Brian Holmes: Escape the Overcode

https://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2009/01/19/book-materials/

Table of Contents

===> INTRODUCTIONS

• The Affectivist Manifesto: Artistic Critique for the 21st Century
• Toward the New Body: Marcelo Expósito's "Entre Sueños"
• Recapturing Subversion: Twenty Twisted Rules for the Culture Game

===> POTENTIALS

01-Network Maps, Energy Diagrams: Structure and Agency in the Global System

02-Do-It-Yourself Geopolitics: Global Protest and Artistic Process

03-The Potential Personality: Trans-Subjectivity in the Society of Control

===> EXPERIMENTS

04-Coded Utopia: Makrolab or the Art of Transition

05-Extradisciplinary Investigations: Toward A New Critique of Institutions

06-Differential Geography: Research and Rhythm in Artistic Representation

07-The Speculative Performance: Art's Financial Futures

08-50 Ways to Leave Your Lover: Exit Strategies from Liberal Empire

09-The Absent Rival: Radical Art in a Political Vacuum

===> GEOCRITIQUE

10-Remember the Present: Representations of Crisis in Argentina

11-Continental Drift: From Geopolitics to Geopoetics

12-Articulating the Cracks in the Worlds of Power: Interview w/16 Beaver

13-Invisible States: Europe in the Age of Capital Failure

14-Disconnecting the Dots of the Research Triangle: Flexibilization, Corporatization and Militarization of the Creative Industries

15-One World, One Dream: China at the Risk of New Subjectivities

===> DARK CRYSTALS

16-Adam Curtis: Alarm-Clock Films Cultural Critique in the 21st Century

17-Future Map: Or How the Cyborgs Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Surveillance

18-Filming the World Laboratory: Cybernetic History in Das Netz

19-Guattari's Schizoanalytic Cartographies or, the Pathic Core at the Heart of Cybernetic

20-Swarmachine: Activist Media Tomorrow

===> CONCLUSIONs

Decipher the Future

INTRODUCTIONS

THE AFFECTIVIST MANIFESTO - Artistic Critique in the 21st Century

In the twentieth century, art was judged with respect to the existing state of the medium. What mattered was the kind of rupture it made, the unexpected formal elements it brought into play, the way it displaced the conventions of the genre or the tradition.

What we look for in art is a different way to live, a fresh chance at coexistence. How does that chance come to be? Expression unleashes affect, and affect is what touches.

Artistic activism is affectivism, it opens up expanding territories.

The striking thing from the affective point of view is the zombie-like character of this society, its fallback to automatic pilot, its cybernetic governance. Neoliberal society is densely regulated, heavily overcoded.

Since the control systems are all made by disciplines with strictly calibrated access to other disciplines, the origin of any struggle in the fields of knowledge has to be extradisciplinary. It starts outside the hierarchy of disciplines and moves through them transversally, gaining style, content, competence and discursive force along the way. Extradisciplinary critique is the process whereby affectively charged ideas -- or conceptual arts -- become essential to social change. But it's vital to maintain the link between the infinitely communicable idea and the singularly embodied performance.

Existence in world society is experienced, or becomes aesthetic, as an interplay of scales.

Intimacy is the biological spring from which affect drinks.

Only we can traverse all the scales, becoming other along the way. From the lovers' bed to the wild embrace of the crowd to the alien touch of networks, it may be that intimacy and its artistic expressions are what will astonish the twenty-first century.

Toward the New Body: Marcelo Expósito's "Entre Sueños"

In this chapter Holmes describes the transformation from industrial to communicational labour and argues that the functions of artistic production and its relevance for political transformation is also changed in this this historical process.

As the tension mounts and the demonstrations break out, how many museums and educational programs will have the courage to explore the work of activist-artists who have dealt directly with the affects, the aspirations and the self-organization of this precarious generation?

Those willing to erase the divide between politics and art will find great interest in the production of the Spanish videomaker Marcelo Expósito, who over the last five years has been carrying out a multi-part evocation of the new social struggles under the name Entre Sueños (Between Waking and Dreams). Unlike conventional documentaries establishing the historical facts, this videography records the nascent movements of history in the gestures and the stories, or indeed the imaginations, of those who attempt to make their own history in the streets.

the old leftist dream that artistic expression could become directly active in the struggle for emancipation.

The philosopher Paolo Virno gives fresh voice to that dream in excerpts from a lecture where he describes the resemblance between virtuoso performance and communicational labor. Neither of them produces a finished object or work; both depend on improvisational sequences carried out before a public. Yet the same is true of politics.

For Virno, the linguistic and performative turn of the economy tends to dissolve the boundaries between labor, inner contemplation and political action. ... He speaks enigmatically of an invisible notation, a hidden score: the sharable potential of a "general intellect" that informs or even orchestrates the multifarious activity of today's economy.

Chainworkers group in Milano mounting an unheard-of campaign: a mobilization of the shit-job workers who staff your supermarket, sort your mail, deliver your pizza -- and play your music, host your party, cuddle your kids, probably write your advertising too.

Action at the supermarket: what Virno calls "infinite publicity without a public sphere."

Tactical Frivolity + Rhythms of Resistance

Those who are curious about vanguard art might remember Peter Wollen's question in Raiding the Icebox: "What form of bodily movement would correspond to a process of production that displayed a different, transformed rationality -- and, of course, a transformed gender division and sexuality?"3

Twenty Twisted Rules of the Culture Game

Let's go straight to the point. How does art become subversive of the social order?

Thanks to Deleuze and Guattari, and perhaps even more, to the Autonomia philosophers, we have a good idea of what subversion can mean today.1

a "whole way of life" as cultural studies founder Richard Hoggart said, or even a "whole way of conflict" as E.P. Thompson riposted

You can see this subversive potential at work -- or liberated from work -- in computer hacking, when someone takes the central productive techniques of contemporary society and diverts them for non-profitable or illegal uses, which involve sharing, free cooperation, collective action.

Similar things are done by artists: commercial images and corporate organizational forms are taken apart, altered in detail or even at their functional core, then repurposed in a process very much like reverse engineering.

Bureau d'Etudes

The network map becomes an energy diagram. That's what you can use for subversion. Free cooperation on the basis of subversive energies became something like a "principle of hope" for anti-systemic movements in the late 1990s and the early years of the new millennium. These are the kinds of practices I described in my last book, Unleashing the Collective Phantoms: Essays in Reverse Imagineering.2 Building on those experiences I have developed a theory of the generative diagram, presented here under the heading of "Potentials."

Once we had understood that individuals and groups can become mobile and active within the maps of constituted power, then we were able to intervene in the social and political arenas. Through inspired collaboration, one could help to invoke networked demonstrations and occupations, and then participate as a "free radical" in an emergent multitude.

What happened around the turn of the century was the emergence of collective phantoms on a transnational scale: movements that take a determinate name, like Reclaim the Streets or the Tute Bianche or No Border or EuroMayday, and then refuse to have leaders or structures, turning the category-trap of mediated politics into the open field of their own self-transformation.

networked capitalism

Nikeground offers a striking image of the artistic practices that flourished around the turn of the century. At its best such a hoax can be a provocative transgression and a symbolic echo of broader social movements. But anything transgressive or symbolic can easily fall into the category of the prank, oiling the wheels of commerce with self-reflexive humor. Today we need to ask about the limits of this subversive alteration of perception.

Since 2004 I have been less involved with direct action and more with unclassifiable projects that function as mobile laboratories and experimental theaters of social and cultural change, where movements of the imagination unfold at territorial, national, continental and global scales. Such projects are explored in this book under the heading of "Experimentalism."

These are practical ideas, dealing with the status of freelance labor in contemporary capitalist societies. Yet practice is inseparable from both aesthetics and discourse. The problems coalesce around the abstract concepts of overcoding and the apparatus of capture, both of which refer to parasitic social constructs that are understood to contain, normalize and channel the diagrammatic energies of free cooperation.

Deleuze and Guattari's text on "The Apparatus of Capture" is a geophilosophy of power, pitting the territorial deployments of the state against the subversions of the nomadic war machine.5 → apparati of capture → overcoding ← important! → At its heart is the notion of overcoding, developed out of studies of ancient imperial mythology by the historian Georges Dumézil.

So the book is the application of a chapter of C&S to the post-2004 activist practices, concentrating on media activism.  The main theoretical problem is precarious work.  These all reflect very well the background of Holmes: a global precarious curator/activist.

def:overcoding

Overcoding is the institution of a social tie, a quasi-magical bond, imposed as a language of power. It's the organizing grammar of a transcendent symbolic hierarchy that casts its unifying net over the proliferation of primitive tongues that had initially named and encoded their disparate patchworks of territory. This overcoding of experience appears everywhere there is a symbolic hierarchy, mapping out a realm of transcendent figures that serve as idealized measures of rank and value, to organize the chaotic tangle of social relations on the ground. The overcode is the ultimate apparatus of capture: the law of the gods, the language of the stars, given voice and effective reality by the emperor. Capitalism, with its extension of the world market, came to decode these transcendent structures, releasing dynamic, mobile flows on a plane of pure immanence; and world populations then entered the endless strategic game of encoding, decoding and recoding the possible forms of existence. This game is played out in the smooth space of the market, whose image for Deleuze and Guattari is not the hierarchical chessboard, but the undifferentiated grid of the Japanese game of Go.

If Go is capitalism, and capitalism is networked, then...

First there was the idea of building a hierarchical counterpower against the hierarchical enemy.  The Communist Parties are such entities.  Second, it was the idea of opposing the hierarchical enemy with a nonhierarchical counterpower.  Third, we realise that the enemy is already nonhierarchical, and still oppose it with a nonhierarchical counterpower?  It seemed a good idea to be different, not to reproduce the same logic, etc.

Of course, if we can believe one of the most mystical tenets of the autonomist forefathers, we could explain ourselves that it was the countermovements which broke up the hierarchies of our enemies, that it is already the scattering of the flee.  The workers had the initiative, and capital had to transform itself to their image.

Yet, I feel nostalgic about the idea of assymetry, also how it is theorised in assymetric warfare even by Hardt & Negri.  It is a compelling argument for the weaker to win — always handy in social struggles.

Introducing a new complexity, one can argue further that hierarchy and nonhierarchy are mere dichotomies which hide the practical questions of concrete architecture from the bird eyes of the theoreticians.  It is not a questions of zeroes and ones but whole diagrams of power, flow charts of energy, which determine the actual properties of social systems.  Therefore our nonhierarchy has nothing to do with their nonhierarchy other than the fact that both are based on forms of distributed and mobile routing algorithms.

Constituent power and constitutive power are a dichotomy that is less clear but can still differentiate us from our enemies.

The ideas of capture and overcoding laid the foundation for the first really challenging political interpretation of globalized capitalism, Hardt and Negri's Empire.

Negri and Hardt follow the insights of Deleuze and Guattari into the society of control, and they relate the specific procedures for the capture and modulation of attention under networked capitalism to the regulatory effects exerted by the monetary regime of floating exchange rates, with all its consequences in the financial sphere.

In my work since 2004 I have tried to carry out that kind of research in a deliberately destabilizing interplay with artistic inventions, according to a meta-theory of critique that I call "extradisciplinary investigation." The idea is both to understand a complex world and to change it.

This relationship with screen environments can be better understood by exploring the underlying technoscientific principles of cybernetics, cognitive psychology and complexity theory.

The studies devoted to cybernetics, in the final section of this book, are transversal to the essays on art and social movements. The visual metaphors of those texts are drawn chiefly from cinema, giving further scope to the extradisciplinary investigations.

These concerns cut close to what I am interested at the moment: cybernetics as an abstract ideology and a concrete technology packaged in a single box.  Its interactions with an art beyond representation and human relations which can act on both bits and ambient affects.

Ideas: an emerging group of organic intellectuals who are organic not to the industrial working classes but to the postindustrial (machinistic-symbolic) working classes.  Rigi’s critique of care vs. symbolic labour: how care workers fit into this scheme?  Are they connecting the two eras?  Can we go further in that?  Is tech support paradigmatic in this sense?  My scene of activist technologists as pedagogues and documentation writers.

Like Foucault, Guattari was particularly interested in the subjective dimensions of governmental procedures and technologies; but he always laid more stress on resistance, invention, deviance -- in a word, subversion.

One way to prolong the discussion of works like Nikeground is to look at the role of global brands in soliciting and structuring our most intimate desires for creative expression. And here one sees the limits of the autonomist discourses on overcoding and capture.

So what does Holmes argue about the insufficiency of autonomist theory?  What is his contribution to that theory and how exactly does he go beyond it?

Branded

Reading Arvidsson, it seems that the "communism of capital" evoked by autonomist theorists is amazingly close. For Paolo Virno, the communism of capital would mean the unrealized possibilities of the flexible work regime: the abolition of wage labor, the end of state coercion, and above all, "the valorization of all that which renders the life of an individual unique." But watch out: in Virno's eyes these were unrealized possibilities, cruelly distorted by actual developments in the post-Fordist economy, which had gone in a fundamentally opposite direction since the 1980s.

How Google does not ask anything from its user workers, only that they live their life confortably and creatively, while the company can capitalise on their biopolitical gestures by aggregating them and assembling a large database-image to construct the population as market research for advertising.  Individuality becomes the subject of profiles and statistics, but what is the fundamentally new element of this surveillence is that it is never dissolves but merely assembled.  When an ad pops up besides your email your individuality is reassembled from the database and combined with the wishes of the marketeers, only to go back to the giant datastore.

In artistic practice, the soft utopias of relational aesthetics offer a perfect image of this communicational universe.10:

10 See Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les Presses du réel, 2002/French 1998); the similarity with Arvidsson’s theories is yet more pronounced in Bourriaud’s Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay, How Art Reprograms the World (New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2002).

The task of brand management is to create a number of resistances that make it difficult or unlikely for consumers to experience their freedom, or indeed their goals, in ways different from those prescribed by the particular ambiance.11

"Capturing cool," he writes, "is a matter of incorporating and profiting from the resistance that consumers spontaneously produce."

"The forces of production are becoming too advanced to be contained within the capitalist relations of production," we read on the final page of his book. So, according to the most precise autonomist analysis of brands, the apparatus of capture has been perfected. And it is now in the process of setting us free.

Focus on this ^^^ .

Decoders

Arvidsson's theory is too clean and not very close to reality. → "a creeping denial of reality, characteristic of postmodern schizophrenia" → The coexistence of overcoding and resistance is everywhere, sure, but to explain it as a dialectic of freedom or a teleological movement toward capitalism's self-overcoming is to obscure the real issues.

Only a deep financial crisis shakes the faith of the middle classes, as happened during the closure of the banks in Argentina in 2001-2002. But that shaken faith has an odd way of returning. What you do see on such travels is that the rise of the relational commodity has been accompanied by a resurgence of both confessionalism and racism -- not only in the underdeveloped lands, but also in the overdeveloped regions of North America and Europe.

And from my perspective, the most important among them was the role that we could play: we who work with communication, in the so-called creative industries.

Back in the mid-1960s, Mario Tronti described how the organizational and technological structures of capitalism could only appropriate the inventions of workers in their resistance and their freedom.

Toni Negri developed a similar theme in philosophy, with his vitalist ontology of living labor.13 Foucault and Deleuze also echoed Tronti's insights, with their paradoxical notion that resistance is primary.14

Yet from here there also arose the willfully optimistic belief that the openness of the relational commodity -- in the form of Web 2.0, for example -- or the extraordinary proliferation of the creative industries could somehow represent a "great transformation" of capitalist society, a decisive change in its structures that only needed to be taken up in its full promise and stabilized in new institutional forms.15

15 The chief exponent of this idea is one of Tronti’s French translators, Yann Moulier-Boutang, in Le capitalisme cognitif: La nouvelle grande transformation (Paris: Amsterdam, 2007).                                                                                      
16 For these perspectives, see the work of the P2P Foundation run by Michael Bauwens (http://p2pfoundation.net).

key idea was that innovation and creativity are fundamentally uncontrollable by any labor discipline

What disappeared in all this were the ideas of Tronti himself, his passionate conviction that workers must throw off the organizational structures that transform their labor and life energy into the driving force of capital.

To theorize an inevitable sublation or even an impending breakdown of the cultural system under the pressure of its inherent contradictions is to repeat an historical error of antiquated Marxism (and the second time around is definitely farce).

the privileged status of art within the creative city and creative economy discourse obviously has to be left behind; and even more, it has to be actively resisted, deliberately subverted, so that something new can arise

What creates a contemporary leftist culture? How is a subversive subjectivity forged? And what blocks its formation?

Key questions ^^^ – focus on these!

Tectonic Shifts

The type of mobile, dynamic, protean individual shaped by participation in the networked world market (what I call the "flexible personaity") clearly has a better chance of eluding capture when he or she is exposed to confrontations of values with people from very different horizons.

more attention to an anthropology of self-fashioning

The proposal of a political project, a call for cooperation:

And since many thousands of active people who have reshaped their convictions in recent social movements are now beginning to play around with cultural self-management, it may be possible in a time of crisis to launch broader and more significant experiments in decoding and recoding -- that is, in collective metamorphosis. Yet to achieve this would in turn require a deeper knowledge of persistent sovereignties and control techniques, along with an ability to map their restructuring with each new round of systemic crisis.

"Geocritique," which is the necessary reformulation of cultural critique in the present.

As we have discovered through collective work in the Continental Drift seminar,21 the five scales of intimate, territorial, national, continental and global experience all tend constantly to interrelate, making the lifeworld into an interplay of scales. The pressures on the self become considerable under the multiple rule-sets of this spatialized game; but so does the vital interest of the players.

... CYBERNETICS

That the book should end with detailed studies of the remote-control systems born of the military science of cybernetics is a token of the times, which have witnessed one last desperate and ill-fated resurgence of the old Anglo-American drive to imperial hegemony.

Crucial to any experience of the digitized worlds is the question of modeling, which abstracts from one context of interaction the parameters, rules and protocols that will make it possible to formulate another one. Of course, this is the technique that has given us control environments such as airports, malls, entertainment palaces and other "scripted spaces," where carefully constructed scenarios of experience are modulated in real time according to data gathered from the people moving through them.

But a long tradition of dissent and subversion within the sciences of complexity means that cybernetics cannot entirely be reduced to the procedures of control.

He describes art, not as it hangs on the wall in a museum, but as it returns in your memory and your senses, as a refrain or ritornello of insistent presence cut off from anything you could precisely define or own.

The philosopher-therapist wants to introduce us to the territories where subjectivity gains the desire to speak and act through a contact with the deterritorializing rhythms of art.

The four zones of the map -- existential territories, energetic flows, rhizomatic ideas and constellations of aesthetic universes -- thus become a matrix of relations between different domains of action and experience.

Art, or philosophy for that matter, is no longer approached as a strictly specialized zone, but as a mobile element in an existential mix.

There is no reason to be afraid: a movement toward autonomy is the only way to fully reengage with the social and political dimensions of existence.

Timeline

1999-2004: collective phantoms -- direct action + carnival against capital

2003: failure of antiwar marches (together with post 9/11 consolidation): decline of direct action

2004- : situationism, merely symbolid and therefore melancolic

POTENTIALS

Network Maps, Energy Diagrams --- Structure and Agency in the Global System

How can the networked society be represented? And how can it be navigated, appropriated, reshaped in its turn?

Fredric Jameson pointed to the need for "an aesthetics of cognitive mapping" to resolve "the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects."

"again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion."1

This map shows a record of peering sessions between some 12,500 "autonomous systems"

Thus we can distinguish between a determinate network map --- a geographical representation of structures of networked power, which attempts to identify and measure the forces at play -- and an undetermined energy diagram, which opens up a field of possible agency.

This understanding of the way that social hierarchies can be altered or dissolved by a deliberate twisting or counter-application of the very forces that make them cohere was the fundamental breakthrough of French critical thinking in the late 1970s and early 1980s, going beyond the deterministic schemas of traditional Marxism (even that of Louis Althusser), but without abandoning the description of dominant structures. At stake here is a fundamental concept of resistance and exodus.

Jameson saw the correlation of abstract knowledge and imaginary figures as key to understanding contemporary symbolic structures, and regaining the capacity to act within them.

power ← → swarm

The best examples of what might be called "swarm cartography" have come from activist groups in Spain. "Transacciones/Fadaiat" is a "geography of the geopolitical territory of the Straits of Gibraltar," compiled in 2004 by independent media producers of the group "Hackitectura," with collaborations from Tangiers and the Canary Islands.

Projects mentioned:

• bureau d'études
• hackitectura
• fadait.net
• govcom.org (Issue Crawlers)
• theyrule.net
• Christian Nold: Biomapping
• Esther Polak's "Amsterdam RealTime: Diary in Traces,"
• GIS art in general
• iMapData
• International Campaign Against Mass Surveillance

on theyrule: But the weakness of all such studies is precisely to focus on what sociologists call "strong ties" -- eliminating the play of chance encounters and the insurgency of events that continually reshape social existence.

Michel de Certeau's opposition between the representational grid of the modern map and the "spatial practices" of walkers in the city, their "opaque and blind mobility," narrated through word and footstep.

02-Do-It-Yourself Geopolitics: Global Protest and Artistic Process

Vanguard art in the twentieth century began with the problem of its own overcoming.

Then, Situationism: the overcoming of capital. → hijacking

Something fundamental changes when artistic concepts begin to be used against a backdrop of potentially massive appropriation, with a blurring of class distinctions.

computer hacking and the general model they proposed of amateur intervention into complex systems gave confidence to a generation which had not personally experienced the defeats and dead-ends of the 1960s.

Masking up releases our commonality

Raoul Vaneigem saying "to work for delight and authentic festivity is barely distinguishable from preparing for general insurrection."

Criminal Justice Act, which gave the authorities severe repressive powers against techno parties

Global Street Party: A new cartography of ethical-aesthetic practice had been invented, embodied and expressed all across the world.9

Circuits of Biopolitical Production

J18 was not an artwork. It was an event, a collectively constructed situation.

the recent political mobilizations help make another world possible for artistic process, outside the constituted circuits of production and distribution.

Classic examples are the transnational listserve Nettime, the New York-based website called The Thing, the former Public Netbase in Vienna, Ljudmila in Ljubljana, etc. Their emergence, in the mid-1990s, gave intellectual focus and a heightened sense of agency to the meeting of artistic practice and political activism, under the name of "tactical media."

The concept of tactical media was worked out at the Next 5 Minutes conferences, which took place in Amsterdam from 1993 to 2002, at three-year intervals.11 David Garcia and Geert Lovink summed it up in 1997: "Tactical Media are what happens when the cheap 'do it yourself' media, made possible by the revolution in consumer electronics and expanded forms of distribution (from public access cable to the Internet) are exploited by groups and individuals who feel aggrieved by or excluded from the wider culture."12

Michel de Certeau, who described consumption as "a set of tactics by which the weak make use of the strong."13

the new activists practice an "aesthetic of poaching, tricking, reading, speaking, strolling, shopping, desiring.... the hunter's cunning, maneuvers, polymorphic situations, joyful discoveries, poetic as well as warlike."

Michel Foucault's concept of biopower, which it defines as "a form of power that regulates social life from its interior, following it, interpreting it, absorbing it, and rearticulating it." Biopower is "an integral, vital function that every individual embraces and reactivates of his or her own accord." But this internalization of the control function has the effect of offering the master's tools to all the social subjects

"When self-exploitation acquires a central function in the process of valorization, the production of subjectivity becomes a terrain of central conflict," remarks André Gorz in an issue of the journal Multitudes:

Projects mentioned:

• Reclaim the Streets
• Ne Pas Plier (gfx group)
• nettime
• Public Netbase
• Ljudmila
• The Thing

03-The Potential Personality: Trans-Subjectivity in the Society of Control

Thought is essentially charged with plastic potential. - Ricardo Basbaun

The Device

In a recent series of proposals [2] they take the form of specialized gallery or museum installations where your passage is modulated by the presence of what look like miniature iron fences,

"system-cinema": a real-time, closed-circuit television that enhances my perception of the space while also recording images

memorizable logo of the entire permutational process that Ricardo Basbaum has been proposing, in constantly changing guises, for over a decade. The logo also exists as an acronym: NBP, which in turn unfolds as "New Bases for Personality."

Channeling Flows

One of the traditional problems of vanguard art has been the frame.

The framing problems of contemporary art differ fundamentally from those conceived by the twentieth-century vanguards.

The society of control was first defined in a well-known text by Gilles Deleuze, published in French in 1990.[5]

Moreover, he associated these miniaturized, mobile processes of surveillance with their seeming opposite: the voluntary energy of personal motivation, elicited and channeled by the psychological function of marketing.

Deleuze: "What traditionally philosophy had conceived as the subject of will, or traditional ethics, as the integrity of the whole person, is reduced to "the code of a 'dividual' material to be controlled."

The vanguard gesture of breaking through the frame could no longer produce a liberating effect, if authoritarian limits to behavior were to be replaced by the elastic fluctuation of continuously monitored environments.

In the same text, Basbaum indicated four characteristics of artistic practices in the face of the new control procedures:

1. An autopoetic or self-renewing machinic environment, whose autonomy develops at variance with its surroundings;
2. An intervention that consists not in the rupture of generic or disciplinary boundaries, but instead in a deliberately localizing confrontation with diffuse, all-embracing cultural forms;
3. An impersonal status of the artist, who becomes a vector for the theatricalization of a lived environment, through the propagation of an "individual mythology";
4. A new reception of the artistic work, whereby an actively participating spectator adopts an ethical-aesthetic-creative position.

What's surprising is the degree of coherency that these four fundamental presuppositions have retained, some thirteen years later. (re: the theoretical program sketched out in 1992)

Qualitative processes that dissipate the circularity of feedback loops and render impossible any modelization of behavior: here are the initial characteristics of an artistic resistance to the control society.

First, what sort of "confrontation" is achieved with the diffuse, all-pervasive forms of contemporary culture? And second, what can now be said of the "ethical-aesthetic-creative position" -- that is, of the position of the former spectator?

Towards a Diagram of the Swarm

surveillance

Accompanying this trend is the diffuse consciousness that if we are all being watched, then unbridled opportunism -- or a chance to be at the controls of the new system -- is a far better outcome for me. The result is a pliant, continuously available individualism, a willingness to find one's personal advantage through constant adaptation to arbitrarily changing rules. The pathology of domination/submission that I have analyzed as "the flexible personality" is now fully installed in the Western societies.[8]

Jordan Crandall, who since the mid-1990s has produced one of the most consistently insightful bodies of work devoted to subjectivation processes at the interface between man and machine.[9]

Wikipedia:

Artists and researchers at CRCA have been involved in numerous technoscience research projects, such as Sheldon Brown's work on Game Design focusing on algorithmic generation of 3D game environments in Scalable City, [7], the Software Studies Initiative's work developing data visualizations of large sets of cultural data[8] and Micha Cárdenas' 365 hour Becoming Dragon project, about which Katherine sweetman of San Diego City Beat said "nobody has ever 'lived' in virtual reality continuously for so long".[9]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Research_in_Computing_and_the_Arts

"collective heterogenesis."

a proposal like Nós Nós (2002), an "affirmative all-inclusive manifesto" which associates the Portuguese word for "we" (nós) with its homonym meaning "nodes" or "knots".

As Basbaum remarks: "If the group is conceived of as circuit, each node is not a single individual, but another group in itself -- the fractal structure is evident."[11]

It's no accident that the Nós Nós proposal also refers to "coletivo formigueiro," a group of Brazilian artists and cultural workers dedicated to media activism.

in recent years they have contributed to a new kind of social formation, a new intentionality, increasingly capable of self-organization through transindividual processes that cannot be easily identified or targeted, that have found a constitutive principle in dispersion. Here is a choreography of the multiple self, a contemporary territory of existence.

Facebook has a business model for facilitating exactly that process and freedom and disruptive potentiality. :( And THEY have the real map that corresponds to these allegories.  The new resistance may be substantialised exactly through the formation of new social networks, like using RetroShare or ???

Experiments

04-Coded Utopia: Makrolab or the Art of Transition

Moving away from the creation of recognizable works, art becomes an experimental territory for producing subjectivities -- according to the "ethico-aesthetic paradigm" of Felix Guattari.

Makrolab is a collaborative project that emerges from the vision of the Slovene artist Marko Peljhan.

Living Laboratory

"Ladomir" (1920) by the Russian futurist Khlebnikov.

co-founder of Ljudmila

A prototype, Makrolab Mark I, was included in the program of Documenta X and installed for the summer of 1997 on Lutterberg Hill, several miles away from the city of Kassel.

The empowerment came through the reception and decoding of civil and military transmissions, carried out in collaboration with the American artist Brian Springer.

Birringer locates Peljhan and Springer's practice on the borderline between the new technologies and the techniques of the historical vanguards (collage, readymade, cut-up, drift). The specific difference of the contemporary mixes, in his view, was the framework within which they were exchanged: no longer did the artists address the classical institutions (magazines, galleries, museums) but instead the new public spheres of the NGOs, and above all, the "gift economies" of the net activists.

In Eshun's view, the public or "epic" work of environmental and informational mapping -- exemplified by the French conceptual art group Bureau d'Études -- becomes subtly secondary to the "confessional mode" of the researcher's logbook or intimate journal, recording the "intricately funky daily routine of the Makronaut." [6]

In support of this argument, Eshun quotes an article by Boris Groys entitled "Art in the Age of Biopolitics: From Artwork to Art Documentation." Groys remarks that the effectiveness of biopolitical technologies is to give form to life itself, conceived as "a pure activity that occurs in time":

Art documentation is a record of these life-decisions, "the only possible form of reference to an artistic activity that cannot be represented in any other way."

"If reproduction makes copies out of originals, installation makes originals out of copies.... modernity enacts a complex play of removing from sites and placing in (new) sites, of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, of removing aura and restoring aura."

Entropic Societies

The thesis is that individuals in a restricted, intensive isolation can produce more evolutionary code than large social movements."

a generative matrix, a device for producing evolutionary code

It was the heyday of the industrial rock band Laibach, then of the broader art movement known as NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst) -- a time when cultural revolt took place through what philosopher Slavoj Zizek called an "over-identification" with the most explicit symbols of authoritarian power. [9]

But it was Dragan Zivadinov, the director of Cosmokinetic Cabinet Noordung (successor to the Scipion Nasice Theater) who went the furthest with the imaginary of the capsule, orchestrating in 1995 the first in a series of complex performances, carried out in a sculptural stage-set resembling a space vehicle.

Yet a fundamental difference separates him from the generation of the 1980s, a difference involving the very conception of artistic practice, and of its role in society.

"There was one defining moment when I decided that this is not going to be a stage. This is going to be something different. It's not going to be a performance. It's going to be real."

Being real means obtaining funding, logistical support and cultural prestige for an expensive sci-art project that originates from a small Eastern country and operates subversively on the fringes of the globalized exhibition system, drawing on the autonomous energies of the hacker ethic and the tactical media crowd to conduct "civilian counter-reconnaissance" with high-tech equipment.[16]

The contrast could hardly be greater with the transition strategy of NSK's Irwin group, culminating in the recent East Art Map.

From the start, Peljhan seems to have relished the contradictions between activist subversion and institutional backing.

Horizons

Biopolitics -- the consciously cooperative creation of life's artificial frameworks -- defines itself in resistance to the coercive biopower that is exercised on human time.[22]

The language of Makrolab suggests something else: a generative matrix, close to the models of social evolution developed in Guattari's complexity theory.[23]

The end-products of the "dataesthetic" can therefore be interpreted somewhat differently, outside the gap between raw documentation and the ineffable immanence of lived experience.

05-Extradisciplinary Investigations: Toward A New Critique of Institutions

What is the logic, the need or the desire that pushes more and more artists to work outside the limits of their own discipline, defined by the notions of free reflexivity and pure aesthetics, incarnated by the gallery-magazine-museum-collection circuit, and haunted by the memory of the normative genres, painting and sculpture?

such arguments were launched by Robert Smithson in his text on cultural confinement in 1972, then restated by Brian O'Doherty in his theses on the ideology of the white cube.1

a "finance art" whose birth was announced in the Casa Encendida of Madrid just last summer.

We can approach it through the word that the Nettime project used to define its collective ambitions. For the artists, theorists, media activists and programmers who inhabited that mailing list -- one of the important vectors of net.art in the late 1990s -- it was a matter of proposing an "immanent critique" of the Internet, that is, of the technoscientific infrastructure then in the course of construction. This critique was to be carried out inside the network itself, using its languages and its technical tools and focusing on its characteristic objects, with the goal of influencing or even of directly shaping its development -- but without refusing the possibilities of distribution outside this circuit.2

Though they aren't the same, interdisciplinarity and indiscipline have become the two most common excuses for the neutralization of significant inquiry.3

The extradisciplinary ambition is to carry out rigorous investigations on terrains as far away from art as finance, biotech, geography, urbanism, psychiatry, the electromagnetic spectrum, etc., to bring forth on those terrains the "free play of the faculties" and the intersubjective experimentation that are characteristic of modern art, but also to try to identify, inside those same domains, the spectacular or instrumental uses so often made of the subversive liberty of aesthetic play -- as the architect Eyal Weizman does in exemplary fashion, when he investigates the appropriation by the Israeli and American military of what were initially conceived as subversive architectural strategies.

This complex movement, which never neglects the existence of the different disciplines, but never lets itself be trapped by them either, can provide a new departure point for what used to be called institutional critique.

Histories of the Present

What has been established, retrospectively, as the "first generation" of institutional critique includes figures like Michael Asher, Robert Smithson, Daniel Buren, Hans Haacke and Marcel Broodthaers. They examined the conditioning of their own activity by the ideological and economic frames of the museum, with the goal of breaking out.

To find out where their story leads, however, we have to look at the writing of Benjamin Buchloh and see how he framed the emergence of institutional critique.

The first is A Square Removed from a Rug in Use, and the second, A 36"x 36" Removal to the Lathing or Support Wall of Plaster or Wallboard from a Wall (both 1968).

everything about this specialized aesthetic space is a trap, that it has been instituted as a form of enclosure. That tension produced the incisive interventions of Michal Asher, the sledgehammer denunciations of Hans Haacke, the paradoxical displacements of Robert Smithson, or the melancholic humor and poetic fantasy of Marcel Broodthaers, whose hidden mainspring was a youthful engagement with revolutionary surrealism.

Second generation: Among the names most often cited are Renee Green, Christian Philipp Müller, Fred Wilson or Andrea Fraser.

Phase Change

The end may be logical, but some desire to go much further. The first thing is to redefine the means, the media and the aims of a possible third phase of institutional critique.

The notion of transversality, developed by the practitioners of institutional analysis, helps to theorize the assemblages that link actors and resources from the art circuit to projects and experiments that don't exhaust themselves inside it, but rather, extend elsewhere.10 These projects can no longer be unambiguously defined as art. They are based instead on a circulation between disciplines, often involving the real critical reserve of marginal or counter-cultural positions -- social movements, political associations, squats, autonomous universities -- which can't be reduced to an all-embracing institution.

in full awareness that the second nature of the world is now shaped by technology and organizational form. In almost every case it is a political engagement that gives them the desire to pursue their exacting investigations beyond the limits of an artistic or academic discipline. But their analytic processes are at the same time expressive, and for them, every complex machine is awash in affect and subjectivity. It is when these subjective and analytic sides mesh closely together, in the new productive and political contexts of communicational labor (and not just in meta-reflections staged uniquely for the museum), that one can speak of a "third phase" of institutional critique -- or better, of a "phase change" in what was formerly known as the public sphere, a change which has extensively transformed the contexts and modes of cultural and intellectual production in the twenty-first century.

An issue of Multitudes, co-edited with the Transform web-journal, gives examples of this approach.11

On considering the work, and particularly the articles dealing with technopolitical issues, some will probably wonder if it might not have been interesting to evoke the name of Bruno Latour. His ambition is that of "making things public," or more precisely, elucidating the specific encounters between complex technical objects and specific processes of decision-making (whether these are de jure or de facto political). For that, he says, one must proceed in the form of "proofs," established as rigorously as possible, but at the same time necessarily "messy," like the things of the world themselves.12

An anonymous protester's insistent sign, brandished in the face of the TV cameras at the demonstrations surrounding the 2003 EU summit in Thessalonica, says it all: ANY SIMILARITY TO ACTUAL PERSONS OR EVENTS IS UNINTENTIONAL.14

Today more than ever, any constructive investigation has to raise the standards of resistance.

Thanks to Gerald Raunig and Stefan Nowotny for their collaboration on this text and on the larger project.

06-Differential Geography: Research and Rhythm in Artistic Representation

It is as though the works had to recognize within themselves the presence of a spatial order at once homogeneous and fragmented: the abstract space of the contemporary capitalist planning process, as it is sketched out and realized in some of the largest infrastructural programs of the present. It is this rigidly segmentary space of control that the artworks melt and dissolve into the affective rhythms of "a myriad of human trajectories on the ground."

Searching for Motives

At stake here, as curator Anselm Franke noted in his introduction to the exhibition catalogue, is the "silent language of infrastructure." 2

It was, to date, one of the most searching and insightful projects of what some people are calling visual geography.

These precisely conceived investigations of the southeastern periphery of Europe, and of its continual transformations since the end of the Cold War, take us far away from any purely aesthetic definition of art. The ambition is clearly to develop a new mode of inquiry and expression, yielding results that are qualitatively different from those obtained either by artists or by social scientists.

Corridor X: a functional whole, via private-public partnerships of tremendous stealth and complexity.5 This kind of project seems calculated to dwarf the human being, and in that way, to vanquish in advance any imaginable resistance or possibility of democracy.

The BTC pipeline presents a similar aspect. Today it is already buried beneath the ground, to secure it against terrorist attacks, but also to reduce its exposure to the media. It was only visible for a few short years, during the period of its construction; and even then, you had to find it on the terrain, since the British Petroleum corporation gave no information whatsoever as to its location.

The other side of the pipeline -- all that is "beyond" its abstract functionality -- rises gradually into our field of knowledge through this questioning relationship with the people along the wayside, often migrants, displaced persons, who know what it means to have to recreate a world.

Multiplying Narratives

To move closer to the most important stakes of this research, one could begin by saying that what it represents -- what it shows or explicates -- is the production of space, in the sense that was given to that phrase by Henri Lefebvre. → differential space

The enigma of the body -- its secret, at once banal and profound -- is its ability, beyond "subject" and "object" (and beyond the philosophical distinctions between them), to produce differences "unconsciously" out of repetitions -- out of gestures (linear) or out of rhythms (cyclical). Just like the fleshy body of the living being, the spatial body of society and the social body of needs differ from an "abstract corpus" or "body" of signs (semantic or semiological -- "textual") in the following way: they cannot live without generating, without producing, without creating differences.8

interactions between the positionality of subjects and the forms of situated knowledge (including expressive knowledge).9

certain artists working with contemporary media have sought a more active and affective intervention into the production of space, by means of the material and linguistic qualities of videographic editing itself.

Instead of a pure analysis of abstract space or a pure aestheticization of the human landscape, artistic research can now give form to a differential geography, that is to say, to a mode of cognition -- and of recognition, and of self-recognition

B Zone -- which Melitopoulos describes as "a zone of transitions, processes of becoming, unstable political conditions, neocolonial strategies of cooptation and antithetical historiographies"10: → it is actually a line of flight

can start flowing back into the saturated imaginary space of the A Zone, and begin to create a field of coexistence. This is the active force of differential geography. → i don’t get this and it also does not sound very militant

"The video image does not document the real, but acts as a mnemonic agent or a visual memory."12

Maurizio Lazzarato's vidéophilosophie

principle of the two-screen installation

a process of trans-subjective editing that traverses a continent

As she explains: "The mass media do not censor individual opinions, but the complexity of the processes of subjectivation. Many-layered, complex relations of identity and subjectivity affect people beyond their self-attributed identity and produce a group that is not represented by the majority opinion."15

The fact is that sustained artistic research into the gendered and ethnically hierarchized worlds of uneven geographical development does not yet exist to any massively significant degree -- no doubt because it cannot be planned like a pipeline or a corridor, but must instead emerge from the cultivation of desires for a more meaningful mobility.

07-The Speculative Performance: Art's Financial Futures

Since the heyday of "tulipomania" in Holland, financiers have been speculating on aesthetics.

the exhibition "Derivados, Nuevas visiones financieras," mounted in the summer of 2006 at the Casa Encendida in Madrid. The organizing group, Derivart, brought together a select bouquet of works to celebrate the birth of "Finance Art."

At the heart of this new genre is an aesthetics of information, an "infosthetics": the transformation of data streams into visual or sonic representations, by way of computer algorithms.3

Works:

• Black Shoals

If we understand critique as a purely deconstructive operation, then a performance like "Tickerman" can be critical, just as arbitrage operations can be considered an "art" in the text by Daniel Buenza. But if we understand critique according to its etymology, as the attempt to intervene at the moment of a life-threatening crisis, then maybe we should look elsewhere for a critical art -- far from the data-bodies and abstracted surgeries of infosthetics.

This article will examine two performances, both of which engage their authors in an embodied reflection on the financial markets.

Trading on the Razor's Edge

Goldberg set out to deal artistically in derivatives of a single stock: News Corp., the global media empire of the right-wing billionaire Rupert Murdoch. The title was "Catching a Falling Knife" -- financial jargon for a risky deal.

By reflexively performing his real role as a day trader within an exaggerated gallery environment, Goldberg made a public event out of the intimate interaction between the speculative self and the market as it coalesces into presence on personal computer screens.

Markets: "knowledge constructs.", "postsocial relationships.", "global microstructure." 14, "consensual hallucination.", the postsocial relationship: "engagements with non-human others."

"what traders encounter on screens are stand-ins for a more basic lack of object."

Jaques Lacan's concept of the mirror stage, where the speechless infant is fascinated by the sight of its own body as a whole entity, and at the same time disoriented by the inward perception of a morcellated, untotalizable body-in-pieces.

Clifford Geertz, in a discussion of Balinese cock-fighters and their high-stakes gambling, called "deep play."17

The work, then, is no mere illustration or celebration of "deep play" in the financial markets. However, there is a more telling question to ask about its performative intentions. Was Goldberg just hedging his bets with his tacit critique, which in the worst of cases could always serve as a kind of blue-chip value on the intellectualized end of the art world?

How to confront the link between art and finance, without succumbing to the latter's attraction? How to engage a relation of rivalry or artistic antagonism within the most fascinating capture-devices of contemporary capitalism?

Cartography off the Tracks

This is what Castoriadis himself does not seem to have taken into account, even as late as 1987 when he offered a definition of the political act: "Create the institutions which, when internalized by individuals, most facilitate their accession to their individual autonomy and their effective participation in all forms of explicit power existing in society."21 The question that must be asked is how such institutions could exert their influence, or indeed, who could create them, if the very process of internalization no longer works?

"In a nutshell, the argument is that the incompleteness of being which I have attributed to contemporary objects uniquely matches the structure of wanting by which I have characterized the self."22 The Lacanian concept of a "lack-in-being" proves strangely pertinent when it comes to drafting a structural cartography of the relations of subjectivation in capitalist societies. But in such societies, wouldn't an instituting imaginary also have to be processual? And wouldn't it also have to be fundamentally exterior to the subject?

In the summer of 2005, artists, researchers, activists and alternative media producers were invited to put their discourses and practices to the test of movement beyond familiar borders, by joining a conference and art event on the rails between Moscow and Beijing, in the corridors, berths and dining cars of the Trans-Siberian train. The event was organized by collectives associated with the web-journal of the ephemera group, devoted to "theory & politics in organization." Its title was Capturing the Moving Mind: Management and Movement in the Age of Permanently Temporary War.

"Whereas discipline was always related to molded currencies having gold as a numerical standard, control is based on floating exchange rates, modulations, organizations of the movement of currencies. In short, it tries to follow or imitate movements and exchanges as such, paying no attention to their specific contents. The knowledge economy is the continuance of capitalism without a foundation, and arbitrary power is its logical form of organization."

Some of the Finnish participants in the project have just put together a collective under the name of Research Station General Intellect...

In this case, the ruses of arbitrage seem impossible: no one knows what will emerge. Invisible maps of territories still undreamed.

08-50 Ways to Leave Your Lover: Exit Strategies from Liberal Empire

Along the river bank in the city of Dongducheon, some twenty miles north of Seoul in the Republic of Korea, the artist Kim Sangdon organized a hilarious public performance. Participants were invited to create slingshots, kites, catapults, flying machines -- in short, to hurl every imaginable homemade projectile over the rusty razor wire separating them from the recently vacated U.S. Army base of Camp Nimble. The missiles carried a payload of clover seeds, which in the best of cases could scatter on impact, sprout, flourish, cover the ground and begin remediating the poisoned soil left behind by decades of military occupation.

After eight long years of the Bush administration's useless wars, I want OUT of the obscene and seemingly endless love affairs between the U.S. and its army, whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, Korea or in our own country.

What would it take to exit from a sixty-year relationship that has defined the United States no less than the Republic of Korea? Above all, what does it mean to be free in an age of liberal empire?

Little Chicago and the Silver Screen

Roh Jae Oon's web-based piece, Bite the Bullet!, which explores one of the defining genres of cinema: the war flick.

Reflecting on the discipline that led his pilots to a successful mission and their own deaths, the admiral asks "Where do we get such men?" What is the operation that produces them?

propaganda images of the US Army's "Future Combat Systems" confirm the implicit reference to the military-entertainment complex.

"Either you create your future or you become the victim of the future someone creates for you." That's a statement by the former director of Rumsfeld's Office of Force Transformation, which initiated the entire relocation concept that is shifting South Korea's military geography. Quoted by a Korean artist, it becomes an intensely ironic expression of the high ambition and deep anxiety that the Dongducheon project is trying to communicate to its viewers.

From Militarized Modernity to Liberal Empire

The exhibition looks back at the past without nostalgia or resentment, in order to grasp the complexities of the present and in that way, share at least some hope of shaping the future. Even after considering barely half the pieces, one can sense that each detail and nuance has been discussed intensively during the research process, working to create that most rare of events, a group exhibition (and not just a selection of works to fit a curatorial concept). One can wonder, then, about the absence from the show of a theme that would seem to be central to its whole proposal. I am thinking about the specifically Korean form of productive discipline that Moon Seungsook calls "militarized modernity" -- and of the ways that it relates to, and differs from, more characteristically American patterns of character-formation.

the maintenance of an extremely tense Cold War stand-off with the North, this pattern endured in its strongest expression all the way to 1987, when the democracy movement finally led to liberalization and the end of the dictatorship.

What remains largely invisible in the show, therefore, is the lived experience of militarized modernity and its consequences on Korean subjectivities today.

Here we have the fundamental contradiction that structures liberal empire. On the one hand, a continuous insistence on the necessity of force, to be applied under "states of exception" in distant outposts such as Guantánamo; and on the other, an unshakable confidence in the rule of law, which can always be reestablished back home by the infallible procedures of American democracy.

the blindness lies in civil society's naive belief that traditional legal instruments are still enough to restrain the immense, unbridled powers of the Pentagon.

our Lover « Sunset Project (5/13) that makes it grounds for dishonorable discharge. The ongoing dispute in the US between the two opposing positions -- are we an empire? or are we a law-governed power enforcing a liberal international order? -- becomes yet another way of refusing to face the imperious reality of this effective contradiction.7

What are the actual consequences of militarized modernity and liberal empire on our societies today? This is the question that critical artists and intellectuals should never avoid, either in Korea or in America.

to investigate the rape of a twelve-year old Okinawan girl by two Marines and a Navy seaman. There he began work on another major concept: the "empire of bases."9

Johnson has led the way towards a geopolitical understanding of American militarism, by describing the network of over 750 U.S. bases on foreign soil, inhabited by approximately half a million soldiers, support staff, private contractors and dependents, and underwritten by a partially secret budget of approximately a trillion dollars a year. Mark Gillem, an architect working critically inside the U.S. Air Force, takes a further step. His recent study of military urbanism is entitled America Town, in reference to the gated bar and prostitution district constructed outside Kunsan airbase with the active complicity of South Korean officials and businessmen.

to speak of the financial sphere is one thing; and to see how it touches the ground is another.

What Gillem has assembled is the portrait of a bloated society living on borrowed money and time, under the shadow of current and impending battles for the ultimate developmental resource: the oil needed to run all those grotesquely oversized cars, trucks, ships and planes.

Pretty Things that Glitter in the Dark

"By 2004 approximately 27.4 per cent of rural South Korean men were married to non-Korean women."13

There may well be a clue here for those who are wondering how to definitively move beyond the attitudes of the 1980s generation, when the democracy movement violently confronted the forces of order on the streets, while the Minjung artists excoriated militarist discipline on their canvases. That step beyond is clearly being taken by contemporary Korean activism

The search to articulate political subjectivities with a foundation in personal experience and a consciousness that goes far beyond it is what interests me most today. This articulation isn't easy, and among other things, it involves changing the definition of what art is and what it can be. That's almost impossible to do when you have repressive regimes on your back.

09-The Absent Rival: Radical Art in a Political Vacuum

Was there ever a vanguard without enlightened industrialists? Is it possible to shock the bourgeoisie in the twenty-first century? Does anyone have ears to hear what activists are saying? Or has the privatization of knowledge destroyed even the common space where words have their meaning?

Skeletons in Suits

Yes Men's work on Dow Chemicals

Counseling the Prince

Enter an unusual figure: Bernard Stiegler, the French philosopher who leans to the left, believes in industry, dreams of technology, and wants to be the counselor of the prince. He worries about the collapse of today's "libidinal economy" and thinks Europe should develop a new industrial model. He's also nostalgic for the statism of General de Gaulle, dislikes anyone who wears tennis shoes and shows every sign of being a cultural conservative. One of his recent books (but he publishes three or four a year) is dedicated to Laurence Parisot, the president of the French bosses' union: a corporate crusader to whom he proposes "saving capitalism" by "re-enchanting the world."2 Stiegler's ideas are stimulating but also weirdly naive, pragmatic yet strangely delirious. Let's have a closer look.

His first move is to establish an equivalence between the technologies of cognitive capitalism and what Foucault calls "the writing of the self." The mediation of externalized linguistic techniques is fundamental to the process of individuation.

As Stiegler says, "service capitalism makes all segments of human existence into the targets of a permanent and systematic control of attention and behavior -- the targets of statistics, formalizations, rationalizations, investments and commodifications." Or in Rifkin's less abstract way of putting it: "The company's task is to create communities for the purpose of establishing long-term commercial relationships and optimizing the lifetime value of each customer."3

"grammatization."

Writing, reinterpreted in alphabetic form by the Phoenicians and the Greeks, becomes not only a vector for authority, but also an instrument of self-government.

human individuation (the process that allows one to say "I") is inextricably bound up with a broader pathway of collective individuation (the process that allows us to say "we").

the twofold process of psychosocial individuation is inseparable from the process of technological individuation, to the extent that the former is dependent on the specific kinds of externalized memory made possible by the latter

This is the relevance of the hacker work of the Collectives.  Also the significance of the insistence on freedom as choice by the FOSS developers.

I become who I am, and we become who we are, within the range of possibilities offered by the concomitant evolution of the recording machines to which I/we have access.

Internet appears as a potentially dynamic principle of technological writing

Patrick Le Lay, CEO of the premier French commercial channel TF1, who infamously declared at a corporate strategy session that what he had to sell to Coca-Cola was "available human brain time" for their advertisements.

The Internet as a "global mnemotechnical system" is itself threatened by industrial populism, whose massively damaging consequences we see all around us -- above all in the global warming created by the Fordist economy,

Here we come to the heart of the dilemma. Because the appeal to a European corporate elite is at once totally logical and deeply unrealistic.

epochal change could come from either end of the techno-cultural system. For just as the industrial production of better mnemonic devices would stimulate a higher level of participatory culture, so the latter would itself create a broader demand for more intricate and useful machines of self-government. And if we consider the track-record of our capitalist elites, then the cultural demand might seem a much more likely starting point than the industrial offer.

But hackers are intervening exactly at the technological end: the premise of Holmes’ argument is that technology can only be made with capital.  This is true to some extent but on the other hand widely challenged by the whole hacker scene.

the real driving forces of a critical and emancipatory use of mnemotechnics. I'm referring to the production of free software

Letters and Destinations

There is an obvious place to look for positive transformations of networked technology: in cooperatively written, non-proprietary computer code, which comes to most people's desktop as a Linux operating system (like the one that brought you this book).

FOSS interpretation!  I hope the question of individual motivations stays away! :)

holding closer to the ideas of anthropologist Marcel Mauss, one could conceive certain "gifts" as charged with antagonism, devised in reality to crush an opponent with overwhelming abundance.

Why such a concerted reaction from the hacking community? Behind the copyrighted tunes were lurking all the metaphysical subtleties of free software's ancient enemy: private property.

GPL

Stallman himself makes a curious observation about how this came to pass: "In 1984 or 1985, Don Hopkins (a very imaginative fellow) mailed me a letter. On the envelope he had written several amusing sayings, including this one: 'Copyleft -- all rights reversed.' I used the word 'copyleft' to name the distribution concept I was developing at the time."6

Few people realize that the keyword of today's most emancipatory technology came mailed through the post. Even fewer probably realize that the term "copyleft" was independently invented by the artist Ray Johnson, founder of the "New York Correspondance School."7 But one thing is obvious when you consider art history: Mail Art provided the matrix from which radical uses of the Internet would spring.

In between Filliou and Baroni is an interview with Ray Johnson, published in 1982 in Lotta Poetica (Verona, Italy)

Mail art is an addressing system for the multiplication of desire.

Contact through a far-flung network became part of what Ulises Carrión referred to as the shift from "personal worlds" to "cultural strategies."12

After the first Global Days of Action in 1998, "cultural strategies" came to mean the art of mobilizing tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands of people.

B -- B Prime

The philosopher Christoph Spehr sums it all up, in a film that violates every provision of copyright. On Blood and Wings: A Study in the Dark Side of Cooperation is a contribution to the cutting edge of Marxist theory, clipped from the archives of B-grade vampire flicks.13 It starts from the classics of 1930s expressionism, then goes on to hilarious 1990s video, dubbed over with Spehr's cutting-edge ideas on free cooperation.

In November 2008, the Yes Men and friends brought out a million and a half copies of the New York Times, just like the real thing but with a political project for changing what makes the news.15 The least that the rest of us can do is bring some education into the infected realms of public institutions.

GEOCRITIQUE

10-Remember the Present: Representations of Crisis in Argentina

For us it's clear that if we want to strengthen a grassroots democracy, we have to make a definitive bid for radicalization. It's no longer a matter of 'returning to normal,' of returning to political rhetoric, of getting the game of formal democracy into gear, or of constructing a 'true representation of the people.' We have to strengthen other tendencies, other logics. We have to reinforce the popular struggles, and not to channel them back toward power. --- Colectivo Situaciones, March 24, 2001

memorial plaque informs us that this Puente de la Mujer, or "Bridge of Womankind," was inaugurated on December 20, 2001. But that's impossible -- because that was the second day of the Argentinean revolt against the consequences of neoliberal globalization, and the city's elites were in no position to do any celebrating.

Puerto Madero appears as a speculation, in all the senses of the word, on the prospects -- and the profits -- of a total erasure of memory.

It raises a question about how to represent, or better, how to enact a counter-memory.

I've taken my inspiration from Paolo Virno's book Il ricordo del presente; from the unusually searching art show Ex Argentina; from the clues to be found in a wide range of books and articles; and above all from the testimonies, viewpoints and interpretations offered by friends and acquaintances in Buenos Aires and Rosario.1

The aim is to provide a discursive frame for some of the most impressive experiments in political art to have emerged around the turn of the millennium.

History Paintings

the artist Azul Blaseotto carried out a portrait in oils of the people who built the facade of Puerto Madero. This enormous painting -- a neo-expressionist grande machine with a central panel and two lateral wings -- depicts the cultural, economic and political elite of Argentina, gathered together in a glass-walled room that looks down on their creation.

What happened, on December 19 and 20, 2001, in Argentina? How to understand the images of revolt that reached us from those days? The sacked supermarkets? The burning tires? The highway roadblocks? The solidarity between the urban middle classes and the disenfranchised industrial workers, who together raised first great popular revolt against the consequences of neoliberal globalization?

One way to grasp the Argentine crisis is to look at a very different kind of "history painting," by the French conceptual art group Bureau d'Études.

Entitled Crisis, the work by Bureau d'Etudes functions as a chronology of the world financial system in the 1990s.

There is a perfect correlation between the fall of the Northern stock markets and the rise in the "payment incidents" affecting the reimbursement of the Argentinean debt. The world economy is so tightly integrated that the long process of Argentina's economic decay entered its crisis at the very moment when the American bubble finally burst.

Theater of the Streets

Is money an adequate information system for recording popular resistance?

The contemporary Argentinean Left has built itself around the memory of another date: March 24, 1976, when a military coup inaugurated the Videla dictatorship that lasted until 1983. I first saw that date on a wall in the barrio of San Telmo, in Buenos Aires, where it had been painted by a popular assembly during the insurrection.

By the time of Perón's death in 1974, the split was consummated. The radical workers became increasingly well organized, using shop-floor coordinating committees to escape the control of their union representatives.

Soldiers occupied the factories and the universities. They applied counter-insurgency techniques learned from the French and the Americans. Little by little they identified the ideological elements. It was in 1976-77 that the worst was done. Everyone knows the figure of 30,000 disappeared. Often they were thrown from airplanes into the river. Many more were tortured. An estimated nine hundred children were born in prison and adopted by the torturers, after the disappearance of their mothers.

For Latin Americans, the dictatorships of the 1970s, and not the financial globalization of the 1990s, mark the beginnings of neoliberalism. Economic historians on the Left now characterize this decade as an initial phase of strategic de-industrialization: a way of disciplining national working classes by breaking down their opportunities to exert any influence on the development of the productive process.

The Siluetazo was one of the most powerful artistic events in twentieth-century Argentina. Where are the disappeared? What did they do with them? That unanswered question flooded the streets of the country when the dictatorship fell and democracy began its return. The silhouettes were stamped on walls, window shutters and city billboards, pleading for truth and justice. Little by little they vanished from the streets, but they left their demand impressed on collective memory. The artistic interpretation of what was happening melded together with the popular mobilizations demanding trial and punishment for the assassins of the dictatorship, and thereby it gained legitimacy as a powerful tool of struggle in the streets.

"The Siluetazo entailed the socialization of the means of artistic production and distribution, to the extent that the spectator joined in as producer. The visual deed is 'done by everyone and belongs to everyone.' This radically participatory artistic practice encourages the massive appropriation of an idea or concept, and of simple but striking artistic forms and techniques for the repetition of an image."4

Madres de la Plaza de Mayo: "By turning motherhood into a public activity, they were crucial in setting new boundaries of what politics or political spaces are."5

H.I.J.O.S.: "Children for Identity and Justice, against Oblivion and Silence."

This is the second generation of Argentinean human-rights activists, who invented an extraordinary new form of political intervention, the escrache.

engage in long preparatory periods of popular education before each action, now typically held in popular neighborhoods

Etcétera: political movement of the surrealistic imagination.

the collective chanced upon the abandoned premises of the former Argonauta publishing house founded by the surrealist artist Juan Andralis, filled with dusty books, photographs, images, paintings, sculptures, costumes and old mannequins form the 1930s and 40s.

a moment of "objective chance," just as Marcel Duchamp had described

The point was to develop an art as poetically unpredictable as a dream, and then hurl it like a football into an unbelievable reality.

It's impressive to realize that interventions like this unfolded at the exact time when groups such as Reclaim the Streets were inventing the carnivalesque demonstrations of the antiglobalization movement. In the Argentinean case, the political carnival would culminate in a national insurrection.

Grupo de Arte Callejero / "Street Art Group"

Before the day of an escrache, they would help print fliers giving the date and time of the event and also the name, address, telephone number and portrait of the agent of the dictatorship, along with a list of his crimes.

creating plaques that become like historical markers on the road towards the construction of a counter-memory. "300 meters ahead, ASSASSIN, Luis Juan Donocik, Honorio Pueyrredon 1047, first floor," reads one.

Colectivo Situaciones typically contributes by forming hypotheses about the autonomy of the groups they work with, and about the meaning of their struggles, then engaging discussions with the groups on that basis, after which they transcribe and publish the results in cheap booklets that serve to distribute the results of the collective process.

Almost four years have now gone by since our first escrache, in December of 1996. Over the course of these four years, the escrache has become a new tool of struggle. The escrache has been and continues to be a way to turn memory into action, an innovative way to denounce impunity. A way to show that impunity is not just an abstract word.

A justice founded on the certainty that true justice will not fall from the heights of power like a ripe fruit. A justice which understands that if crime is organized from within the State, then it is society that will have to identify the criminals, judge them, condemn them, pursue them even in their dreams. A justice of the popular sectors, who do not forget and who do not pardon State terrorism, concentration camps, torture, death flights and the abduction of children....9

Insurrection

Martial law was declared on December 19, a month after the crisis had opened with the prohibition on withdrawals from the banks (known as the corralito) and just a day after the sacking of supermarkets had commenced on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. Masses of unemployed piqueteros, who had begun their revolt long years before in the provinces, were now advancing on the capital. No one could predict what would happen when they reached their destination.

"People's Silkscreen Workshop.": The themes were indicated by the piqueteros, often to commemorate the victims of repression. The work was exemplary of a desire to leave behind the professional role of the artist, to cross class lines and to explore the most immediate use-value of aesthetic creation.

"Vos lo viviste, no dejes que te sigan mintiendo" (You lived through it, don't let them go on lying to you)

From the larger network emerged the visual art group Arde Arte, practicing a variety of street actions that emphasize participation. One of their most striking interventions, in March 2002, involved groups of demonstrators advancing toward the police with large plaques of reflective material, on which were inscribed the slogan "Vete y Vete" (see yourself and scram).14

The memorial plaque was destroyed several times by the police; but that act was finally filmed and revealed in the media, and the ensuing scandal gave the popular movements the legitimacy they needed to impose this piece of history on the built fabric of the city.16

Coda

The artists discussed here would hardly be known in the North -- or recognized in their home country -- without Ex Argentina, the exhibition organized by Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann. The show, held in Cologne in 2004, included most of the artists I have discussed, as well the Argentineans Sonia Abián and Carlos Piegari, Leon Ferrari, Eduardo Molinari, Proyecto Pluja and Sergio Raimondi. They were juxtaposed to politicized artists operating in the European context, including Bernadette Corporation, Alejandra Riera and Fulvia Carnevale, Jürgen Stollhans and many others. A philosophical foundation was provided by the investigations of Colectivo Situaciones and by the proposals of John Holloway, an Irish emigré to Mexico whose book Change the World with Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today (2002) was as important to the antiglobalization movement in Latin America as it was in Europe.

Inside the museum itself, a simulacrum of the G8 negotiating table was decorated with pig's heads, to which were attached the names of the heads of state. At this table a German activist group, the Glücklichen Arbeitslosen ("Happy Unemployed"), shared a bacchanalian feast with the invited artists on the night before the opening, leaving the remains as an ironic message to the public. Only in Germany can vanguard Marxist intellectualism still be publicly expressed at this level of sophistication and symbolic violence.

March 2006, with the exhibition Estéticas de la memoria (Aesthetics of Memory), held at the Recoleta Cultural Center thirty years after the onset of the Videla dictatorship, where Etcétera and the Grupo de Arte Callejero proposed "a collective work that seeks to appropriate the institutional space of art, using words as a medium in the face of the empire of the image."

"HOW DOES THE STATE JUSTIFY THE VIOLATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS TODAY?" They also listed on the walls the names of 1,888 persons killed by the security forces of the democratic republic, since the end of the dictatorship in 1983.

11-Continental Drift: From Geopolitics to Geopoetics

Seminar at 16 Beaver St., NYC (2006) → grassroots intellectual action in the contemporary world-system

Neolib goes Neocon

the international monetary crisis continually looms; and as any historian remembers, trading-bloc formation after the collapse of the gold standard was a prelude to the global conflicts of the 1940s.

China constantly struggles to produce what the US constantly struggles to consume -- at an ecological risk that no one can even measure.

To make the wheel of fortune go on spinning, the Chinese lend their manufacturing profits back to the US, so as to prop up speculation on the almighty dollar and keep the world's largest market soluble.

Levels of conflict are rising all across the globe, and the problem of how to intervene as a world citizen becomes more complex and daunting than ever.

The counter-globalization movements marked the first attempt at a widespread, meshworked response to the chaos of the post-'89 world system. These movements were an uneasy mix between democratic sovereignists, no-border libertarians (David Graeber's "new anarchists") and traditional, union-oriented Keynesians. They could all critique the failures of neoliberal governance, but they all diverged and faltered before its cultural consequences. ... The backlash against globalization became a powerful new tool of manipulation, used by the same elites who launched the whole process in the first place.

The current scramble to consolidate regional blocs reflects the search for a compromise between global reach and territorial stability. Beyond any "clash of civilizations," finding a feasible scale for contemporary social relations has now become a pressing question.

Disorienting Compass

The extraordinary breadth and speed of the current metamorphosis -- a veritable phase-change in the world system -- leaves progressive leftist activists facing a double challenge, or a double opportunity. They must remap the cultural and political parameters that have been transformed by the neoconservative veneer, while remaining keenly aware of the neoliberal principles that remain active beneath the surface.

In this effort the social sciences are the key, whenever it's possible to emancipate them from their illusory neutrality. Economic geography is crucial for tracing the global division of labor and grasping the wider frameworks of what European activists call "precarity." The sociology of organizations reveals who is in control, how power is distributed and maintained in a chaotic world. The study of technics charts out the future in advance, to show how it operates and on whom. And the toolkits of social psychology offer insights into the structures of willful blindness and confused consent that uphold the reigning hegemonies. This kind of analysis is critically important for activist initiatives, which can stumble all too easily into the programmed dead-ends of manipulated ideologies.

How could activist-researchers move to disorient the reigning maps, to transform the dominant cartographies, without falling into the never-never lands of aesthetic extrapolation?

This is when geopoetics becomes a vital activity, a promise of liberation.

How to interpret artworks and artistic-activist interventions so as to highlight the forms taken by the geopoetic imaginary? Through analytical work on the dynamics of form and the efficacy of symbolic ruptures, one can try to approach the diagrammatic level where the cartography of sensation is reconfigured through experiment.

Just Doing It

If you want to accomplish anything like this kind of research, don't expect much assistance from the existing institutions. Most are still busy adapting to the dictates of neoliberal management; and the best we could achieve during the first big round of meshworked critique was to hijack a few of their people, to divert a few of their resources.

Another goal of the critique is to raise the level of debate and engagement in the cultural and artistic sectors -- the vital media of social expression -- where a narcissistic blindness to the violence of current conditions is still the norm.

Yet a further realm that urgently needs exploration is the matrix of interlinguistic exchange and the crisscrossing vectors of translation, beyond the common currency of imperial English.

Other possible worlds will only be articulated by a multitude of tongues, speaking the relations of the scales in their own words and in the words of strangers: intimate, urban, national, continental, global, all overspilling their idiosyncratic dictions. Geopoetics is the revelry of Babel.

Still the most important aim, for me anyway, is to help relaunch the grassroots mobilizations that were so promising around the turn of the millennium. "Help" is the word here, because there is no intellectual privilege in the activist domain. Activist-researchers can contribute to a short, middle and long-term analysis of the crisis by examining and inventing new modes of intervention at the micropolitical scales where even the largest social movements begin.

Who can play this great game? Whoever is able to join or form a meshwork of independent researchers. What are the pieces, the territories, the wagers and rules? Whichever ones your group finds most productive and contagious. How does the game continue when the ball goes out of your field or domain? Through shared meetings in a meshwork of meshworks, through collective actions, positions, projects and publications. And most importantly, who wins? Whoever can provoke some effective resistance to the downward spiral of human coexistence at the outset of the twenty-first century.

12-Articulating the Cracks in the Worlds of Power: Interview w/16 Beaver

13-Invisible States: Europe in the Age of Capital Failure

Introduction

Metamorphoses of the Welfare State

The exhibition Capital (It Fails Us Now) has its locus in two national states on the northern edges of Europe: Norway, which has declined to be a formal member of the European Union, and Estonia, which is among the new members in the former East. In both these countries (but for very different reasons) the form of the state as a democratic instance and an economic project is intensely at issue.

In what follows I will not give any account of the exhibition itself, but rather focus on the changing forms of the capitalist state, within a European context that is structured not only by its shaky supranational architecture, but also by far-ranging transformations of the world economy.

The point is not to expect salvation or damnation from what Engels famously referred to as "the ideal collective capitalist."1

Within the world-system composed by the capitalist democracies of the post-WWII era, the state has in effect been called upon to act a kind of double filter, articulating the specific relations between its various classes of inhabitants, as well as their general relations with the outside world. In this respect, the state is -- or more precisely, has attempted to be -- the "integral of power formations," to borrow the phrase with which Félix Guattari once described capital.2

Metamorphoses of the Welfare State

In an article published in 1982, and destined to become an enduring definition of a fast-disappearing reality, the American specialist in international relations John Gerard Ruggie described the structure of the post-WWII economic compromise as "embedded liberalism."4

This was before the days of US Army journalism, when one could still aspire to express complex meanings. Ruggie borrowed his key term from an anthropologist, Karl Polanyi, who had maintained that in all known societies prior to that of nineteenth-century England, exchanges of goods were embedded in an institutional mix, indeed in a human ecology: there was no separation between specifically economic calculations and a broader set of social reciprocities regulating the care and reproduction of land (i.e. the natural environment), labor (the human body/mind) and money itself (whether the cowrie shells of the Trobriand Islanders, or the fiduciary currencies of nation-states). Polanyi showed that the development of English economic liberalism, propelled by the industrial revolution and extended to worldwide dimensions by the gold standard, had effectively disembedded the economy from society, transforming land, labor and money into what he called "fictitious commodities," continuously bought and sold on a supposedly "self-regulating market."5

"Embedded liberalism" described the effort to reconcile the benefits of international trade with the domestic policies for full employment and social welfare that had first emerged (though in disastrously isolationist forms) during the period of closed currency zones and trading blocs in the 1930s.

The postwar instruments of this reconciliation were regulated international currency exchange (Bretton Woods), import quotas and tariffs to protect certain productive sectors (the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) and labor legislation and social programs (the domestic welfare states).

Closer to our time, the regulation-school economist Bob Jessop has developed the most comprehensive description of the general form or ideal-type of the capitalist state that resulted from the postwar compromise. He calls it the "Keynesian Welfare National State" (KWNS), in reference to the economist and statesman John Maynard Keynes, the English negotiator at Bretton Woods. Keynes was the first to theorize the full employment of the working classes, supported by government debt-financing of works projects, social services and social insurance payments.

This is amazingly English centric thinking, no?  “Was the first to theorise” → I am sure he did not check but assumed that if it was the first in English, it must be automatically universal!

"Third Way" programs of the British New Labour party at the very close of the century.

Such was the basic system of constraints -- the underlying grammar of international relations -- that generated the initial trend toward what Jessop analyzes as the SWPR: the "Schumpeterian Workfare Postnational Regime," named in reference to the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, who focused on entrepreneurial innovation as the motor of economic growth.10 What's indicated with that reference is the transformation of the welfare state according the requirements of the transnational information economy.

A pattern of changes in the forms of state intervention then sets in, which is fulfilled unequally, depending on the specific conditions of each country.

Automatic unemployment benefits, suspected of encouraging idleness, tend to be scrapped in favor of workfare "activation" programs that require continuous job searches, compulsory retraining, or community service (with the Danish "flexicurity" model becoming the new paragon of perfectly calibrated government intervention to meet the needs of a high-turnover job market).

Voluntarist or charitable "third sector" associations (often religious in nature) are called upon to fill in the gaps of stripped-down social programs; while in business operations, centralized state regulation is limited in favor of "governance" exercised by networks of interested parties or "stakeholders."

This is the basic repertory of the "New Public Management" that has spread from Britain throughout the formerly social-democratic countries (including Norway in particular), and has also been proposed as a model of state-formation for the post-socialist countries of the former East.11

The avowed aim of its neoliberal ideologues is to gradually strip the public sector down to the hardcore functions of a night-watchman state: police, justice, diplomacy, army.

Towards a New Political Ecology

In the 1960s and 70s, only France resisted the fundamental Americanization of Europe; but even there, the resistance was merely gestural and diplomatic.

EU's leading cosmopolitan philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, constantly invokes the normative horizon of a "world domestic policy" (Weltinnenpolitik).15 But one should never forget that the EU only functions as a democracy at one remove, via the Council of Ministers and the European Commission, both of which emanate from the arcana of national administrations, leaving room for only very limited direct representation of the continent's voters in the European Parliament.

Core Europe, New Europe, and what might be termed "Edge Europe," i.e. the peripheral countries to the south and east of the current borders.

A New Europe country like Estonia exemplifies this three-tiered situation.

Leaders, parties, political programs succeed each other in a confusing whirl; and what stands out from the rest is the default option of nationalist populism.

But just how far from that same sort of predicament are the hollowed-out social-democratic states of the European core, including Norway and the other Scandinavian lands?

The obvious danger in Core Europe today is that of slipping into a new political ecology of fear, which sutures the gaps between diverging social fractions by the knee-jerk scapegoating of the easiest targets, who are the immigrants, the people gathered to do the jobs that aging Core Europeans no longer desire to perform, or are no longer allowed to perform in an economy that needs under-the-table employment as the only possible way to compress the wage-variable, and therefore continue to make a profit in a fiercely competitive economy.

The question then becomes, why does such an obviously short-sighted tactic seem to be spreading throughout Europe? Why are we looking at the rise of liberal-fascism, and talking about something else? What explains this inability to see the future, when it's already right here before our eyes?

The Chances of Vision

In the finance-driven, networked economy of the postnational competition regimes, it is necessary to add a fourth "fictitious commodity" to Polanyi's list of three (land, labor and money). This fourth fictitious commodity is knowledge, in a spectrum of forms ranging from science, technology and law to literature, cooking and everyday know-how. Its production depends on long-term institutionalized learning and teaching experiences, publicly available libraries, archives, museums and databanks, internalized modes of individual self-cultivation, urban spaces of improvisational or structured group interaction, processes of hybridization between different cultural traditions, the constitution of critical and dissident discourses ranging from punk rock and poetry slams to networks of concerned scientists or alliances of traditional and organic farmers, and so on through a near-infinite spectrum of practices whereby objective observation, theoretical abstraction, individual expression and patterns of social solidarity are laid down in complex traces and artifacts that can be taken up and transformed by successive individuals, groups and generations. The impossibility of completely functionalizing this subtle interweave of practices and motivations is obvious, and was recognized throughout the long era of national institution-building, from the early nineteenth century onwards in most parts of the Western world.

Indeed, the commodification of knowledge is the driving force and central goal of the Schumpeterian competition state, to the precise extent that the leading edge of capitalist production is redefined as technological and managerial innovation (particularly in the financial sphere). All the flowerings of human aspiration and experience can then be treated not just as commodities, but as investments in an entrepreneurial self, as the economist Gary Becker has shown with his notion of "human capital."18

Below are some paragraphs on artistic thinking / artist research.

Paradoxically, the damage caused by this capitalization of knowledge is at once a primary factor in societal blindness, and a chance to bring the new states of human coexistence under the neoliberal regimes to visibility. The collaboration of artists with social scientists, labor organizations and ecology movements during the recent cycle of antiglobalization counter-summits, and now around the theme of the "precariousness of existence" in the flexible economy, has marked a step forward in the ability to name and describe the effects of the neoliberal transformation process. Art has become one of the means of investigation, akin to social science, but irreducible to it.

When artists begin to explore the operations of capital, and to point directly to instances of capital failure, they are participating with their own expressive methods in a complex response to the gradual installation of the competition regime, imposed as a single set of exclusive and increasingly intolerant rules for the difficult and irrevocably multiple states of human coexistence in society. The process of exploring and interpellating these currently invisible states is one aspect of the broader effort to constitute social formations that might act in common, having not only shared objective interests but potentially even an interest in each other.

The deeper problem is that in order to survive as exploratory and transformative practices, and in order to generate enough interest and involvement to reconstitute a socialized cultural sphere under fresh auspices, the contemporary arts have to throw off their blatant or subtle dependence on the new corporate-oriented institutions that promote an opportunistic and flexible subjectivity. And this is easier said than done, as shown by the ambiguous relations between cultural producers on the museum circuit and activists seeking forms of organization for precarious labor.20 Because it's easy to invest in a little anguish over the biopolitical instrumentalization of one's own creativity, in order to produce a new niche product for the originality markets. And it's just as facile to criticize that investment. Indeed, hyperindividualization and the capitalization of everything seems to be the very formula for the breakdown of solidarities, and the emergence of liberal-fascism.

The accession of ten new members to the European Union underscores the difficulty. The problem is that none of these countries can find any interest in maintaining the conditions of a welfare state which they cannot afford, and whose restrictions would block their own path to development.

These concerns must surely feel distant to those who live in the state of Norway, outside most of the EU's political constraints, and close to the North Sea oil wells, with a newly elected center-left government coming into power in the fall of 2005. The Norwegians seem to inhabit a different cartography. Yet despite the hopes of intellectuals, the Socialist Left Party lost ground to traditional Labor in the last elections; while the conservative liberal right-wing Progress Party, with its populist and racist leanings, received "only" 22% of the vote, making it the second largest force. Is it possible for a small nation to steer itself safely through tumultuous changes in the world-system? For a few weeks that same fall, in the self-run space of the artists' union in Oslo, highly abstracted forms of capital failure were on display. Behind them, one could almost glimpse the invisible states of the union.

14-Disconnecting the Dots of the Research Triangle: Flexibilization, Corporatization and Militarization of the Creative Industries

The Research Triangle is an unusually wealthy, unusually brainy metropolitan region of North Carolina, centred around the university towns of Chapel Hill, Durham and Raleigh, and home to about one-and-a-half million people. It owes its name and fame to the establishment in the late 1950s of a state-funded science park, the Research Triangle Park, which is a woodsy retreat for the R&D labs of giant transnational corporations. 'Where the minds of the world meet' is the RTP motto.

Entropy and its Discontents

To raise a few doubts, I'm going to try something between thick geographical description and allegorical landscape.

what's striking is that here in the South, in cities like Durham or Raleigh with historically important black communities, everything that looks the slightest bit monumental tends toward an increasingly pure, clinical white.

Shannon is the founder of the 'mathematical theory of communication'. Recall that for him, 'meaning' is irrelevant: all that matters is the quantity of information, the ratio of signal to noise. More signal, less decay, less disorder -- less entropy in the usual sense of the word. [2] Shannon's ideal is maximum order, perfect transmission, i.e. negentropy, which literally means entropy in reverse. Now, negative entropy is held by modern science to be the characteristic of life, of growth

In the knowledge-based economy, growth just cranks up the volume of white noise.

Surface Illusions

In short, it's a perfect architecture for what I call 'the flexible personality'. [4]

And so it might be possible to say, in a very general vein, that there can be no critical approach to the creative industries without a dissolution of the commodity veil that both conceals and reinforces the relation between copyrighted image and patented technology.

Back to the Future

Research Triangle Park, or RTP, is a separated, isolated space designed specifically for patent production.

critical weaknesses with respect to comparable regions in the US: failure to meet the needs of start-up companies, less opportunities for social interaction, a lower level of popular brand-name recognition, an absence of networking and awareness-raising mechanisms to encourage the creation of spin-offs.

Great Expectations

The first was a way to keep the technologies acquired functionally private, reserved for exploitation by a single licensee. The patenting of material formerly in the public domain accomplishes this, with worldwide profits, thanks to the extension of intellectual property treaties under the WTO. The second thing was a maximum of social legitimacy, a pure and unquestionable ideology of direct benefits for everyone, to maintain an unruffled equilibrium among all the minds that are destined to meet, even those still tempted to believe in utopias of technological progress for the whole planet. This could be provided by the touchy-feely side of the new technologies, or what are now called 'the creative industries'. Yet if you look around the world, what mets your eyes is really an updated version of classical imperialism, where intellectual property laws and IMF-guaranteed loans are used to extract profits from a global 'South of the Border'. Is it too much to speak of a white ideology?

Intellectual Incubators

the Bayh-Dole act of 1980. [13] Passed in a context of rising international competition and declining federal funding for education, it served to codify the increasingly prevalent practice of patenting and commercialising publicly funded research.

The keyword here is technology transfer, or the process of moving ideas as quickly as possible from laboratory to industry. This transfer has spawned two new identities: the professor as small-time entrepreneur, and the university as big-time business.

The disinterested university becomes the active incubator of homo economicus.

Little wonder that the theoretical infinity of biological growth -- negative entropy -- has fascinated corporate capital for the last ten years.

Thrift describes the strategy of the Singapore Economic Development Board as consisting in: 'the creation of a "world-class" education sector which would import "foreign talent", both to expose Singaporean educational institutions to competition (thereby forcing them to upgrade), and also to produce a diverse global education hub attractive to students from around the Asia-Pacific region.

In any case, there is now a huge market for the education of the flexible knowledge-worker. Such an education is an export product for its chief supplier, the United States, with a profitable role left for all kinds of intermediaries. One could make similar remarks about the role of Britain -- the great promoter of the creative industries -- as a major relay in the transmission of 'white noise' from the USA to Europe.

The Final Frontier

No longer an isolated, secluded activity, R&D is now proposed as a whole way of life, able to extract the full spectrum of value from every creative person engaged in it.

It seems that the final frontier of knowledge-based capitalism -- or the last natural reserve of energy to be exploited by the state and its corporations -- is you, your body, your intelligence, your imagination. The question is, what will you be used for?

Who knows? With the help of defence, academic and corporate contracts, along with a dash of aesthetics and a few computer-piloted automobiles, the declining science park might still contribute to a future World Government. Unless some more radically creative class finds the way to disconnect the dots of this hell machine.

Epilogue

These reflections were inspired by an in-depth introduction to the Triangle region, offered generously by the 3Cs Counter-Cartography Collective at UNC Chapel Hill.

They've created a 'disorientation guide' to the school, with a definition of precarious labour on the back, and a cartographic image stating that the university is both a 'functioning body' and 'a factory producing your world'.

the triple program of corporatisation, flexibilisation and militarisation that increasingly defines the shapes and destinies of the knowledge-based economy.

The public universities -- not only in the US, but everywhere -- are the places to begin imagining an entirely different future, a turn away from war and ecological collapse. And if it's impossible to use them for anything but intellectual property production and self-fetishization, then it's time to start up free ones, where there's some room to think among the debris of the future. Every step through the postmodern mirror offers our still-functioning bodies another chance to cut the signal, click off the automatic pilot, give away the dots and open our minds to other possible worlds.

free university!

Also, i have to read this: 4. Brian Holmes, ‘The Flexible Personality’, in Hieroglyphs of the Future, Zagreb, Arkzin/WHW, 2002; online at http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/1106

15-One World, One Dream: China at the Risk of New Subjectivities

One World, One Dream. With all the resources of state-controlled media, Beijing was preparing to claim its place in the pantheon of global cities. This time there would be no denial, no memory of the failed 1993 Olympics bid under the shadow of the "Tiananmen incident."

The gravitational shift of wealth accumulation to new centers in East Asia may well bring a metamorphosis of capitalism itself, as the historian Giovanni Arrighi has suggested.1

Global Individuals

Jia Zhangke's great film, The World (2005) on Beijing World Park.

Koolhaas's CCTV building, rising up like an ideogram of power. The city itself is now the world park, glittering with the stardust of transnational architecture.

The first is that the global extension of the Anglo-American technological and organizational toolkit has given rise to a world civilization, what Félix Guattari called "integrated world capitalism."2

2 For a definition of the term, as well as the remarkable premonition of "a new type of authoritarian democracy" following dissolution of the Cold War divides, see Félix Guattari, "Le Capitalisme Mondial Intégré et la Révolution Moléculaire," unpublished paper given at a 1980 CINEL seminar in Paris, online at http://www.revue-chimeres.org/pdf/cmi.pdf

read that ^^^

continental scale has become decisive in the world today, because only that scale can fully internalize, but also resist global forces.

"transnational capitalism with Chinese characteristics."

a strongly normative political system and a wildly expansive economy

It is now attempting to deploy the concept of the creative industries, as part of a bid to increase its international and domestic legitimacy, to overcome a longstanding deficit in product innovation and to build a much-needed internal market for the consumption of sophisticated goods and services.

everything that creates the aesthetic experience of the hyper-mediated city

Just a warning before beginning: I'm no Sinologist, and I have no particular authority to pronounce on all these things.

Urban Divide

For a 1996 performance entitled Half White Collar, Half Peasant, Luo Zidan confectioned a double or split exterior, wearing a tattered Mao suit on the right of his body and an impeccable shirt, tie and slacks on the left. He used cosmetics and hairstyling to distinguish a smoothed, whitened face from the pockmarked bronze skin of a country-dweller. This is how he appeared on the city streets of Chengdu in Sichuan province, holding a crisp hundred-yuan note in one hand and what appeared to be a crumpled rag in the other.

One World One Dream « Continental Drift (7/33) status to the "China price," i.e. the lowest asking price on the entire planet for any given category of basic manufactured goods. But the availability of the China price depends in its turn on the capacity of the urban white-collar worker to extract tremendous amounts of underpaid labor from his other half, the peasant arriving to toil in the factories.

Their relation has been formalized, since 1949, in the communist version of the hukou or household registration system, which served to immobilize people in their locality of origin.

To the extent that this particular social relation is implicated in the production of so many of the clothes we wear and the goods we consume, could it be worth knowing about? Are we as foreign to China as we seem? The evolution of the hukou system over the the next ten years may be the most precise barometer for registering the inevitable changes in the class structure, not just of China, but of the world.

Does the air conditioning make it impossible for you to feel your other half sweating inside the same skin?

Coastal Networks

"Shanghai wants to be a 'world class city,' comparable to New York in finance, London in trade, and Paris in culture. Make no bones about it -- Shanghai will achieve its vision by 2025, and is using World Expo 2010 as a stepping stone."11

What's presented in Still Life (2007) is the desolation of a landscape that has become purely economic.

Jumping into the Sea

To describe the experience of leaving socialized security behind, the Chinese of the reform era used the expression "jumping into the sea" (xiahai).

As Nikolas Rose explains, it requires people "to conduct themselves with boldness and vigour, to calculate for their own advantage, to drive themselves hard and to accept risks."16

There is a biopolitical function to this kind of exhibit, and indeed, to all the accelerated, syncopated video displays and computer graphics that one constantly encounters in East Asia. It's a matter of inserting the body in the new urban sensorium created by advanced production, transportation and consumption technology -- science-fiction environments of superhuman scale, which could be totally overwhelming if there were not ways to get used to them, to tame them, to let yourself be energized by them.

Video is the medium used by Yang Zhenzhong, for an ingenious piece called "Spring Story" (2003) carried out with the Shanghai production unit of Siemens Mobile Communications.17

The central question under such a social system is: Who will supply the mobilizing energies to hundreds of millions of free agents? Who will communicate to the communicators?

Outracing the Economy

Here is where the creative industries come in: not the traditional fine arts, nor the modernist cultural industries like cinema and radio, but instead the newly minted and digitized professions that shape the lightweight, complex, ephemeral, ever-changing aesthetic experiences of the hyper-mediated city.18

Reagan, 1966: "That is the basis of the Creative Society -- government no longer substituting for the people, but recognizing that it cannot possibly match the great potential of the people, and thus, must coordinate the creative energies of the people for the good of the whole."21

British culture minister Chris Smith and his functionaries would draw up their famous Creative Industries Mapping Document.22

All they really did was to package and re-export a set of practices that had long characterized the productive hegemony of the USA.

"Cultural and Creative Industries." The goal is a rise of Chinese products through the global value-chain, from "Made in China" to "Created in China."23

"You can see the inter-linking effect of these original walkways. We can use that to help carry creative energies throughout the whole structure."2

The classic question of whether creativity can be managed and produced doesn't seem to bother the real-estate developers one whit.

When state-capitalist power begins manufacturing your dreams, then art becomes the primary process of politics.

Today, Chinese avant-garde or experimental artists have gradually lost the consciousness of space that once defined their identity. Their creative spaces, studios, exhibition spaces, galleries and museums have gradually been integrated into one. The art world in China today can be described as a "triumph of systems." ... The external environment for an avant-garde artist no longer exists since the "wall" between the avant-garde artist and the official system is no longer there.28

This is not to say that Factory 798 or Moganschan Lu are uninteresting or merely "co-opted" places, far from it. They both represent the kind of cultural infrastructure that makes an artistic gesture or a literary conversation possible, and on that strength they are worth defending. But like it or not, they also bear witness to the capacity of an authoritarian government to control a population by carefully sketching out the open pathways on which it can evolve with apparent freedom.

When an artist like Liu Bolin sculpts an immense iron fist pressing with all its oppressive weight on the ground, he clearly enacts an anti-authoritarian gesture.29 What's less clear is where that gesture resonates, what kind of weight it has in the imagination.

After the sequence at the university, Liu Wei goes out to film this ground, its calm, perfect order, without agitation. The historical experience of repression has been internalized as the everyday reality of self-censorship, which remains a palpable force in the lives of an overwhelming majority of the population, including the artists and intellectuals.

Today it is the economic imperative, not the state, that commands in detail what should or should not be represented by the creative industries.

What's missing in all our societies are the psychic and social resources for resistance to the present.

Floating Cities

RMB is, of course, the abbreviation of the Chinese currency, the people's money or renminbi; and Tracy China is the Second-Life avatar of Cao Fei, busily rendering all enduring clichés of her country into the synthetic landscapes of the latest global village.

What better symbol of the future than the dreamland of Second Life, for a country that has gone in a single generation from the extremes of popular socialism to the extremes of popular capitalism?

If you want to understand the reality of the Pearl River Delta, the concise texts and images of Adrian Blackwell and Xu Jian could be a lot more useful. They diagram the structures of a camp-like "factory territory" based on land leased by village collectives to industrialists, and on dormitories built by individuals to extract rent from migrant workers.35

What you don't see are the wildly swinging real-estate prices, the continual financial turmoil awaiting a full-fledged crash, or the dependent relations with Americans as consumers of last resort, absorbing floods of products that China itself now pays for by investments in Treasury Bonds looking more worthless every minute. What you don't see is what everybody knows, what everybody feels in the ground beneath their feet, what nobody can put into an image. The incalculable risk of the twenty-first century. The infinite uncertainty of global individualism.

DARK CRYSTALS

16-Adam Curtis: Alarm-Clock Films --- Cultural Critique in the 21st Century

The point is that despite the intellectual depth and visual complexity of Curtis's work, there is no comparison with the aesthetic subtlety of the essay-film: cinephiles can go back to their darkened theaters. This is TV, made for the anxious postmoderns with their zappers and their 36-inch screens. But what great TV!

The story Curtis has to tell is always fundamentally the same, except for the fantastic attention to detail. He retraces the intellectual history of the twentieth century to find out how arcane psychiatric and managerial ideas became widespread governmental techniques, which in turn have produced what we call our private selves and what we feel as our shared predicament. He has clearly read a lot of Foucault; but he has also developed an expressive practice of the archive.

His own technique is to isolate key figures and to interview them personally, or if they are no longer alive, to unearth the historical footage and professorial commentaries that will sum up their discoveries in a nutshell, along with the consequences for society at large.

the audiovisual experience comes very close to reproducing the uncanny gap one often feels between the steady flow of inner discursivity and the startling movements of one's own imagination.

Like Foucault, Curtis asks one question: "Do you want to be governed like that?"

These are alarm-clock films, wake-up calls for passive populations whose only recourse would be to think sociologically: but not as their masters do.

Genealogies of Power

The ambiguity of the series is that you never know whether Curtis shares the philosophers' sense of disgust, or what alternative he would offer to their moralism.

What could be more urgent to understand than this eternal return of the politically undead?

The claim that Bush and Blair exploited the Al Qaeda menace for geopolitical power agendas is widely accepted today. But getting that claim onto British television in 2004 was quite another story.

The evil-twin relation plays out here between uncle and nephew: the austere and pessimistic Sigmund Freud, who invented psychoanalysis, and his cynical, fortune-seeking relative Edward Bernays, who invented public relations. To understand Bernays just read his famous essay, "The Engineering of Consent," still cherished by the PR profession; or better yet, check out his "Torches of Freedom" campaign, a sexy and sassy public gesture conceived to liberate (the disposable income of) women smokers in the 1920s.4

Fatal Equilibrium

The Trap begins with imagery that is immediately familiar to anyone who has read Paul Edwards' great book on Cold-War computer science, The Closed World.6

In a series of equations for which he would win the Nobel prize, Nash showed that a system driven by suspicion and selfishness did not have to lead to chaos. He proved that there could always be a point of equilibrium, in which everyone's self-interest was perfectly balanced against each other.

The German socialist Ferdinand Lassalle famously remarked that nineteenth-century liberalism had reduced the state to the status of a night watchman. But in the original text he adds: "or a traffic policeman."

Control, in this scenario, means the isolation of atomized individuals within privatized and often highly paranoid bubbles of self-interest, like automobilists moving through the traffic-planner's grid.

What postwar America exported to the world -- in collaboration with its major ally, Britain -- was a cybernetic concept of homeostasis, whereby an organism or a machine achieves a state of dynamic equilibrium by continuously adjusting its control parameters to any changes in the environment. The new generation of feedback systems that emerged after 1945 were all designed to maintain this kind of dynamic equilibrium, or "ultrastability," which appeared as a fundamental value after the chaos of the Great Depression and the Second World War.8

cybernetics!!!

denying an effective role for politics in social existence

"We will benefit our fellow men most if we are guided solely by the striving for gain," claims the father of neoliberal economics, Friedrich von Hayek, in the first archival interview of the series. "For this purpose we have to return to an automatic system which brings this about, a self-directing automatic system which alone can restore the liberty and prosperity," he continues in Strangelovian tones.

Statistical Madness

And this whole pattern was introduced, we are told, in the late 1980s under the government of Mrs. Thatcher, who confided the reform of the National Health Service to an American economist, Alain Enthoven -- a man who studied game theory at RAND in the 1950s, then worked in the 1960s for Secretary of Defense McNamara as the primary strategist of nuclear deterrence.

The only ones who did, it seems, were economists themselves -- and psychotics.9

Neolib Goes Neocon

To evoke the genesis of government by statistics Curtis could have focused on the aggressive scientific genius John von Neumann, who not only developed the logical architecture of the computers used in the SAGE early warning system, but was also the author, with Oskar Morgenstern, of The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944), the book that launched an entire discipline. If Curtis chose instead to highlight the Nash equilibrium, it was undoubtedly because of the fascinating interview he obtained.

a doctrine that philosopher Isaiah Berlin defined as "negative freedom."10 For Berlin this is freedom from governmental constraint, the freedom to decide privately on a private destiny -- at antipodes from the revolutionary notion of a positive freedom to change the world and to remake society in the image of a higher ideal. The price of such positive freedom, according to Berlin, was always totalitarianism.

the same path that leads from the French revolutionary Terror to the more recent calls for violent liberation espoused by Sartre, Frantz Fanon, Pol Pot or the Iranian insurrectionalist Ali Shariati. What is envisioned in the contemporary West, however, is not any kind of collective transformation based on solidarity or community. Instead, the neoconservatives try to impose on the entire earth and all its peoples the freedom to decide privately on a private destiny.

Curtis shows forcefully what most politicians, public intellectuals and commentators in the West still refuse to accept: that worldwide opposition to the democratic program arises not just from fear of modernity and atavistic regression, but above all in reaction to the intense exploitation, oppression and domination put into effect by that same "democratic" program.

how a supremely rationalized version of laissez-faire capitalism suddenly collapses back into religious moralism and the geopolitical claims of imperial authority. In short, how neolib goes neocon.

Last Look

What's impressive in the recent work of Adam Curtis is the ability to follow a complex paradigm like game theory through an intricate tissue of changing historical contexts, showing how it continues to influence society today.

Curtis ends up portraying nearly everyone as the unwitting mouthpiece of a diabolical idea. Both the substance and the effects of major intellectual debates are lost in this way.

a broader epistemological shift, whereby the cybernetic logic of stable homeostatic systems and clearly traceable feedback loops is replaced by the theories of chaos and complexity, with their attention to emergent phenomena in situations far from equilibrium.

Epistemology, in its turn, is inseparable from technopolitics: the concept of the market as an information system for a self-organizing society was a tremendous spur to the development of the Internet and personal computing.

The characteristic reflexivity of "second-order cybernetics" -- elaborated in social terms by an entire spectrum of contemporary thinkers, from Beck and Giddens to Deleuze and Guattari or Hardt and Negri -- is flatly ignored, along with its political predicaments and potentials. Yet it is in these arenas that the dominant logics of the corporations and the state are now being forged and contested, while new forms of collective freedom are invented in response.

At worst, his condemnation of Leftist nihilism seems to hark back to some Golden Age of responsible public service that it would be difficult to find in reality.

The strength of his work lies in its power to awaken us to historical transformation, at a time when neoliberalism itself is fading into the same background blur that now surrounds the rationalist modernism of the Cold War. Yet awakening implies action, or indeed, invention.

17-Future Map: Or How the Cyborgs Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Surveillance

In his final book, published in 1964 at the height of the industrial boom under the title of God & Golem, Inc., the scientist Norbert Wiener asked a question: "Can God play a significant game with his own creature? Can any creator, even a limited one, play a significant game with his own creature?"1 The example he used was trivial: a computer program for playing checkers, written by A.L. Samuel of the IBM corporation. As for the definition of "significant," it's not very clear: but Wiener does observe that just as in the contest between God and Lucifer, the programmer may well lose the game.

In December of 1944, acting jointly with his colleagues Howard Aiken and John von Neumann, he invited a select group of researchers to join a "Teleological Society" to study the intersections of neurology and engineering.2

Wiener saw Von Neumann's game theory as deterministic and scientifically outdated. He preferred the statistical analysis of stochastic processes, and a policy of continuous error-correction rather than any quest for absolute certainty.

closed-loop information system called an antiaircraft predictor. This was a three-part problem: use radar to record the zigzagging path of an airplane performing evasive maneuvers; calculate the probabilities of its future course based on its past behavior; and convey this information to a servomechanism that would correct the firing of the gun -- an operation to be repeated in a continuous, circular fashion. Yet more was at stake than a sensor, a calculator and a servomotor, because the gun, like the enemy airplane, was also connected to a human being.

the operators seemed to regulate their conduct by observing the errors committed in a certain pattern of behavior and by opposing these errors by actions deliberately tending to reduce them.... We call this negative feedback.5

The upshot of Wiener's prediction research was a double inscription of the "human element" into the system: on the one hand, as a servomechanism, pointing the gun or steering the plane, and on the other, as a source of information for the feedback loop.

the conceptualization of the pilot and gunner as servomechanisms within a single system was essential and irreducible

"The physical and the human both had to undergo ontological metamorphosis into 'messages with noise' in order to be combined into a new synthesis."7 But Galison and Mirowski are speaking of the same thing: the infomechanical being that emerged from the Second World War."

Its double constitution could be felt in the uncanny identity of the strange new creatures that fired the guns and piloted the planes: both seemed to waver between machinelike, implacable humans and intelligent, humanlike machines. Where did this uncanniness come from?

a Manichean science, permeated by the violent interrogations of its subject and the dissimulating absence of its object. This founding relation makes up what Galison calls "the ontology of the enemy."

The systemic unity of man and machine, split at its heart by an ontology of the enemy, is what I will explore in this essay, in order to gain a new understanding of surveillance. But the concept of surveillance itself will have to be expanded far beyond its traditional range.

The myriad forms of contemporary electronic surveillance now constitute a proactive force, the irremediably multiple feedback loops of a cybernetic society, devoted to controlling the future.

Our movements, our speech, our emotions and even our dreams have become the informational message that is incessantly decoded, probed, and reconfigured into statistical silhouettes, serving as targets for products, services, political slogans or interventions of the police.

Wiener's philosophical question returns in an inverse form. Can a creature play a significant game with her creator? Can we play a significant game with the cybernetic society that has created us?

Cardinal Points

four characterstic technological systems

1. The Joint Helmet-Mounted Cueing System
2. InferX privacy preserving real-time analytics

"What these algorithms do is they look at what's the normal pattern for any given set of data points, and if those veer off by any fashion, then the protocol says you need to look at that."13 → hunt around the world for "unknown unknowns"

1. Personicx customer relationship management system
2. Orbit Traffic Management Technology

in order to more efficiently capture the client's desire and convert it into sales

predictive algorithms

When surveillance develops to this degree you can say goodbye not only to privacy, but to the entire public/private divide on which individual choice in a democracy was founded. Today, what Habermas called the "structural transformation of the public sphere" has crossed another threshold.19

I've presented take us from looks that kill, with the helmet-mounted cueing system, all the way to looks that consume, with customer experience management. In between, they show how data-mining provides the power to identify probable criminals or terrorists, but also probable buyers of a product or voters for a candidate.

what the architectural critic Sze Tsung Leong calls "control space," i.e. urban design shaped by real-time information on the aggregate behavior of individuals.21

The environment is overcoded with an optimizing algorithm, fed by data coming directly from you.

To understand contemporary surveillance, however, requires abandoning two commonly held ideas: the literary image of Big Brother peering out from a screen, and the more complex architectural image of the Panopticon.

But as we know, such clearly defined institutions with their carefully molded subjects are increasingly hard to find in present-day society, even if we do not lack schoolmasters, sergeants and psychiatrists in the pay of the state.

It's obvious that both Big Brother and the Panopticon are dated, though they have not entirely disappeared. The question, then, is how do we characterize a surveillance regime that is neither totalitarian nor disciplinary, but depends primarily on the statistical treatment of aggregate data in order to shape environments in which populations of mobile individuals can be channeled and controlled? How, in other words, do we understand the political economy of surveillance in a cybernetic society?

Security Devices

Foucault, lectures.

Nantes: the aeration of unhygienic neighborhoods; the facilitation of trade inside the city; the direct connection of the streets to long-distance transportation networks; and the surveillance of traffic in an urban environment that is no longer walled or subject to curfew. The keyword here is circulation.

"to reduce the most unfavorable, deviant normalities in relation to the normal, general curve."

It is now a matter of political economists adjusting the parameters of an open environment so as to stimulate and channel the probable behaviors of a population, and to manage the risks entailed by its free and natural mobility, or indeed, by the expression of its desire. The problem of governments under this liberal paradigm, Foucault explains, "is how they can say yes; it is how to say yes to this desire."

"freedom is nothing else but the correlative of the deployment of apparatuses of security."

The liberal art of government, for Foucault, consists in intervening not on the players but on "the rules of the game."

Cybernetics -- whose etymology means both "steersman" and "governor" -- has become the applied social science of control at a distance, the necessary correlate of American aspirations to global free trade, and indeed, to liberal empire.

He conceived the security devices as an eighteenth-century addition to the disciplinary procedures of the sixteenth century, just as those procedures had been superimposed on the juridical forms of medieval sovereignty

Very few people have sought to theorize this highly unstable condition of governance; but has anyone managed to crystallize it in an image? And has anyone managed to oppose it with what Foucault would have called "counter-behaviors"?

Precog Visions

William Bogard, in his book The Simulation of Surveillance: a virtual reality in which crime is already vanquished and desire is already satisfied

simulation as "hypersurveillant control."

Steven Spielberg's Minority Report: "Pre-Crime Department" of the Washington D.C. police in the year 2054

American Express, one of the pioneers of the "panoptic sort" studied by Oscar Gandy

"Enjoy yourselves! That's an order."

Philip K. Dick's short story is worth quoting here

in that way, Spielberg simplifies a metaphor that was much more brutal and precise in Dick's short story. There the precogs are pure sensibility, without reason or personal identity -- something like the "reptilian brains" that contemporary marketers try to map out in their experimental subjects.28

They stand in for the populations whose affects and mental activities are relentlessly probed and palpitated, so that their aggregate data-image can be mirrored by seductive products and waking dreams.

Whereas in Dick's vastly more paranoid imagination, the plot against Anderton is a way for the Army to abolish Pre-Crime as an independent department and to wrest the control of the future back from the civilian authorities.

What's more, Dick gave a precious indication in the story, having Anderton explain that when he worked out the theory of Pre-Crime he refused the temptation to apply it to the stock market, where he could obviously have made fortunes. Had Spielberg been able to seize these two motifs -- the relation to finance, and the army's hunger for power over the civilian state -- then the film, which came out shortly after September 11, could have become the metaphor of an entire epoch.

"Policy Analysis Market" (PAM) that would mobilize the predictive capacities of investors by getting them to bet their money on civil, economic and military trends in Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Turkey. Finance, which for twenty years had been at the leading edge of cybernetic transformations, would now be repurposed for the needs of sovereign and disciplinary power. In this way, the distributed intelligence of the market would be harnessed and the price signals given off by these fictional "futures" would indicate the likelihood of given trends or events.

The Policy Analysis Market would be a sensing device in such a self-regulating, closed-loop system -- like a human thermostat connected to the inferno of American economic, diplomatic and military power.

The PAM trading interface is literally a map of the future. It is also a perfect example of what Foucault calls a "security device," offering precise insight into the dynamics of surveillance under cybernetic capitalism. It is not a police program, but a market instituted in such a way as to precisely condition the free behavior of its participants.

It produces information while turning human actors into functional relays, or indeed, into servomechanisms; and it "consumes freedom" for a purpose.

God Machines

As Maurizio Lazzarato has written more recently: "The West is horrified by the new Islamic subjectivities. But it helped to create this monster, using its most peaceful and seductive techniques. We are not confronted with remnants of traditional societies in need of further modernization, but with veritable cyborgs that articulate the most ancient and most modern."35

Conclusions

What's at stake is the elaboration of different functional rules for our collective games, which in today's society cannot be put into effect without the language of technology.

Distributed infrastructure exists for such projects, in the form of open-source software. Laboratories for this kind of experimentation have been built ad hoc, by people such as Jaromil, Konrad Becker, Laurence Rassel, Natalie Jeremijenko, Critical Art Ensemble, Hackitectura, the Institute for Applied Autonomy, Marko Peljhan and hundreds of others.

Social interaction is always a game of control, as David Lyon's work on surveillance shows.36

24The historian of technology Otto Mayr has documented the pervasiveness of simple feedback mechanisms (thermostats, governors) in liberal Britain during the eighteenth century, at a time when such devices remained rare among the authoritarian societies of the Continent. More importantly, he shows that these mechanical devices were commonly used as metaphors for such characteristic political-economy notions as supply-and-demand, checks-and-balances and self-regulation. However, Foucault never cites Mayr's groundbreaking work of technical history, The Origins of Feedback Control (Cambridge, Mass., 1970). The more explicit comparative study only came later: Authority, Liberty and Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1986). Cf. Galison's discussion in "The Ontology of the Enemy," op. cit. pp. 262-63.

18-Filming the World Laboratory: Cybernetic History in Das Netz

What does it mean to be part of a cybernetic system? For a conscious human being it means taking part in an evolving loop, where you are both the subject and the object of experimentation.

Warren McCulloch conceived this science as an "experimental epistemology": a way of knowing continually tested and modified through laboratory investigations which only that particular way of knowing makes possible.1

as the paradigm expanded, thanks to the patronage of Anglo-American research administrators in the 1940s and 1950s, the laboratory shifted its sites of inquiry from the deepest recesses of the mind to the entire range of social relations, before finally focusing on the most integrated circuit of them all, the ecosystem.

only through its historical unfolding can an epistemology bring forth a world

Cybernetics was a hot topic in scientific journals and the mainstream press from the end of World War II until the late 1970s Its public presence then declined, as the disciplines it had transformed began producing their own breakthroughs and as cognitivism arose to provide a more strictly objective paradigm for the sciences of mind.

information, as Gregory Bateson had explained, is the "difference that makes a difference" in your own life This turning-point in the experience of everyday existence was accompanied by a spate of fascinating books on the history of cybernetics, whose authors have become well known among hackers, cyberpunks, computer scientists and social theorists.

Das Netz: Why did control engineering leave such a deep mark on postwar social science, and indeed, on the American psyche?

Feedback in the Flesh

On the plane he sketches a network of interconnected concepts: Art, Technology, Computer.

biologist J.Z. Young: "We create tools and then we mold ourselves in the use of them." This is a doctrine of radical constructivism.

Brandt: one of the cultural gurus of what Dammbeck calls "an alternative form of cybernetics," marked by an enduring fascination for the libertarian appeal of "open systems."

what it was about postwar cybernetic culture that drove Kaczynski to terrorism?

quotes from the Unabomber Manifesto urging the use of advanced technologies to distribute the anti-technological message

Before gaining its aura of countercultural liberation, cybernetics would be the operating code of America's imperial dominance in the postwar period.

Dammbeck recalls the key notions of informational feedback and error-correction along the pathway to a goal, as developed in Wiener's writings, but he does not even mention the logical ancestor of cybernetic automation: the Turing machine, a conceptual model developed in the late 1930s by the British mathematician, Alan Turing.

As Turing noted, "it is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence."6

"A Logical Calculus of Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity."8 What they had done was to map out the possible circuits of feedback in the flesh.

The crucial thing to realize is that this model of nervous activity both preceded and inspired the logical architecture of the computer, sketched out by John von Neumann in 1945 after he had encountered the work of McCulloch and Pitts.9

The age of the world laboratory begins with the ambition to extend the universal model of coded informational loops into every substrate, whether physical or biological.

Das Netz provides a filmic approach to the "ontology of the enemy" that the historian of technology, Peter Galison, has identified at the origins of cybernetics.13

Another accelerated sequence evokes the Macy Conferences of 1946 to 1953, which gathered the outstanding minds of an era to develop the operating technologies of America's new global governance.

He claims that the participants "registered a particular interest" in a book called The Authoritarian Personality, published in 1950 under the direction of Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School.15

Margaret Mead to declare: "We must see this war as the prelude to a greater job -- the restructuring of the culture of the world."16 For Mead, cybernetics would be a vital contribution to this civilizing project, because it helped her see how change could be offered as a possibility to be freely chosen, rather than a straitjacket to be imposed by force. Victory in 1944-45 would set the stage for new and highly sophisticated forms of "democratic" social engineering.

Henry Murray, who invented the Thematic Apperception Test used by the researchers of The Authoritarian Personality. Murray, a psychologist, had worked for the US government on a personality profile of Hitler, then devised stress-tests for soldiers. During the war he adopted the ideas of the World Federalist movement and argued for a process of global political unification, which, as he wrote in a letter to Lewis Mumford, "involves transformations of personality such as never occurred quickly in human history; one transformation being that of National Man into World Man."17

Here again, at the heart of a carefully calibrated laboratory experiment unfolding in the calm and privileged atmosphere of a liberal university, we discover the ontology of the enemy.

Blowback in Society

Kurt Lewin ... showed that citizens of a democracy could be far more effectively manipulated when they were given an active role in the process that changed their own beliefs.19

Murray, his early work in personality assessment is considered "the first systematic effort to evaluate an individual's personality to predict his future behavior."20

There is a parallel here with my own research into the psychosocial transformations of contemporary culture. In an essay called "The Flexible Personality," published in 2002, I tried to show how a more pliable subjectivity emerged from the 1960s revolts against the military regimentation and industrial discipline that had produced the authoritarian character.22

The most challenging thing the film suggests is that Ted Kaczynski was a distorted product of efforts to transform the national character: an unwanted side-effect of psychosocial engineering.

The subject of the film now appears as a symbolic crystal, traversed in every direction by an uncanny system of interlocking fractures -- or "circular causalities" -- that allow the major conflicts of the present to be glimpsed in all their historical, spatial and ideological displacements.

In a radical transgression of the unwritten law that bars the terrorist from ever appearing as a subject (or as an experimenter) Dammbeck lets Kaczynski speak for himself

What springs to mind is the extraordinary doctrine of a geostrategist working for the US Navy.

"Non-Integrating Gap": Wherever flows of capital and communication are violently cut off or simply do not penetrate, he explained, the Pentagon must prepare to intervene.

Radical constructivism reaches its height in a networked map that is destined to become the territory.

When official geostrategists publish books like Barnett's, nothing remains for paranoid critics to reveal.

What about the ground realities of life and death, he asks, in a world that has instituted the shape-shifting potential of the virtual as its dominant order?

From the first scene of the film, Dammbeck places Das Netz beneath the fallen star of the mathematician Kurt Gödel, who proved the impossibility of laying a perfect axiomatic ground for the sciences, then lapsed into the waking nightmares of paranoia.

Dammbeck on Gödel: "The truth is superior to provability,"

Von Foerster initiated the reflexive turn of second-order cybernetics in the early 1970s by insisting on the inseparability of all feedback systems from the thought-processes of their scientific observers.27

the self-reflexive Von Foerster explains that the Indo-European root of the word "science" (but also of "schism" and "schizophrenia") is scy, which means to separate; whereas the root sys points in the opposite direction, toward ideas of joining, merger, integration. Systems theory is an attempt to go beyond the split between observer and observed. What he sees as common to both research and art is the movement "from science to systemics."

Von Foerster was both a contract researcher for the military and a fundamental critic of instrumental reason in the sciences, deeply interested in the social contestation of the 1960s and close to the radical Chilean biologists, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela.

Despite the intense critique that permeates the film, something about Von Foerster's ambiguous philosophy clearly appeals to the author of Das Netz.

On the one hand, the exploration of the individual's ethical position within the collective activity of scientific modeling could point outside the instrumental logic of the world laboratory and beyond the notion of "experimental epistemology," toward an ecological understanding of the interdependency of living beings. This would be the path of Gregory Bateson, of Francisco Varela, of Félix Guattari, whose work I will describe in a following essay. On the other hand, it could lead to an infinite multiplication of clearly circumscribed and incommensurable world-models, open to manipulation by anyone with a superior understanding of the modeling process and its effects on the lives of those who engage in it. This would be the path that was massively taken by the entrepreneurial cultures of the new economy, giving rise to the highly sophisticated productive devices of the control society, in which most forms of artistic creativity are now caught and instrumentalized for financial, ideological and military purposes.

Is logic the only fundament of human existence? Can representations be multiplied to infinity? Where is the ground of reality in this worldwide system of machines?

19-Guattari's Schizoanalytic Cartographies or, the Pathic Core at the Heart of Cybernetic

A desiring mind seeks infinity, and finds it today in a proliferation of signals: electromagnetic waves beaming down from the skies, fiber-optic cables emerging from the seas, copper wires woven across the continents.

the highest task of the artist first emerged: that of giving form to the heavens, of rearranging the stars above our heads?

In his final book, The Pentagon of Power -- the second volume of The Myth of the Machine -- Mumford explained how astrology itself had contributed to the royal sciences of the early Renaissance: It established as a canon of faith a belief in the strictest sort of determinism; for it interpreted singular life events in terms of collective statistical probabilities, based on data originally gathered from a mass of individual biographies, collected and collated, it is reported, by royal mandate. Thus royal patronage had not merely promoted star-gazing but laid the groundwork for the more austere and pragmatically useful determinism of the physical sciences. Once firmly embedded in the mind, this assumption would even lead a proud mathematician to boast that from a sufficient knowledge of a single event the position and state of every other particle in the universe could be predicted. That unfortunate exhibition of intellectual hubris laid the foundation at an early date for the dubious alliance between scientific determinism and authoritarian control that now menaces human existence.1

"Information is indeed 'such stuff as a dreams are made on,'" observed an American social scientist in the early 1960s. "Yet it can be transmitted, recorded, analyzed and measured."2

Deleuze and Guattari use the concept of overcoding to describe the process whereby singular human actions are integrated to dominant social structures. Overcoding is first of all a linguistic notion: it designates the syntactic articulation of a material substrate, giving rise to "phenomena of centering, unification, totalization, integration, hierarchization, and finalization."3

the chapter of A Thousand Plateaus devoted to the theory of the state -- under the title "Apparatus of Capture"

Mumford: megamachines

Deleuze and Guattari take Mumford's critique two steps further, bringing it closer to the complexities of everyday experience.

Necessary to the construction of these megamachines is an enormous bureaucracy of humans which act as "servo-units", working without ethical involvement.

This was the day of the radio broadcast of Antonin Artaud's most radical performance, To Have Done with the Judgment of God -- a poetic revolt against the overcoding of body and mind by the advancing armies of organized commerce and industrialized war. What Artaud proposed in response to the megamachine was a "body without organs": a smooth slippage of flesh without grasp for the robots of battle, and an exit from the geopolitical map of the Cold War. The broadcast never happened: it was censored by the French government.

Guattari took the perspective of an artist and an activist, seeking an ethico-aesthetic paradigm.

to reconfigure the articulation of bodies and machines (the relations of biosphere and noosphere)

a set of vectors whereby the virtual and the actual come to meet

Systemic Entanglement

"intensive imperialisms" that uproot or deterritorialize individual subjectivities and entire social classes, in order to reconfigure them according to the axioms of globally integrated capital.

Before any reflection, perception itself is constructed by the mediated environment in which it takes place, displacing the moment of radicality from the perceiver to the builder of the system, or even more, to the shaper of its underlying models.

There is in this a positive absorption into the transparency of computers, which is something worse than alienation.13

For decades, the cyberneticians had relentlessly sought to extend the boundaries of systemics, which, as Von Foerster pointed out, is a word based on the Indo-European phoneme sys, meaning to join, to integrate.15 In the age of integrated world capitalism, Guattari would be drawn toward quite different conceptual frontiers, the ones marked by the phoneme skei, which means to separate or cut -- as in science, of course, but also in schism or schizophrenia

Chaotic Thresholds

What he was concerned with, in short, was the articulation of collective speech.

his extraordinary final statement, "Remaking Social Practices."

Since his meeting with Franco Berardi ("Bifo") and his support of the Radio Alice project that unfolded in Bologna during the Italian social upheavals of 1977 he had been a practitioner of what is now called tactical media, launching Radio Tomate in Paris in 1981, then working subversively with the Minitel commercial information network from 1986 onwards, in collaboration with a broad spectrum of voluntary associations including striking hospital workers.20

Yet what remains insufficiently understood, even by media tacticians working directly with computerized tools, is the degree to which his theoretical trajectory forms a response to the reductionism of the postwar cybernetic paradigm, whose entry into structuralist psychoanalysis he directly witnessed in the seminars of Lacan in the mid-1950s22 and whose far-reaching consequences he would encounter some two decades later in the "systemic therapy" practiced by Mony Elkaïm.

the book Order out of Chaos, by Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers.28

For the theorist of micropolitical transformations, who saw the singularities of small-group breakthroughs as catalysts for larger social movements, such a model could only come as a huge encouragement.

If matter itself could be disorganized by an influx of energy to the point of bringing forth an entirely new equilibrium, why not imagine that the passivity and conformism of societies -- or worse, their pathological regressions toward authoritarianism -- could be thrown into chaos by the introduction of disruptive and paradoxical elements, whether linguistic, aesthetic, philosophic, sexual or machinic

Such ideas are quite tantalizing, because they promise an expanded historical role for relatively small-scale experiments in collective cooperation and self-organization.

The theories of complexity and chaos were highly productive at the end of the twentieth century.

Jay Wright Forrester

The prestige of Japanese methods was accompanied by the exportation and adaptation of kaizen management techniques, which demanded the active implication of workers as shop-floor inventors and problem-solvers.

The subjection of industrial workers to rigid disciplinary models, codified by Frederick Taylor in the early twentieth century, would gradually be replaced by the subjectivation of prosumers seduced into action by the new possibilities of miniaturized, ergonomic technologies.

The fundamental question for a revolutionary was that of steering the molecular forces away from their normative patterns.

It concerns the passage from a "subjected group," alienated by social forces, to a "subject group," capable of formulating its own statements.38

However, the Sartrean notions of individual choice and undivided responsibility for one's own actions now appeared too restrictive and linear, from a systemic viewpoint where the range of possible statements is determined by the basic parameters of the system.

The core of uncertainty at the heart of each cartography offers an instance of dissociation that resists what Baudrillard called the "transparency" of contemporary information societies. Now I will explore the ways that this resistance comes into play on existential territories.

The Fourfold

Analysis, or the process of splitting -- the schiz itself -- is merely another way of describing the movement of deterritorialization that brings the four domains at least partially to consciousness.

Any of the fields can be a source or a stimulant of this deterritorialization; thus the domains are called "functors," to indicate their transformative effects on the assemblage whose overall dynamics they initiate and sustain.

1. Universes of reference or of value (U),
2. existential Territories (T),
3. energetic Flows (F),
4. Phyla of abstract machines (Φ).

What's being sought are the interrelations between these four heterogeneous domains: the self-referential dimension of aesthetic qualities (form, color, rhythm, tone, intensity); the body with its sensible experience (grasping, becoming, anxiety, ecstasy); the social world of things, energies and signs (institutions, projects, constructions, conflicts); and the conceptual realm of ideas (logic, diagrammatism, invention, reflexivity).

1. (U) the self-referential dimension of aesthetic qualities (form, color, rhythm, tone, intensity);

2. (T) the body with its sensible experience (grasping, becoming, anxiety, ecstasy);

3. (F) the social world of things, energies and signs (institutions, projects, constructions, conflicts);

4. (Φ) the conceptual realm of ideas (logic, diagrammatism, invention, reflexivity).

5. top: possible

6. bottom: real
7. right: virtual

8. left: actuality

9. virtually possible (U),

10. the virtually real (T),
11. the actually real (F)
12. the actually possible (Φ).

To "speak" in Guattari's sense is to shake up the existing order and balance of the world with new contents.

Guattari speaks of existential territories. Where do you feel familiar, at home, what paths do you retrace without thinking? This is a realm before or beyond signification, it's about an animal's touch with the land, sheer sensibility, where language collapses into skin.

individual bodies and aesthetic intensities play essential roles in the generation of collective speech, which when it finally appears is impersonal, rhizomatic, the voice of no one. To speak is to produce this singular pulsation of social experience: to create another world.

Start Again

The extreme deterritorialization of those home grounds, accomplished through the use of sophisticated derivatives, finally turned the black holes of defaulting borrowers into bottomless sinks draining away the fantastic excess of global liquidity. An entire ethos -- what I call the "flexible personality" -- has now begun to collapse along with world markets. The outcome of all this remains uncertain.

It is clear that art took on an increasing importance in his conception of political action, not in the romantic sense of a transcendent or mythical figure capable of imprinting its destiny on the passive substance of a people, but instead as a kind of psychic shifter, enabling the passage from bounded existential territories to the social worlds of interconnected flows, and serving as a kind of fuzzy translation between the necessary embodiment of voice and the infinite proliferation of abstract ideas.

in Deleuze and Guattari's final co-written work, What Is Philosophy?, the specific locus of art is identified as the plane of composition, producing the constellation of a sensible universe.48

If cartography has been a key metaphor for so many movements over the course of this last decade, ... a generalized disorientation and a change in the very coordinates of change, leaving behind devitalized images in the arts and "zombie categories" in the sciences, as the sociologist Ulrich Beck recently put it.49

But what even the best sociologists do not seem to understand is that new coordinates cannot just be deduced from a purely intellectual analysis of the totality of the world-system, however "cosmopolitical" it is claimed to be. They have to be invented in a rupture from its existing state, or better, from its illusory continuity. This act of collective invention is the preeminent use of the noosphere, with its proliferation of pulsating signals.

Where is the art that will rearrange the stars above our heads? And the science that will shift the ground beneath our feet?

20-Swarmachine: Activist Media Tomorrow

A decade after Seattle, we still don't understand the role of decentralized media intervention as a catalyst for grassroots action at the global scale. The concept of "tactical media" should be abandoned for another one, closer to what really happened on the streets and on the screens, and richer with promises for the future.

Pulsating Networks

3 key ideas:

1. The first concerns the morphology of the Internet as an all-channel meshwork, where each node is connected to others by several different pathways. Ultimately there are only a few degrees of separation between every element -- a flattened hierarchy.

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``` This is a lie. Consumers are not autonomous systems. Only autonomous systems are autonomous systems, and most of those are run by nations or corporations, or at the very best civil society organisations and public universities. Such a topology is the promise of mesh networks.

1. The second concerns the property of emergence, associated with large populations of living organisms like ants and bees, where group behavior is coordinated in real time and manifests a purposiveness beyond the capacities of any individual.

Emergence describes a moment when the possible becomes actual -- a phase-change in a complex system.

1. The third idea concerns the multiplicity of networked society: the poles that emerge from its interconnections are autonomous, they are endowed with intentions that distinguish each one from the others, creating a situation of irremediable complexity.

These ideas came together in the early 1990s, in the image of the swarm promoted by technovisionary Kevin Kelly in the book Out of Control. It was a great insight. But now we can compare that visionary image to a few realities.

We need to understand what really works in the relation between the streets and the screens.

Twice-Woven Worlds

Two factors can explain the consistency of self-organized actions. The first is the capacity for temporal coordination at a distance: the exchange among dispersed individuals of information, but also of affect, about unique events unfolding in specific locations.

a second factor is the existence of a common horizon -- aesthetic, ethical, philosophical and/or metaphysical -- that is deliberately built up over longer periods of time, and that allows the scattered members of a network to recognize each other as existing within a shared referential and imaginary universe.

Media used in this way is more than just information: it is a mnemonic image that calls up a world of sensation.

At stake in such situations is the development of an existential frame for collective experience, what Prem Chandavarkar calls an "inhabitable metaphor."5

Swarming is what happens when the aesthetic or metaphorical dimensions of radical social protest are enriched around the planet via electronic communications. A transnational activist movement is a swarmachine.

Thresholds of Invention

The fragmentation of the social fabric today lends a political dimension to the problem of the subject. Here, it seems, lies the connection with tactical media.

Because of this, the "strategic" model is also transformed, as if defeated by its own success: it was based on the definition of a "proper" distinct from everything else; but now that "proper" has become the whole

Everyday tactics, in De Certeau's sense, are a refuge of multiplicity amid a dominant technological rationality.

Ironically, the Brownian motion which De Certeau takes as the very signifier of aimlessness and unpredictability was in fact mathematicized as a probability function by Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics.

Global Microstructures

One way to approach the new formations of social activism is through the work of the sociologist Karin Knorr Cetina, whose studies of currency traders led her to the concept of "complex global microstructures."

Standard social network theory found its dynamic principle in more-or-less random attractions between atomistic units bound only by the "weak ties" of contemporary liberal societies.12 The notion of autopoietic social groups introduces a very different type of actor.

Second Chances

Knorr Cetina claims that change in the contemporary world is driven by microprocesses, put into effect by light, agile formations that can risk innovation at geographical scales and degrees of complexity where traditional organizations are paralyzed.

How to invent alternatives to the violence of capitalist deterritorialization, but also to the fundamentalist reterritorialization that follows it?

At stake is the refusal of arbitrary authority, of course, but also solidarity across differences and the desire to create consensus not on the basis of tradition, but rather on the basis of invention, experimentation and collective self-critique.

The ability to create the event is what gave the alterglobalization movements their surprising agility in the world space.

As Maurizio Lazzarato writes: "The activist is not someone who becomes the brains of the movement, who sums up its force, anticipates its choices, draws his or her legitimacy from a capacity to read and interpret the evolution of power, but instead, the activist is simply someone who introduces a discontinuity in what exists. She creates a bifurcation in the flow of words, of desires, of images, to put them at the service of the multiplicity's power of articulation; she links the singular situations together, without placing herself at a superior and totalizing point of view. She is an experimenter."14

CONCLUSIONs

Decipher the Future

What constitutes a break, a rupture, in societies like ours? How does a momentary departure from the norm become a durable alternative in people's lives? And if such alternatives do exist, what are their chances in the current crisis?

Electric Shades

Chris Marker offered a reflection on the breaking wave of twentieth-century collectivism in his film Sunless (1982), particularly in the scene filmed in 1980 in Guinea-Bissau, where then-president Luis Cabral decorates a military fighter for his revolutionary deeds.

Amid the flux of technoscientific change, they say, our reactions to events can never gain the consistency of viable politics and shared ethical principles. And they are right about one thing. Any alternative to the postmodern norm has to deal with the chaotic flux of change -- and its systemic regularities.

99, our 68

It should have been understood decades ago that not individuals submitted to massive investments in consciousness management, but only social movements with their unique combinations of embodied practices, philosophical discourses and aesthetic inspirations can launch changes in political subjectivity. And it should have been understood that in our age of relentless overcoding, only experimental groups and tightly woven networks can prolong those transformations into any kind of durable alternative.

That recently lived history was infused with a constructivist spirit, responding in our time to the experiments of the Soviet vanguards. But this "new productivism" emerged in the context of the economy's linguistic turn and therefore has to be discussed not only in terms of tools and work routines, but above all in terms of communication and codes.3 The Internet's emergence as a transnational public sphere in the mid-1990s involved a literal decoding of specialized government, military and corporate knowledge. The black boxes of Cold War technology were gradually opened and the operating codes of planetary communication were revealed to the profane.

Hackers continually extended the process of decoding to anything with a digital lock on it, launching a notion of open cultures in the process.

to grasp intuitively what overcoding means, just consider the explosion of Web 2.0 platforms for the solicitation and surveillance of everyday comportments, combined with the constitution of strictly traceable identities, the securitization of public space and the more sinister aspects of contemporary military programs -- including "homeland" programs.

Territory and Experiment

The reason is that a horizon is open and yet does not prevent you from seeing where you are, from feeling the ground beneath your feet. Not by chance did the cartography of potentials become the emblematic expression of a rhizomatic culture.

hehe, but there is precisely no horizon on a map.  it’s one of the things lost for cartography.

For me, the mapping aesthetic has culminated in a recovery of Guattari's most singular project, the Schizoanlytic Cartographies.4

Artist-activists, whether readers of Guattari or not, have taken this social and machinic creativity in the most diverse directions. Projects such as Makrolab or Hackitectura offer explicit examples, complete with their own models and prototypes, their meta-narratives.

What could seem like a retreat from the global movements of a few years ago has been a deepening of experimentation, in the space that opened up again when the scattered threads of a former internationalism were rewoven into a new relation of distance and proximity.

Among the Sphinxes

In art as in politics, the serious discussions always go back to the 1960s and 70s. Maybe our chronologies need reevaluating.

start the email from here!

Brian Springer is known in media-activist circles for one great work: the pirate documentary Spin (1995).

Along with Ujica and Farocki's Videograms of a Revolution (1992), Spin became a touchstone for a generation of tactical media practitioners

The Disappointment: Or, the Force of Credulity.8

To define the "apparatus of capture," A Thousand Plateaus explores two opposed ideas: the legalistic concept of mutuum, the medium of exchange, involving freely drawn and freely severed contracts; and the hierarchical concept of nexum, the bond, the knot, the social tie of obedience and submission.

Q & A

If you look at pp. 141-44 of A Thousand Plateaus, there they describe the diagrammatic functioning of the abstract machine as that which "escapes" the axiomatic of capital.

what Mumford calls the "megamachine." In the linguistic sense, overcoding sets up the binary opposition between signifier and signified. But above all, it is the name for "phenomena of centering, unification, totalization, integration, hierarchization, and finalization" (41). In short, we are talking aout structuralization. This interests me urgently because that's what I see the American imperial society doing with such great success since WWII. In particular, cybernetics very clearly corresponds to this definition of overcoding.

Guattari's "meta-modelization," in the Schizoanalytic Cartographies, is about escaping the overcoding, subjection and machinic enslavement that we encounter under the contemporary cybernetic system of transnational state capital, with its always-incipient form of reterritorialization and capture of flows, namely, empire.

To be effective, a cultural critique must show the links between the major articulations of power and the more-or-less trivial aesthetics of everyday life. It must reveal the systematicity of social relations and their compelling character for everyone involved, even while it points to the specific discourses, images and emotional attitudes that hide inequality and raw violence. It must shatter the balance of consent, by flooding daylight on exactly what a society consents to, how it tolerates the intolerable. Such a critique is difficult to put into practice because it must work on two opposed levels, coming close enough to grips with the complexity of social processes to convince the researchers whose specialized knowledge it needs, while finding striking enough expressions of its conclusions to sway the people whom it claims to describe---those upon whose behavior the transformation of the status quo depends.

This kind of critique existed very recently in our societies, it gave intellectual focus to an intense and widespread dissatisfaction in the sixties and seventies, it helped change an entire system. Today it seems to have vanished. No longer detached from the dynamics of class, in the course of the 1980s, cultural studies became one long celebration of the particular twist that each individual or group could add to the globalized media product. In this way, it gave legitimacy to a new, transnational consumer ideology.[4] This is the discourse of alienation perfected, appropriated, individualized, ethnicized, made one's own. styles, thereby making a real contribution to the ideal of popular education.[2] What is more, cultural studies constituted a veritable school on the intellectual left, developing a strategic intention. However, its key theoretical tool was the notion of a differential reception, or "negotiated reading"---a personal touch given to the message by the receiver. The notion was originally used to reveal working-class interpretations of dominant messages, in a model still based on class consciousness.[3] But when the emphasis on reception was When it emerged in the late fifties, British cultural studies tried to reverse aesthetic hierarchies by turning the sophisticated language of literary criticism onto working-class practices and forms. Elevating popular expressions by a process of contamination that also transformed the elite culture, it sought to create positive alternatives to the new kinds of domination projected by the mass media. The approach greatly diversified the range of legitimate subjects and academic does the aesthetic dimension appear as a contested bridge between the psyche and the objective structures of society. It is as though we had lost the taste for the negative, the ambition of an anti-systemic critique. In its place we find endless variants on Anglo-American "cultural studies"---which is an affirmative strategy, a device for adding value, not for taking it away. The history of cultural studies argues today for a renewal of the negative, of ideology critique.