Re: [-empyre-] The Hyper-Modern Condition
Dear empyre list members,
I want to briefly respond to some of the issues raised on the list in
response to my posting on 'the hyper-modern condition". Christina
mailed me and thought it would be a good way to end the discussion of
March, in this case just a few days later.
Obviously there are a lot of issues raised in these postings, and a
lot of them are contentious. Still it could be good to review a few
of them and give a personal take on it, more or less on the fly...
On Mar 28, 2006, at 21:49, G.H.Hovagimyan wrote:
gh comments:
I tend to speak as an artist. Although I can quote theory, I like
to make works that challenge theory or mess it up or don't fit into
neat curatorial categories. I can't stand tidiness. I also dislike
the smug self-congratulations of the in-crowd even if I'm part of
the crowd. This is exactly the problem with the "trans-avant garde"
they are reactionary. The problem is that Modernism at this point
is reactionary. It's antique and charming. It can be used in a
nostalgic manner to evoke another period. This allows people to
negate the qualities of the present times. This is not however an
anti-art negation. The emotion of nostalgia is similar to that of
the Utopian impulse but it's a degraded impulse. When Eric talks
about a "...regression to closed cultural systems,..." I think of
the contemporary art scene. Speaking of Walter Benjamin, his most
important work was probably The Arcades Project. I tend to think
of contemporary art fairs such as The Basel Art Fair or The
Documenta or the Venice Biennial as the quintessential arcade vis a
vis Benjamin.
OK, so first of all we should clarify the difference between what I
think (from memory) Habermas called "cultural modernity", comprising
a certain broader set of tendencies in culture and society set in
motion by Enlightenment discourse in the middle of the 18th century,
and "aesthetic modernity", which basically refers to the legacy of
the avantgardes or 'historical avantgardes'.
The problem is for me that while the avantgarde art movements as such
are over and should indeed be seen today as only a regressive or
'reactionary' option, the larger system of what Habermas has termed
"cultural modernity' seems far from over, even if it no longer exists
as a coherent program, even if it can no longer be thought of as a
trajectory of (self-)emancipation according to the inner logics of
how society and culture are supposed to function, and even if the
universalist claims, implicit within that discourse are now widely
rejected. Still modernity survives in an endless array of scientific,
technological, social and political projects, and even political
Marxism in a classical sense is far from dead when you step outside
of the Western frame.
This is why my feeling is that even though we might want to be beyond
the phase of modernity, we are still very much entrenched in it.
Moving definitely beyond modernism / modernity will probably just be
a gradual process until someone recognises (probably after the fact)
that we have arrived somewhere else.
Now to the avantgardes themselves, even though they are over in their
original form they still are available as an enormous reservoir of
ideas, tactics and strategies to engage dominant forms of
representation or dominant discourses. So, one could look at them as
a kind of toolbox, no longer connected to the need to establish a new
program they become tools to do exactly that what Lyotard has
recognised in them, ways to demonstrate that the unrepresentable
exists and that what is representable, demonstrable in a unique form
in space in time is an endless process of reinvention of what is
representable at all knowing that the unrepresentable remains outside
of that possibility and that therefore the space of representation
itself remains infinite.
ok - I know this is contentious, but a few more remarks on it when we
come to the question of language versus digital notation....
On Mar 31, 2006, at 0:48, Brett Stalbaum wrote:
I have a question. You say:
"When Naomi Klein wrote "From symbols to substance" she was dead-
wrong, symbols is the only substance that is left for our social
reality, which has scaled up so far beyond the face to face that
any physical action only becomes socially meaningful in as far as
it is technologically / symbolically mediated."
To me, the later part of this argument may actually support Klein's
position! Yes, given, symbols do mediate the real. (And this is
where I think we should pursue the social through exploring the
novel manifestations that can be made to emerge at the points where
the virtual and the real co-generate... but this is not my
question...) So, how could we simultaneously hold that "symbols
[are] the only substance that is left" and still hold that
"physical action" continues to exist? Is the physical action
somehow totally effaced by the awful taint of being symbolically
mediated? It is social when a database plays a role in physically
distributing the food I eventually acquire, or other aspects of
material wealth and how it is distributed, or who with and how I
communicate, etc? Yet we hold that symbols remain the only social
reality?
I think that symbols enter holistically into the material and the
social (and have for a long time... a case I make here http://
www.paintersflat.net/database_interpret.html... different
topic...). Here, I'll hold that symbols don't efface the social or
the physical, it is just that we don't understand fully how they
mediate these yet. It is possible that as we understand how this
works or more interestingly might be made to work (the role of
artists, imho), that our postmodern state (the early phase where we
are excessively thrown by rapid change - remember it took modernism
a long time to incorporate around the material realities of the
industrial revolution) might become the N-state, whatever that is
or might be. Just as "Modernism" eventually crystallized
epistemologically as culture incorporated the social consequences
of the motor, maybe we are on the verge of socially incorporating
high-speed computation and digital computation, post-silicone, into
something even more theoretically coherent than the first wave of
postmodern thought which grappled with the consequent social
changes... Just a thought.
This has something to do with ethics. Naomi Klein was writing a few
weeks after the 9/11 attacks and she declared the tactics of
appropriation and culture jamming dead. She recognised, as many
others with her, that the real impact of the terrorist attacks in the
US was not so much in their immediate physical effect, as horrible as
they may have been for those involved, but rather in their mediated
effect, the amplification of the symbolic intervention into the space
of especially corporate power as with the twin tower attacks, which
became iconic images.
On indymedia people were asking "was it one of us?"
Naomi wrote that these symbolic interventions became fraud,
illegitimate, after they were used in such a horrific way by the
terrorists, and that these tactics could no longer legitimately be
applied by anti-globalisation, anti-corporate power movements
anymore. She also suggested that these tactics were not much more
than levers, ways of opening a discussion, raising problematic
issues, stepping stones towards political change, the substance was
in the arguments, the issues raised themselves, and that was what
gave them (these tactics) their legitimacy.
There are two problems with this argument:
1 - It seems as if 'miss nologo' didn't seem to believe that symbolic
interventions could have real-life effects. It seems as if she
believed that they only opened doors, behind which then the real work
could be done. It suggests that even in a completely media saturated
society that operates more or less in real-time, social and political
discourse, decisions, policies are still determined behind closed
doors, in back offices, as if the rest of what goes on in society, in
inexorable speed, doesn't matter one bit. A much more realistic take
would be that a lot of doors remain closed and back offices do play a
very important role in determining the course of contemporary
politics, but that an effective politician or policy maker simply
cannot afford to ignore what messages circulate in the integrated
multimedia network. It is as if she never really believed in all the
stuff she was writing about...
2 - Rejecting symbols or symbolic intervention because it has become
ethically complicated is a regressive and fatalistic move in a media
saturated society. It picks up from the point made above. The
question that someone raised when I was doing a seminar in Gothenburg
early 2002 was quite clear: Klein argues "the semiotic environment
has been irreversibly transformed", the reply the smart man (forgot
the name) made was "yes, the environment might very well have been
transformed, but it is still a semiotic environment...".
In short, live up to the consequences and responsibility that comes
from what you have been preaching....
On Mar 31, 2006, at 16:25, Christophe Bruno wrote:
very quickly:
I need some lights here: I'm a bit skeptical about the underlying
hypothesis about infinity
1) strictly speaking I'm not sure that anybody can state that
(roughly) human language is caracterized by infinity and digital by
finiteness. This is quite close to the question that arises in the
Turing test, isn't it ?
And a radical materialist (a position I have a lot sympathy for, J.O.
de Lamettrie is still one of my favourite philosophers and free
thinkers), might argue that also material reality itself is finite
and since there is nothing else, everything is finite and infinity
simply does not exist, is an illusion, a myth, or rather a delusion -
why not?
This leads to an endless debate about the origin of things, matter,
life, energy, the universe, etc...
Perhaps another way to approach this is to look at the practicality
of the arguments rather than their essentialistic tenability:
The scheme of digital notation is fully articulated (see for instance
the discussion of analogs and digits in Nelson Goodman's Languages of
Art for a precise explanation of that point), and therefore for every
digital notation system it is possible to easily calculate the total
number of possible states that this system may hold, while with
physical reality this a lot more difficult because we don't even know
how much energy and matter exists in the universe, so we cannot
extrapolate the total number of possible interrelations that could
exist between all the constituent elements. Furthermore, we are still
in a process of exploration as to what the constitutive elements
actually are (as in elementary particle systems).
However, in both cases we can simply ask, is it conceivable that
mankind will ever be able, with an investment of all its efforts to
represent all possible states of either any conceivable digital
system, or indeed of physical / material reality itself?
In both case the answer is clearly no, therefore even though
theoretically finite (digital) and maybe finite (material / physical
reality), it is in practical and experiential terms infinite.
There is a very funny algorithmic artwork some young artists made in
Amsterdam, who came up with the idea of creating an algorithm that
could display on a computer screen every possible image, simply by
systematically changing the pixels on the screen (position and colour
designation) bit by bit. If the program was running long enough it
would eventually represent all possible images within the
capabilities of this computer graphics system. The depth of the
colour range was extremely limited and therefore the space of all
possible states was also relatively limited. Still the computer
program would have to run for something like half a million years to
complete its mission (with 256 colours for each pixel at 1024 x 768
or something degraded like that). I.e. there would simply not be a
culture conceivable that could witness, understand or inculcate this
process or understand it, or bring it to its completion as some kind
of monumental mythical ritual.
Needless to say, the limited amount of time the program has been
active so far it has only produced complete visual junk...
So, theoretically this digital space is finite, but experientially it
is impossible to comprehend or capture, and the experience of this
disjuncture between that what can rationally be ascertained but
subjectively is impossible to grasp locks it right in with the
aesthetics of the sublime.
This argument does not do away with determinacy of the electronic
digital systems, and technological systems per se that Lyotard is
critiquing, but I do wonder how on an experiential level a real
difference can be made between digital systems of representation and
non-digital systems of representations, especially when these digital
systems acquire a 'resolution' that exceeds the human perceptual
capabilities.
2) even if we could assert this difference, I don't think it is so
crucial : I'm very often referring to the short story by Poe "the
purloined letter". Here the exhaustive "algorithmic" search of the
police could last an infinite time, they wouldn't find the letter
(the empty signifier?). Another important reference to me here, is
"le temps logique" by Lacan in 1945, in which he discusses a
"prisoner's dilemma" version which echoes the Turing test.
With a lot of words I have already agreed to this criticsim -
remember I was reviewing Lyotard's arguments, not immediately my own.
3) the infiniteness arises indeed in human relation, but isn't it
the presence of the other, the RECEIVER (as Christiane points out)
that creates this feeling: the fact that the subject is suspended
to the response of the other, or its silence... precisely... and
then incommensurablity arises
4) maybe the confusion is still increased because language has an
utilitarian (and therefore technological) side, and a non-
utilitarian one. But you can't really separate one from the
other... you can't separate the uncountable from the countable...
Fully agreed, and even seemingly non-utilitarian uses can have
meaning on another (social / emotive) level - think of what linguists
call phatic language.
5) to me, the conclusion of Eric may be only a moment, a step of
the process: when Dupin recognize the letter in the short story,
then he steals it back and replace it with a fake, but we don't
know the very end of the novel... of course, because this may be
precisely the question we are all discussing here
6) There are many ends: the one we are living is that things are
reverted: the power has learned from the activist/artist/Dupin and
has become more "intelligent" (in the sense of Poe's short story)
than him !
Fine, nicely phrased!
7) And (sorry to refer here to my own work) but what I learned from
the Google Adwords Happening is that this symbolic play can indeed,
and - how surprisingley - have real effects: on me and my Visa Card
I have agreed fully already in my further explication of the
criticism of Naomi Klein's 'substance instead of symbols' argument
so it doesn't seem to me so easy to draw a line to isolate the
symbolic. But I'm not sure that was Eric intent. Actually it would
be great if he could develop his conclusion ... may be I got all
wrong I don't know
So, then we need to go into an even more speculative terrain - that
is which conclusion to draw from the criticism of Lyotard. Let me
digress for a second first to Paul Crowther, who has also devoted an
essay to Lyotard's Les Immatériaux in his book Critical Aesthetics.
He proceeds along similar lines in his argument (I was not aware of
his, in fact wrote it down for teaching purposes in art education
long before Crowther published his text) and he arrives at the same
point where he sees that Lyotard has produced a brilliant linkage of
(avantgarde-) aesthetic and techno-scientific discourse and their
connection to the dynamics of advanced capitalism, but that his
arguments lead to a dead-end. The solution that Crowther suggests is
a return to neo-expressionist procedures in contemporary art
production, as identified in the "Neuen Wilden" or the Italian neo-
expressionist painters of the 80s. I'm lumping too much together
here, but broadly that is where his argument is going.
So Crowther basically says, jump out of the digital / technological
systems, back to some basic subjective relationship to reality that
is outside of a coherent artistic program and is beyond the notion of
the avantgarde. That is quite obviously not the position that I have
chosen given my deep involvement with new media culture, media arts,
media activism and other genres...
Instead, I would follow the argument made above that a theoretically
finite space can still be experientially and subjectively experienced
as an infinity, and is in any conceivable practical form endless.
Therefore the mechanisms, procedures, tactics and strategies that
have been developed by the avantgardes remain available to us as a
toolbox with which to take apart, question, interrogate, and indeed
negate the representational systems that are employed in the realms
of electronic and digital mediation. These procedures are no longer
part of a larger artistic program, they no longer belong to the
'unfinished' project of cultural modernity and its inherent
universalism, and they are far from politically and ethically
neutral, but they can be 'useful' as tools to investigate the
conditions of the media saturated societies we are ineluctably part of.
One of the really vexing questions that emerges from this is that
when power indeed shifts from the actual to the represented realm of
social / political events, when it shifts to the symbolical, and that
when social communication in the 'network society' increasingly
operates in a bipolar logic of representation within the integrated
multimedia network versus marginalisation in face to face
subcultures, and cultures operate in the mode of real virtuality
weaving new intertexts between the real and fictional (as Castells
has argued in his main work), what does this then mean for the status
of these symbolic interventions into that integrated multimedia
network of multimedia text (again in the latter paraphrasing Castells)?
It seems as though this intervention is no longer a purely artistic
gesture operating in a relatively closed cultural system (art world,
modern at) as it did with the historical avantgardes. Rather, it
would seem that these interventions are simultaneously symbolic and
real (in their immediate effect because of their real-time mediation)
at the same time. In my 'transfiguration of the avantgarde' text I
tried to investigate these problems analysing the work of the yesmen
in particular. Much later their now famous appearance happened on BBC
World commenting on the 20 year anniversary of the Bhopal disaster,
posing as Dow Ethics representatives. The real effect of this
intervention was indeed problematic, since it raised hopes but also
stirred up pains and later on resulted in more deception in and
around Bhopal, by those people directly and still today affected by
the disaster and its aftermath. Those feelings were very real indeed,
and they were the greatest concern for the people involved in the
action.
However, not to act (as Klein suggested in her text and later in her
book) would have been an even bigger defeat for the environmentalists
who for twenty years have been trying to get those responsible to
acknowledge their responsibility and finally do something for those
people affected by that horrible disaster (like clean up the area
after twenty years!). What the yesmen / BBC World intervention
managed to do was to link the name of Dow Chemicals inextricably to
the Bhopal disaster, something the environmental movement never
succeeded in doing (Dow bought up Union Carbide the original owners
of the factory in Bhopal).
Now is this just symbolical?
Symbols, or substance, or perhaps both in one?
best wishes,
Eric
This archive was generated by a fusion of
Pipermail 0.09 (Mailman edition) and
MHonArc 2.6.8.