that 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). [14] The issue of the Internet as an extension of the public sphere makes reference to Habermas's _The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere_ (1985) and texts such as Mark Poster's 'Cyberdemocracy: Internet and the Public Sphere' (1997) - see also 'The Digital Crowd' (1999), in section 8. [15] This approach to a conclusion is inspired by Virno's _A Grammar of the Multitude_ (2004).