Re: [-empyre-] Is Modernity our Antiquity

["Christophe Bruno" <christophe.bruno@unbehagen.com>]

> - master narratives need rails to run their fiction on, nazism the ruins of
> WOI and the economic disarray of the twenties, stalinism equally so 
> worsened
> by post-tsarist chaos in the Soviet empire. Do you see global terrorism and
> its consequences of a culture of surveillance serving as a rail to run the
> Benthamian panopticum of semantic capitalism (BPSC) on?

Well, situations are not identical. In one case we are at the end of some 
modernist process. But in the case of BPSC, we are at the end of a 
Postmodern phase (if ever what I said has some pertinence), which ironically 
allows the achievement of some of the trends of the modernist process. One 
of the ‘rail’ here is the story of the Web that everybody knows: first, at 
the beginning there is a huge hope that concentrated many ideals: sharing 
media, freedom of speech etc. anybody feels he could become his own 
publisher, share its intimacy etc. There is also a strong postmodern 
component in 'some' renewal of the concepts of identity, space, time, social 
networks etc; this is the time of net.art. Then there is the rise of the 
“old” capitalism: they still think the Web as if it was part of the 
spectacle society, and that's a big failure; in 1998 net.art commits suicide 
and in 2000 the bubble bursts. Just at the same time, or a little before, 
Google appears. They come from the universitarian world, linux guys, basic 
unix interface, they are the nice guys with an ethical position about  free 
speech. But in fact, this attitude allows them to make an amazing deal with 
the internet users who just give up the exploitation rights of their 
intimacy to Google and it is the triumph of the society of control. The aim 
here is to scientifically predict the behaviour of the users in order to 
optimize the adwords/adsense machinery (on which Google IPO is based). 
Google claims it’s a fair deal, I don’t believe so; this is the idea of 
“fair use” behind which they hide during their trials about Google Books 
(formerly Google Print). Considering here blogger as producers of speech 
that give up their production to Google, I sometimes think of this new phase 
of capitalism (which by the way still weights absolutely nothing when 
compared to the traditional market capitalism) as witnessing a change of 
nature in the way surplus-value operates. Because producing speech is not 
exactely the same thing as producing cars. May be...


> How about
> justifications for the BPSC in view of our need to avert actual and
> impending catastrophes (global warming, reigning famines in Africa
> untsoweiter) originating from science?

I really don't know

> - do you think of the BPSC as a closed event? It happened, so we're done
> for? Or are we in its concluding phase, wrapping up the remains of the day,
> closing up the façade with laws on sedition, cleaning up the mess of
> intimacy in the Big Brother house, locking down the gaps in the defense of
> our savezones?

we’ll see...

> - do you think of your own work as somehow fighting the BPSC, are you
> developing strategies towards that, or do you limit yourself to commenting
> it, exposing it?

I’m a minimalistic-sado-masochistic artist ;-)

> - has the BPSC got the rise of the Asian empire covered (ouch)?

clearly it will be interesting to see how China is going to deal with all 
this...

> I read your Cosmolalia proposal prior to the discussion, must say there's a
> lot there resembling my own thinking, up to the use of Mallarmé's ptix 
> (very
> funny, i already considered it to be somewhat 'my ptix', so i feel a bit
> bereft of it). There are, however,differences in degree i think, so, 
> knowing
> most of the answers are contained within the text at
> http://www.cosmolalia.com/readme100/, perhaps you could expand on the
> questions here nonetheless? I'm asking a lot, i know how exhausting these
> exercises can be, but it would be nice if we could bring the views there to
> relate to the problem we're attempting to tackle here.

why don't we start by you telling me what are these "differences in degree" 
? In the mean time I read your article