[-empyre-] Pacific Parables (forward from Raqs Media Collective, Delhi)

[Christina McPhee <christina112@earthlink.net>]

Pacific Parables


by Raqs @ 14.08.2006 07:14 CEST

Raqs was invited by Steve Dietz and Joel Slayton of ISEA 2006 and  
Zero One San Jose (http://www.01sj.org/) to be 'conversationalists'  
at the Pacific Rim New Media Summit last week. Being outsiders to the  
Pacific Rim, we decided to make our entry in the form of stories, so  
we put together what we called 'Pacific Parables' a set of narrative  
vignettes that ask questions about the world, connectivity and our  
time, scanning beneath the surface of old and new media.

Here they are.
Pacific Parables
Raqs Media Collective

The Pacific Rim as a Fiction of Place

The Pacific Rim is a fiction about place, a filter through which you  
can look at the world if you choose to and confer more or less  
arbitrary meanings on to a set of latitudes and longitudes. There  
have been previous fictions about place straddling this water, one  
was called the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, and unleashed  
havoc in the name of the solidarity of oppressed peoples of Asia,  
another thought of the Pacific as a Californian frontier, a kind of  
Wild Blue West. A third spoke French, and drew naked women in Tahiti,  
and dropped hydrogen bombs in the water. A fourth, the South Pacific  
Bubble, was one of the first episodes of global financial speculation  
that shaped the turbulence of the economy of our modern era.

Meanwhile, Sikh peasants from the Punjab, Chinese railroad workers  
from Canton, Agricultural workers and sugarcane cultivators from the  
hinterland of North India traversed the ocean, Mexicans swam, or  
walked along the coastline, Australian sailors, New Zealanders on  
whaling ships, Japanese factory workers, Filipina nurses and  
itinerant Pacific Islander communities traversed the Pacific, and the  
wider world, buffeted by the rough winds of recent history. They grew  
fruit trees in Napa valley, felled timber in British Columbia, mined  
tin in Peru, pressed grapes in Chile and made what some of choose to  
call the Pacific Rim what it is today. In time, agricultural  
labourers were joined by software programmers. And roads from Napa  
Valley began to lead in and out of Silicon Valley.

Ringed by fire, held together by fragile surfaces that slide on to  
each other, girded through with pipelines, beset by storms. You could  
say that the Pacific Ocean, apparently endless and bottomless, almost  
sounds like the internet. Which is not altogether inappropriate  
considering that the Pacific Rim, between California, East Asia and  
Australasia probably contains within it the highest density of  
internet traffic.

The first question we want to ask you is as follows - how can this  
fiction of location, this imaginary map, the ones that you, and we  
all are currently engaged in drawing not reproduce the boundaries  
that beset all map making exercises? How can you as map-makers avoid  
the predicament of an expression of mastery over the landscape you  
intend to survey?

Dead and Living Reckoning

We forget that Cartography is as variable a practice as any. There  
are maps and then there are maps, and there are different kinds of  
map making. Modern maritime navigational charts, based on latitude  
and longitude, determine a principle of navigation known as 'Dead  
Reckoning'. Dead Reckoning, in our limited understanding, is the  
method by which the position of a moving body is deduced in advance  
by taking fixes from previously known positions and then reading them  
against calculations with variables such as speed, direction, wind  
speed, tide patterns and currents. Prior to GPS, most navigators had  
to rely on dead reckoning, with a little help from a compass, an  
astrolabe, star charts, chronometers and longitude tables. Dead  
Reckoning models itself on the dynamics of the relationship between a  
moving object and a notionally inert surface.

We say most, but should qualify it immediately, because for most of  
human history, the largest water body in the world was navigated  
using a different system of reckoning. The Pacific Island cultures,  
who were probably the most prolific seafarers that the history of  
humanity has known, actually used the opposite navigational  
principle. Reckoning was taken on the basis of a metaphorical  
assumption of the still navigator interfacing with a world that  
courses towards or away from him or her. Thus, it is not the sailor  
that approaches an island, but the island that advances towards, and  
then past the sailor. Meanwhile, the stars remain constant, thus  
marking general orientation. The course is set by the stars, and the  
world; a living, dynamic entity flows past under the navigator's  
gaze. For terminological convenience alone, one could call this  
method, 'Live Reckoning'. The relationship between dead and live  
reckoning is a study in the encounter of two knowledge systems, two  
practices and ethoi of information. The difference between them  
ultimately lay in how much gunpowder they had backing them. One had  
lots, the other, none. The ships that used 'dead reckoning' carried  
cannons and muskets; the canoes of the live reckoners were armed with  
arrows and spears. The knowledge system with guns won the day.  
Pacific Island navigation systems remain as relics, occasionally  
resuscitated by an anthropologist or a sailing enthusiast.

Today, we who are practitioners of information, artisans of  
knowledge, often forget that our practices are also guaranteed by  
sophisticated weapons, not only of the lethal kind. Modernity's edge  
is ultimately a matter of ammunition. What safeguards should we  
institute to ensure that our encounters with the few remaining  
knowledge, information and communication systems different from our  
own do not result in their extinction? How can the business of  
reckoning continue to remain alive?

Cargo Cults

We head now in the direction of the island of the long wait. We refer  
here to a quintessentially modern practice of faith, the Cargo Cult,  
that arose in the Pacific Islands in the wake of the second world  
war, as a poignant marker of the power that technology (even if it  
does not work) can wield over the human spirit. In a typical Cargo  
Cult, contact with the accoutrements of modern Industrial  
civilization at war time (in the form of airdrops of food and other  
essential items from large transport or cargo planes for soldiers  
stationed in the islands) allegedly convinced the islanders that all  
that they needed for utopia to arrive was the ability to attract the  
right kind of airplane to land and disgorge its cornucopia of wealth  
(food, refrigerators, white goods, durables, clothes etc.) on the  
island. It had been observed that airplanes tended to land on  
airstrips that were complete with runways, observation towers, a few  
standing airplanes and radar. So replicant infrastructure and replica  
airplanes were built with locally available materials in the hope  
that such engineering efforts would attract the bountiful flying  
machines from the sky. Needless to say, the planes would never land.  
The islanders waited, and perhaps still wait.

Why do we wait for things to come to us? What guarantee is there that  
if we create replicas of the structures that house cultural  
expressions in other spaces, we will automatically create the  
conditions of a new culture? Why be in such a hurry to acquire the  
latest technology, and why wait so long for the perfect machine, the  
perfect piece of code, the killer application? What is it about our  
situation that makes us so afraid of being left behind? Why do we  
fear obsolescence?

Easter Island

What more remarkable reminders of obsolescence can there be than the  
stone giants of Easter Island. They too stand, as if waiting,  
scanning the horizon of the Pacific for a perpetually deferred  
future. We know almost nothing about the people and the culture that  
created them, and we do not know what they were trying to communicate  
to the big ocean by placing these standing figures. What we do have a  
sense of is the fact that this activity of intensive stone quarrying  
devastated the ecology and social structures of the island, and that  
ultimately, the culture could not bear the burden of its own  
communicative practices. Perhaps a useful object lesson. Sometimes it  
becomes useful to audit the social and ecological footprints of our  
communicative practices. The making of computer hardware and  
software, and also involves toxic materials, depressed wages and  
prison labour, and a great deal of this occurs on either side of the  
Pacific seaboard, in East Asia and in California. How can we  
reconcile the utopian promises that are made on behalf of information  
and communication technologies with the dystopic realities of their  
production in our societies?

El Nino

Sailing in the Pacific is a hazardous job, because depending on the  
direction in which you are going you could run across strong contrary  
winds. A combination of atmospheric phenomena and pressure conditions  
creates weather systems that may be specific to, or originate in the  
Pacific, but have global consequences. One of them is the El Nino,  
which together with its companion La Nina, arises in the waters off  
the coast of Peru, and creates weather conditions that lead to  
depletion in fish stocks in some waters, overabundance in other,  
hurricanes in some places and droughts in others. It was noticed  
sometime in the late Nineteenth Century that drought and famine  
struck India and Australia with remarkable concordance, and it was  
deduced that this had something to do with the way in which the  
phenomenon known as the El Nino Southern Oscillation affects the  
weather system of the Indian Ocean and its littoral region.

This is well known; what is less well known is the matter of a  
speculative economy, particularly in the fixing of global food and  
primary commodity prices that capitalizes on the eccentric but not  
irregular periodicity of the El Nino and La Nina systems. Here you  
have real time based weather report, statistical observation of  
meteorological systems going back at least a century, commodity price  
fluctuation indices and a globally integrated market working together  
to reap enormous profits from the tamed uncertainties of the weather.  
The futures market in primary commodities, in food and other natural  
products works on this basis, creating enormous wealth, based on  
speculation for some, and misery for billions of others. Here, data  
and disaster often go together. How can those of us who work with  
information in a creative manner begin to get a handle on the  
enormously significant ethical questions that arise from the handling  
of information in today’s world, especially in the region that we  
describe as the Pacific Rim.

Nauru: Birdshit and Gold

The consequences of the generation of disproportionate assets through  
operations on information, knowledge and culture, require special and  
extended treatment, and this is probably not the best occasion to do  
that. But there is a Pacific Parable that can be drawn from the dots  
in the ocean that are composed of skeletons and shit. We refer to  
islands like Nauru in the Pacific, where I visited over a few years  
as a teenager, whose entire economy consisted of phosphate mining  
operations that processed fossil birdshit into gold. Nauru is a  
parable for the toxicity that accompanies a gold rush. The wealth  
that was produced within the span of few generations – the first ship  
with guano left in 1907 – was consumed within a generation, leading  
to a population that is unwell, intoxicated, and poor. Growing up in  
Nauru was not the most exhilarating experience, and my teenage utopia  
of a Pacific Paradise never matched up to the reality of dependence  
and decay that I saw around me. Today, Nauru is reduced to being a  
place where the Australian state out-sources the detention of people  
it considers to be potential illegal immigrants.

When the accumulated deposits of millennia are mined within a  
generation, people are left with little or no resources for the  
future. If the ruthless commodification of nature always produces a  
toxic culture, what would the relentless mining of a commons of  
culture produce? An unquestioning faith in the mechanisms of  
intellectual property takes for granted that the accumulated  
creative, imaginative and mental labour of our ancestors, which  
informs all our thought and creativity today, is a resource available  
for plunder. This engenders an acquisitive, proprietary attitude  
towards cultural production that inhibits growth, learning and future  
creativity.

The epics, stories, songs and sagas that represent in some ways the  
collective heritage of humanity have survived only because their  
custodians took care not to lock them into a system of ‘end usage’,  
and embellished them, adding to their health and vitality, before  
passing them on to others. When codes or languages closed in on  
themselves, allowing no ‘interpolations’ or trespasses after a point,  
they rapidly hemorrhaged. How can we in our generation, immersed as  
we are in the language of property, ensure that there is space left  
for the cultivation of the commons. We ask this also because even  
initiatives like free and open source software, and the creative  
commons initiative, ultimately take recourse to the language of  
ownership and property, albeit an annotated notion of ownership, to  
make their case. Is there a language for culture, especially for the  
reproduction of culture that can elide the question of property? We  
are not sure we have an answer, but we are happy to leave you with  
this question.

The Kula Ring
Unlike commodities, gifts can accrue value to themselves as they pass  
from one person to another in a network of gift exchange. The  
ethnography of the gift exchange in the Trobriand Islands, made  
famous by the Anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski as the Kula Ring in  
his remarkable book, 'Argonauts of the Western Pacific', is an  
instance of this phenomenon; as is, in a less exotic sense the ways  
in which heirlooms add value to themselves as they pass down  
generations. In a digital environment it is not necessarily the  
patina of age or prestige that will lend value to a digital object as  
it passes between persons; rather, it is the possibility that it will  
be improved, refined, and have things added to it through usage  
(without doing any damage to an always available earlier iteration of  
the object itself, which can be recovered through the layers that  
gather to a work in a palimpsest).

It is this fact that gives to electronic piracy, and to any act that  
frees information from the prison of artificial or illusory  
‘originality’, its true cutting edge. It does so not out of any  
radical intent to subvert the laws of property and the commodity, but  
because it makes eminent common sense for people to share information  
in any community through networks of informal sociality, especially  
if the act of sharing brings with it no depreciation in the value of  
that which is shared. Rather, the person who shares more gathers  
prestige to herself, and by now we are all accustomed to  
extraordinary feats of electronic generosity (which sometimes carry  
with them an aura of ‘bravado’) as means of earning reputations  
within tightly knit online communities. The new pirates are just as  
desirous of chronicles of their adventurous heroism as their  
ancestors! The Pacific has distinguished histories of gift giving,  
complex circulation and custodianship principles for cultural  
material, pirate economies and mutinous sailors. How can this history  
of an adventurously redistributive generosity inform our practices  
with information and culture today? What can Pacific traditions of  
abundant reproduction and replication teach the contemporary global  
moment? How may we rediscover a robust ethic of transaction that does  
not lock culture into the dungeon of 'end user agreements' that  
inhibit circulation?

Depth, Shipwrecks and Dark Fiber

It is well known that the Pacific holds within itself the world's  
deepest spots. Many fathoms below the surface of the sea, the Mariana  
trench is the world's deepest place. Deep spots such as these are  
places where residues and remains accumulate. The depths of  
cyberspace, and what is beginning to be called 'information society'  
like the depths of the ocean, are places where all sorts of residual  
pieces of information accumulate. Here, amongst forgotten and  
shipwrecked media, one encounters strange, mutant electrical life  
forms. Beings made of what Geert Lovink has called 'Dark Fiber'.

So much of the discourse about information technology and  
communication is about light, about transparency and knowledge that  
we forget that information is crucial for the manufacture of  
disinformation. We are thinking right now of the enormous energy that  
is being put into the media, electronic, online and print, all over  
the world, but also especially here, in the United States, in  
justifying the naked aggression that the State of Israel is  
inflicting on the people of Lebanon. How can we begin to talk about  
the dark matter of information, or disinformation, and the political  
management of information, or at least with as much attention and  
energy as we do about information enlightenment? How can we render  
the deep and the dark in our work with light?

Lemuria: Lost Continent

We come now to our final destination. This time, we are sailing in a  
submarine. After all, we were plumbing the depths of the Mariana  
Trench a moment ago, so it makes sense to keep going under water,  
crawling along the sea floor in search of a lost, submerged  
continent. At the fag end of the age of geographical discovery in the  
late nineteenth century, the public imagination in many parts of the  
world, in its thirst for new worlds, hit upon the idea of lost and  
submerged continents. Mariners tales, philosophical speculations and  
utopian strains of thought were dredged from all across history to  
yield lost continents like Atlantis, and its variant in our  
neighbourhood, Lemuria. Lemuria first came into view as an attempt at  
explaining a zoological puzzle, the pattern of distribution of the  
Lemur family of primates, which hugged the shorelines of islands and  
continental landmasses of the Asia Pacific region, from Indonesia to  
Africa. Lemuria was invoked in explanations of everything from the  
missing link in the chain of human evolution, to the origin of  
diverse language families, the origin of the human species and the  
routes taken for the first human migrations.

What interests us here is not the project of recovering a fascinating  
imaginary history so much as a speculation about the distribution of  
a life form yielding an image of a space and a continent. This can  
lead to a prospective, and not retrospective insight. Like Lemurs,  
many of us who occupy spaces within the media arts, hug the  
shorelines of landmasses of cultures, especially in the Asia Pacific  
region. We recognize that something, a family likeness perhaps, an  
eccentric sense of the kinship of our practices, the broad features  
of common questions and concerns, hint at some kind of extended  
lineage that we can draw from. These would include the histories of  
communication that we have inherited and the questions that our  
social, cultural and political milieux confront us with. If we are to  
create Cultural Futures for ourselves, we will have to place and  
ground our practices on the terrain of a recovered continent. How can  
we begin mapping this continent that awaits our recovery of its  
submerged landscape. What do we need to do now to explore the  
shorelines of all our practices?


http://blog.raqsmediacollective.net/blog/archive/2006/08/14/pacific- 
parables.html