Re: [-empyre-] transgression anyway

["Jeff Sonstein" <jeffs@it.rit.edu>]

Aliette writes:

> We have to reinvent; if we went out of the era of the production (of the 
> criticism of the political economy) then let us take place beyond the 
> question of the technique as resource of class: which possesses it, who 
> produces thanks to it, who fires his resource from it, etc...?

my training was as a "social scientist" so please pardon any 
misunderstandings of your argument on my part...

I don't know that we actually *have* gone out of the era
when an analysis of who controls what has to be 
a central part of understanding our social surround(s)

maybe the emphasis is shifting to producing 
that which does not fit well into 
the previous model of *physical* production
and 
perhaps there is still an argument to be made
for social understanding rooted in an analysis 
centered on who tries to control
"raw materials" and "production" and "distribution"
and how they do so...

one could well argue that the analytic model 
should now be more about the production of ideas/meaning
(extracting/creating information from discovered/created data)
and about the control of the production and storage of 
data and ideas and meaning 
(data and ideas as raw material)
and about the transportation of ideas/meaning
and so on...

the former Serbian government tried to control
how it's citizens understood the outside world
and how they communicate with the outside world
and in repsonse
transgressive students in Serbia set up a website at xs4all
and kept it so up-to-date during the democracy struggle
that western news agencies used it for a source...

is this not "at the core" a part of 
a struggle best understood in terms of 
who controls the production of data and information and meaning
and who controls the storage and transportation of ideas?

> But ubiquity of hypermedia and the recent laws of control which accompany 
> it: what do you think of? What transgression (malpractice) is possible which 
> cannot be otherwise watched or only of the mist expert hackers? (thus far from 
> the common social practice shared in every day life?)

    in the beginning there was data
    and it was without form...
    then it was organized into information
    and that was good...
    then there was so damned much of it
    that it collapsed back into the primordial ooze again
    becoming [effectively]
    an oozing and undifferentiated mass
    and that was confusing...
    so on the eight day She sighed
    and went back to the drawing board

sure 
instruments of social control *can* watch 
every electronic communication of everybody
and 
at this point in the spread of connectivity
they can no longer *notice* very much 
for there is so damned much of it...
and that is only going to get worst 
(from their perspective)

IMHO this makes/will-make a lot of "transgressions" 
easier to "hide in the grass" 
because they are embedded in 
"the common social practice shared in every day life"...

because individual computer ownership
is beyond the means of the average city-dweller in the PRC
"Internet Cafes" have sprung up all over the place...
they are supposed to log what everyone does
they are supposed to restrict where everyone "goes"
and yet we find the government periodically shutting down 
thousands of unlicensed and uncontrolled Internet cafes
each time the government has an info-control spasm

what is the popularity of these transgressive places about?
IMHO
it is that they bring the ideas flowing over the internetwork 
into the everyday lives of people who use them
and thus these centers of transgression make possible 
a back-and-forth flow of ideas/expressiveness

this seens to me compatable with 
what I understand to be 
the core idea of "situationism":

  transforming the categories of  "art" and "culture"
  from separate activities
  to integrated-into-everyday-life activities

jeffs

--
Jeff Sonstein, Assistant Professor
Department of Information Technology
Rochester Institute of Technology
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