Re: [-empyre-] Matrixial Encounters

["James Barrett" <jim.barrett@humlab.umu.se>]

This exchange has been most engaging in its concepts if not for its
dizzying breadth.

I, as a resident in a materially privileged corner of the globe, feel we
can discuss the consumer capitalist simulacra that we live in until it
makes us feel better about being so damn rich.  However our arrangement
clearly has its disturbing problems and glaring injustices, but we, the
relatively few, benefit materially from it every day we log on, upload,
download, buy, sell, display, publish and create the huge amount of
digital or electronic art that is either commodity or gift at the moment.
By inference the hacker without Microsoft et.al. would be somewhat
meaningless (as Saul suggested).

Applied critical theory can allow for more accurate understandings of our
own subjectivity and there have been instances whereby people have acted
en mass based upon theoretical positions. But very few great artists have
been great theoreticians and vice versa (ouch!). A complimentary or
symbiotic relationship could be said to exist between the theorist and the
artist. Sometimes they meet in direct exchange but often it is an 'a
posteriori' relationship.

The ?sad militants of ?68? certainly were naive in many ways but one
should not underestimate the effectiveness of organised militant activism
generally. The international environmental movement (Earth First etc.) and
the peace movement (Ploughshares etc.) over the last 30 years have made
relative but nonetheless significant gains, both materially and in term of
spectacle consciousness (i.e. media). The nature of activism should be
view as well as a continuum, like any human activity. To turn to the very
dark side of militant activism employing new media technology, I recently
watched with horrid fascination for about 20 seconds before turning away,
the online streamed video of the bloody execution of a hostage in Iraq.
Having grown up in Australia with many surviving relatives from 1939-45,
it was The Knights of the Bushido, which gave me the image of a
decapitation execution at the hands of a heartless enemy. The contemporary
digital variety was instead a different form of visual terror but one
designed as spectacle none the less. The terror and revolt inspired by
such a mass representation of an act of violence is thought by many to
have aided in returning the Republican President for a second term in the
White House. Jean Baudrillard?s recent short essay The Pornography of War
(http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/berg/cpij/2005/00000001/00000001/art00003)
discusses the cracked rationality behind the violence better than I ever
could.

Felix Guattari acknowledges in his final poignant text ?Chaosmosis? that
it was only relatively late in the western cultural continuum that art
separated itself from ritual- This coincided in Time with the rise of the
museum and the growth of the bourgeois political economy. This economy
largely maintains itself today in ongoing modifying forms and it continues
to cast its light over our own estimates of such constructed binaries as
?Tribal, ethnic, mythical? opposing ?Cultural, historical, economic?. The
estimation of the events of ?68 as ?sad? was perhaps in regards to the 'a
posteriori' realization of the complete failure to maintain a mass state
of revolutionary ?becoming? beyond the pseudo-counter cultural icon that
the events became within the authorized procession of HIStory. The
philosophies around the Self and becoming, in turn, are a major theme in
much of the best of Continental critical work that emerged in the years
following the blab bla bla ?events of 68? (yawn):

?The closest thing there is to order is the approximate, and always
temporary, prevention of disorder. The closest thing there is to
determinacy is the relative containment of chance. The opposite of chance
is not determinacy. It is habit.?
Brian Massumi, 1992, 58


Finally, in the spirit of Massumi's "chance", I would like to quote the
linguist Edwin Sapir: "All systems leak.". I believe this is actually the
advantage held by anyone who wishes to attempt to ?live, create, think,
perform? more autonomously and in doing so transgressively. In the gap is
our space, but it never will last very long. But nor should it. The
digital form is not still, is not permanent, not static.

As Jeremy wrote:

"I really think that fighting the inevitable is futile. The thing to do is
to search these new frontiers and galvanize behind ways to push them in
pure art and alternate culture jamming and dissent organizing
methodologies and stratagems."

To quote someone who is little respected in academic circles but read in
many of the squats and occupied collectives of my own past experience,
Hakim Bey on Pirate Utopias:

?Absolutely nothing but a futile martyrdom could possibly result now from
a head-on collision with the terminal State, the megcorporate information
State, the empire of Spectacle and Simulation. Its guns are pointed at us,
while our meagre weaponry finds nothing to aim at but a hysteresis, a
rigid vacuity, a Spook capable of smothering every spark in ectoplasm of
information, a society of capitulation ruled by the image of the Cop and
the absorbing eye of the TV screen.?

Waiting for the back blast.
James

>> Yes.
>
> The issue at hand is one that has been around through countless earlier
> new technologies, functionalities, gizmos, etc.
>
> I have experienced this personally.  I helped create an early locative gps
> spatial narrative and sound project that got a lot of press in the art
> world first, then the business folks sniffed the utilitarian and
> commercial applications of what we created.  We went from being written
> about in wired and speaking on npr to getting emails about commerical
> ends.  This is inevitable with any tool that begins to hint at or clearly
> elucidates some new gizmo aspect of existing business paradigms.  We never
> intended that to be our goal at all, in fact we were coming at it from
> purely concept and avant garde angles.   We left it to others to go in the
> commercial direction ( essential a literalization and dumbing down of what
> we and a few others came to as art and  cultural commentary).
>
>  I really think that fighting the inevitable is futile.  The thing to do
> is to search these new frontiers and galvanize behind  ways to push them
> in pure art and alternate culture jamming and dissent organizing
> methodologies and strategems.  We cannot argue and pick at fine points,
> signifiers, qouted reference points in the words of philosophy and
> previous analytical constructs while the need for action and unity in
> dissent and awareness grows at such a frightening rate.  A crucial
> discussion would be one of what technologies and functionalities we have
> now at hand, what we will have very soon, and what to do.
>
> jeremy
>
>
>
>
>
>> Capitalist (bourgeois) relationships (those of ownership)  are now,  as
>> in the past a fetter on the development of the means of production --
>> within such a environment  "Hackers" no more make up a class in the
>> classical sense of that word then the militants  (from the luddites to
>> the Maoist) who in the name of various ideologies sought to combat
>> capital -- and in actuality by classic Marxist -Leninist terms they are
>> adventurist  because their actions are volunteristic -- directed by no
>> class vision and lacking ties to those classes in whose name they act
>> -- to identify this individualism and lack of discipline and the
>> resulting spontaneity as liminal is to romanticize the Hacker  who seem
>> to occupy no more than a petite bourgeois position as a facilitator who
>> has already been appropriated into the capital's research and
>> development dept.
>> _______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
>> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>


-- 
Doctoral Student, Umeå University
Department of Modern Languages/English
+46 (0)90 786 6584
HUMlab.Umeå University.SE-901 87.Umeå.Sweden
Blog: http://www.soulsphincter.blogspot.com
HUMlab: http://www.humlab.umu.se/