RE: [-empyre-] The Hyper-Modern Condition: Forward from Christiane Paul

[Christina McPhee <christina112@earthlink.net>]

From: <Christiane_Paul@whitney.org>
Date: March 30, 2006 1:06:22 PM PST
To: <empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
Subject: RE: [-empyre-] The Hyper-Modern Condition


A few more (slightly disconnected) notes on Eric's post, which I very  
much enjoyed…

Eric wrote
"Lyotard states the incommensurability of language games, because a  
shared scale of measurement (of judgements) is absent these language  
games are untranslatable into one another. Conflicting judgements,  
especially epistemological and moral judgements, can therefore only  
be 'resolved' by applying 'terror' to one or more of these  
conflicting language games if they are to reach a common ground of  
consensus. Consensus then is terror and therefore fundamentally  
suspect."

This very much connects to the theories of Chantal Mouffe, although  
she has taken these ideas to a different level. Mouffe would argue  
that public space -- as a space of deliberation -- has to be an  
agonistic space, that is, a battleground of agonistic confrontation.  
[agonistics = The science of athletic combats, or contests in public  
games] This form of confrontation is very different from the  
'antagonistic' one, where opponents do not necessarily share common  
ground (and, in Lyotard's terms, applying 'terror' would be the only  
form to reach consensus). In Mouffe's concept of agonism, 'we | them'  
are recognized as legitimate opponents in a shared symbolic space.

As a footnote, Warren Sack's online project "Agonistics - Alanguage  
Game" was directly inspired by these ideas.
http://artport.whitney.org/gatepages/april05.shtml

Eric wrote:
"The decisive step is the moment when digital data were introduced,  
data without an analogy to their origin. "It is as if a filter has  
been placed between us and the things, a screen of numbers", Lyotard  
writes in the text on the concept of the show in the catalogue.

Once digital data start to circulate in electronic networks they  
dissolve every connection with the reality they seek or are supposed  
to represent. Any source-information is translated into a universal  
code (without analogy to its origin) and is subject to the  
possibility of endless circulation and complete malleability. …

Art that relies on digital mediation then falls essentially short of  
the highest task that Lyotard has ascribed to art today, and equally  
as carrier of social discourse and debate digital mediation precludes  
the possibility to demonstrate the incommensurability of language games"

This is where I would disagree with Lyotard and where his argument  
feels a bit 'dated' or at least becomes blurry given current  
discussions. An argument that connects to Lyotard's ideas was made by  
Jean Baudrillard in "Requiem for the Media," his reply to  
Enzensberger's "Constituents of a Theory of New Media"  (originally  
published in the New Left Review in 1970; both texts are reprinted in  
"The New Media Reader" edited by Montfort and Wardrip-Fruin).

In his essay, Baudrillard is fundamentally critical of the concept  
that the media allow mass participation in a productive process: "The  
mass media are anti-mediatory and intransitive. They fabricate non- 
communication -- this is what characterizes them, if one agrees to  
define communication as an exchange, as a reciprocal space of a  
speech and response."

His main criticism concerns the very structure of media itself, the  
transmission-reception process, which -- in his opinion -- does not  
allow for response or an exchange of speech. The problem according to  
Baudrillard lies in the ideological matrix embraced by communication  
theory (and formalized most notably by Roman Jacobson), which is  
based on the following sequence:
TRANSMITTER - MESSAGE - RECEIVER
(ENCODER - MESSAGE - DECODER)

Baudrillard calls the above "matrix" a simulation model of  
communication since it supposedly excludes reciprocity of  
interlocutors and the ambivalence of their exchange; and makes a  
message impossible since it would only exist within the categories of  
"emitted" and "received." "Terrorism of the code" is how Baudrillard  
describes this condition since the code -- at least in his model --  
becomes the only agency that speaks.

I think it is debatable whether the process of "encoding" applies  
only to technology. One could argue that verbal human exchanges are  
highly reliant on codes (be they linguistic or social) and therefore  
are encoded and decoded on the speaker's and listeners end. The  
ambiguity of the "pure," verbal message is not erased through  
technological transmission but the latter admittedly adds further  
layers of mediation, which very often increase ambiguity. The seeming  
need for the so-called emoticons in e-mail messages is one indicator  
of the insecurities surrounding the proper reception of a message. In  
contemporary theory, both humans and machines are frequently  
understood as "coded devices." According to theorists such as  
Katherine Hayles, we have already become "post-human" --  
technologically or biologically extended humans. There seems to be no  
escape from code (in the broadest sense) and while its agency is much  
discussed, it is neither perceived nor examined as a form of terrorism.

On a slightly different note, much of today's discourse on online  
spaces (from blogs to Flickr) addresses the question of social 'data'  
and the human and individual inscription in data spaces / databases.  
Technological layers of digital mediation aside, there still seems to  
be a pronounced human factor in these digital spaces…


Christiane



-----Original Message-----
From: empyre-bounces@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au on behalf of Eric  
Kluitenberg
Sent: Mon 3/27/2006 6:57 PM
To: soft_skinned_space
Subject: [-empyre-] The Hyper-Modern Condition

Dear empyre list members,

It was my strict intention to enter the debate on the lingering
legacy of modernism much earlier in the month. However, a flue has
rendered me rather unable to work on anything intellectually
demanding for the last two to three weeks, and even now I am
struggling with the last cold symptoms. Apparently, a lot of people
here locally (Amsterdam) have been taken down by this flue and have
similar experience with intensity and length of this viral
contamination....

I have followed some of the discussion on the list, though not all,
and it seems there is a highly lively debate. However, I did not find
the particular perspective introduced here that I originally
suggested to Christina as a possible contribution to the discussion.
So, what I want to do right now is to provide you with some basic
notes on the topic I suggested. These notes follow below, plus
further references. Although not much time is left for the current
discussion, and my own time is severely under pressure after having
lost a good two weeks of productive time, I welcome comments,
criticism or remarks.

---------------------------------

The Hyper-Modern Condition

Cursory notes on the persisting legacy of modernism


Walter Benjamin seems to have said that there has never been an era
that has not felt itself 'excessively modern'.

Almost thirty years after Jean-François Lyotard published his
'rapport sur le savoir', "La condition postmoderne", the experience
of modernity seems far from over. Lyotard himself observed that there
is something that links the technosciences, the avantgardes and
advanced capitalism together that defines this unique experience of
the modern, and that 'thing' is a shared affinity with infinity
("affinité avec l'infinité").

The technosciences exhibit the infinite ability of knowing (acquiring
knowledge), the avantgardes exhibit the infinity of 'plastic
invention' (the infinity of possible modes of representation), and
advanced capitalism exhibits the infinite ability to realise. Thus,
in Lyotard's formula the modern program can be summed up as "seeing
all, knowing all, realising all". The horizon of modernity is that of
all that is possible, and Lyotard reminds us, horizons recede into
infinity as we move forward....

Now the problem of infinity vis-à-vis representation is, of course,
that infinity itself is qua hypothesis unrepresentable, and can only
be established, 'shown to exist', negatively, via an inverted sign, a
sign that is a non-sign, a sign that points beyond itself through its
negative (non-representational) form to hint at something
unrepresentable. In this case it is easy to see that something
without an end (something infinite) can never have a specific form -
in the Kantian formula; can never be synthesised into unique form in
space and time.

This specific understanding of the 'modern condition' of Lyotard,
quite inescapably drives him into the direction of the aesthetics of
the sublime, which he adopts from Kant's Kritik der Urteillskraft,
but modifies substantially to integrate the avant-garde's use of
negative signs to show that the unrepresentable exists. At some point
(in his essay "la philosophie et la peinture à l'ere de leur
expérimentation" of 1979 - the same year as his Postmodern Condition)
he even states that it is the highest aim of (avantgarde) art today
to show that the unrepresentable exists, and even that it is the only
task worthy of a practice with a century of heroic 'experimentation'.

So, to make a mild understatement, it is clear that this is not a
side-issue in his work. In fact the figure of the unrepresentable is
at work in the Postmodern Condition as well. Here Lyotard states the
incommensurability of language games, because a shared scale of
measurement (of judgements) is absent these language games are
untranslatable into one another. Conflicting judgements, especially
epistemological and moral judgements, can therefore only be
'resolved' by applying 'terror' to one or more of these conflicting
language games if they are to reach a common ground of consensus.
Consensus then is terror and therefore fundamentally suspect.

In "Le Differend" Lyotard develops this point in great detail and
shows that even in the most gruesome case, the holocaust denial,
conflicting judgements between incommensurable language games can
never be resolved without the application of terror. It is this point
more than anything else that locked Lyotard in a bitter dispute with
Habermas in the 80s, which became widely known as the modernism /
post-modernism debate. Today we see the lingering of these positions
in the different stances that are taken on the debates of
multiculturalism  versus integration, and the continental European
debate on a "Leitkultur". Here the ambiguities of moral judgements
between universalisms versus inextinguishable difference collide head
to head in some of the most virulent and controversial socio-
political debates and the policies that are based on the positions
taken within those debates on immigration, integration, and
segregation, in Europe but also elsewhere.

Now, going back to Lyotard's aesthetic theory (as I tried to show in
some broad brush strokes intimately linked with his "post-modern"
political theory), what puzzles me is that he coined the term "post-
modern" for a particular condition he observed in the technosciences,
society and culture. What this term suggests is something 'beyond'
modernism'. While, especially in his aesthetic theory, and the use of
the motives of the sublime, the unrepresentable, the negative sign,
the negative dialectics of the image, he is using 'classically'
modern concepts to discuss tendencies in contemporary arts and culture.

Furthermore, knowing that it was Lyotard's primary profession to be
an aesthetician, rather than a philosopher of science or a political
philosopher, and also knowing that he did indeed write some
magnificent texts on contemporary artists of his time and made many
invaluable contributions to art-theoretical discourse also in main-
stream visual arts magazines, the use of these modern (modernist)
concepts is in no way out of naiveté, or a lack of understanding of
the contemporary context of art-theoretical and aesthetic discourse.

Thus the figure of the unrepresentable and the aesthetic reflection
on that what is qua hypothesis impossible to give shape or form
should be considered at the heart of Lyotard's philosophy and through
his phenomenal influence on the modernity / post-modernity debate
should also be considered one of the core themes of this debate per se.

That make sit all the more problematic that while the suggestion of a
move beyond modernism / modernity / the modern experience is made, a
curiously modern set of concepts and analytic strategies is employed
to make this point. In fact the kind of program that Lyotard
postulates for 'la peinture' in the age of its experimentation is not
post-modern, but hyper-modern.

To stretch language a bit further here and use some Baudrillardian
terms in a tongue-in-cheeks way, you could say that this discourse is
not hyper-real at all, but instead 'really hyper-modern'.....


Why is this a problem?

OK - so if this argument I made would hold on closer and critical
scrutiny I could maintain that I have shown that Lyotard's thought is
no no way beyond the modern, but is instead hyper-modern. This would
leave most of the debate on what is customarily understood as post-
modern in philosophy / political science / cultural theory in tact.
It also does not affect the furious debate on universalism versus
inextinguishable difference, and it seems but a technical point - of
interest for Lyotard adepts like myself, but rather less interesting
for the rest of humanity....

But here is only where the trouble starts. Lyotard presents a
magnificent framework that allows us to link up avant-garde art
production, the techno-sciences and advanced capitalism in one
analytic framework - that of a shared affinity with infinity. And the
unrepresentable links up the debate in epistemology on the unknowable
in an all too perfect way with the negative dialectics of the avant-
garde and the incommensurability of language games. The second point
Lyotard summed up in an interview in a theme issue of the German art
magazine Kunstforum International as "The incommensurable is the
unrepresentable" and thus his political and aesthetic theories are
firmly interlocked in an ultimately condensed and clear formula -
brilliant!

The problem arises from Lyotard's strict rejection of technological
mediation. In 1985 he produced, together with Thierry Chaput a rather
infamous exhibition at the centre Pompidou called Les Immatériaux,
which tried to investigate the meaning of the fact of the 'new
materials'. Rather than being strictly didactic exhibition it
presented scenario's and situations that attempted to heighten the
sensitivity of the audience for the things that were changing because
of the fact of the new materials - materials that in a contradictory
way were no longer materials for a project - thus the term
'immaterials'. Here Lyotard connects his exploration of the
technosciences, the avantgardes and advanced capitalism with the
development of new materials en mediation techniques. The show seems
ultimately positioned to question the difficulties and contradictions
these new materials and mediation techniques bring about, but also
their transformatory social potential, in a way their emancipatory
potential.

Lyotard goes at great length to show that ever more complex
technological arrangements place themselves in-between man and the
reality that she/he tries to transform or work upon. We increasingly
loose contact with the materials, and increasingly interact via
'immaterials' that have placed themselves between man and (social /
physical / material) reality. The decisive step is the moment when
digital data were introduced, data without an analogy to their
origin. "It is as if a filter has been placed between us and the
things, a screen of numbers", Lyotard writes in the text on the
concept of the show in the catalogue.

Once digital data start to circulate in electronic networks they
dissolve every connection with the reality they seek or are supposed
to represent. Any source-information is translated into a universal
code (without analogy to its origin) and is subject to the
possibility of endless circulation and complete malleability.
However, what is crucial to understand about digital data (digital
notation) is that its notation scheme is essentially finite and
completely articulated. In it, Lyotard states in a later interview
about the show, "everything becomes a message - even the silence,
which strictly speaking does not tell anything, but generates meaning".

Already in an earlier essay that examines the advance of photography
and its influence on the artistic practice of painting Lyotard
critiques the "complete determinacy" of the technological medium.
This is brought to its logical conclusion in the digital notation
scheme and its application to electronic technologies (that operate
in real-time). This complete determinacy leaves no space for the
indeterminate, which is stamped out as a possibility of
representation, but also can no longer be negatively represented
within this notation scheme as everything within that scheme is a
message, he maintains, Digital mediation then precludes the
possibility of showing the unrepresentable to exist.

Art that relies on digital mediation then falls essentially short of
the highest task that Lyotard has ascribed to art today, and equally
as carrier of social discourse and debate digital mediation precludes
the possibility to demonstrate the incommensurability of language
games because it is itself a finite language game, defined by
immutable rules: A matrix of perfect articulation.

If you would follow Lyotard's position that language games are
incommensurable and subject to terror if one is to imprint a shared
final position in a conflict of judgement between such
incommensurable language games, then the universalist discourse of
classical modernism must be understood to be essentially flawed.
Habermas' position of communicative transparency must then for
instance be understood as nothing else than the imposition of a view
of dominant culture on to a less powerful culture through the
application of terror (physical and/or cultural force). Personally I
would reluctantly follow the argument and adhere to that position of
Lyotard.

The emancipatory potential of digital mediation should then,
following the same arguments outlined above, be considered nihil. The
finity and complete articulation of the digital scheme precludes the
possibility of the incommensurable difference between language games
to emerge within that system of digital mediation, because the system
itself is already predicated on a specific, finite and fully
articulated language game. The use of digital media thus would not
allow for any kind of bridging of cultural differences and/or divides
but simply erase cultural difference within the finite and fully
articulated scheme of digital notation.

Out with the system of digital mediation and more broadly
technological mediation, which has been rejected by Lyotard because
of its complete determinacy, also goes the possibility of
intervention into the domain of technological mediation. However,
most of social interaction today is carried by technological
mediation, from print media to electronic mass media to internet, e-
mail, discussion fora, blogs, mailing lists (like empyre), mobile
phones, sms, 3rd and 4th generation wireless media, wifi networks,
open source and free software systems and much much more. All of
these simply serve the establishment of a dominant cultural code that
extinguishes the very possibility of difference to enter the social
arena, to manifest itself or to be invertedly demonstrated by
negative signs that point to the infinity of possible language
games / modes of representation / the infinity of plastic invention.

Lyotard's discourse thus becomes hermetic and locks itself in a dead-
end street. Indeed in some of his latest writings he is utterly
dystopian and considers 'the system' to have become all-encompassing
(as afar as the social process goes) and without an external point of
critique since everything, the social in its entirety is fully
captured and completely immersed in 'the system' (technoscientific
rationality and the infinite ability of advanced capitalism to
realise). And this position is obviously completely unproductive if
one still has any hope for social, cultural and political progress of
whatever kind....


Being excessively hyper-modern and how to go beyond the hyper-modern
condition...

What is amazingly striking about Lyotard's critique is that it
pinpoints some of the most painful fallacies of modernist discourse
and the social and political systems they give rise to, yet that the
very same arguments lead Lyotard in classically modern trap. The
critique of modernity comes from within (this is a bit like
Tourainne), but it leads to a hermetic position that cannot escape
the system from which it was produced, and still suggest a necessary
outcome of 'historical' development, not an end of history, nor an
'incomplete project', but rather a final endpoint of the modernist
project, and all-encompassing system that no longer has any external
reference point from which a fundamental or systemic critique could
be successfully raised, since any critique is already subsumed in the
system.

This leads to a dangerous fatalistic position: The only
transformation of this all-encompassing system is its complete
destruction by an incommensurable form of otherness. In more mundane
terms, a clash of civilisations, the destruction of the west by
what...?? The orient? The Islamic world? (whatever that may be...).
By the 'global south'?

Digital / technological mediation in any case according to this
formula would not be a possibility for starting some kind of
dialogue, since it merely means the application of terror to any form
of otherness not already subsumed in the cultural system that
produced these technologies.

One way out might be to reject Lyotard's position on the
incommensurability of language game and to re-approach the incomplete
project of finding a communicative meta-level at which conflicting
judgements between different language games can be resolved in terms
of 'universal' human needs, concerns, and aspirations. But I must say
that I just cannot see how such a universalist discourse would ever
work, even if it is developed from a fundamental understanding of
respect for the initial difference of these conflicting judgements
and the cultural systems in which and across which they are made?

To take just a very simple example; how can a typically modernist
aspiration as the quest for self-actualisation of the subject,
ultimately be reconciled with a culture which is entirely predicated
on family relations and where these family relations define the moral
framework within which judgements about proper behaviour are made? We
cannot erase that difference by going back to common biological and
material determinants as this would inflict terror on all language
games  / cultural systems - culture after all 'is' our nature....

Another option would be a regression to closed cultural systems, a
reactionary move away from the modernist affinity with infinity, a
rejection of the desire to see all, know all, and to realise all, and
instead opt for deliberate restriction to a historically grown and
fortified cultural framework, in which difference is not so much
denied as it is evaded or ignored. That would indeed be a completely
regressive and reactionary move that might work for somebody like
Roger Scruton, but certainly not for me.

Overlooking this battle-field I cannot help but feel totally immersed
in modernity and quite unable to escape it, even if its limitations,
its implicit terror and its internal contradictions are blatantly
clear to me, and as such I can no longer claim "I'm a believer!".
Instead I feel hyper-modern, and in this case, and different from
Lyotard, in a sense closer to the notion of the hyper-real that
Baudrillard has suggested.

This could be summarised as being fully aware that what is
circulating in the networks are the empty signifiers of failed modern
project, the symbols of empty modernism, yet acknowledging that (in a
society saturated by technological mediation) symbols is all that is
left to act through in the social arena, in the public domain. 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.

The approach one could take then to still act socially and in public
is concrete action in this symbolical and technological mediated
domain, for which the history and legacy of modernism and the
avantgardes offers us all the conceptual and practical tools to
deploy such actions.

--------------------------


I tried to explore some of these issues in the text "Transfiguration
of the Avant-Garde" and I think that this text is still not
satisfactory, also it links up quite exclusively to interventions of
The Yesmen  in the second part of the text (though this material was
developed way before they became a hype), and the analysis needs to
be expanded along the lines roughly sketched above. You can find the
text in various places on-line, a.o. here:

http://www.debalie.nl/dossierartikel.jsp?dossierid=13636&articleid=13798

Some more info concerning my biography, projects, texts, can be found
here:

http://www.debalie.nl/persoon.jsp?personid=920


I hope this was / is of interest.

best wishes,

Eric

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